Art + Spa

Lisa Tannenbaum studied Architecture and Art History and now she is a Spa Architecture Design Consultant based in New York City. We met up several months ago at a special event hosted by the Foundation Center for not-for-profit arts organizations and again recently at the Yale Club to discuss each others pursuits and efforts. This email interview is a follow up to our conversation.

Drew:
I once wrote that in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke gave us detailed and complex visual experiences directly, without graphic stimuli. Your background is in architecture and art history but now you are focusing on spa culture with a historical approach and an academic understanding and applying this knowledge as a consultant. Do you think that the well being from therapeutic spas is simply a direct approach to our core through our bodies, which art approaches indirectly or do you think the former is purely corporeal and the latter mainly cerebral?

Lisa:
Drew, your questions are similar to my research questions. This one in particular addresses a central theme I am exploring in my academic work at the moment: the connection between art and spa. For me, the experience of great art, in the Kantian sense, is one of meditation. When we encounter art, we contemplate it, stare at it, and our mind goes blank fixated on the fascination of this human creation. What does the gallery of a museum look like when filled with people? What are they doing? People are quiet, still, gaze fixed off in the distance at a point, from time to time moving in a progression, individuals in a large group all engaged in a collective experience while internally meditative. I describe this typical scene at a painting gallery in the Met or MoMA because for me it is identical to the experience of a thermal spa. So the answer to your question is that they are an identity, and I think that art and spa should both approach the corporeal core and stimulate the mind in a way that is relaxing and renewing to the body, mind and spirit. Unfortunately, today in our NYC culture, the experience of art is usually in a jam packed tourist filled blockbuster show, and the experience of spa is not at all what it could be in terms of incorporating great art and design. This is an area where I would like to have an impact on the field.

Drew:
I want to ask this first question a different way. Many artists, especially the modernists such as Mondrian and Brancusi and the minimalists such as Tony Smith and Carl Andre (his Equivalent VIII pictured left) use symmetry of form and there is something visually "right" about this. We feel aligned by the order but we may still be physically unbalanced. If we are reacting to certain art because it creates this sensation but does not actually align us, isn't it logical that we should approach it more directly, through physical means?

Lisa:
Approaching more directly through physical means I think entails a 3-dimensional art object, such as a Tony Smith sculpture. I would not say that a large outdoor sculptural installation makes me feel balanced, rather it shows the tenuousness of balance and how teetering on axes can create motion. There is a kinetic sculpture (Two Planes Vertical–Horizontal II by George Warren Rickey) at Yale's Pierson College Courtyard that is really a metal flag pole with a rectangular metal flag that moves with the wind, or when exuberant college students push it. The piece is interactive and may serve to balance us by receiving and releasing extra energy in the form of wind or student power. It illustrates the Vedic principles of Shiva and Shakti, destruction and creation, stability and motion. The pole represents Shiva, stillness, and the moving part represents Shakti, movement, and together represent the balance of the universe.

Drew:
You have traveled around the world and seen various spas. Describe the prevailing visual aesthetic. Is the overall affect of relaxation most dependent on the physical/architectural design/layout or is it more about natural finishes or are there objects and images around these places such as sculptures and paintings that are key? Or is it a combination of all three?

Lisa:
Spas range from water parks to serene zen gardens. Spas are chameleons and can take any form from their context. The thing I find insincere is the term spa design which is adopted by many architects and interiors firms. There is a bogus line in marketing materials about the meaning of spa as salus per aquam and how spas influenced the environments they created. This was simply a line and they did not even understand what they were saying in my opinion. What I would like to teach, and have created a course about, is sincere analysis of spa layouts and spatial organization throughout history in different times and places, relating spas to their social, historical, urban and cultural contexts for a deep understanding of their design and function. So my answer is layout and location in terms of my interests architecturally and urbanistically at this point, but I think that all three are essential and should be integrated.

Drew:
I was in the spa town, Carlsbad, this summer (Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic). It was my second time there and this recent trip confirmed my initial impression from 15 years ago, that there is a feeling of "too much". Visually this translates as pretty but kitsch architecture and something regal and opulent. I assume modern spas are toned down but can you perhaps explain if there is a relation to "lifestyles of the rich and famous" that actually contributes to an overall general healthier feeling of someone caught up in that haze or is this simply a facade to command higher prices?

Lisa:
I think you are asking whether the opulence of a spa directly correlates to the impact on health and well-being. From my experience researching thermal baths architecture in Switzerland on a Fulbright grant, what I find most fascinating, is the juxtaposition of high and low culture in one establishment. In a single spa complex, there are usually three parts: the luxury hotel spa, the medical wellness center, and a public bathing establishment. Kitsch aside, I think that the availability of various price points and levels of service offers the spa experience to a broad egalitarian audience, and this is a sensibility I would like to bring to the US. The public facilities are usually simpler, but can be, in the case of Budapest's Gellert and Szcheny baths, grand palaces of the people. It depends on the time and the culture that created it.

Drew:
Another related question I have is...do you think that people in a more relaxed setting, such as a spa, are more vulnerable to artwork that might be, for lack of a better word, tacky? Do we drop our critical guard when we are happy? I do not want to get into the history or definitions of degenerative art but can you perhaps personally comment on artwork that is disturbing and upsetting but also important? Historically I could point to someone like Goya (who predates the degenerative art label). I cannot imagine Saturn Devouring His Son hanging in a spa lobby and yet it is a very powerful piece.

Lisa:
I disagree. The sculpture of Laocoön and his sons being eaten by serpents was found in the Roman baths. This is certainly a disturbing piece. Sigfried Giedion expressed in 1948 that the way a culture regenerates or relaxes on a daily basis is representative of the level of the civilization. I think it is representative of the decline of our culture that challenging and great art is no longer found in spas. I would like to see and inspire a culture of spas designed around art and as art. This maybe refers to your earlier question about whether spas are designed around an object, based on finishes, or physical layout. Spas built today are more for trends in the $1billion + US industry, so there is little incentive to build them to last with expensive finishes, great art or lasting materials. The layouts are determined by maximum profit income per square foot, and being in business for 30 years would be an extremely long time, so the limited life expectancy also limits the design and construction efforts.

Drew:
Reviewing your own educational evolution, are you where you are now because of some personal Hegelian progression? Have you reached your personal end of art or are all of your experiences layers that inform each other?

Lisa:
I have always felt like Penelope. I have been talking about these issues for the past ten years, and now people are starting to listen. Perhaps it is a personal choice, or Hegelian progression (or dharmic as I prefer), that I insist on sticking to a topic that seems out there to many, spa history, but in my view of it is central to all human activity. A close friend, architect Andrew Heid commented about my work, that bathing is like Rem Koolhaas' Harvard study of Shopping. It's the anonymous activity that we all participate in, but isn't the topic of scholarship. Another friend, New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro, said to me people are so into topics like eating, pooping, so why not bathing?

Drew:
In the history of spas, was practicing art (i.e. painting, dance) part of the experience of relaxation and re-creation? I remember reading a decade ago about a special resort/spa in northern Europe that was only for artists. I think they were mainly performing artists. It would be interesting to see what kind of program they have.

Lisa:
Art is intimately linked with spas. Springs were historically places of inspiration. This is thought to be linked with the release of negative ions from flowing water. It is also about relaxation in general, as well as being places of cultural exchange. European spas are always places of art exhibits, music performances, writers and those seeking to release creative blockages such as Fellini's 81/2 at Montecatini Terme in Tuscany.

Drew:
So what kind of art do you like most and how do you want to experience it?

Lisa:
I saw Stifters Dinge at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Great Performances in December. This to me is exactly what I would like a spa experience to be like. It is a totally engaging and sensory 80-minute performance piece by director Heiner Goebbels. There are three pools that fill with water during the performance and are a reflective surface for lighting and sound effects, as well as catching artificial rain drops beautifully and bubbling up with dry ice at the end. I paid $57 for the ticket and it was more transcendent and relaxing than any equivalently priced spa experience in NY. I would love to walk into a spa and have Stifters Dinge be going on and that is the experience of art + spa.

Drew:
Thank you for your time.

Lisa:
Thanks to you and the Museum of Peripheral Art.


...addendum...
Coincidentally, the Laocoön and His Sons sculpture appeared again to me today in an offline and unrelated context. I was walking towards the Highline on a frozen Sunday in Chelsea and was keeping my eyes peeled for open galleries. At the front yard of the Jim Kempner Fine Art gallery on West 23rd Street was a small group of unrelated Parisians who had converged to admire Carole Feuerman's Survival of Serena. Typically, I am unimpressed by hyper-realist sculptures but there is something so idealized in her work that you want to believe in it. Survival of Serena is several times "life size" and is basically a bust with arms with half a sculpted inner tube. No matter how how bad you may find its perfection, your skin tingles when you are in its presence. It is so unapologetically sentimental that when I saw it today, one of the coldest days of the year, I was transported back to my childhood, swimming in a warm tidewater Virginia creek on a steamy Fourth of July. The relaxed, classical female swimmers of Feuerman's world are water nymphs and poolside yogis...they seemed irresistibly fitting for today's post. Went I went inside the gallery to read up on Feuerman, I found tear sheets from the October 2009 issue of Sculpture magazine. The cover of that issue of Sculpture (pictured above, left) shows a copy of the Laocoön sculpture (sans serpent). The issue theme reads, Time and History in the Body and Object. Pictured below is Survival of Serena.