A sculptor’s scavenger hunt
WHEN the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden turns 30 this spring, it will celebrate with a new, site-specific commission by the youngest artist to take on the outdoor terrace since the museum first seized on the idea of turning it into a seasonal gallery.
He is Adrián Villar Rojas, 36, of Argentina, and on April 14 he will pull back the curtain on The Theater of Disappearance, a series of roughly 20 large-scale sculptures referencing (and toying with) artworks and objects the artist has cherry-picked from among the 17 curatorial departments at the Met, including the Egyptian wing and Arms and Armor. (Frequent visitors to the Met may recognise favourite objects; Villar Rojas’s installation might even inspire a scavenger hunt to locate his original sources of inspiration.)
“My assumption is they expected me to sort of activate the museum,” he recalled recently, while commuting from Manhattan to New Jersey to work with fabricators who are helping realise his vision for the rooftop. For the artist, that meant learning the history of the museum, “how it began from zero to now”, he said. “One of the first requests I made was I wanted to meet everybody,” he added.
Though he prefers the theme of his project to be shrouded in mystery for now, it’s fair to say that Villar Rojas likes to make big statements. He first attracted art-world acclaim for his colossal dead whale “beached” in the Patagonian forest, created from clay, wood and concrete in 2009. His other huge projects include elephants at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2013; and a menagerie emerging from the Sea of Marmara at the Istanbul Biennial in 2015 that became an Instagram sensation.
He represented his native Argentina at the Venice Biennale in 2011, when he was 31, but insisted he hadn’t seen a Jackson Pollock until he was 30, and recalled first visiting the Met with his family at age 11.
Beatrice Galilee, the project’s curator at the Met, who is 34, said, “I wanted to work with someone of my generation.” During her first week on the job, Galilee found a book on her desk about the artist that was a gift from her boss, Sheena Wagstaff, who leads the museum’s contemporary and modern art department. “Sheena and I were both fans,” she said.
The Theater of Disappearance is an umbrella title for several of the artist’s projects this year, which he said he saw as inextricably linked. It is the name of his film trilogy about what he described as “the current state of latent war that seems to be throbbing underneath the entire human landscape”. It had a premiere last month at the Berlin Film Festival. He is also employing the title for an exhibition with the contemporary art organisation NEON in Athens ( June 1-September 24); and two museum-size installations, in Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Austria (May 6-August 27), and then at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, in Los Angeles (October 22-February 26, 2018).
Many works, like his permanent outdoor installation at the Fondation Vuitton in Paris, emulate or display elements from the ruins of what he imagines as a postapocalyptic, posthuman era. In some cases, he allows vegetation or decomposition to take over his forms. (Imagine the wildly overgrown Manhattan of the Will Smith film I Am Legend (2007), in sculpture.)
The Roof Garden overlooking Central Park opened in 1987 and is the most popular large-scale installation of art in New York City. It has flourished with a towering bamboo village, a balloon dog and, last year, a haunted house by the British artist Cornelia Parker, which drew more than a halfmillion visitors and was also organised by Galilee. The Theater of Disappearance will take its final bow on October 29.