Guggenheim and Basque Country

I woke up Thursday morning in Bilbao. I got a map at the bus station and set off toward the old part of the city. Somehow I wound up walking through the immigrant neighborhood, which was refreshing. In Andalucía there are some immigrants, but they try to blend in or keep to themselves because they aren't really accepted (especially not in Priego). In this neighborhood in Bilbao, restaurants with Jamaican flags painted on their facades were next to African hair stylists who were next to Chinese grocers. It was great to see such diversity in a small, Spanish city. It made me realize how much I miss New York and Boston (okay Somerville/Cambridge) for this reason. It was also refreshing to see a "gritty" neighborhood. Spanish seem so obsessed with old, charming architecture, which I do like, but after a while, it gets somewhat boring. Bilbao has plenty of that, but it also has modern buildings and working-class areas. Even middle-class areas of Granada look like they're trying to be something more. This wasn't fake.

In the old section of the city, I saw the San Antón church and bridge. I also went to a market, which wasn't anything special, and walked around the seven original streets of Bilbao. Then, it started to rain. In the drizzle, I climbed some steps to see the old part from above. I couldn't get a great feel for what it would have been like to live there when this was the only part of the city because now it's full of designer boutiques. Leaving the old part of the city, I crossed the river and came face-to-face with a protest....my first in Spain!! People had gathered to promote May 21st as a day off from work (they want their employers to pay them more because of the economic crisis). It was a peaceful protest, a few people, a bullhorn, lots of flyers.

I walked past an art nouveu train station and crossed the river again to see the ayuntamiento (town hall) which is housed in an old palace. In the dampness, I crossed the river again, this time using Santiago Calatrava's Zubizuri pedestrian bridge. He constructed a glass and steel bridge which looks like it's twisting as you cross. I sought out this bridge because I like another one he did: the Women's Bridge in Buenos Aires's Puerto Madero neighborhood....yes, I am that big of a nerd. (I also saw his Puente de Lusitania in Mérida in April.)

Finally, back on the main side of the city, I went to the Guggenheim. This was my main impetus for coming to Bilbao in the first place. It was definitely worth it. Frank Gerry is amazing. The building is huge and was built on an awkward piece of land: it actually has a (car) bridge going through/above it. Also, it's along the river which is somewhat lower than the rest of the city. When I entered the museum I was in a three-story high gallery which had glass windows in front and behind me. This space was used as a gallery: eight, white sedans were suspended from the ceiling with flashing red tube lights through them. Off to the side, Jenny Holzer had another light installation. This one was a series of panels (the little red dot lights used in advertising) with words about life and love. She had the words in English and Spanish on one side of the exhibit and in Basque on the other. You could see these lights from upstairs and they reflect off the metal walls of this gallery. The other large exhibit on the first floor was Richard Serra's The Matter of Time. Serra is a genius...mathematically at least. I had seen his work at the DIA: Beacon in NY. He takes ovals and stretches them, then puts them into spirals and other forms. He then turns them into large-scale (10-foot-high) metal sculptures which you can walk through. You loose sense of space and direction inside them. It's bizarre. If he's got an exhibit near you, go.

I ate a salad for lunch at the museum's cafe. Upstairs, I encountered two more exhibits. The first was Murakami's "From Private to Public," a retrospective of the Japanese artist's freaky/colorful/cartoonish art. It combined sculpture, paintings, wallpaper, carpets, video, and Louis Vuitton bags. He has certain characters that he has created. He repeats these images throughout various media. The final exhibit I saw was by Chinese Cai Guo-Qiang. It was called "I Want to Believe." Cai designed the fireworks at the 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. Videos of his fireworks displays were on view in one part of the exhibit. For the Olympics, he created a series of footsteps across the sky. He also had sculptures and paintings on display. One of the sculptures was called "The Age of Not Believing in God." It was a series of wooden religious statues, suspended from the ceiling with arrows in them.

At the end of a video exhibition, I encountered a room with books on installation art. I didn't stop to read them because I had already read most of them in doing my research for my communications project last year. It was strange to see them in the museum. It made me think of last semester at Tufts and hunting these books down at the BPL.

Jeff Koons had two pieces at the museum. In the back, he had a bright series of tulips. This was similar to the works he did on the Met's roof last year. In the front, he had a puppy made of flowers. It was like a large, colorful topiary terrier; a nice contrast to the metalic facade of the museum.

Bilbao has a bad reputation for being an ugly city with not much to see. I think this might be true of the old Bilbao, but everywhere I went, I found streets and buildings under construction. The museum has given life to the city. Tourists are there and the people are working to make their city nice. It's doing well: they've got some parks, the river looked decently clean, there's a bike path, there's a metro system...I could live there.