Arte Americana

Cold Spring, as its irritatingly cute name suggests, is a quaint and tiny town, with a population just four people shy of 2,000 and a main street that looks exactly like the set of Gilmore Girls—wholesome and inviting, with red brick storefronts advertising local cheese and paisley curtains adorning the window of a doll repair shop. Three miles away is Magazzino Italian Art, the only American museum with a stated mission to advance scholarship about and public appreciation of postwar contemporary Italian art. Last September, the institution opened the Robert Olnick Pavilion, a collaboration between the offices of Spanish architects Alberto Campo Baeza and Miguel Quismondo.

The building is brutal and beautiful—a solemn, L-shaped mass of concrete embedded into a hill and sparingly appointed with objects meant to be contemplated and revered. It was February when I visited. Next to the blindingly white snow on the ground, the pavilion appeared not gray but golden, basking in the soft warm light that spills strategically into its interior galleries. The architects cut a handful of windows and skylights across the monolith, creating throughout the structure the sort of sublime play of light that can weaken the knees if you stop and allow yourself to experience it in earnest.

This was especially true within “the isotropic room,” a perfect cube of thirty feet on each side, with pristine white paint on every surface. (Disposable shoe covers are provided as a requisite to step inside. I wobbled in place as I slipped mine over each of my boots; two other visitors peeked in but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.) Once inside, three square openings on and near the ceiling revealed a blue sky; a single one, rising from the ground level, framed the wintry skeleton of a tree. Light passed through these apertures triumphantly, casting perfectly crisp geometries that shifted as the sun traveled overhead.

Usually, art is the protagonist within the halls of museums. Three paintings and two sculptures by Ettore Spalletti are exhibited in the isotropic room, attempting to establish a dialogue of equals with the architecture, though I felt the latter overpowered the pieces. Less impressive were the pavilion’s cramped hallway, next to four unnecessarily large bathrooms, and a minuscule elevator that, on the top floor, opens to another dark and constricted corner preceding a sun-soaked café. The building’s transitional spaces were clearly an afterthought for the design team, which seems to have focused on the four galleries. Back in September, The Architect’s Newspaper reported that Campo Baeza himself “pronounced [the isotropic room] a crowning accomplishment of his career,” which, he has repeatedly stated, is concerned with beauty and truth; with serenity, legibility, and the omission of needless embellishment. Regardless of their siting, Campo Baeza’s buildings always espouse a single, minimalist vernacular. His vision of what is beautiful and true is heedless of context, tradition, and history, perhaps because he believes that a ray of light superimposed on a white surface is universally entrancing.

I’ll tell you the truth. Conceptual art and contemporary architecture, as much as I appreciate them, lack the beguiling allure I find in brazen displays of Americana. It must have something to do with my childhood. In the late 1990s, when I was six years old, my family moved from Mexico to central Florida, near Orlando. We went to Disney World often, which perhaps explains why I have always associated America itself with artifice; I suspect it is too good to be true, but I still can’t look away from it and in fact harbor a somewhat perverse desire to be a part of it. I was twelve when we moved back to Mexico, and if I could explain the strange nostalgia I’ve nurtured since then in terms short and simple enough for this piece, I wouldn’t be writing a book about it. In any case, walking around Magazzino, all I could think about was Cold Spring. Even with its vistas of snowy hills and a stable for miniature donkeys, there was something aseptic about the museum’s campus. Its permanent exhibition is housed in the main hall, a slightly older sibling to the Olnick Pavilion, similar in style but different in its arrangement, built in 2017 by MQArchitecture. I rushed past the Boettis and Pistolettos, itching to go back to Main Street to inspect that doll repair shop. Who was it for, and how could it possibly remain in business?

Cold Spring is a seductive suggestion of the comfort, ease, and security born of prosperity. Being there feels like stepping out of a time machine, into an era when the United States had only recently emerged victorious from World War II and positioned itself as the world’s benevolent ruler. It is what politicians today allude to when they speak of a national return to greatness, what people in foreign countries see in movies and yearn for themselves, and what immigrants who make it into the US, more often than not, fail to find. The charming town is imbued with the glow of postwar optimism; by necessity, then, it is indifferent to the political and social upheavals that transpired in the second half of the twentieth century and that, interestingly enough, engendered the sort of art exhibited at Magazzino.

Coined in 1967 by Germano Celant, the term Arte Povera—“poor art”—refers to the collective production of a generation of Italian artists that emerged in the late 1960s, employing cheap materials like cloth, paper, rope, wood, dirt, and rocks to create works evocative of a preindustrial age and, thus, critical of the midcentury infatuation with technological progress. Now, many of those pieces are exhibited on the other side of the globe inside two sleek buildings made of concrete, glass, and aluminum, a few miles away from a real town that functions as a nostalgic ode to American exceptionalism.

Perhaps the irony of it all is intentional. Perhaps the tension of traveling in a single day from Grand Central Station to Cold Spring to Magazzino and back again is what makes the experience interesting: three nodes constellating divergent worldviews and possibilities. Still, as its campus and ambitions grow, it might be interesting to see Magazzino at least attempt to reckon with the implications of its local context; for its architects to build not a perfect white cube but a space that engages with the preoccupations of the art it harbors. I wanted to ask Campo Baeza about all of this, but he never responded to my emails.