‘The End of Imagination’ is the title of Adrián Villar Rojas’s exhibition opening November 27 at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. But it was also the title of his September 2020 show at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, just as it is the title of his museum exhibition opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia this December. Confusing, yes. But the time-space warp of that is right up this artist’s alley.
Normally, here’s where you’d find an enthusiastic quote from the artist, and a few more details. But one of the challenges I’ve found when interviewing and writing about this artist over the years (for The New York Times and its style magazine, T), is that the go-to materials for Villar Rojas are most consistently mystery, rumor, clues, hearsay, and surprise – with a sprinkle of obfuscation, too. For this article, both museums were directed to keep mum about what’s in store.
‘This commitment to no mediations between audience and an “art experience” goes back to my earliest projects,’ Villar Rojas reminded me when we corresponded about the Miami show. ‘It is important to me that the audience comes to the museum as they are. No preconceptions, no expectations.’
I admire the daring contradiction of opening a big show the week of Art Basel Miami Beach at a museum just a few blocks away, and at the same time doing what he can to frustrate it: ‘Signage, names, previews, opening events are all amputated from probably 90% of my shows.’
Villar Rojas thinks a lot about the politics of ‘museums as kind of “context machines”’, as Leilani Lynch, curator for The Bass show, puts it, ‘like how something is presented to you within a museum, which is generally viewed as neutral, of course, but it isn’t.’
Over the years, I’ve found that tension can lead to artwork that’s challenging to contemplate, in a good way. For instance, in 2015, I was allowed to step onto the roof of the Guggenheim Museum in New York to see a tiny, secret sculpture Villar Rojas created to sit – apparently to this day – atop the Guggenheim’s famous oculus. The piece was meant to evolve/devolve over time – like the South American bird’s nest that inspired it – and its ‘exhibition’ involved contractual agreements with the artist, which, naturally, the Guggenheim could not share. I loved the whole rigmarole, as well as his highly intellectual explanations of his approach to his work, quoting Wittgenstein here and Melanie Klein there.
Museology, and his rebuke of it, was also a chief preoccupation of his installation on the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 for which he used machine technology to recreate treasures from across 17 of the Met’s curatorial departments and an array of eras, and recombined them to comment on false distinctions and cultural insensitivities of the museum itself. The ‘intent was one of profound critique’, he told me recently, adding that ‘the political power of museums as shapers of reality reappears in this project for The Bass.’
Of course, Art Basel week is jam packed and people need clues as to what to see. So, here’s what I do know, as I write this several months before the exhibition debuts: The Bass has given over its entire second-floor galleries to Villar Rojas. And the artist is making several new site-specific commissions.
But I was warned by the hands-tied-behind-their-back Bass representatives that the exhibition’s focus is ‘the recontextualizing of older works’.
That language means more here than just fussy art-speak for ‘some pieces are old.’ That’s because Villar Rojas has been known to recycle his previous art installations into new work, often combining broken-down bits of past work with found materials from the world outside his studio. Many works, like his hulking striated sculpture Where the Slaves Live (2014) on a terrace of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, incorporates both natural (leaves, moss, mushrooms) and not (sneakers, glass, iPods, coins, shoes, tire treads, plastic bags).
True, there may be at least one or two of his greatest hits: keep an eye out for something from one of his gallery shows with kurimanzutto; Ruth Benzacar, who represents him in his native country; or Marian Goodman.
Or perhaps there will be elements from the animal world, territory he often mines: an elephant like the one he made for his 2013 solo show at the Serpentine in London; or bits from the bestiary he made in Istanbul in that city’s 2015 biennial; or perhaps chunks of the almost life-size whale he created in clay and ‘beached’ in the forests of his native Argentina in 2009, gaining international acclaim. (He represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale in 2011, transforming the Argentine pavilion into a colossal clay forest.)
In Miami, I wouldn’t count on that leviathan – at least in whole – but overall you can expect that Villar Rojas will be bringing it in big for the Bass. ‘Why we love Adrián is because he creates worlds: He’s a world builder,’ Lynch says. ‘The works will be monumental in scale.’
It seems a good gamble that some of the video the artist presented in Athens at the former Public Tobacco Factory also under the title ‘The End of Imagination’ may find its way to The Bass. He shared with me that from ‘the first moments of quarantine in March 2020, I began to monitor, gather, and compile real-time video footage from publicly available web cameras, which were often streaming 24/7… footage from all around the globe, as well as outer space.’ And as humans around the world were captive in their homes, he developed a special interest in ‘nonhuman animals being monitored in captivity, in zoos, natural reserves, conservation parks, aquariums, and game reserves.’
Lynch concedes that the show has been shaped by the pandemic, which started mere weeks after discussions began with the artist on what they might do. With all the push and pull of the pandemic, ‘We were thinking about what type of work would be best in the fall of 2022,’ Lynch recalls. One of ‘the main themes that runs through the show’, she continues, is a ‘disorientation’ expected to resonate with visitors because of ‘this kind of fungibility of time that we’ve experienced acutely I think over the last few years’.
Time and time travel to the future-past in particular – which he has long ruminated on – have been recurring themes for the artist who seems to so clearly speak to us now.
This article was originally commissioned for the Art Basel Miami Beach magazine 2022.
‘The End of Imagination’ will be on view at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami from November 27, 2022 – May 14, 2023.
Caption for both full-bleed images: Adrián Villar Rojas, The Most Beautiful of All Mothers, 2015. Installation view on the shore of Leon Trotsky’s former house on Büyükada Island, 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015. Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, and kurimanzutto. Photo by Jörg Baumann.