EGN NEWS DESK
A brick-and-mortar presence might be, usually is, an important a part of an artwork museum’s attract. The Guggenheim’s mom ship inside is such a thrill that it prepares you to like no matter’s on view. The interiors of the Frick and the Morgan are intimate sufficient to make you are feeling proprietarily, and fabulously, at residence.
The Rubin Museum of Art additionally has design and artwork going for it. Housed in what was as soon as the ladies’s put on wing of Barneys New York, it retains the shop’s six-story steel-and-marble spiral staircase, and turns areas conceived for leisurely procuring into ideally scaled galleries.
And the sort of artwork gathered in these galleries is, in its focus, like nothing else on the town. Mostly historical, largely non secular, it’s all from Himalayan Asia, a area that stretches from India to China, and has, on the Rubin’s map, Tibet at its heart.
With its suave look, dynamic artwork assembled over many years by the philanthropists Donald and Shelley Rubin, and buyer facilities — a present store stocking artisanal goodies, an East-West fusion cafe — the museum was a success from the day it opened in 2004, and one with a comeback vibe. It was the place you ended up lingering in simply because it felt good to be there, in an environment that felt calm however charged, that discouraged hurry, inspired quiet.
In a number of months all that might be gone. The museum not too long ago introduced that it might completely go away its bodily house on Oct. 6, with plans to promote the constructing. It will journey the home assortment right here and there, preserve a digital presence with the objective of selling Himalayan tradition internationally. It will transition to being, in its personal obscure phrases, a “museum with out partitions.” But from the attitude of a once-frequent customer to its Chelsea residence, I think it’s going to grow to be largely a reminiscence.
The reminiscence might be completely satisfied but in addition troubling. When the Rubin opened, it was one of many only a few locations within the nation — or anyplace, actually — the place you possibly can discover a main assortment of historic Tibetan artwork. Its solely American rival on this simply occurred to be pretty shut by: the Newark Museum, with its century-old Tibetan holdings — they first went on view in 1911 — centered on an altar that has been blessed by the Dalai Lama.
(For anybody curiosity in Tibetan non secular tradition, a go to to Newark stays an indispensable pilgrimage. And for these New Yorkers who would fly to Asia earlier than they’d take the PATH practice to New Jersey, the magnificent Tibetan Buddhist shrine room on the Rubin has been a boon and a well-liked draw. The museum plans to seek out new quarters for it after closing, although no location has been introduced.)
A specific great thing about the Rubin was that, initially and for a very long time, it resisted the lure of New Ageism that its aesthetic focus might sound to ask. Like any severe historic museum, this one was research-driven, intent on lighting its stunning objects with new information. In still-understudied fields of Asian artwork its contributions, by exhibits and catalogs, have been invaluable.
And its curatorial attain quickly expanded past Tibetan Buddhism. In 2008 got here a survey, probably the primary main one, dedicated to the non secular tradition referred to as Bon, which existed earlier than Buddhism arrived on the Tibetan plateau. And there have been two unforgettably shifting exhibits exploring the artwork of religions that originated in India however had a worldwide presence: Jainism and Sikhism.
Among viewers attracted to those two exhibits have been practitioners of the religions. Their presence cast a hyperlink between the museum-as-archive and a world of dwelling spirituality, in a lot the identical method that, a decade earlier, exhibitions like “Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas” had introduced devotees of Santeria and Candomblé into one other of town’s maverick establishments, the Museum for African Art in SoHo.
Added to all this was the Rubin’s early consideration to Twentieth- and Twenty first-century materials. Its founding curator of contemporary and modern artwork, Beth Citron, organized three eye-opening exhibitions devoted South Asian modernism. She additionally initiated on-site residencies for younger Asian and Asian American artists, amongst them the great Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh.
Over time, although, the establishment’s strengths have undergone erosion. In 2019, there have been workers cutbacks and departures. (Citron is now curator of contemporary and modern Asian and Asian Diaspora Art on the Asia Society Museum.) The once-rich program of scholarly exhibits thinned. New Ageism crept in within the type of audience-participation tasks like “OM Lab,” in 2017, and the present, nearly art-free “Mandala Lab,” an “interactive house for social, emotional, and moral studying” that occupies the museum’s whole third flooring.
No doubt many elements — monetary stress, repatriation issues, viewers falloff from Covid, and the vogue for museum “experiences” over objects — have been at work. But the fact is that the Rubin, because it exists immediately, seems like a diminished model of what it as soon as was.
Its farewell Chelsea providing, “Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now,” put in over six flooring, appears designed to clinch the establishment’s id as a museum of the current, not the previous. With three curators — Michelle Bennett Simorella of the Rubin; Tsewang Lhamo, founding father of the Yakpo Collective of Tibetan diaspora artists in New York; and Roshan Mishra, director of Taragaon Next, a personal museum in Kathmandu, Nepal — the present options 32 artists of Asian descent, most from the Himalayan area, doing work associated or in direct response to gadgets within the museum’s historic assortment.
As is the case all over the place at current, there’s numerous illustrational figurative portray — examples by Bharat Rai (Nepal), Prithvi Shrestha (Nepal), and Tenzin Gyurmey Dorjee (India) stand out — together with high-polish digital work, together with animated pictures of nonbinary Buddhist-Hindu avatars by the Chinese-born LuYang.
Some artists make references to religious and ritual continuance. Sonam Dolma Brauen does in a bunch of mold-made clay funerary mounds or stupas displayed across the base of a giant vintage copper stupa from Tibet. And so does an artist referred to as Imagine (Sneha Shrestha), in an association combining ceremonial vessels from the Rubin assortment with nearly similar examples, bearing traces of energetic use — candle wax and incense ash — from her household’s residence altar.
Such balances of previous and new are delicate and telling. But too many occasions in a lbumpy however fascinating present — one which introduces a spread of latest artists we seemingly wouldn’t in any other case see — new artwork overshadows previous, actually within the case of barely seen centuries-old work that may solely be exhibited with protectively low lighting. The large, accessible Now dominates a recessive, endangered Then.
Museums disappear, even when brick-and-mortar stands. After a sequence of organizational fumbles, the Museum for African Art, supply of among the most conceptually daring exhibitions of its period, vanished. Technically, on paper, it nonetheless survives as one thing referred to as the Africa Center, which is housed in a high-rise on higher Fifth Avenue and seems to have solely tangential connections to artwork. Anyone who skilled — which implies was educated by — the unique museum is aware of that it’s lengthy gone.
The Rubin Museum isn’t even pretending that it needs to proceed as a walk-in entity, as an ambient website of stimulation and contemplation. It is forthrightly selling its dispersal, declaring itself, in impact, a mail-order home of artwork and concepts. Chunks of its assortment are already touring to school galleries, which is nice. The undeniable fact that its most in-demand export now appears to be “Mandala Lab” — variations have appeared in London, Bilbao and Milan — serves as a reminder that the museum has, for a while, not been what it as soon as was.
And what it was, was certainly one of this metropolis’s walk-in, sit-in, dream-in treasures, companionable in environment, singular in cultural focus, snug with the concept of devotion in all its types. Too dangerous to should say goodbye to that.
Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now
Through Oct. 6, Rubin Museum, 150 West seventeenth Street, Manhattan, (212) 620-5000, rubinmuseum.org.
