Small Things Brought Together: Bard's New CCS Hessel Museum
by Johanne Renbeck

Most are familiar with the story of Vincent Van Gogh, whose paintings are now a well-known treasure, but who in his life time went unrecognized. "Great things are not done by impulse," said Vincent, "but by a series of small things brought together." Perhaps he was describing the construction of a painting, but his words can just as well illuminate the creation of the new CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Scheduled to open November 12, the museum will offer exhibits drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, which consists of more than 1700 pieces by artists working from the late 1960s to the present. The story of this new museum is actually three stories that exist together in the same space: about building, about construction and about the small steps that led to the establishment of a rich cultural asset for the Mid-Hudson region.

The first layer of the story concerns the building of the new museum space that has been under construction since groundbreaking in May of 2005. Designed by architects Goettsch Partners, the new museum extends the existing Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College with the addition of 17,000 square feet of galleries. When I visited the Hessel Museum in July for a hard hat tour, the dramatic stages of construction were complete. The conjoined buildings, new and old, looked like comfortable friends and the wide walk entry invited approach. Intriguing phrases written stencil style with stainless steel letters that had been imbedded in the walkway alerted me: here I'll be turned around, invited to see with new eyes, to make new connections. "BRICKS ENOUGH TO FORM AN ARC... TORQUE ENOUGH TO TWIST A LIVE WIRE NEAR ENOUGH TO ANOTHER TO ARC A SPARK," says the sidewalk in this work by artist Lawrence Weiner.

Outside, all looked calm and complete, but once inside the new facility, guided by museum director Tom Eccles, I discovered a hive of activity. We clamored over building materials, yielded to front loaders, greeted electricians, sheet rockers, stepped around machines that buffed the poured cement floors to something smooth and eternal. The hive notion stuck with me as we moved from room to room and I lost orientation in the maze of spaces, not perfect identical cells, but a progression of unique intimate galleries. In some, windows welcoming swaths of light opened onto campus vistas. In others, doorways allowed for interesting connections to adjoining gallery rooms. Certain rooms evoked calm, others elation or expansiveness. There seemed to be no end to the elaborations on space and the sensibilities stirred by them. "It's rather like a rubix cube," Eccles said, as we entered an expansive space with high ceilings and sky lights. He went on to describe how the two large central galleries surrounded by many smaller exhibit spaces will offer curators many choices about pacing, mood and interconnection. For instance, by opening or closing archways in the walls, it will be possible to create relationships between works in different galleries, thus involving viewers spatially in a thought process that will expand their encounter with the art. Eccles saved a good bit for last. We ended our tour in the gallery that visitors will enter first. A large square of floor was open where a piece by Do Ho Suh will be permanently installed under transparent flooring. This art you can walk upon—art you can peer into from an unconventional vantage point—will certainly set the stage for new points of view.

Do Ho Suh's piece brings us to the next layer of the story: the art itself and the construction of Marieluise Hessel's collection. In an interview by Tom Eccles and art critic Michael Brenson earlier this year, Marieluise Hessel talked about events and insights that shaped her collection: "Art was everywhere when I was growing up. We were surrounded by beautiful Baroque churches, paintings adorning houses.... Then when I was 18 years old, I was invited to the home of art collectors in Garmisch. Until that time I had no exposure to contemporary art but I remember very clearly that the visit made an important impression on me." At first, she bought very little and hung what she bought in the apartment she and her husband used when business brought them to Germany. Eventually, she needed to rent a storage space for her purchases.

It was at this point that she began thinking of becoming a collector. "I wanted to build a collection that reflected the time I lived in." Later, she became interested in issues of identity within the artwork. Originally attracted to painting, Hessel found her way into photography with the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She was his first serious collector. "By that time I had already decided to tell stories in my collection, stories that were important to me or as a believed history.... I thought Robert's work was an important document of that time." Then something happened to refine the focus of her collection further. "At the beginning... my focus was only on the art. That changed after I saw the 1987 exhibition Paris-Berlin curated by Pontus Hulten at the Pompidou in Paris. I realized for the first time how powerful a message an exhibition could communicate.... [It] influenced my collecting, changed the way I looked at art, and how I experienced it. From that moment on, I looked not only at the quality of a work of art, but also the message it told about our culture."

Almost from the beginning Marieluise Hessel knew that someday she wanted to collection to be available to the public. She visualized giving it to a small town museum where contemporary art was not accessible and where the character of the collection as a whole would retain its integrity. Her vision led Bard President Leon Botstein to propose the establishment of the Center for Curatorial Studies as a home for her collection. In 1990, the original Center opened with 38,000 square feet of galleries, advanced collection storage facilities, classrooms, library and offices. With the completion of the addition this year, Hessel states, "the new museum space will allow visiting curators to install their own exhibitions while they are working with the students." Students in the CCS Master of Arts program will use the galleries of the original building for their thesis projects in curating.

Curating brings us to the third layer of this story. A building has been constructed. A collection has been built (and will continue to develop during Hessel's lifetime.) Now curators will structure exhibits, which are constructions in and of themselves, a series of small things brought together, to use Van Gogh's words. For curators of the inaugural show, Tom Eccles and Trevor Smith, a curator at he New Museum in New York City, the challenge has been to build a show that reflects the spirit of the Hessel Collection, not as documentary, but as an active engagement with viewers, offering them opportunities to explore and contrast a variety of social and artistic points of view. "The show is very accessible," says Eccles. "You can understand it as a thinking person. You might not like everything you see," he notes, [but] "it's a very human show, meant to be argumentative... a little bit of Family of Man with an edge."

Eccles's wishes for new museum resonate with those of Hessel herself. Eccles hopes that the Hessel Museum will become a museum of the local community. In that wish lies another construction in the making: the building of relationship between people and some artists of their own time. If Van Gogh's work had been collected by a Marieluise Hessel of his day, it is inviting to imagine how that would that have changed his life and the lives of his contemporaries who never had the privilege of considering his vision of the world.

As the conclusion of my visit, Eccles toured me with decided enthusiasm through the catalog he is developing for Wrestle, the inaugural exhibit. I glimpsed works by Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist, Sigmar Polke, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, and Cady Noland, among others.

"There's a lot to talk about here," smiled Tom Eccles. Without doubt, there is.

For more information about CCS and the Hessel Museum, visit www.bard.edu/ccs.