Art center director sticks to his guns

If you were strolling the clean streets that surround it, you’d be tempted to turn away -- and not just because of the bad memories it recalls.

The squat, hulking building in a handsome Viennese neighborhood of late-empire apartments served as a Nazi anti-aircraft tower during World War II, spitting flak at Allied planes.

To those too young to recall its history, it’s just plain ugly; Austrians call it a Schandfleck, a blot on an otherwise pristine landscape.

Either way, this is not exactly a natural choice for Europe’s next important art center.

That’s what Peter Noever, the globe-trotting head of Vienna’s MAK Center of applied and contemporary arts, envisions for impenetrable, windowless Arenbergpark Flak Tower. In the process of transforming it, he also hopes to create a new model for the production and presentation of contemporary art.

Noever, in Los Angeles earlier this month to discuss his plans and meet with a fundraiser, concedes that the building is “a bunker ... with a very negative spirit.”Yet this intense, driven man with a gray buzz cut and heavy black eyebrows -- sitting in the incongruous confines of a Tuscan-style hotel off Sunset Boulevard -- envisions the dark monolith as a beacon for the future: The Contemporary Art Tower will serve, he hopes, as the basis for something unprecedented.

“The idea is to build a collection of the 21st century. And to do it on site, and step by step. It will be very slow -- 15 to 20 years. You invite one artist, and then see what he has done, and then see what you do next. It is the very opposite of the kind of collection that’s offered on the market,” which changes as parts are bought and sold.

This collection is intended to be as permanent as the bunker that houses it. The tower currently serves as a storage depot for MAK Center artworks, which are sometimes put on display.

“Hardly any visitor,” Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel daily judged of the tower’s plan, “will be able to remain unmoved by the dangerous fascination of the place.”

Still, why -- even as police parking garages, power plants and grain silos are retrofitted as museums -- would someone want to do such a thing? Noever, for one thing, has a history pursuing demanding, some would say lost, causes: In 1986 he became artistic and executive director of the then-fading MAK, Vienna, now the Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, angering much of the city’s rigid cultural community by merging the applied and contemporary arts.

Then in 1994, he helped save the Rudolf Schindler House in West Hollywood, which now houses the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, a satellite to the Vienna headquarters. He’s fought a losing battle to keep its Kings Road block free of what he considers an imposing condo development.

The 138-foot-tall, 15,070 square-foot Flak Tower has been part of the cityscape for nearly as long as Noever, 64 and a Vienna native, has lived. (It’s so physically solid, he says, that the only way to destroy it would involve taking out some of the surrounding neighborhood.) But it wasn’t until the ‘90s that he was struck by its possibilities.

“What interested me was the dialogue between the past and the artists,” says Noever, who has been an architecture professor, magazine editor and art publisher over the years. “Art is the only media that can find a dialogue with an ugly spirit, make it understood.”

Although he will leave the matter of dealing with history to each individual artist, he doesn’t want the tower’s origins to be lost: He’s tired of Austria reveling in its cultural heritage but avoiding its shameful past. He’s frustrated, that is, at countrymen who believe -- as the old joke has it -- that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler a German.

What appeals to him most is the way the tower’s raw industrial space will be reshaped by the sensibility of living artists.

“Vienna never had that, because the collections end in the 19th century: They came from the empire.” The republic’s taste in visual art, he says, is generally backward-looking and conservative. “The city, the people, the politicians behave like they did 100 years ago,” only claiming literary and artistic figures until after their deaths.

And for all of Europe’s relatively lavish public funding of culture, he says, Austria doesn’t have as rich a base of collectors as the United States does: “If they have money, they have very bad taste.” As a result, he says, even the best contemporary work remains obscurely collected and displayed, even as museums hail Klimt and Schiele.

The first artists to be commissioned to create work for the CAT are James Turrell, the Light and Space artist, and Jenny Holzer, the conceptual artist of slogans and exhortations. Their work, which will involve projecting light on the outside of the tower, will begin in late 2006. Over time, other artists will develop work for the interior. (Turrell will also design a “Skyspace,” on which visitors can gather and take in the view, on one of the tower’s gun platforms.)

“It’s unusual to be asked to work on a flak tower -- how could I resist,” Holzer says from her upstate New York studio. She was drawn to the project because of Noever, whom she’s known for years and credits with a fascination for “big, difficult ideas.” And the building’s clean, if imposing architecture compelled her, as well as “the ghastly history of it. Not just morbid fascination, but the chance to do some alchemy, to turn it into something useful -- without lying about what it was.”

Noever doesn’t expect to have difficulty persuading artists. “Most museums being built don’t relate to the way art is being made today,” he says, since installations tend to be designed for the context in which they’re shown. “Contemporary art,” says the tower’s business plan, “needs new forms of presentation.”

Similarly, the tower’s funding, which will come to about 20 million Euros, will be unusual: a combination of public and private funds that will accumulate gradually, while the tower is up and running. He and the other founders hope to attract visitors from around the world to the collection as well as the rooftop restaurant, bar and informal art spaces the tower will comprise.

The art tower has been in the works for a long time, and Noever emphasizes that hurdles remain, mostly because the public-private partnership is largely a new model in Europe. The tower has been planned for a decade now -- various models and renderings have been displayed in exhibitions around the world since 2000 -- and Noever seems wearied by the effort of keeping the ball rolling. “They crucify me in Vienna,” he says.

Still, recent progress gives him hope. In the long run, Noever says, the labor will be worth it.

He envisions a day when 21st century art -- which seems not only new but provisional and fleeting now -- is the hallowed work of the past, the way Picasso’s blue period and Brancusi’s sculptures strike us today.

And at that point, the two decades consumed with establishing the tower’s collection will seem like just a flash of light.

“If this makes any sense, it’s a way to make other generations interested in the past. If the content attracts you, go there and have a confrontation.”