New Yorkers, Meet your New New Museum

This week-end’s opening event for the New Museum (235 Bowery at Prince) featured free access for 30 continuous hours to the institution’s new Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANNA-designed building, and its exhibition Unmonumental. The museum’s spacious lobby – which might look sparse once normal hours and rates ($12) are put into effect – provided a pleasant and flexible space for visitors. The exhibition in the ground-floor gallery, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Black on White, Gray Ascending (on view until March 23rd), cleverly manipulates our expectations to deliver a multi-faceted narrative that rewarded viewers’ prolonged attention. The museum store occupies a section of this ground-floor space, its undulating mesh wall repeating the grid pattern found on the museum’s exterior. A good collection of contemporary art books and museum store knickknacks fills the shelves, and the cleverly ironic “New T-Shirt” tees seemed to be a hit. Meanwhile, the museum’s auditorium and only reasonably-sized bathrooms are located in the basement, as is a captivating mural by Jeffery Inaba saturated with information about arts patronage and philosophical quotations on giving.

Heading up to the galleries (on the second, third and fourth floors) was an undertaking, particularly given the limited elevator space. Taking the stairwell – I’m sorry, the Fern and Lenard Tessler Stairs, apparently mid-range patronage only gets you seven flights of stairs these days – brings visitors to the three floors of the Unmonumental exhibition. Already a bold assault on traditional museum exhibitions, it features only sculptural assemblages right now, but three additional sets of artworks (2-dimensional, audio, web-based) will be incorporated before it ends in on March 23rd 2008. The assortment of three-dimensional collages was certainly uneven, but the whimsical grandeur of the largest works and the minute intricacies of the most complex smaller creations, made up for certain lackluster inclusions. Hopefully the less-interesting pieces in the exhibition will become more compelling when Unmonumental’s subsequent layers are added (2-dimensional on January 16, audio on February 13, web-based on February 15). The galleries themselves (as the building’s silhouette suggests) resembled a few of Chelsea’s gallery spaces stacked on top of each other. The high ceilings, white walls and concrete floors faithfully recreate the gallery atmosphere that – for better or worse – is the preferred viewing environment for contemporary art.

The fifth floor’s education center, with its low ceiling and ugly carpeting, was an awkward and cramped space, particularly difficult to explore when most visitors didn’t understand what it was. Maybe keeping this level closed during the opening event would have made more sense. Climbing to the seventh floor bore the main reward of Target’s 30 Free Hours event, though it would have been difficult to predict: free candy. The museum’s top floor was outfitted with Target-logo decals on the windows, a DJ and a long set of drawers filled with free red and white candy, and adorned with two large Target logos. During the day children and aesthete adults rubbed elbows to get at the free treats, and by the wee hours of the morning the sweets were not so abundant and the crowd not so sweet-toothed – but still a little. At all times, the seventh-floor terrace affords spectacular views in all directions, a fitting reward for climbing seven flights of stairs, and an unusually nice setting for candy-gobbling.

While the New Museum’s opening event was hard to separate from its intriguing architecture and its main exhibition, the effect of all three together was exciting, like glimpsing some moment – however significant only time will tell – of contemporary art history as it happened. Throughout crowds seemed enthusiastic and pleased with what they saw, be it the families and tourists who came during the day, or the assortment of sober and tipsy hipsters and impatient art-lovers hoping to avoid crowds who filled the museum during the night.

For more photographs of the New Museum opening, click here.

A similar version of this post can be viewed on the New York Press blog, here.

All pictures by Benjamin Sutton.