The contemporary galleries on the fourth and fifth levels are reached by way of the precipitous central spiral staircase, with its views of the building’s roof and the city beyond (or by elevator). Ascending the staircase gives one a sense of how Gehry has used the experience of space to create metaphors that frame the collection itself. The two levels devoted to contemporary art are appropriately high-ceilinged and flexible, and the collection is as eclectic as the art world has become. There is Joyce Wieland’s Time Machine Series (1961), showing a face blurring against a spreading stain of aqueous blue, and nearby are the bleeding oranges and blues of Helen Frankenthaler’s Orange Breaking Through (1961): both paintings are about the fluidity and beauty and heartbreak of time. Around the corner, in sharp contrast, is Agnes Martin’s austere white Untitled #8 (1977), with its grid of prairie horizon lines. In still another shift in tone we then reach N.E. Thing Co. and IT Works’ finely wrought send-ups of 1960s art stars, such as Pneumatic Judd (1965).
At the top of the staircase one finds another lively, contrapuntal mixture of sensibilities and styles, Canadian and international: a room devoted to Gerhard Richter (containing his haunting, vaporous black-and-white Helga Matura, from 1966), and a room devoted to the late Betty Goodwin, in which hangs the fiercely painted Falling Figure (1965). There is Karin Davie’s undulating In Out In Out (1992), Susanna Heller’s apocalyptic wall-sized drawing World Trade Center Tower I—Disintegration (2002) and Brian Jungen’s trilogy of masterfully ironic golf-bag totem poles, 1960, 1970 and 1980 (2007). After all of this and more, I was relieved to reach the spiral staircase on the southern side of the building and contemplate the CN Tower and the lights of downtown Toronto. For those who take the elevator, there is still more: playing on a small LCD screen inside is Vera Frenkel’s menacing This Is Your Messiah Speaking (1990–91).
Significant works of architecture have often made for problematic museums; rather than expanding a viewer’s experience of a collection or an exhibition, they tend to compete with it. Few works can hold their own against the swirling concrete ramparts of Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim or the heavy, low-pitched roof and luminous windows of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s transcendent Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The brilliance of Gehry’s transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario is this: the experience of the building is part of the experience of not only the art but also the city, country and continent that it is in, part of being immersed in a North American landscape and history, from the vantage point of the 21st century. One can only look forward to future exhibitions, like “Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World,” which opens this April, and how they will enter into a dialogue with both the building and the permanent collection. And how all three will be in a dialogue with us as we walk up and down those spiral staircases, occasionally stopping to gaze out at the city.
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