SCREEN CAPTURE
Does it make artists crazy when architects make art? Because it makes me crazy when artists make architecture. Too often, when artists use architectural forms they fashion structures that are unintentionally naive. That’s as it is with the current installation on the roof of the Met, a collaboration between artist Dan Graham and landscape architect Christian Vogt.
The roof is covered in padded green astroturf, which gives it the hyper-real intensity of a manicured suburban lawn. Right at the center there’s a paved stone pad about the size of a two-car garage. This pad is bound on its east and west sides by eight-foot-high green walls, lush with vines. Between these green walls, connecting their far corners, is an “S”-shaped screen made of two-way mirror glass, set in a heavy steel frame. As one looks at the screen one is met with reflections of oneself, the rooftop lawn, the foliage in Central Park , and the Manhattan skyline, all collapsed onto views of what one sees through the glass.
It’s a rich effect, executed with details that are, when considered architecturally, awkward. Why isn’t the glass a single piece, rather than two separate ones that meet with a gap right at the critical point where the two curves meet and turn? Why isn’t the frame made from a polished metal with a clean, narrow profile, to heighten the barely-there nature of the glass? Why isn’t the screen freestanding, pulled away from the green walls, so that visitors can circle it and take in more fully its shifting, cinematic views? And why doesn’t the whole screen sit directly on the lawn, so that it rises from it like an apparition?
Rather than an instrument that reorients visitors within the roofscape and the city, the screen ends up being an object on the lawn, not so different from a traditional sculpture. One sees it, walks towards it, catches the web of reflections on its surface, and then turns around to lose oneself in the magnificent, unobstructed views of Central Park all around. Those views, while static, are immediate, and stirring.
Photograph by Nalina Moses.