Many people visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao for architecture, and the building is stunning and at some point, if I ever get arround to doing the post on it I will post some photos of it, but what's inside the museum, is well, not quite a good, still defiantly worth seeing.
This piece appealled to me It's called 'Matter of Time' by artist Richard Serra and is admittedly somewhere between architecture, and the curved lines of the organic curves of Frank Gehry's exterior and the here is a smallish rectangle with some paint on it of standard art gallery
The blurb for this states:
The Matter of Time allows the viewer to perceive the evolution of the artist’s sculptural forms, from the relative simplicity of a double ellipse to the complexity of a spiral. The last two pieces of this sculpture are created from sections of toruses and spheres that produce different effects on the movement and perception of the viewer. These are unexpectedly transformed as the visitor walks through and around them, creating an unforgettable, dizzying feeling of space in motion. The entire room is part of the sculptural field. As he has done in other sculptures composed of many pieces, the artist has arranged the works deliberately in order to move the viewer through them and through the space surrounding them. The layout of the works along the gallery creates corridors with different, always unexpected proportions (wide, narrow, long, compressed, high, low). The installation also includes a progression in time. On the one hand, there is the chronological time that it takes to walk through and observe it from beginning to end. On the other, there is the time during which the viewer experiences the fragments of visual and physical memory, which are combined and re-experienced.
For the laypeople - this means it's a giant room with a heap of oversized steel sculptures in it that you wander around in
Each of these is a different experience, you feel trapped and then released, there is a sense of never-ending, how could this possibly still be going, you are alone in spaces and you are squeezing past people
The structures a Cor-Ten or weathering steel (Cor-ten is a word I've said a lot in my life but never written down, I would never had know it was spelt Cor-Ten - short for Corrosion resistant and tensile strength) It's a product you see a lot of home in Australia, there is something rural and 'red centre' in the Australian pysche about it, so it felt very at home to me.
I usually see this outside in the element, where it's looks like it's rusted, but in fact it hasn't and doesn't to see it inside is interesting, the way the light plays off it, they was it's fourteen different colours all at once is amazing.
It's hard to get across the scale of this, it's also hard to shoot without other people in the way
