Artist's Statement Two

ARCHITECTURE for the ARTS
Photographs by
Robert A. Baron

For his third year as a contributor to the Annual "Eclectic Quintet" exhibit, Robert Baron has selected some of his recent and past photographs of museums and other cultural institutions. These images highlight the array of associative meanings architects and their clients sought to convey in building homes for art, music and for whatever else they may have thought culturally significant.

What he finds most interesting among these rather serendipitous selections is the way they hold on to the vocabularies and methodologies of Western Culture – be these works traditional or modern.

For instance, in Nos. 11, 12 and 9, the oldest of this set, the buildings offer the traditional analogies of classical architecture – passing down the long history of using the forms of natural vegetation to build monumental structures of stone. At root, the columns and their capitals are but stylized trees and foliage; the vaulting and archways, no matter how they are really constructed, call to mind ancient Roman building techniques – in this manner solidifying the continuity of Western civilization.

If we turn to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Guggenheim Museum in New York (Nos. 1–3), at first, it appears as a startlingly abstract structure – an embodiment of 1950s and Bauhausian formalism. Simultaneously, the knowledgeable observer easily puts aside the condescending myth that claims the architect based this building on failed plans for a circular garage ramp, and realizes, instead, that he was creating a large open space with an oculus on top – purposefully evoking the Pantheon in Rome as a way to make the reverential purpose of the earlier building apply to the meaning of the more recent one.

Even Frank Gehry’s signature Disney Concert Hall – starkly formalistic as it bathes in the light that strikes its shiny metallic carapace – is predicated upon stylistic principles of western architecture – but here in an anti-classical mode known as the Baroque. Whereas the earlier "classical" examples of this exhibit based its aesthetic upon a vocabulary of expressively engineered forms, Gehry’s building masks its underlying structures. The outward form, however, seem weightless, like banners riding a wind whose relentless rhythms grab hold of the sky. Gehry’s work (No. 8) for the Experience Music Project (essentially a museum dedicated to Jimi Hendrix) uses the metallic body of its structure to evoke draperies fluttering in the wind – as caused by the speeding monorail as it glides to a halt in the EMP station. One does not stretch too far afield if one notices in this hard metal fantasy principles of the baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, for whom the rush of a spiritual ecstasy (of St. Theresa) causes the physical world to pulse – as if it, too, billows to and fro by a wind.

Aside from their intertwining historical dimensions, the images Mr. Baron presents also warp the rational basis of sight. The effect is clearly seen in the ultra-wide ("fish-eye") photographs of the Guggenheim Museum where they take in more than the eye, itself, can see. The result is analogous to the famous portrait of the Pantheon by the 18^th-century painter Giovanni Paolo Panini. Similar transformations can be found elsewhere among these images.

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Robert Baron, a member of the Westchester Photographic Society since 2003, frequently exhibits his photographs in Westchester. He has taught the history of art, served as an authority on the automated cataloging of museum objects, worked for the College Art Association as chair of its committee on intellectual property, and headed the Academic Image Exchange as project director. He is currently working on an upcoming one-man show for the Mamaroneck Artists’ Guild, and will be curating an exhibit exploring the variety of ways in which the Mona Lisa has been turned into a cultural icon. He has been called by the State Department to discuss copyright infringement with visiting foreign dignitaries. His website is located at www.studiolo.org.