Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan

Broad Appeal

Everyone who lives in East Lansing tells you to go visit the Broad Art Museum on the Michigan State University campus. They say this either because they are proud of the gleaming steel structure that appears to crouch like an insect poised to pounce on prey along Grand River Parkway or because they loathe the building for its sheer shock value.

After I tour the building, accompanied by a junior-year film student I met at the university, I decided, simply, that the building is a work of sculpture that its architect, Zaha Hadid, created. Her priority, clearly, was to create a minimalist sculpture rather than a useful museum for art. The structure she designed trumps all of the art within—and as a piece of sculpture, it is novel because it is an artwork you can actually occupy. This is not to say that her art is better than that housed inside (though a gallery piled with crumpled paper and drizzled with faux blood makes me wonder—Imran Qureshi’s And They Still Seek the Traces of Blood). Rather, her architectural statement of isosceles-sharp angles of glass and steel that simultaneously pierce the earth and stab the sky will always be more conspicuous even than any abstract or conceptual work of art that is forklifted, craned, or assembled-in-situ within. That strikes me as unfair to the mission of a museum. The art should be the priority rather than the art of the building.

Throughout the space, you are assaulted by sunlight that silkscreens across the galleries via ribs of windows, what the university press release refers to as “pleated.” Many of the walls are raked so that no artwork can hang flush, an effect that creates an instant vertigo when looking at something that is hinged to one of these surfaces. Long expanses of galleries culminate in show-offy geometries, making for useless spaces for paintings or drawings, let alone freestanding sculpture. Your eye goes to these corners of the building and you wonder how the staff cleans in there.

When my student friend, Nathan, and I walked down the staircase to the lower level, I saw, behind locked glass doors, some realistic mid-nineteenth-century paintings—a landscape, some portraits, cityscapes. What a relief it was to encounter something that showed something. Upstairs, we had viewed the mountain of crumpled paper filling the main gallery. In another gallery, there was an 80-foot-long shard of pink wax interspersed with false teeth that filled that space like a prettier version of a dinosaur’s vertebrae (Mithu Sen’s Border Unseen). Another piece displayed cuttings from a 1950s Uruguayan phonebook. The most interesting exhibit, if that’s what it was, were two typewriters that sat on a console table on the upper level. Guests were invited to type out messages on the machines, both manual typewriters, one from the 1960s, the other from the 1920s. Nathan, who is only 20, marveled at the machines. When we sat at the table, side by side, I immediately starting pounding out a message. The endeavor was akin to that notion of never unlearning how to ride a bike: I had used such machines for many years as a young man and the skill returned to me with the ease of reciting the alphabet. Nathan was flummoxed, pecking out a message so slowly that he was never able to sound the bell at the end of a line, since he never got that far. I, however, was typing so quickly that I needed to keep reaching into the dark cavity of the machine to pull apart spokes that stuck together.

Those realistic paintings we saw on the lower level—canvases with color, animated with figures, each with a sense of discernible poetry and composition—were remnants from a now-closed art museum on campus, the Kresge. Within that classical-styled building, artworks from all eras had once hung. Broad was willing to fund the creation of a new building, hiring a stararchitect, but not willing to donate any money to the restoration of a more traditional building featuring a wider spectrum of (figurative) art. Although all of the art from the Kresge is touted as being included in the new museum, I only saw some of it behind locked doors in a darkened room—as if the figurative art were part of a diorama.

In that lower level, I walked beneath one of Hadid’s recessed areas underneath the staircase, wondering how such an expanse of space was used. Indeed, it was simply a large triangle of unused, unusable space. It is touted that more than 70% of the 46,000-square-foot facility is devoted to exhibition space—but what that means is empty interior space. Paintings: not welcome.

Throughout our walk-through of the museum, the young Nathan and I discussed the idea of his filming one of his student productions in the museum, using the building itself as a character. He liked that idea. And, so, when we left the museum, our fingers still tingling from the tactile experience with the typewriters, we walked into campus discussing the character of the building we had visited. We decided that he/she/it would play a villain.

The Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan