The Stars Aligned
Somehow the stars aligned and I was able to get myself to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim. I am not going to say it was on my “bucket list.” That implies a place you wanna go before you die—when you “kick the bucket” as they say—and I certainly do not want to program my own death, or associate such a high place as the Bilbao Guggenheim with the end of life. It is nothing but Pure Life, and it will live as long as Art Lookers incarnate to appreciate truth as beauty, and beauty as truth. “Dem stars lined up.” We went to Bilbao to teach a Happiness and Longevity Training with Vicente Dominguez Solera, our colleague and fellow Breathworker there. And I was delighted from the moment we decided to go to Bilbao, because I knew a saunter through the sublime would be in store.
We had not been to the Basque region of Spain, way in the north. It is unique. Green and in the mountains, it seems like the “Switzerland of Spain.” Arid it is not, like the rest of a dry plain that one associates so widely with the Iberian Peninsula. It has its own language, Basque, that sounds nothing like Spanish. It is one of the oldest languages in Europe, and it is more akin to Polish than Spanish. It is spoken by people in the villages of the Basque, though for the most part people in the cities speak Spanish. The small city of Bilbao was an industrial hub that maufactured steel and metal related products. In the late 20th century the industry declined, and Bilbao was culturally revitalized with the building of the Guggenheim Museum of Art in this vibrant and peaceful northern outpost.
Saunter On A Clear Basque Day
We planned to go on our outing to the Guggenheim on Tuesday afternoon, once all of our work was complete, and we had taught the weekend and seen all the private Breathwork Clients who wanted sessions. We were free to move about, then, and have a relaxing time on our saunter. We set out on a clear Basque day with Vicente and his daughter, Jasoné. The best kind of saunter is to have no plan, or merely a loose plan. We knew the Guggenheim was our destination, our “wedding with the sublime,” but we had no idea what unusual details would present themselves to whet our art loving whistles. I knew Frank Gehry designed the building, which was considered wild—a piece of sculpture in itself. And I knew the presence of the buiding may exceed the “wow factor” of the actual “art” inside the museum. I was prepared for this discrepency.
Architecture as Sculpture
In this Guggenheim Bilbao there are arcitectural elements that function like a modernist sculpture, for simply their abstract qualities. This leaning tower of stone tiles has a knife-like cutting edginess that rises above the river plain below, and soars above a major bridge over the Nervión River. The red pier tower joins in the sculptural ensemble, and somehow serves the very practical function of holding up the platform of the bridge itself, high above the water below, but also surprising us with it’s playful shape and color. It is nonchalant in its assertion of something out of the ordinary from an architecture according to proper civil engineering. This bridge is not just “a bridge.” Traversing this span gives the impression one is passing through the building itself. The Guggenheim Bilbao engages the environement in this way, and breaks down the functional boundaries between “a building” that houses something like modern art, and a collection of architectural elements that engage us in a spatial ambulation on a largely urban scale. I encountered this famous art museum like a grand circus tent with three rings of architectual acrobatics that flipped my perception upside down. The Guggenheim Bilbao is not a mere erection that houses something precious and pristine. It is a construction of the highest order of art itself, with its material gyrations and flips that lead me to realize my total surprise of flying through the air with the greatest of ease.
Onward to “The Puppy”
Apparently when the Guggenheim opened in the late 1990s there was a super surge of tourism to Bilbao that was planned, but whose scale was not fully foreseen. Such an infusion of new wealth came into the city that the locals could hardly believe their good fortune! One Million, Two Hundred Thousand visitors to the Guggenheim came in the first year of it being open. Bilbao, an industrial center throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries, had fallen into decline beyond repair. Industrial pollution had nearly destroyed the life blood of the Nervión River basin, and the people were reeling from commercial decline.
Enter: the Guggenheim by outrageous architect, Frank Gehry, with the “Puppy” close behind by an equally convention-buster Jeff Koons. We wanna hug such a thing—the “Puppy,” that is. It comes upon us when we approach the front entrance of the museum, and we find ourselves lingering around it, almost wanting to sniff the fragrance of all those clumps of flower-covered doggy delights. Indeed, delighted we feel standing next to such a thing. The atmosphere of Bilbao itself is enough to expand the chest and open the heart, but this “Puppy” thing right next to one of the major modern art museums in the world is enough to make one go into a spontaneous “rebirth” of a billowing breath release! It takes your breath away in the good sense, and lifts your soul into realms of divine perfection.
The Guggenheim decided to keep the “Puppy” flowered year round, so what was designed to be a temporary “WOW” became a permanent explosion of a horticultural halleluiah of color, and a landmark of the Guggenheim Bilbao itself. So much for the playful. Someone asked architect Le Courbusier why he put an open pool of water on top of the roof of one of his buildings, in a place where very few would ever come. He took out a piece of notebook paper and quickly fashioned a paper boat. Placing it on the calm suface of the water pool, he said, “that’s why.”
We are dealing here with the expansion of the imagination, not merely architectural form following function. We live in a dream space, whether we want to admit that or not. Even the confines of an industrial praticality are submitted by the minds that are confined to the production and efficiency of manufactured ends. But the art of the sublime operates in another kind of dreamtime in which our imaginations are allowed to soar beyond the confines of predictable productions. This kind of architecture fulfills something of our yearning to enter the halls of Valhalla. It is something that lifts our Spirit out of solitary confinement, and takes a person across the “rainbow bridge” into the hallowed halls of a holy liberation. We expect the unexpected in this kind of an architectural thing. Certainly I did, just thinking about my meeting with the Guggenheim in Bilbao. I was not disappointed. I had no idea there would be a “Puppy.” And now, a couple months later, I realize this floral canine encounter is actually embedded now in my DNA. I can dream of genie in the midst of a garden of my dreamtime, and there he is! Voilá!
I was not prepared for this
One would think a big surprise like the “Puppy” would be followed by a mild let down. Not so. Each turn and surprise in the ascension of my time spent at the Guggenheim Bilbao was like an original Adam & Eve trip to the garden of paradise they never really left. No one was kicked out, but rather brought back into this river valley of artful encounter with the sublime. Around each corner was a new meeting with the beauty of amazement, entirely different than before, but somehow oddly integrated in its ability to consolidate each encounter within a collection of seemingly disparate elements. Sauntering through the Guggenheim of Bilbao, one passses into the cosmic wholeness of a riparian deluge of riverside delights. I was not prepared for this, but there I was guided along in the row boat of a life being but a dream—within a heavenly realm of an unexpected artistic nirvana.
I walked along mildly stunned into an inner expansiveness hardly felt before in any conventional “art museum.” The so-called “art” and the “architecture” merged. One did not distinguish between the two. One did not exist solely in support of the other. They became truly unified—melded together as an integrated whole.
Nowhere was this melding of Art and Archetecture more apparent than in a saunter through the sublime of the Richard Serra sculpture that took up a major portion of the entire first floor of the museum. Fabricated out of 2 inch thick Corten steel, it seemed to defy the rigidity of a material that one could hardly imagine being shaped and sculpted into these highly organic undulations and curves. Standing in parallel groupings they formed a kind of modern day maze through which walking became the major experience of the Art itself. They created a space of wonderment and wanderlust in an interior forrest of Corten construction that seemed to plummet down to earth from some distant intergalactic intelligence. Where on earth could these things have come from? Dunno? I was reminded by the monolith on the moon found by the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Oddessy.” Was I really seeing what I was seeing, feeling what I was feeling walking through these towering waves of steel? What but supernatural powers could have shaped these things on this larger than life scale?
Sondra and Jasoné walked hand in hand through this Modern Maze of Wonder. I followed close behind and did the best I could to capture the experience in an iPhone record. It was a tactile experience. I could not help but run my fingers along the steel as I walked through the maze. I was transported into another dimension. It truly was the Dimension of the Divine. Outside of time and space, yet grounded totally in one of the most visceral materials on earth one can imagine—cold hard steel. Yet, cold and hard as it may be in its challenges to be shaped into these undulating forms, it was warmed by the patina of the Corten process that gave me a feeling of being surrounded by the Mother of this very Earth. I was in the Divine Mother’s Womb, so to speak, feeling totally taken care of in all my spiritual needs and physical appetites. I was truly nurtured in this space by Frank Gehry and Richard Serra and the countless artisans who came together to produce such a thing in this Guggenheim Bilbao temple of the Arts.
Onward to the Sublime in Paint
We got our fill of the Richard Serra Scupture, and then headed up to the upper floors that housed a special exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler, one of the second waves of Abstract Expressionists who painted mainly in the 1970s. Mind you, abstarct art has to be approached like music. One cannot expect the most immediate response to be finding some hidden or even obvious image or illustration that tells a story with carefully rendered, recognizable objects. The paint strokes are the “objects.” Just like in a Mozart symphony the sound coming out of the violins and cellos are the “objects.” We don’t seem to demand of music to conjure up an “image” outside of itself. We are perfectly fine pondering the harmonies and melodies of the notes put together in some kind of composition. Therefore, the painters of so-called non objective art, or “abstract art,” demanded that we relate to the purity of their forms of the media itself, just like in classical music the composers put forth pure sounds of standardized intruments, symphonically arranged into something artfully sublime. In abstract pictures, we ponder the direct relationships of color, line, shape, stroke, intensity, etc., in relationships with themselves in the painting. If one approaches this kind of art with this preparation and in this frequency, he or she will have an entirely different, and more “accessible” experience. OK. So, “Enter, Helen Frankenthaler.”
We are entering into a “dreamtime” here. There are fields of color that fill our consiousnous with a kind of amorphous space in which every stroke, swirl, and thumbprint of posited paint awaken our nocturnal awareness with a borderland of definite messages we are left to interpret. Its like a murky sanguine bloodstained bog in which the light of the moon shined forth it’s midnight illumination. A definite yellow “pop, pop, pop, pop” only half shown rises up on the left to give us something to grab hold of while pondering the depths of an ominous implication. A concentric impression in the upper right gives us a New Moon hint that could place the whole thing in a kind of blacked-out phase. Yet, the bright blue watery lower left quadrant cannot but suggest to us that the pools of the “Borrowed Dream” contain our primordial sustenance that encourages our coming out, onto the solid ground af a new earth.
Akin to Landscape
If we had to attach a traditional genre to the paintings of Abstarct Expressionism, I would say they exist in the realm of Architectural Landscape. Just like the Richard Serra scupture that becomes something one experiences in a purely sensuous way, amidst the buildings’s spaciousness, the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler take us into an immersion with fields of barley green and one hand waving free on the plains of an elysian field. They are about to set us down into the free space of our own emotional liberation. There is a swirl of delight happening here. A kind of mud-puddle nirvana we had as kids with the endless play of of summer days. Between beach combing and forrest traipsing we find ourselves in a natural environment of Mother Nature’s very elements. Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Space, is there anything left out? Probably not. We are engulfed in a field of benevolent care of our soul. We feel nurtured and surrounded by the actions of Nature Herself. How could we feel less than caressed and cuddled in this pastureland of color. Constable could not have done it any better.
It’s a kind of “pop, pop, pop.” Helen Frankenthaler has an affinity for it. It could be that the Mother sends everything out from the Nada Bindu. And Frankenthaler pays homage to that, consciously or unconsciously. But nevertheless, they are there—the points of creation out of which all things spring. The Nada Bindu of Mother Nature is that moment of spatial possibility, an instant of nothingness, out of which an action of life comes forth. And here it is. The Life of these paintings goes on spreading its Joy. Why would we not see it as such? The yellow green of a spring time escapade is showing some trail of a bird-claw scratching, about to take flight no less, but still making an imprint on the field of a fresh anticipation of the time we will spend soaring over the clouds.
Orbs of Nirvana can hover over the mountain ranges of our fleeting stormy weather. In the end, Light prevails. We gaze into the stars with an optimistic expectancy. We meet the swirls of a Shiva dance, the Nataraja that goes on until the end of time. We participate in a Saunter through the Sublime, and this is our birthright to do so. Why should we not? Everyday is a meeting with the “now-point” of our Life. And who is to say this Saunter has a “high or a low.” Perhaps never a “low” if we so choose. The Guggneheim Blibao was definitely a high for me. But in this Saunter would I be off to the “Saint-Terre” of my soul, the “Holy Land” of my Being in which I live every waking and sleeping moment of my days. And when this body life is done (and who knows how long into an infinity that will be, according to a Will of God’s Perfect Happiness) will I find myself in the deep appreciation for the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Especially those I had on that enlightened day in Bilbao we spent with our friends, going up the ladder of our ultimate ascension toward the Love Space of an Eternally Pure Joy!
