The thongs were a problem.
Whenever someone wants to identify where the Bellevue Art Museum went wrong–where it was that it abandoned what is coming to be known with increasing frequency as its “constituency,” where you could most obviously see the great misstep that led it down a path that ended in terrible financial straits and the decision, described by board president Rick Collette as “wrenching” and “drastic,” to close the museum last September–the thongs come up.
In G-Force, an installation last year by artist E. V. Day, a battalion of thongs were stretched and starched into objects reminiscent of stealth bombers even as they still looked like panties, and mounted on wires that spanned the museum’s great curved entrance hall and crisscrossed its skylight. Day, who lives and works in New York, may or may not know the Eastside’s culture of shopping, but G-Force combined that element with the military precision of faddishness, among other things, to create a sculpture that engaged a space that was difficult to engage, with a relevance that was uncannily precise. After all, Victoria’s Secret was just across the street in Bellevue Square. I thought it was hilarious.
I may well have been the only one.
In the four months since its abrupt closing, the museum’s skeleton staff, along with Collette (who has been the president of the board of trustees for about a year and a half) and Mark Haley, described by the Seattle Times as “a Tacoma candy magnate and longtime arts booster” hired to serve as the museum’s interim managing director, have been working very hard to figure out how to get it open again. To that end, BAM’s new vision and mission statements were presented last week in a series of low-key, brightly facilitated public meetings in various Eastside locations, and those who fear a repeat of the thong incident shouldn’t worry; all signs indicate a retrenchment from any contemporary art that might provoke a similar response. The bad feelings generated by thongs, it seems, are best soothed with arts and crafts.
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Knowing this you might be surprised that BAM’s new vision statement is so broad and general as to seem almost useless: “Bellevue Art Museum illuminates and enriches the human spirit through art, craft and design”; the new mission statement, which is how the museum plans to implement the vision, is “Bellevue Art Museum is the Pacific Northwest’s center for the exploration of art, craft and design through exhibition, educational programs and partnerships, emphasizing the work of regional artists.”
What is not explicit in these two statements is what Collette and Haley and Barbara Jirsa, the director of public and community affairs, say they heard over and over again in over 300 inquiries they made throughout the community. I learned, at a public meeting in Crossroads Shopping Center, and then in another one at the Kirkland Performance Center, that people wanted a return to the museum’s roots, to the community standard set by the annual Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair (which the museum grew out of, and which is now in its 58th year).
“There was a consistency of the message coming back to us,” Collette said, “and it was, ‘Why did you not build on the legacy of art, craft, and design? Why did you not stay true to this legacy?'” Local artists, according to Jirsa, were asking, “Why are you ignoring us?”
So although the words “art, craft, and design” refer in general to pretty much the whole spectrum of creative activity, the museum’s new emphasis is on craft, on providing educational context for art and design with exhibitions on crafts. “In order to understand art, you have to have some basis,” said Jirsa. “It doesn’t mean going backward, it means taking the category and expanding it. There is so much wonderful contemporary craft that can be illuminated with two-dimensional and contemporary work.”
In the speculative talk I’ve heard so far, “craft” includes such items as studio glass and exhibitions by local high schoolers and “motorcycles, cars, belt buckles, and watches,” according to Haley. The new museum may have rooms permanently designated for Pilchuck works, or for artifacts from the Burke. In order to appeal to the immense diversity of Bellevue (which is something like 27 percent nonwhite), there will be an emphasis on ethnic crafts. “Craft is a unifying form,” Haley said. “[By showing ethnic crafts] we can appeal to every ethnic group.”
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There are great arts and crafts museums, and it’s possible that the Bellevue Art Museum could become one of them. But what does it mean for a major art institution to make art secondary to craft? How is it that art like Day’s G-Force, with its refusal to parrot back to us pleasant news about ourselves, has come to be seen and felt, quite deeply, as anathema rather than the kind of commentary we look to art to deliver?
And if the arts and crafts roots were so integral to BAM, why were they abandoned in the first place? Diane Douglas, who was BAM’s director from 1991 through 2001, explained to me the process through which the museum acquired its more contemporary edge. It was Douglas who took the museum through the capital campaign for a new building and administered the museum under its previous vision statement. That one–“see, explore, and make art”–was also the product of community interviews, focus groups, and marketing studies, as was the idea that took the museum from the top floor of Bellevue Square into a brand-new building in 2001. And the new building was about building a future for Bellevue beyond malls, about turning Bellevue into a real city.
According to Douglas, a group from the Urban Land Institute came out to Bellevue to “focus on urban growth and transformation from suburban to urban.” The ULI people determined that the new museum building was a priority, and should be in the core of downtown, “as a balance to the prevailing retail flavor,” Douglas told me. “There was a recognition that the museum was part of this transformation of Bellevue into an urban center. It was a signal.”
The result, Stephen Holl’s controversial red H-shaped building, along with an art school to address the “make” facet of its vision (eliminated under the new vision), was to represent a new Bellevue. It was to be a city center being shaped by the influx of new money to the region, by new technologies that made new kinds of art and architecture possible, by, as writer Jim Demetre put it in a good artdish.com article about BAM, the parallel phenomenon that as “our individual and collective confidence grew… so did our tolerance for risk.”
And from 1997 to 2002, when Brian Wallace was BAM’s chief curator, some of the best contemporary art exhibitions in the Seattle area were in Bellevue. “What I tried to do,” he said, “was have thematic exhibitions work as bridges between what was familiar and what definitely wouldn’t have been.” This included transforming some of the existing programming into exhibitions that were both pleasing and sophisticated, that satisfied both the old and new Bellevues. Wallace changed the annual children’s show, “[which had in the past been] something patronizing,” he said, “like children’s book illustration,” into an all-ages exhibition, which one year was Game Show, a fun exhibition that also got down to the difficult business of exactly what it means to interact with art.
And then the economy tanked. Wallace and Douglas left, and Kathleen Harleman arrived as BAM’s new director, bringing with her Ginger Gregg Duggan as chief curator. Harleman inherited a huge deficit, and Duggan put up a number of not tremendously successful shows. A museum that functioned as a signal of a new urbanity became less palatable; what had been reservations about Holl’s building turned to hostility. Of this Douglas says, “I think that part of the disjunction that people feel is the sense of Bellevue’s aspirations as an urban center, and the fact that [those aspirations] are not yet realized.”
The “return to roots” can be seen, in light of Bellevue’s ambivalence about its own urbanness, as a move toward pre-boom suburbanness, opting for the local and safe. I heard this theme frequently at the public meetings I attended, as from one man who kept insisting that he liked art, he really did, he just didn’t get what the museum was offering. Others wanted assurances that “what went wrong” would never happen again, and they didn’t simply mean the museum’s financial woes. At one of the public meetings I attended, the attendees were asked to express their wishes for the future museum. One lady said, quite firmly, that she wished she would never ever have to look at anything edgy.
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It’s likely that none of this would bother me if I didn’t detect, during the public meetings, a vigorous contempt for art. Ostensibly, the meetings were meant to gather feedback, but some suggestions, such as adding the innocuous word “community” to the mission statement, or moving the placement of the words “Pacific Northwest,” made both Collette and Haley bristle with defensiveness. Haley was particularly given to putting air quotes around words he found objectionable, such as “media” and “art” and “art professionals.” At one point Collette said that as a visitor to the museum “you will be engaged, you’ll learn, there won’t be this elitist stuff that no one understands.”
Well, that’s not quite true–certainly some people understand it and even like it, but the intimation is that people like us don’t–a kind of reverse elitism that sounds a lot like provinciality. It was Collette who made that weird statement in the Seattle Times about how the museum was, “On a scale of 1 to 10… displaying a 9 1/2 and the public would like to be at 5 1/2.” I’m still wondering about the strange specificity of this, but more about the implication that we should only ever see what we think we can handle. It raises a question about what museums are for, about whether culture ought to be dictated from the top down, by someone who knows more than we do, or whether it rises from the community. Certainly the kinds of shows BAM was putting up were not bringing in the income the museum needed to stay open, but I don’t believe you can build a great museum by focus group. You build a great museum with vision.
But BAM’s new vision isn’t visionary. A vision is singular and specific, the way the Dia Art Foundation began by supporting large and difficult site-specific works like James Turrell’s Roden Crater, or Michael Heizer’s City; BAM’s vision is vague and a bit condescending. Giving the public the gentle 5 1/2 it wants? Reeling in Bellevue’s ethnic groups by appealing to them with their own ethnic crafts? Exhibitions of cars? Doesn’t this cater to a blinkered mentality rather than enlarge it?
One of the benefits of the museum’s new structure will be in more exhibition space with more different exhibitions, so that if viewers don’t like one show, chances are something else will appeal to them, a development meant to address the feeling that viewers weren’t getting enough art for the entrance fee. More gallery space is certainly an advantage, but I don’t like the repeated insistence that visitors to a museum must get their money’s worth. It turns a viewer into a consumer, always determining worth against ideas–which is precisely the kind of ethic that museums exist to counteract. In more than one way, BAM’s new vision backs away from art–however you define it–rather than moving toward it.
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At the Kirkland public meeting there was a single spectacular moment, and it was when Craig Sternberg–who is an Eastsider and not incidentally the father of Miriam Sternberg, a curator who lost her job when BAM closed–jumped into the conversation about how to make Holl’s building friendlier and more accessible. Sternberg said, “If you don’t know what to do with the building, you should sell it. Don’t go and put a totem pole in front of it.” He went on: “You lost the community,” he said, “and you’re not going to get it back with crafts.”
Sternberg’s fury thrilled me. There was an uncomfortable silence, a rather long one, before someone broke it by suggesting a new location for the parking garage elevator. And then it seemed that everyone began to talk at once.