Countryside, The Future, curated by Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, was on view at the Guggenheim Museum from February 20, 2020, to February 15, 2021.
A New York architect born and bred on the great rural plains of Nebraska, I’m here to offer some country-almanac predictions for the not-yet-installed Rem Koolhaas/AMO/Guggenheim exhibition Countryside, The Future.
Koolhaas, in refusing to follow Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid’s lead as the third in a line of recent architectural subjects warranting full-spiral career retrospectives at the Guggenheim, has opted—as might be expected—for the unexpected choice instead: to fill the museum with research on the countryside done by his office and students. Here we will enter the world of data—or in this case, the data of the world—as the exhibition aims to “explore radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as ‘countryside,’ or the 98% of the earth’s [landmass] surface.”
The move is a welcome respite from the predictable alternative-universe scenario: a Guggenheim with a Brobdingnagian bent half-leg of the CCTV building built to fill the center atrium and surrounded by a river of genius-man sketches and models ascending through time up the gentle spiraling slopes of history, peppered with rest-stop opportunities to purchase REM sleep masks, orange OMA/Prada manpacks, and AMO pie-chart refrigerator magnets.
What Koolhaas and the Guggenheim offer instead is a page from the art-curation playbook—the foie-gras approach of feeding the arts establishment uncomfortable, seemingly indigestible content. That is to say that the art world always eventually loves things it is not used to consuming: in this particular provocation, not putting the objects of “architectural design” into the museum, but instead filling it with what would normally, to most, be considered bland “architectural research.”
Architectural research, in the current sense of the term, is a recent phenomenon in the profession. It is often powered by Google searches yielding vast amounts of data, the most interesting of which is transformed by students or office elves into happy infographics with bold shapes, vibrant colors, and lots—and I mean lots—of arrows. It is less intellectually rigorous than actual sociological research, but no matter. In the case of the Guggenheim, the goal is not peer review but rather the edutainment of the masses. I anticipate that the exhibition will show fertile fields of revealing research processed into palatable flavors for the widest possible consumption. Will the public bite?
Probably. Since at least 1917, indigestibility of content has been a solid, even locally successful strategy in the arts; it was a mere 46 blocks south of the Guggenheim that Marcel Duchamp submitted his infamous “fountain” urinal to the Society of Independent Artists. While the original urinal was pulled from the exhibition, the controversy it prompted led to important inquiry: Was it art? Could anything now go in an exhibition or museum? Could art be about manipulating concepts instead of paint? These questions, in turn, opened future doors for further challenges to the boundaries of art curation, be they dead sharks (Damien Hirst), starving dogs (Guillermo Vargas), or performing artists staring deeply into visitors’ eyes (Marina Abramovic).
I wonder whether “architectural research” can ever provoke in an arts institution whose oeuvre already deems not only urinals, but also actual celebrity urine, to be within the annals of the acceptable.
In that context, I suspect that the presence of “architectural research” in the museum will not be so challenging to the world of art or museum visitors. Museums have long been in the process of abdicating their status as sacrosanct defenders of artistic prestige. Not too long ago, I found myself in the very same hallowed Guggenheim atrium for the launch party for Lady Gaga’s perfume Fame (as I had collaborated on an outfit for her). Soon after Paris Hilton arrived, we all watched as Lady Gaga, one-upping Andres Serrano, upended a champagne bucket, squatted over it, and proceeded to urinate for all to enjoy. I wonder whether “architectural research” can ever provoke in an arts institution whose oeuvre already deems not only urinals, but also actual celebrity urine, to be within the annals of the acceptable.
Architectural research in a museum may not be quite as shocking as bodily functions or their receptacles, or as useful as peer-reviewed research, but it is not without merit. Its significance will lie not only in elevating its humble country content, but also in prompting worthy, related questions that attempt to disciplinarily reconcile the worlds of architecture, research, art, and infrastructure and the role of “the museum” today. Can architecture be research? Can research replace art? Does placing research in an arts institution—or making it more photogenic for tourists—disempower it? Can the excavation of data be artistic? And if it is, will it still be useful data?
Or, is Rem just so shy and gracefully humble he simply didn’t want a retrospective of himself?
Having just spent the holidays on what has been my family’s Nebraska farm since 1877, I can faithfully report first-hand that changes are afoot in the countryside. Our farm, 80 percent smaller now than a century ago, confronts issues of sprawl, trademark infringement, and now big-brother eminent domain. And we are the lucky ones.
Sifting through the visually vibrant and overwhelming quantity of countryside data that Koolhaas’s team has likely collected should, in fact, produce shock if not existential despair, revealing as it will the actual physical effects of increasingly virulent, unregulated capitalism in the form of climate change, natural devastation, resource theft, labor oppression, pollution, and the many faces of poverty hiding in the often-forgotten beige spaces between the sexier red urban dots on the unfolded geography of the world. Yet it is in this “countryside”—the flyover states, countries, and even continents—that at least half of the world’s population lives. It is where even more of us have roots. Art or not, palatable or indigestible, this freshly harvested country data is deserving of our attention.