Groping In The Dark

The usually bright and airy Guggenheim Museum looks somewhat darker and melodramatic these days. That's putting it mildly. The whole rotunda has been painted absolute black, and Frank Lloyd Wright's original terrazzo flooring for his landmark Manhattan edifice has been covered with much darker linoleum. Way up the museum's famous spiral trail, wavy black exhibition walls loom spookily. Spotlights illuminate art works as if they're heads in a wax museum. And undulating, firelike lights lick at the perimeter of the rotunda's giant skylight. What gives? Has the Guggenheim--in its steamroller crusade to bring the art museum into the 21st century--finally decided to merge totally with swinging pop culture and turn itself into the world's tallest disco?

No, it's all merely an installation design by French architect Jean Nouvel for a huge, dizzyingly variegated exhibition titled "Brazil: Body and Soul." (It runs through Jan. 27, before traveling to--where else?--the Guggenheim Bilbao, its only other venue.) Brazil, as we know, is an enormous, vital, intensely multicultural nation populated by native Indians, descendants of Portuguese colonizers, nearly 70 million people of African heritage (which is more than twice the number in the United States) and immigrants from practically everywhere. The show is divided--if that word can be used in the Guggenheim's unintentionally morbid fun-house decor--into three general categories: indigenous, baroque and modern.

Since the indigenous masks and spears--while beautiful and admirable for their passion and obsessive craftsmanship--tend to be the sort of fare you wish you could see in brighter light with more explanation, and the modern Brazilian art is, frankly, fairly minor, the largest section of "Body and Soul" justifiably comprises baroque sculpture. Most of it consists of intricately carved, painted angels, saints, Virgins and Christ figures. But the indubitable centerpiece of the show--rising like a curvy, golden dance-and-DJ platform 45 feet above the rotunda's floor--is a monumental altarpiece (circa 1785) from the Benedictine monastery of So Bento in Olinda in the northeastern province of Pernambuco. Because of a delay in shipping owing to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, finishing touches on its reassembly were still going on last week. And although any number of German and Austrian churches boast near--but immovable--equals, this thing has to be seen to be believed, especially in such a weird, completely secular context.

That context includes, of course, the question of why and how the Guggenheim--founded in 1939 as a "museum of non-objective painting" and until the advent of go-go director Thomas Krens in 1988 a strictly modern and contemporary institution--came to mount such an encyclopedic, historical show. Answer: the Guggenheim is a museum of the art of the deal as much as the art of art. The termite-ridden Benedictine altarpiece, for example, was cajoled from the monks with the offer of a complete restoration. It took seven months, cost about $240,000 and turned out to be a win-win situation for both the museum and the abbey, where the altarpiece was expected to collapse within five years. In the bigger picture, the Guggenheim wants to add another branch in Brazil. Krens and quasi in-house architect Frank Gehry have visited Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Salvador and Curitiba to check out possible sites. (When it did the "China: 5,000 Years" exhibition in 1998, the museum was reportedly considering trying to open a Shanghai branch.)

Just as the Guggenheim's institutional maneuvers at times overshadow its ambitious cultural programs, so the installation of "Body and Soul" in the end overwhelms the art. The show includes 350 objects--not to mention various flat-screen videos and projections covering related material, like Carnival and the 1950s instant-capital-city Brasilia--but it feels like both endlessly more and succotash less. The faint hubbub you hear on the ramps comes from the adjacent galleries, where a Norman Rockwell retrospective is on view to cheerfully gesticulating crowds. To go from one show to the other is like eating tropical seafood and a strawberry sundae at the same time. And--if you really want to enjoy these bossa-nova days at Club Krens--try to remain oblivious to the slight buzz of danger that comes from wandering around in the dark on tilting ramps.