Bay Area Exhibition Review: Architecture of Life at the New BAMPFA

Architecture of Life at the New BAMPFA

 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704
January 31 - May 29, 2016
Museum Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 11am - 9pm

Architecture of Life is the inaugural art exhibition of the new University of California, Berkeley Art Musuem and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).  The show debuted on January 31, 2016, the same day BAMPFA was first opened to the public.  It was organized by Lawrence Rinder, director of BAMPFA.  The title of the exhibition seems appropriate as it opened alongside the actual BAMPFA building, which is an artwork in itself, and examines the various meanings of architecture, both literal and metaphorical.  Architecture of Life is massive yet inclusive, with over 250 artworks spanning approximately two millennia, and a marvel to look at and experience just like the actual building.

Exterior view of the new BAMPFA.

The relationship between Architecture of Life and the BAMPFA building is collaborative with the show's overarching theme of architecture.  The building makes an impression even from the outside, with its abstract and organic form and steel-plated exterior that houses the theater within.  The history of BAMPFA is an interesting one and may very well be one of the artworks in the exhibition due to this history and the technical and artistic achievement of the complex.  The first location of BAMPFA was originally on Bancroft Way (also in Berkeley) within Mario Ciampi's Brutalist-style structure.  The museum opened in 1970 but was deemed unsafe in 1997 due to it being constructed mostly out of concrete (Berkeley has a relatively high earthquake risk).  In 2001, iron braces were placed on the exterior of Ciampi's building, but the final decision was to move BAMPFA to where it stands today on Center Street.  The design of the new BAMPFA was created by the design studio and architectural firm, Dillor Scofidio + Renfro (DS + R), and unveiled in 2011.  The design reused a UC Berkeley printing plant that was built in 1939 under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was in disrepair and in need of renovations.

A view of the former location of BAMPFA at the Brutalist-style building designed by Mario Ciampi.

 

A view of the abandoned 1939 printing plant that was renovated for the new museum on Center Street.

The former Art Deco-style plant is no longer recognizable with the new BAMPFA and its "contemporary" appearance on both the inside and outside.  The architecture is also impressive on the inside.  Upon entering the building, viewers can take in the entrance of the first floor, which has a "contemporary" look with a high ceiling, concrete floors, white walls, and bold accents of red that appear in the stairwell and some places on the ceiling.

A view of museum's entrance near the ticket counter (a wall installation by artist Qiu Zhijie is located to the left).

The BAMPFA building might be considered the first "artwork" in Architecture of Life that is noticeable and makes a strong impression, but the artworks that are officially part of the exhibition are by no means diminished by it.  For example, artist Qiu Zhijie was commissioned to make a wall drawing near the entrance inside the building.  The World Garden is situated near wooden bleachers and covers the entire wall.  The large-scale drawing alludes to the tradition of Chinese literati paintings that were commonly make by the upper-class literati (gentlemen-scholars) from the Tang to Ming Dynasties.  For this artwork, as with most of the others in this exhibition, an accompanying didactic panel helps shed light on the artist's intent for his or her creation.  According to the panel, The World Garden specifically refers to shan shui ("mountain and river"), which is a style of landscape painting that uses natural features as metaphors for various parts of the human experience.  The formal elements of The World Garden are inspired by Chinese landscape paintings, but terms such as "The Lake of Lonely Happiness" and "The Logic of the Zig Zag Bridge" reveal Qiu's whimsical and even critical take on the tradition of Chinese landscape painting.  The "world garden" is also a composite of gardens from around the world and range from Italian Renaissance gardens to Japanese tea gardens.  The panel further elaborates on how Qiu questioned the tradition of Chinese landscape painting in that the majority of these paintings were created only by upper-class individuals who worked in seclusion.  Qiu's seemingly playful phrases that identify the landmarks and natural features in the mural and his inclusion of gardens from different cultures allude to his vision of a more cosmopolitan world where all kinds of people interact with one another instead of being isolated and secluded.  Qiu's mural is a great introduction to the rest of the exhibition, as it encapsulates and envisions both the physical world and the human experience as complex structures.

 

Qiu, The World Garden, 2016, ink on wall.

  

Also on the first floor is an exhibit within a small gallery.  Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno and his work pay homage to nature's own rendering of architectural forms.  Within the dimly-lit gallery space are four suspended glass boxes that contain spider webs made from "semi-social" and "social" spiders.   Drama is added to the entire space with lights placed underneath the boxes, lending a ghostly quality to the four boxes and web structures.  The title of Hybrid solitary semi-social musical instrument Ophiuchus: built by Parasteatoda lunata--two weeks--and a Cytophora citricola--two weeks has a documentative quality that maps out Saraceno's process for making this particular artwork.  The spiders are truly the architects here, but Saraceno also added his own touch by using carbon meshes to aid in resulting look of the "finished" web.  The artist also contributed to the musical instruments by using different species of spiders, which means the webs would probably not exist in nature.   Overall, Saraceno's work showcases the architecture (the webs) created by spiders and how man and nature can work together to create something unique and unexpected.

 Saraceno, Hybrid solitary semi-social musical instrument Ophiuchus: built by Parasteatoda lunata--two weeks--and a Cytophora citricola--two weeks, 2015, spider silk, carbon fiber, glass.

Architecture of Life featurs a large amount of work that covers not only the first floor but the basement floor as well (the top floor contains the café).  If viewers continue into the main galleries on the first floor, they are greeted by an dizzying array of different artworks by artists from a wide variety of backgrounds.  All of these works, like Qiu's and Saraceno's, are a different interpretation of architecture (or are interpreted as such).  Several "star artist" paintings are featured in this area, including Fernand Léger, Johannes Itten, and Georgia O'Keeffe.  Léger was known for his Cubist and Futurist style, which is seen here in Study for Nude Model in the Studio.  The panel next to Léger's painting offers an interpretation of why it is in the show; it notes the fragmented figure as being inseparable from its surroundings to create an "all-over architecture of being."  Itten's Encounter is similar to Léger's in that it portrays a space with a human figure in it.  However, the space and figure are not recognizable and manifest instead as a spiral of colors.  Itten's relation to the exhibition's theme of architecture appears not only in this painting with its structured forms and carefully planned composition but also in his ties to the Bauhaus, which was a German art school that specialized in architecture among several other art disciplines.  O'Keeffe's Wall with Green Door literally portrays an architectural element of a door, but the accompanying text proposes that her painting relates to Taoist mandalas, a subject covered in a book given to her by her mentor, Arthur Wesley Dow. 

 Léger, Study for Nude Model in the Studio, 1912, ink, oil, and charcoal on paper.

 Itten, Encounter, 1916, oil on canvas.

 O'Keeffe, Wall with Green Door, 1953, oil on canvas.

Hyun-Sook Song's work offers a meditative and ethereal counterpoint to O'Keeffe's Door.  Her work, such as 4 Brushstrokes over Figure, quantifies the number of white brushstrokes that overlay the figure against the black background.  Her work relates to architecture not only with her structure of placing brushstrokes in a specific manner and number but also with her reference to her native Korean life with the figure clad in white holding a stick.

 Song, 4 Brushstrokes over Figure, 2012, egg tempera on canvas.

The writer standing next to Song's painting.

Other artworks on the first floor are similar to Saraceno's in that they portray structure and architecture in nature, such as microscopic views of radiolaria (marine organisms) and snowflakes.   The front part of BAMPFA also includes work that are literal architectural models, such as the "Home for All" project undertaken by Japanese artists after the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011.  Other artworks on the first floor also tackle serious global problems.  Several drawings by Lebbeus Woods propose a rebuilding of the destroyed buildings and towns that were the aftermath of the Bosnian War and Genocide of 1992 - 1995.  One of his drawings titled SCAR Construction refers to the devastation of war and the atrocities that were committed during this particular conflict. 

 Nipam Patel, Radiolarian Confocals 1x - 10x, confocal microscopic imaging.  This video artwork shows a revolving radiolarian with its very structured form.  

 Yuji Obata, Homage to Wilson A. Bentley No. 12, 2005 - 06, pigment print (edition 1/5).  Obata's snowflakes were photographed in Hokkaido, Japan.  Bentley was known for his images of individual snowflakes captured using a camera-microscope.  

Toyo Ito, Kumiko Inui, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, "Home for All" in Rikuzentakata, 2011 - 12, wood, styrene board, plastic, styrol, flowers (five miniature models).  The "Home for All" project aimed to rejuvenate and inspire the community of Rikuzentakata after the earthquake and tsunami through architecture.

Woods, SCAR Construction, 1993, graphite and colored pencil on board.

View of the first floor galleries.
 

In the basement level is also a vast collection of artwork.  Work by "architectural greats" such as Buckminster Fuller and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe appears on this level.  Fuller's downstairs drawings show geodesic domes, which he helped popularize in the public mind, and Mies was another prominent figure associated with the Bauhaus school.  Mies's drawing shows his plan for the the Barcelona Pavilion of 1929.  Similar to the BAMPFA building, Mies's vision was to have the Pavilion be an experience in itself.  Both his and Fuller's work are examples in this show that relate directly to architecture as a practice.

 Fuller, A Geodesic Hangar: Plan Projection, Geodesic Dome, Styrofoam or Tubular Aluminum, 1951, graphite on tracing paper.

 Mies, German Pavilion, International Exposition, Barcelona, Spain, Interior Perspective, c. 1928 - 29, graphite on illustration board.

Other highlights downstairs in the BAMPFA include the detailed Pomo baskets that rely on the artist's meticulous ability to coil plant materials and count the number of stitches that are used to make intricate patterns.  Two structures made of paper by Norioko Ambe are also highly detailed in that he meticulously stacked pieces of paper to make his own terrains that merge the man-made with the natural.  Iannis Xenakis's sketches of his musical work creates a link between architecture, art, and music.  One sketch portrays music as a visual.  In this sketch, Xenakis outlined how sound waves from one of his music compositions created architectural arcs mirroring the structure of the Philips Pavilion as the music was played.

Artists unknown, Pomo baskets, no date (n.d.), coiled plant material.  Some of the baskets have feathers and shell beads, which typically adorn "gift baskets" that the Pomo were renowned for making.

Norioko Ambe, A Piece of Flat Globe Vol. 12, 2010, cut YUPO (paper).

Xenakis, "Sound as Lightning," 1958, sketchbook with colored pencil on paper.  The sketch describes the acoustic qualities of the Philips Pavilion, which was shown during the World's Fair of 1958.

One last gallery space that I will cover perhaps best represents one of accomplishments of Architecture of Life, its ability to make connections between different artworks, disciplines (art, science, and music to name a few), and media to create a dialogue that moves beyond architecture as a literal practice.  Marcel Duchamp's Boîte is placed in a space filled with mandalas, paintings, and sculptures from different Asian cultures.  The Asian artworks create a space different from the others (but this may also be due to the notably different floor that is made of wood not concrete), but they are not culturally separated either from the rest of the works in the show.  This is helped by the fact that the layout of BAMPFA is open and the rooms flow into one another, but works like Boîte create a dialogue between Eastern and Western art.  Boîte relates to Architecture of Life because it represents a mini-museum that Duchamp made in Dadaist fashion.  He painstakingly recreated some of his notable two-dimensional paintings by using a stenciling process.  His Large Glass is also seen in miniature in the center of the box along with his infamous Fountain (a urinal turned on its side).  The didactic panel explains his work's placement next to the mandalas in that it could be interpreted as its own kind of mandala; the "museum" has a red color not unlike that seen in actual mandalas, and it has a circular shape.  Like a mandala, Duchamp's Boîte might elicit a kind of meditation from the viewers as they observe all of the detail in this artwork and try to figure out its meaning, if there is any.

Duchamp, Boîte, 1966, leather, linen, miniature replicas, photographs, and color reproductions.  Mandalas can be seen behind the display case.

 Architecture of Life is truly about life as whole because it encompasses art, science, music, and other disciplines.  It showcased the structures made by nature.  It also showcased the structures made by man, but its main strength was bringing together so many artworks and artists from different cultures and time periods in a complex, cosmopolitan dialogue.  The show did not just look at art; it looked at the connections between art.  The strength of the show may also be its only weakness, its almost overwhelming number of artworks.  However, the number of work mirrors the way art currently is in the contemporary world.  In the diverse, postmodern era of today, such a global interpretation of the "architecture of life" seems especially relevant.  Architecture does not just exist in buildings, it exists in nature, in the human mind, and anywhere there is structure or a network of connections.