By Valentin Diaconov
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The new home of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas. Photo: Yuri Palmin
On the day of the opening of the new Rem Koolhaas-designed Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow earlier this month, the museum’s employees resembled laboratory mice – bloodshot eyes, skin a shade only slightly darker than white. Not everything was finished, and the building will be tweaked for months to come. For now, the double-layer polycarbonate panels that make the facade a wavy mirror that reflects the surrounding Gorky Park are transparent by default, and that makes the building open to all kinds of daylight that is not always friendly to the museum displays. This is not a bug, but a feature of OMA and Koolhaas’s original thinking behind the project.
After leaving the original location that gave the museum its name when it was founded by Dasha Zhukova in 2008, Konstantin Melnikov’s former bus depot on Obraztsova street, the Garage moved to Gorky Park in 2012 and dwelled in a temporary structure designed by Shigeru Ban, while waiting for a permanent location nearby. The owners originally wanted to rebuild a six-part Constructivist building by Alexey Schusev, erected in 1923 for the first Agricultural and Industrial Expo, now in a state of dramatic disrepair. But Koolhaas persuaded them to look 100 metres away, to a dilapidated cement block that was formerly home to the Vremena Goda restaurant, built in 1968. (‘Vremena Goda’ translates as ‘Four Seasons’. In 1968, there were no hotels of this chain in the USSR, so the name is a coincidence). During the two years of the museum’s construction, Koolhaas praised late Soviet architecture for its openness, as well as its unforced urge toward collectivity – a far cry from the Stalinist Empire style, but a tamer, softer version of earlier Constructivist ‘machines for living’.
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Opening of the new Garage, June 2015. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov
The new Garage’s polycarbonate panels are the most visible architectural intrusion here: most of the details and floor plans of the original building have been lovingly preserved, along with a wall-length mosaic that depicts a young girl flying amongst abstract splashes of colour – typical decoration for the public spaces of late socialism – and large expanses of dark green tile on the walls. The mandarin orange-painted cloakroom and the toilets with doors that stretch from floor to ceiling are just a handful of design decisions that are Koolhaas’s new additions to the look and feel of the building. It seems that Koolhaas has rebuilt a non-descript edifice full of local histories (most Muscovites of a certain generation have, at one point, had beers or Soviet cognacs here) and not much else. This is in fact a continuation of his decades-long project to steer the conversation away from deconstructivist gestures and novelty forms and toward the idea of preservation as a necessity for today’s oversaturated architectural landscape. Interesting, though, how even this humble ideal can look arrogant: a denial of gesture as an ambitious show of force. After all, Koolhaas takes something that has neither obvious historical nor architectural value and by sheer will turns it into a landmark, one of very few buildings in Russia that has the name of a starchitect attached to it.
The response from the architectural community suggests that Koolhaas’s building is shockingly relevant and forward-thinking. Russia’s leading architecture critic, Grigory Revzin, praised the new Garage for demonstrating the unrealized potential of 1960s Soviet architecture: ‘This is not a restoration of the Soviet sixties,’ Revzin wrote in his review for the newspaper Kommersant (full disclosure: I am a staff writer for the same publication). ‘This is a utopia of Soviet sixties […] There is mastery here. There is quality of space, details, effects of the transparent staircase, complex perspectival see-throughs. You should come here if only to understand how Soviet architecture could look.’ But architect Ilya Mukosey, in his overenthusiastic article for Archi.Ru, compared the new Garage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and noted, in bold: ‘Ruins of modernist, or “contemporary”, architecture are not an exhibit of the museum. The whole museum – the ruin and the restoration – is its own exhibit.’
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Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Yuri Palmin
Comparing the new Garage to a readymade and a utopia of unrealized construction ideals are both good points. If we mix these metaphors, we see Koolhaas’s building as the first example of Sots-art architecture – a decidedly Soviet iconography and quality encased in an international dialogue about what contemporary architecture can look like. Like an Eric Bulatov painting in 3D, or, to take another example, something like Dmitri Prigov’s classic poem about a policeman who drinks beer at the Soviet House of Writers cafe and does not even register the usual patrons: ‘Ars longa, vita brevis, and in their struggle life wins out’, go the last lines of the poem, perfectly describing the challenges that the Garage’s curatorial team will have to face. A masterpiece it supposedly is, but does it serve its intended purpose? Can it be a museum?
The first programme of shows, prepared by resident curators Kate Fowle and Snejana Krasteva, takes the lead from the building. The assortment of small exhibitions looks surprising for those who have come to enjoy the grandeur of Russian oligarchs’ conspicuous consumption. Granted, the usual high-profile guests were there for the opening – Larry Gagosian, Jeff Koons, even Woody Allen and George Lucas – but the shows, apart from a couple of installations by Yayoi Kusama, are far removed from blue-chip glamour. There is a retrospective of Rirkrit Tiravanija with an Eastern European twist: Tiravanija includes a series by Czech conceptual artist Julius Koller in his show. A reconstruction (in a reconstruction) of the 1959 American Fair in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, and the subsequent Soviet Fair in New York, courtesy of the Museum of New American Art (Berlin), takes up a third of the first floor.
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Exhibition view of the Garage’s opening programme. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov
Curators Koyo Kouoh and Rasha Salti prepared a historical account of African and Arab cinema produced during the heyday of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the regions. A project by the Garage Youth team (people in their 20s of various professions employed by the museum) is an adequate snapshot of what the 1960s looks like to millennials, complete with a comic strip on Soviet dissidents who went to Red Square in 1968 to protest the USSR’s invasion of Prague. Although the medium of a cartoon comic is frequently used for serious subjects in the Western vernacular (Art Spiegelman’s Maus [1980–1991], recently translated in to Russian, is the perfect example), in Russia it is rare enough to be considered ‘new media’. What these shows have in common is that they all centre on cognitive capital, not the bank accounts of the owners, and this is a welcome strategy in highlighting the values of the new Garage: a sprinkling of blue chip with a strong intellectual undercurrent: the museum as knowledge factory, a nearly object-less entity that produces relations, not passages or passivity.
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Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Yuri Palmin
And for this goal, Koolhaas’s building works. It is not a white cube that assumes the usual role of an impartial container to sustain in its clean, spacious halls the post-industrial, post-war promise of the avant-garde, disengaged from political pressures and the logic of capitalist vitrines.
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Exhibition view of the Garage’s opening programme. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov
By making the space’s previous function and decor stare unflinchingly through the museum content, Koolhaas presents a powerful argument against the amnesia of the new. Here one feels the solid locality of a slab of history – not just Soviet history in its pure form. It is comparatively easier to present a contemporary art programme in a building that bears traces of ideologies that are alien to neo-liberal or post-structuralist thought that prevails in the art world discourse (Munich’s Haus der Kunst is a good example). But the character of the new Garage is both ideologically recognizable (through the style of the mosaics) and elusive: this was never a utopia, just a restaurant, built quickly and modestly. People who drank here had all kinds of conversations, both loyal to the State and wary of its waning delusions of imperial grandeur, as far removed from Marx as today’s Russia is from the Czars. Those fleeting conversations almost no one remembers were the fabric of everyday life. The new Garage’s programme will have to either strive to show art as part of this fabric, or invent new curatorial strategies that circumvent the context Koolhaas has created.
Valentin Diaconov is an art critic and curator based in Moscow, Russia.
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