In the Shadows of a Museum

John Haber
in New York City

Edmund de Waal, Regina Silveira, and Rafael Domenech

Edmund de Waal still remembers his first visit to the Frick Collection. How could he not, when it was so much more for him than a class trip or a holiday? And so it is once again, when his return has become a work of art.

Regina Silveira has worked in the shadow of a museum, too. She has also supplied the shadows, in black vinyl—or she would have, had her work come to be. Unrealized projects show her responding to public spaces and institutions. Last, SculptureCenter for Rafael Domenech is not just a container for sculpture, but a sculpture itself and more. Together, they ask how art necessarily alters a museum and a museum its art. If they more than de Waal impose their vision, they seem all the more visionary when the project is all in their head.

A half-empty glass

The Dutch teenager had, as he puts it, "run away to New York," where he "was staying on friend's floor," and he found himself face to face with plums, two slices of squash, and a half-drunk glass of water. The sensation of at once permanence and transience, in a 1728 still life by Jean-Siméon Chardin, must have resonated with a seventeen-year-old wondering at his place in the world—all the more so on another continent and on a dark winter's day. Now in his mid-fifties, Edmund de Waal has been back often, and he is still marveling. His response has become nine sculptures, as "Elective Affinities," each in a different room. He is the Frick's second foray into contemporary arts and craft, after Arlene Shechet, but this time in the main galleries. He could be making a votive offering to great painting.

Each sculpture has the look of a still life, although near abstract and closer to Giorgio Morandi than to Chardin. They might be cylinders like small vases or nested bowls, with stacked slabs beside them, thin sheets leaning up against them, or torn strips within. I could almost make out water in some cylinders, as in Chardin after all, but it was just an illusion. They are also close to fine objects in the collection apart from painting that one might normally overlook. Some vitrines rest on tables in front of paintings, others closer to the center of a room. One nestles under a table beneath an ornate clock. de Waal had his memories in conversation with Charlotte Vignon, the Frick's curator of decorative arts.

His sculptures mean to get one looking and to slow one down. They are something of a treasure hunt as well, especially given materials like porcelain, alabaster, steel, and gold. They are his history, but not his alone. The artist has written a history of porcelain, and his family collected netsuke, the Japanese art of ceramic, ivory, metal, and wood. A Jew, he must also feel an affinity with Rembrandt, whose treated the Jewish community in Amsterdam with such sympathy. Yet the steel recalls the source of Henry Clay Frick's fortune, as well as a forge in a painting by Francisco de Goya.

The exhibition's treasure map has one seeing the Fifth Avenue mansion through Frick's very own eyes. The clock occupies his living room and Thomas Gainsborough portraits the dining room. "Put one thing down," de Waal says, "and everything around it changes." He is describing his hopes for his art, but also the collector. In buying art, Frick was claiming it for America, while claiming an old-world stature and heritage for himself. In sharing a gallery with Rembrandt and Franz Hals, de Waal sees himself, too, as still becoming Dutch.

The show takes its title from another coming-of-age story, the novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. And elective affinities, with their supposed basis in chemical laws, are and are not choices. Site-specific art may have you thinking more of installations about on architecture and filling it to capacity. This is more site responsive, but still subjective. How exactly does white porcelain at a woman's feet respond to J. A. D. Ingres with that pause of space, and do black vitrines really respond to scenes of fall and winter by François Boucher with their Steel Light? Can another sculpture transform a Madonna and Child by Jan van Eyck with Petrus Christus into an Annunciation?

So, at any rate, run de Waal's titles for his work, but you got me. Their subjectivity is a real weakness, although also a strength, like that glass half empty and half full: it allows them to enter multiple biographies—his, Frick's, an artist's, and the viewer's. I remember my early visits to the Frick, too. I felt a sudden darkness descending in a Deposition by Gerard David as a cloud passed over the room's museum skylight, and I lingered over Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini as if its sunlit revelation was my own. It will be up to you to make it yours.

Safe to take the stairs

Really, it is safe to take in the work of Regina Silveira, no thanks to her. One has to put up with the unforgiving concrete stairs of a Chelsea gallery. Still, the stairwell does not appear to spin off in another dizzying direction above a bottomless pit, leaving one uncertain where to walk or to stand. Silveira planned to create the illusion with a wall drawing in black vinyl. Its bold outlines would have given actual gallery or museum architecture the look of an artist's sketchbook. For now, alas, it remains one of ten ambitious projects in "Não Feito," or "unrealized."

Not everything within speaks to safety. More vinyl would have covered a museum in Stuttgart, with the illusion of glass shattered by an enormous bullet. It would have converted the projecting façade into a billboard in protest against violence—like the gun violence in her native Brazil. It would also have called attention to the fragility of support for the arts. Mostly, though, Silveira is a visionary. She must have liked the optical density of shattered glass, just as she must have liked competing with M. C. Escher and Giovanni Battista Piranesi for the delirium of fictive stairs.

Silveira, now eighty, wants others to become dreamers as well. A traffic circle in Bogotá would have become a waterfall, but more often she has her head in the clouds. Stairs at the Bronx Library in New York would have ended in clouds, and the ceiling of the Santa Maria Novella train station in Florence would have dissolved in clouds as well. She would have covered another ceiling, for a passenger tunnel at a subway in São Paulo, with oversized paw prints—and more paw prints would have lined a four-story elevator at the city's university, while work not in the show represents frogs, snakes, and insects. As with Wild Elevator, she loves the sensation of nature and architecture run wild. She loves even more that one cannot always tell them apart.

The display centers on sketches, scale models, and computer simulations. Her tools are an architect's, in the proud tradition of Latin American architecture, and her constructions are installations. Her bullet wall in Germany would have entered "Mixed Realities," a group show on the theme of VR. Still, she is first and foremost a painter, in vinyl on a mural scale. The paw prints look much like postwar abstraction, like the late drips by Jackson Pollock in black and white. He left his male paw prints at least once on canvas.

Visionary architects, like Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright, have a bad habit of imposing their visions on others. Wright's Guggenheim Museum is notoriously hostile to art. His and other projects in "Never Built New York" would have come close to destroying the city. Silveira, in contrast, welcomes her surroundings. Her library would have opened with the word for library in different languages, in an ethnically diverse borough. Her covering for a soccer stadium would have given its tiered seating the illusion of a circular arena—with an enormous soccer ball flying off into space, as Supersonic Goal.

Not that form follows function. Silveira's work goes back to 1986, but her breakthrough came at the contemporary art museum in Mexico in 1999. She proposed to use vinyl to create deep shadows from two imagined light sources, enriching an interior with natural and unnatural light. Still, she also proposed to empty the rooms of their art. Where de Waal plays his sculpture off the Frick Collection, she wanted none of what she had seen. She was figuratively overshadowing the museum, and one can see why it passed on the opportunity—but one can enjoy it all the more in the safer enclosure of a gallery.

Exhausting the alternatives

For Rafael Domenech, SculptureCenter is also "sculpture, architecture, a pavilion, and a venue for public programs and gatherings." It is, in short, a modern museum, and not even his Model to Exhaust This Place can exhaust the possibilities, for all its own serious limits. It is a place to hang out, to gather, or to take in the former trolley repair shop for itself. It is a venue for his lighting, materials, and furnishing as practical design and as sculpture. It can contain few enough chairs and tables for a comfortably private meeting—or as many as it takes for public seating. And then, taken apart and stacked against the walls, their parts become sculpture, too.

Like the gentrification to every side in Long Island City, change has been slow in coming, only to happen all at once. SculptureCenter still has a modest program, without space for a permanent collection, the resources for a permanent education center, or the sheer greed behind a full-fledged bookstore. You may encounter it less as a destination than as a side trip on the way to one of the new local breweries or after MoMA PS1, and Domenech is fine with that. In the group show just past, "Searching the Sky for Rain," he made only a modest enhancement, a bulge in its basement tunnels. Now he calls attention to its exposed brick that much more by leaving it alone, just as Maya Lin did in planning its conversion. I relished the main-floor gallery and his installation all the more on a weekday for having them to myself.

Domenech claims to draw on the building not as a space alone or a part of his work, but also a means of construction. He says that he relied on its tracks and gantry to weave his materials, although barely a trace of either remains. Besides, his industrial mesh comes ready-made, apart from his choosing its colors, cutting holes in it, and suspending it as makeshift partitions. He cuts a similar oval in the Sheetrock that separates the front desk from art, only larger. In accord with his appreciation for the architecture, it allows a decent view less of the gallery than of its own metal studs. The mesh, in turn, becomes a focus of attention as a coarsely woven fabric in place of canvas and painting.

Rather than opening the wide-open space further, he lets it spill over into its surroundings, starting with the repeated ovals. A table and chairs lie on the desk side of the partition, where one might mistake them for part of the latest group show, "Total Disbelief," continuing downstairs. The chairs consist of crossed wood planes, which also serve as the base for tables, whose tops echo the oval cuts. They supply the most evident accents of color as well. While the mesh looks colorful enough in selected close-ups, it has mostly shades of gray, but Domenech has added text to the wood in red. Disassembled, the planes and their colors look right out of Russian Constructivism.

The text quotes Severo Sarduy, a twentieth-century poet and fellow Cuban, but in no particular order, half hidden, and without translation. It becomes all but meaningless, but then Sarduy practiced concrete poetry—or words for their own sake. If that sounds disorienting, Domenech intends "a poetics of dislocation." In fact, I cheated when I quoted his mission statement as including architecture. He speaks instead of "a decentered architectural model." With its cryptic text and modular construction, the work could serve as a model for the language and architecture of the future.

That, too, recalls early Soviet art and its dreams of remaking the world. And his dreams, too, could be distracting or illusory. You could almost forget to look up to catch red and white paper lanterns, filling the tall upper space with points of light. As his title suggests, Domenech means to exploit the building and the institution while putting them to the test. Still, I appreciate his more modest subtitle without boasting or jargon, SculptureCenter Pavilion. This is a pavilion for the center and the center at its best, as itself a found object and point of light.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Edmund de Waal ran at The Frick Collection through November 17, 2019, Regina Silveira at Alexander Gray through July 12. Rafael Domenech ran at SculptureCenter through March 23, 2020.