3.10.25 — Losing Oneself in New York
To live in an ever-changing city is to know loss. It is what makes you a New Yorker—the passing of friends and loved ones, the restaurant where you knew the menu by heart, the bar where all the customers knew you by name, the bookstore that taught you what and how to read. For Alvaro Urbano at SculptureCenter, it is as if a painting had come to life, only to insist by the very stillness of its actors that he will never see them again.
The show is his “Tableau Vivant” (literally a living painting), through March 24. Successive “In Practice” projects take the back room, and downstairs (as you will see next time) the pair known as ASMA listen for the sounds of Minimalism. Urbano pays tribute to a place where people once gathered and to its one-time creator, 
Scott Burton. Alvaro knows that he cannot bring back either one. You can still see benches from Burton in Manhattan, and people really do gather there and take their rest, but you better hurry. A renovation in Battery Park City has already slated them for removal.
Not that it matters, but a tableau vivant was a nineteenth-century fashion, and it, too, is not coming back any time soon. People put on an act, staging a favorite work of art. No worse, I suppose, than those who use 3D glasses and projections to put you in the middle of a painting, as if The Starry Night were a planetarium—and no better. Urbano’s tableau, however, is no mere reproduction. He salvaged whatever he could from the atrium at the former Equitable building in Manhattan, only a block from the Museum of Modern Art. That does not include people.
Back in the 1980s, Scott Burton brought Brutalism to Minimalism, as if nothing could be more hostile to human feeling, but with fine marble and flowers. He had an architect’s sensibility as well—a commitment to public spaces. Not all were cherished, and not all survive, but such is the city. This one fell victim to yet another tasteless renovation in 2020. Born in Madrid and based in Berlin, Urbano got there just in time and carted off roughly half. The result steals the show, as Atrium Furnishment.
Presence and absence alike haunt its semblance of a plaza where people once hurried past or stopped for lunch. It is a recreation in spirit, and spirits can be threatening. Urbano breaks up Burton’s marble circle, meant to evoke a clock face and the dreaded nine to five. It can now broaden to cover SculptureCenter’s main hall. (Converted by Maya Lin, the former trolley repair shop has its own spirit life.) It has the original’s beauty, but also its formidable mass, and it no longer welcomes seating.
Visitors are warned not to touch, for their own sake as much as the work’s. Leaves that have seemingly fallen are metal, with sharp edges. Their fall colors bring a reminder of death. Much the same colors shine out from light boxes propped here and there on the marble, streaked like a rock face and a geological record. The original’s flooring is gone, but a drop ceiling has collected no end of dust, and one lone object bangs against its glass as if trapped within.
Bastien Gachet has his own “object-based dramaturgy,” as he calls it, in the side room (since given over to Tony Chrenka) through this last October 21. Where you might hope for a bathroom, he sets a bone-dry sink. A keyboard lying on top has nothing to communicate, and a bucket on the floor holds what could be diluted blood. The rest of the installation lacks quite the same shock, but its bare wood furniture is creepy enough. I cannot swear what it has to say, least of all something about “pre-intentional,” real, and fake. It seems real enough to me.
Still, he and the more evocative work out front should have anyone asking what has been lost. Gachet also speaks of the imminent, emergent, and durational, and Urbano, too, confronts the passage of time. Burton’s trees have become his bare leaves, which can never die because they were never alive. They also create a bridge from the chill of an office building to the fragile warmth of Central Park. He took the form of his leaves from the Ramble, north of the park’s lake and south of the Delacorte Theater and Great Lawn, once a popular queer pick-up space. Burton died of AIDS in 1989.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.