Countryside: The Future, on view now at the Guggenheim, doesn’t feel like an exhibition. It feels like a textbook projected onto the museum’s iconic curving surfaces.

Working with graphic designer Irma Bloom, curators AMO, Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal Bantal have taken many bytes of research, analysis and opinion, and printed it on curtains hanging along the museum’s outer wall, and, directly, in vinyl text running along its ceiling and guardrails. It’s a whole lot of data and a whole lot of Helvetica.

Typically visiting the gallery on a Friday evening is the perfect dinner party pre-game; the scene is chic, poised, knowing. Last week the crowd, diminished by pandemic restrictions, was listless, reading wall texts dutifully, but ultimately, as they reached the top, worn out. They wanted a show and got a lecture.

True confession: I didn’t read everything, I didn’t even look at everything. But what was apparent was a nostalgia for the pre-digital and pre-technological. The first wall text, at the base of the ramp, juxtaposes a photo of three rosy-cheeked teenage Russian farm girls from 1905, standing and offering plates of food, with another of contemporary workers inside an industrial hothouse. It reads: The countryside is a stable environment where everyone—man, woman, child—knows their place. There is a pride in costume and products… The sentiment is comically retrograde. One of the last images of the show, at the top of the ramp, is a poster of Koolhaas standing with group of men and women in dark suits, surveying an enormous spread of farmland, possibly pitching ideas. It’s a tired image of the modern architect as cultural savior, particularly sad because Koolhas began his career in sly opposition to it.

The strongest shows at the Guggenheim engage the sculptural drama of the architecture. Giacometti’s figures, Frank Gehry’s architectural models, and Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture all shone within the gallery’s curving walls and tilted floors. At Countryside there are some small objects on stands along the ramp but almost all the material is, both literally and metaphorically flat; it doesn’t provoke. There are some small objects (a drone, a satellite, and bale of hay) hung in a single cable above the ground floor pool, but they’re swallowed by the monumental space. If Rem Koolhaas wants to turn back to a world that is more primal and richly physical, why didn’t he give us an exhibit that is?

Photograph © AMO

TRIPPING

In 1967, after dropping acid and then dropping out, Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert visited a yogi in India and became Ram Dass. In 1971 he published an account of that transformation, an illustrated guide to mindfulness called Be Here Now, that became a bestseller in the United States. The book offers a kind of everyday Zen: move beyond the physical, be your own self, approach everything with love, keep yourself grounded.

While the book’s tenets are no longer surprising, its graphics remain transgressive. Each of its 221 pages reproduces an original large-format cardboard artwork, crafted with rubber stamps, pen and ink by Dass’ commune-dwelling friends. The paper’s dark texture and rough edges, the wonky text alignment and kerning, the shifting font sizes and styles, and the eclectic sampling of Buddhist, Hindu and Christian iconographies, all shape a mood of happy, hippy unorthodoxy. It’s this lack of pretentiousness that makes the project difficult to dismiss or satirize; it’s entirely innocent.

The text is relaxed, conversational and repetitive, lit with flashes of poetry. Dass describes the radiance of his guru, Meher Babu, “. . he’s smiling at you/like the other Marx brother.” But it’s the composition of each page, the dance of text and graphics, that conveys, in a flash, feeling, like a good graphic novel. The book’s stories, songs and musings bend, shrink and swell around the icons and images: dazzling mandalas, idyllic landscapes, smiling sadhus, and naked ladies with long legs and long hair. Rather then religiosity, the mood is one of wonderment and gentle self-reflection. Dass observes, right at the beginning, “We watch the entire drama/That is our lives/ We watch this illusion/with/unbearable compassion.” And one really can’t disagree.

October 22, 2017 by Nalina Moses