Art and Bacchanalia on the Met Roof

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/arts/design/art-and-bacchanalia-on-the-met-roof.html

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Some people think of the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its great views of Central Park, as but a backdrop for boozy summer date nights.

That doesn’t bother Adrián Villar Rojas, a critically acclaimed artist whose projects across the globe — in New York; London; Paris; Istanbul; Venice; and his native Argentina — have ruminated on the ruin of the world and who is fond of citing Borges, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and Wittgenstein as sources of inspiration.

Upon winning the coveted rooftop commission — open to the public starting April 14 and closing Oct. 29 — the artist embraced the sociability of the space, which attracted half a million visitors last year. In fact, he upped the ante by morphing treasures from the Met’s own collection into a tableau of Bacchanalian mayhem.

Last autumn, he began roaming the two-million-square-foot museum and was struck by “the way things are part of people’s daily life and how museology, in its freezing operation, takes things out of that ordinary existence they shared with humans.” The Met’s collection of objects from around the world that were once functional — whether for eating, drinking, fighting or ceremonial rituals — now are preserved eternally behind “glass, shelves, protection, security systems, fences, guardians, all kinds of devices,” he lamented, which strips them of life, and of each object’s natural trajectory of reuse, recycling, regeneration.

“In some way or another, I wanted to play with the doodles of culture,” Mr. Villar Rojas mused about his project, called “The Theater of Disappearance,” adding that he hoped to rejuvenate the collection, and “bring these objects back to life.”

Revelers in the rooftop garden this spring and summer will be in good company: 16 sculptures by Mr. Rojas that merge hundreds of replicas of valued objects that he cherry-picked from across 17 of the Met’s curatorial departments, along with life-size models of human figures, with many of the artworks strewn across overladen banquet tables.

The resulting mash-up is a whorl of jutting, twisting, cradling, writhing, hoisting movement. There is even kissing.

Mr. Villar Rojas said he wanted to break through what he sees as falsely constructed categories within the museum. “I worked under the ontological premise of imagining a museum without divisions, without geopolitics, totally horizontal,” he said.

(Finding the original treasures in the galleries beneath that roof would be a rewarding scavenger hunt.)

From Egypt’s New Kingdom, in 1336 B.C., comes the statue of King Haremhab as a royal scribe — only now a woman straddles his shoulders, sneakers on her feet. Atop her head is a replica of the Hindu god Ganesha from 18th-century India. She raises a likeness of King Tutankhamen in her left hand and covers the eyes of Haremhab with her right, as if they were playing chicken at a crazy-fun pool party.

The rejuvenation includes a complete redo of the roof garden — which celebrates 30 years this spring. “Every single angle and experience, he has considered — nothing has escaped him,” said Beatrice Galilee, the Met curator who organized the project with her boss, Sheena Wagstaff, head of the museum’s contemporary and modern art department. The artist worked with Met staff to redesign the pergola, landscaping and seating areas as well as the bar and its menu so his commission would cohere and foster the social and romantic life of the place.

It’s a delight to hear the artist, prolific and successful at 37, talk so much about life, because for a long time, a deep anxiety and a preoccupation with death has pervaded his practice, which he described as “a little bit suicidal.” (One example: a 2015 show at Marian Goodman Gallery where the floor was fossilized with the detritus of contemporary civilization: sneakers, glass, plastic bags, an iPod.)

In conversations in person, by Skype and by email over the last 18 months, he revealed that destruction, deterioration and decomposition were “important axes” of his practice.

He can look the part, too, with his gaunt and lanky frame. Sometimes — the way he pulls his hoodie up to cover his face or curls his long fingers around every cigarette as if it were his last and then sucks in the smoke almost audibly — you half expect him to be carrying around a scythe.

But Mr. Villar Rojas also has a warm and fragile quality. He wears his dark hair in a long bob, or rubber-banded back into a ponytail. His Google icon is Thumper, the floppy-eared hop-along rabbit from the 1942 film “Bambi.”

And while he used to contemplate each artistic endeavor as if it were his final one, that kind of thinking has been all but impossible of late, with five projects coming to fruition in 2017, all under the same title as the rooftop project, “The Theater of Disappearance”: There is his film trilogy, which had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February; an exhibition with the contemporary art organization NEON in Athens (June 1-Sep. 24); and two coming takeovers of entire museums, first of Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Austria (May 13-Aug. 27), and then of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, in Los Angeles (Oct. 22-Feb. 26, 2018).

His explorations, from prehistory through post-apocalyptic ruin, resonate at many levels. “Adrián’s work allows the visitor to wander through the history of humankind,” said Rudolf Sagmeister, who is a curator of the artist’s exhibition in Bregenz. “For me it creates a mixture of these unconscious images, feelings, objects and spaces that may exist already, and yet he always creates something new within and from them.”

By January, at the Met, Mr. Villar Rojas had chosen the objects he wanted to replicate for use as raw materials, and staff members from the Met’s imaging department were busy creating three-dimensional images to make that happen. They used two methods. The first was photogrammetry, a process born out of aerial and architectural mapping that can create a 3-D model from an array of images shot with a regular camera. The second process used the Met’s new laser scanner to collect millions of data points and then transpose them into a 3-D model.

Early one Wednesday before the Met opened to the public, a gaggle of staffers from the imaging department clustered in the Egyptian wing around the granodiorite statue of Haremhab. The laser scanner sat atop a large tripod. As Oi-Cheong Lee held the scanner’s articulated arm, his colleague Joe Coscia wielded its hairdryer-size laser probe, moving it evenly just above the rough striations of the statue’s surface amid a chorus of happy bleeps, pings, poings and a dididdididi.

“We’re going for a close shave,” their colleague Scott Geffert laughed. “But not too close.”

The men crouched over a laptop to scrutinize the data from the laser. “How about his sleeve — are we good?”

“Hmm, I think there’s a hole there.”

“O.K., yeah, I got it.”

All told, the project would necessitate billions of laser measurements and photographs.

The artist’s studio team and Met staff members also had found a special effects company in Dallas that could scan humans at a resolution high enough to generate, as Ms. Galilee put it, “people-size people” whose figures would animate Mr. Villar Rojas’s sculptures.

In mid-January, a colossal mobile photo studio that was kitted out with 130 cameras had traveled from Texas to New Jersey. A dozen people, mostly friends and family, served as models, even the artist. (On the rooftop, Mr. Villar Rojas’s arms emerge outstretched from one sculpture, one hand making what various cultures call the sign of the horns or the rock ’n’ roll sign).

Over the course of many weeks, Mr. Villar Rojas manipulated and merged hundreds of 3-D images to allow the human figures to hold, wear, sit upon or engage realistically with the replicas of the Met objects. Once the artist had 3-D renderings for 16 cohesive sculptures, the smaller objects — horns, plates, coins — were reborn through 3-D printing.

Larger elements — tombs, armor and human forms — were replicated via a computer-controlled milling process that chisels shapes from a block of rigid polyurethane foam.

On a frigid day in February, Jon Lash, president of Digital Atelier in Hamilton, N.J., gave a tour of the facility, where the sculptures would be fabricated. He gestured through a thick window to a machinery room where dust was accumulating like snowdrifts on every surface as a mill whittled a bird Mr. Villar had chosen to replicate from the Met’s Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The original was made of wood by the Senufo people of the northern Ivory Coast.

Then, in a cavernous warehouse, Ms. Galilee, the curator; Mr. Villar Rojas; Mr. Lash; and members of their teams bent over a just-completed copy of a 13th-century limestone knight, plucked long ago from a Cistercian abbey in France. The artist picked up a fine metal tool to hone it by hand.

On the rooftop, that knight now lies on a dining table amid elements of a feast, with replicas of Persian plates dating back more than 1500 years. A 3-D model of Ms. Galilee snuggles up to him and high-fives one palm. She hoists a sword whose hilt and blade were melded from two different works in the Met’s Arms and Armor gallery.

All the figures and objects were conjoined by “a series of armatures, spines, pins and dowels made of steel or wood,” Mr. Lash explained, made to look seamless before ultimately being covered with a customized paint dust, to suggest that Mr. Villar Rojas’s brand-new artworks were relics of antiquity. (When you see the works in person, it’s tempting to lick your finger and give them a little flick. Don’t. It’s still the Met.)

Mr. Villar Rojas will likely find all this description of his art-making “fetishistic,” one of his favorite words. He is fond of saying that it does not matter what materials or techniques he uses: Days ago, he referred to his artwork in excretory terms. Plus, he likes to leave things unexplained.

But a few days before the completion of his commission, with the trees of Central Park just below beginning to bud, he admitted that the dark anxiety that drove him several years ago, “doesn’t play any role now.”

Maybe these days, for him, the end is not so near.