The Geffen
Contemporary at MOCA DOWNTOWN LOS
ANGELES | LOS ANGELES | CALIFORNIA | USA
OCTOBER 22, 2017-FEBRUARY 26, 2018
MOCA
presents Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance, a site-specific
installation inside The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA’s warehouse space. Villar
Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina) has built a singular practice by creating
environments and objects that seem to be in search of their place in time.
Villar Rojas’s interventions beckon viewers to consider fragments that exist in
a slippery space between the future, the past, and an alternate reality in the
present. With his post-human artworks, Villar Rojas posits the question: What
happens after the end of art?
Villar
Rojas’s method is emphatically site-specific, requiring a deployment of
project-based teams who work on-site for extended periods of time to fabricate
the installations. Long before the beginning of a project, he makes a series of
site visits to immerse himself in the social, cultural, geographical, and,
above all, institutional environment where he will work. This inherently
nomadic process echoes his own personal trajectory as an itinerant artist, one
of constant travel and engagement with a diversity of sites across the globe.
Villar Rojas’s approach is two-pronged. First, before beginning to insert
objects into a given space, he considers the ways in which a space might be
modified or adapted in relation to the incoming exhibition. Employing a keen
sense of spatial awareness, he considers how visitors move through the space,
their relationship to scale, and the affective potential of lighting. This
sensitivity to the poetics of space is at the core of Villar Rojas’s practice,
and no work can begin on a site before these considerations are taken into
account, resulting in modifications to the existing space. He can mandate small
changes, such as to the size of doorways or color of walls, or structural
changes, such as moving the placement of windows or adjusting floor heights.
Villar Rojas sees each project as an educational opportunity not only for those
who visit the exhibition but equally so for himself. The institutions are given
an opportunity, in turn, to reconsider the use of their own architectural
assets, filtered or focused through the lens of Villar Rojas’s highly attuned
sensitivities.
More than
purely aesthetic, this invasive dynamic allows Villar Rojas to develop an
almost—in his own words—“parasitic relationship” with the institution; it is in
this radical dialogue and exchange where both the artist-parasite and the
institution-host explore the limits of what is possible and what is not, what
is acceptable and what is not, what is negotiable and what is not. Ethics and
politics, no less than agency and decision-making, are at stake in the project,
opening a series of tough questions: When and where does a project actually
begin? What if an invisible series of housekeeping-like tasks, part of a wide
range of circumstances that have been dismissed since the very beginning of art
as secondary, is, on the contrary, key to producing that optical illusion we
call a “work of art”? What if we made a radical inversion and took the work of
art as an excuse to do the housekeeping?
Once Villar
Rojas has tuned the exhibition space to meet his goals, the second phase of his
process can begin. Although what the artist and his collaborators introduce
into the exhibition spaces could ostensibly be called sculpture, it differs due
to their functions in a variety of modes. The constructions, produced on-site
during installation, take form in concrete, stone, raw clay, and organic and
inorganic things that keep on changing over time through growth and
decomposition. Old tennis shoes and fruit peels find themselves embedded in the
floor of a gallery, or are seen as part of the geological strata that form a tower
of differently colored layers of concrete. Villar Rojas determines the forms
and objects that will be included in these juxtapositions of organic and
inorganic, permanent and impermanent materials. The artist attempts to view
these man-made fossils as an alien might, with no preconceived associations and
complete horizontality—a profound equalization of art and non-art materials.
The visitor becomes a witness to the entropy of these objects as they decompose
or become obsolete over the course of the exhibition. For Villar Rojas, the
gallery visitor arrives halfway through the process, somewhere between the
project’s creation and decomposition.
Although
what Villar Rojas will introduce into The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA’s
exhibition space could reasonably be understood as sculpture, it also acts as
the material basis for his ontological inquiries. In an effort to undermine the
critical terms that often enable and sustain the commercial and institutional
art world, such as endurance, reproducibility, tradability, and
transportability, everything in Villar Rojas’s project is carefully planned to
show its temporal side: What is doomed to disappearance, what cannot be
preserved. Villar Rojas unveils this spatial and material fragility to remind
us of the fleeting and minuscule presence of our own existence in the universe.
For his
project at MOCA, Villar Rojas will radically transform the Little Tokyo space,
employing dramatic architectural and aesthetic shifts. In preparation for the
installation, Villar Rojas spent a great deal of time exploring technologies
used in Hollywood special effects and was struck by the universal digitization
of the industry. From his perspective, it echoes a kind of post-human world
dominated by technology, and in response, he will create an environment in The
Geffen Contemporary at MOCA that is at once tactile and ephemeral, otherworldly
and utterly human. Villar Rojas will use remaining materials and surviving bits
of “art” from projects produced across the globe and recycle them into new
“art,” this time tailor-made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Petrified
wood from Turin, stratified columns from Sharjah, and silicone molds from
Istanbul will not be reinstalled as what they once were but instead will have a
second, unpredictable life. These elements will journey from “art” to “non-art”
and back again to “art,” reinforcing their impermanence and our own in relation
to our attempts to ascribe imperishable meanings and values to the world around
us.
Contact
details
152 North
Central Avenue , Downtown Los Angeles - Los Angeles, CA, USA 90013
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