Announcing the results of our ‘unsolicited proposal’ selection! (Round 3)
Once again this issue we present a proposal from overseas ? this time from Italy. Hang on, what’s this?! Traversing the galleries of New York’s venerable Guggenheim Museum, fabled creation of Frank Lloyd Wright, on skateboards? Mamma mia! As you, dear reader, are no doubt aware, the Guggenheim is constructed like a snail’s shell, the galleries on different floors connected by one continuous slope.
The proposal proposes to use this slope to whizz from top to bottom. Which sounds like enormous fun. What would the artworks on display look like to those speeding skateboarders? Simply famous paintings flying past in speedy succession? Certainly a very different experience to the conventional museum visit. The interesting thing about this proposal is that it takes into account what you might call the viewer’s line of sight. Imagine how you could build on this theme. Take the familiar Louvre, for example, and compare it from a child’s and an adults’ perspective. Or how about going round in the dark, wearing infrared goggles?
Or if all the paintings apart from those you’d applied in advance to see were concealed behind cloths, and you only paid an admission charge for the ones you saw? Or all the pictures were hung facing the wall, or all visitors had to strip naked to view the works, or view them from a kind of mobile water tank? Imagine if the relative relationship between works and line of sight, museum and visitor could be expressed in outlandish ways: how much more fun a visit to view art would be! Personally I’d like to walk blindfolded through a museum crammed with famous paintings. Although granted, it would be a waste of the admission charge :-).