An arial view of the Guggenheim's interior. Image courtesy of the DesignMuseum.org

Last Sunday, I made the trek uptown and spent a rainy afternoon in the City at the Guggenheim, to see the museum’s current main attraction, Haunted.

This was my first time at the museum and I was immediately enthralled by Frank Lloyd Wright’s pristinely white, spiraled architecture. The cylindrical shape of the building, combined with the seemingly infinite open-air spiral walkway wrapping the interior, fits perfectly with the exhibit, which seeks to

share a connection in terms of their relationship to the past and the idea that they are somehow recording something in the past and bringing it forward into the present…

The exhibit begins on a heavy note, with Andy Warhol’s Orange Disaster #5. This work, which gives the viewer a good idea of what’s to come, represents Warhol’s obsession with mortality in the mass media, and his theory that the serial exposure to a tragic image (in this case, an electric chair) lessens its effect on the viewer.

Continuing up the spiral, viewers are bombarded with disturbing images ranging from Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 which depicts a woman holding a mirror in a way that replaces her upper half with the reflected image of her legs, to Annette Messager’s spiral of body parts, entitled My Vows. These pieces are eventually followed by a stunning video instillation of Marina Abramovic, the famed performance artist, fervently cleaning a human skeleton on her lap.

Of course, there are works in the exhibit that aren’t as haunting as the aforementioned. Nate Lowman’s The Last Supper depicts the classic da Vinci mural with which it shares its name vertically distorted and blotched entirely black. The effect turns the piece into a kind of Rorschach inkblot that the viewer is left to interpret. Personally, it reminded me of the New York skyline.

Then there is Hiroshima Sugimoto’s Princess Diana, a seemingly simple portrait. However, the dimly lit ambiance of the exhibit combined with the tragedy surrounding the subject, creates a chill just as powerful as any of the other, more literal pieces.

Lichtenstein's "Floater", image courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum

One of the collection’s most noteworthy works is the one with which the museum chose to advertise the exhibit: Floater, by Miranda Lichtenstein (see right).

The photograph features a woman drifting on her back in a pool of water, staring up. At first glace there is nothing unusual about the image. Then you notice that her reflection in the water, which shows her mirrored face looking down in the water, is at an angle that would make it impossible to capture naturally. It is perhaps here where the portrait gets its name; the subject is both a pensive woman, drifting along on her back, and a lifeless body, drowned beneath the surface.

All in all, Haunted does more than live up to its name. Not only does it offer an incredible selection of works that deal with the past, the exhibit also takes on a life of its own, staying with you well after you’ve left.

If you’re going to be in New York City before September 6th, think about visiting Haunted.

-Will Defebaugh, Creative Director