Villar Rojas provides no answer key to this intellectual hunt, and perhaps you’ll soon surrender and descend from the roof to search for the original objects. Discerning specific works of Ancient Egyptian art, for me, was by far the easiest - which is telling. Many may actually breeze past the famous yellow jasper face of a queen, which Villar Rojas has enlarged to serve as an inconspicuous perch for a sleeping youth. Some may recognize a replica statue of the seated scribe Haremhab, which occupies a prominent spot in the Egyptian art galleries others may know the travertine Head of a Hippopotamus, held, in the roof installation, by a man who regards it without emotion. For those acquainted with the Met’s collections, moving around this playhouse offers the particularly fun challenge of identifying as many objects as possible. Surprises abound in this foreign way to view the familiar, with every nook and cranny of each sculpture revealing unexpected detail. The Theater of Disappearance encourages discovery, which is why its greatest success, ultimately, is to amuse. The new configurations, placing all works on an equalizing, decontextualized stage, reveal the extent of our personal knowledge and cultural biases. More broadly, they also make you consider the museum’s power as a place that presents truths according to a particular framework. It also made me question why I connect certain forms and styles with certain cultures. Villar Rojas’s jumbled-up trove makes you wonder how all these diverse pieces came to eventually rest here, in New York. The monochrome works, notably, also nod to the Met’s original practice of displaying plaster copies of famous sculptures when it first opened in 1870 only in the mid-19th-century did it begin to showcase genuine artifacts. Here, this space void of divisions considers the origins and composition of the museum’s patrimony - you’ll note, for instance, that replicas of Egyptian art are more prevalent than those of Native American and Asian art. The scrambling and flattening of time is a familiar theme in Villar Rojas’s exhibitions. It’s a complete shift from last summer’s Psychobarn by Cornelia Parker, which was simple and confined to a corner of the public space. Sculptures lie on and surround the tables and chairs (these, too, are part of the installation, and are barred from weary bottoms), and the artist has redesigned the roof’s architecture to match the calcified party scene, from its benches to its pergola to the floor, which is now a checkerboard of gray, white, and black. The roof reflects this kick into overdrive. “In the process, he holds up a mirror to what we do at the museum, questioning the ideological stance of the museum and, in particular, how we choose to present cultural histories over time,” Sheena Wagstaff, the museum’s head of modern and contemporary art, said at the exhibition preview, adding that no other living artist has interacted with the Met’s staff as exhaustively as Villar Rojas. The otherworldly diorama was a result of conversations the artist had with the museum staff, from curators to conservators, to learn about the collection. As its name suggests, it does so by relying on drama and grandeur: Villar Rojas, known for his larger-than-life works - usually of carefully handled clay - has entirely transformed the open-air space into a dystopian banquet hall where culture is the main meal, long-ago consumed. Titled The Theater of Disappearance, the installation, curated by Beatrice Galilee, reinterprets art history as established by one of the most influential Western institutions while also investigating the collecting practices that have shored up its troves. Look closely, and each will reveal treasures culled from the Ancient Near East, Medieval Europe, and Africa, among other regions. The results are confounding contemporary hybrids of cultural pasts. Some also integrate scanned, life-sized statues others, full-scale models of humans. Adrían Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Artīeyond presenting what recalls an attic of wondrous artifacts, Villar Rojas took an extra step to splice together the scans, rescaling and seamlessly merging them to form the final 16 massive sculptures.
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