The rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the best places to enjoy a cocktail during the summer months, and if you opt to party up there this year you'll be joined by a group of plaster revelers, frozen in the middle of a booze-fueled sex party.
Created by Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance is the Met's 2017 rooftop installation. It's comprised of 16 figures locked in varying stages of lusty embrace across a half-dozen long tables. Strewn amongst them are plaster cups, plates, forks, coins, and tiny figurines, all of which are carefully 3-D printed replicas of historical pieces that have been on display at the Met for many years.
With no regard for the disparate styles, geographies, and historical origins of these pieces, Theater destroys the museum's stuffy taxonomy in order to create a piece that's brilliantly transgressive. It's a denial of the Met's status quo built from its own orthodoxy. Villar Rojas's work is in so many ways superior to last year's installation, the one-note Psycho Barn. Missing it would be a terrible mistake.
"Laying open his reinterpretation of the collection, which has been liberated from the usual underpinnings of curatorial interpretation," Sheena Wagstaff, head of the Met's Modern and Contemporary Art Department said Thursday. "His work breathes new life into historic forms, comprising highly detailed replicas of actual museum objects, making provocative and sometimes jarring juxtapositions that raise questions about the extent of our knowledge and degree of sensitivity to the social and political environments in which they were created."
In the past, Villar Rojas has exhibited his work in New York, London, Paris, Istanbul, and Venice, and much of his art finds inspiration in his fellow Argentianian Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges. Borges's essays and stories sought to tamper with readers' perceptions of the real world, and he often contorted time and space into beautifully dense new concepts. The Theater of Disappearance is very much in step with that surrealist approach. Rooftop visitors won't need cocktails to feel disoriented and a little turned on.
