A stunning space for contemporary art in Cincinatti

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 7/26/2003

CINCINNATI -- "Museum visitors are invited to change into bathing suits, enter this protective enclosure, and share the therapeutic effects."

The enticing offer didn't have any takers during my visit to the new Contemporary Arts Center, where Cai Guo-Qiang's "Cultural Melting Bath: Project for the 20th Century" -- centered on a hot tub filled with medicinal herbs -- is on view. It's one of 66 major works by 35 international artists in the center's inaugural exhibition, "Somewhere Better Than This Place: Alternative Social Experience in the Spaces of Contemporary Art."

The "Melting Bath" is prominently installed in CAC's stunning new building, designed by Iraqi-born, London-based Zaha Hadid. It's the first American art museum by a woman architect. And although Hadid is very high profile, it's also one of the small number of her projects actually to be constructed. She generally comes under the "visionary" category.

The building, which cost $35.7 million, is in the congested heart of downtown Cincinnati, squeezed into an 11,000-foot lot on the corner of Sixth and Walnut streets. At six stories tall, it is lower than its architecturally undistinguished neighbors. It's also an attention getter. Glass walls at ground level lighten it, as do the uneven shapes and sizes of the interlocking expanses of concrete and blackened aluminum.

Hadid seems to be playing a game to see how often she can avoid a blocky rectangle. Hence the swooping concrete curve on the exterior, which touches down on the sidewalk -- with a conspicuous "no skateboarding" sign beside it -- and then travels indoors. In an interior staircase the steps are trapezoids. The building is an essay in hyperactive angles, the dynamic design a suitable setting for the up-to-the-minute art in the galleries.

That art, at least in this first show, is heavy on photography, installation, sound works, film, and video: It's almost as if painting didn't exist.

Once inside the building, you look up and see the black underside of the zigzagging main staircase. There's only one piece of art at ground level, Wolfgang Tillmans's giant ink-jet print "Shaker Rainbow," which combines an austere Shaker house with an arcing rainbow and crisscrossing phone wires, the same repertoire of shapes as in the architecture itself.

The CAC dates from the 1930s, the same era that produced Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and New York's Museum of Modern Art, the moment when America woke up to the radical styles of Europe. The center's most dramatic move in championing new art came in 1990, when it fought -- and won -- the First Amendment case that allowed it to present a notorious Robert Mapplethorpe show.

The new building is the center's first free-standing one, with a generous 23,800 square feet of gallery space. By comparison, the ICA's current building has 6,000, and its proposed new one will have 18,000. While the ICA will become a collecting institution, the CAC will remain a kunsthalle, a space for temporary shows, which will give it a nimbleness in reacting quickly to what's out there.

As the title of the CAC's inaugural show suggests, it's heavy on theory: Its subsections come with such titles as "Discourses of Social Order." The divisions often seem arbitrary, and they overlap. Ignore the theory and focus on the art, which is far more engaging than the artspeak around it.

Like many of the works, Cai's "Melting Bath" is interactive -- if you remember to bring your swimsuit. In addition to the hot tub, there are giant chunks of eroded sandstone looking like watchful ancestors, and a Chinese aviary hanging from the roots of a banyan tree and filled with tweeting birds. It's a soothing combination in the abstract, but I don't know how I'd feel about sharing germs with complete strangers in the "Melting Bath."

Among the many pieces loaded with sexual and political meanings are photographs of Vanessa Beecroft's signature performances, in which poker-faced models wear white wigs, stiletto heels, and nothing between. Cool and remote, they're curiously unprovocative, and despite the nudity, which you'd think would make them vulnerable, they seem to be in full control.

Groovisions is the title of the Japanese collective that created a cartoon character with an equally goofy name: Chappie. In her Cincinnati incarnation, Chappie has multiplied into 33 full-size girl mannequins dressed in orange work suits, wide-eyed and willing. Like Beecroft's models, they lack individuality. But they also seem available, while Beecroft's harem is off-limits.

The big Asian presence in the show continues with the Chinese-American artist Zhang Huan's photo documentation of a performance called "To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain." A pile of nudes lying atop one another like sardines, their heads are turned away so they, too, have no individual identities: Building a bigger mountain is teamwork.

Overall, the CAC is strikingly successful. There are, however, a couple of design flaws. One is that grand staircase, which eats up an awful lot of space.The other, more serious one is insufficient soundproofing between spaces occupied by installations with acoustical elements. The result is a Tower of Babel effect.

A couple of the sound pieces surmount the difficulty. One is Janet Cardiff's "Forty-Part Motet," which occupies a large room, secluded and chapel-like. A circle of 40 black speakers on tall poles face inward. Emanating from each is a single voice in a sacred a cappella piece by the English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. Sitting in the midst of this glorious choir feels like being in a Westminster Abbey gone minimal.

Museum boom The new CAC's official name is the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. The local couple gave $6 million to the cause.

The Rosenthals have also funded permanent free admission to the Cincinnati Art Museum, the city's showcase for art from Egypt to now. The museum has also been on a building spree. It's just renovated 18,000 square feet of gallery space to accommodate "The Cincinnati Wing: The Story of Art in the Queen City." A first-in-the-nation presentation of a community's history told through art and artifacts, it features exhibits ranging from a rifle to the Rookwood pottery for which Cincinnati is famed to 19th-century paintings by R. S. Duncanson and Frank Duveneck. The story goes right up to contemporary native sons Tom Wesselman and Jim Dine, who are internationally known. Cincinnati's museum boom isn't over: The Taft Museum of Art, Charles and Anna Taft's collection of Rembrandts, Sargents, and more, is currently closed for a $19 million renovation and expansion. With the Taft's reopening in January, the "Queen City" will become a must on the art pilgrim's route."Somewhere Better Than This Place: Alternative Social Experience in the Spaces of Contemporary Art" is at the Contemporary Arts Center, 44 East Sixth St., Cincinnati, through Nov. 9. 513-345-8400. www.contemporaryartscenter.org.

"The Cincinnati Wing: The Story of Art in the Queen City" is on permanent view in the Cincinnati Art Museum, 953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati. 513-639-2995. www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org.