LOS ANGELES — An opportunity would seem to be lost in Pablo Bronstein’s first Los Angeles exhibition, at REDCAT (through March 15). Unlike the artist’s site-responsive projects, which engagingly recast references to local architecture, “Enlightenment Discourse on the Origins of Architecture” appears disconnected from the unique environs of the gallery. REDCAT is situated directly under and behind Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, and steps away from the postmodern case study that is the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, not to mention the rising fame of Eli Broad’s new art museum set to open in 2015.
Instead, Bronstein takes his cue from REDCAT’s adjacent experimental theater. He transforms the windowless alcove gallery into a stage absent a fourth wall, with performances scheduled each afternoon and during the neighboring theater’s intermissions. His dormant set comprises a symmetrical array of shape-shifting furniture in 17th-, 18th-, and early 19th-century English and Continental styles. Flanking a central cabinet and two chairs run two parallel rows of mirroring pieces: two cupboards, an obelisk and an urn, and two commodes. The objects are scaled for a giant, lending an uncanny sculptural presence, but are also hastily painted like props. A unifying red wash-over-black treatment crudely evokes stained mahogany or chinoiserie lacquer.
The objects’ secondary functions are revealed when a solitary performer, wearing a puffy white shirt over black tights, unlocks, unhinges, reconfigures, and repositions elements of each. She folds over the obelisk’s point, for instance, uncovering a seat and a hole—or toilet; she opens the cabinet to display its shiny confines—a shrine; she flips the chairs so she can climb them like ladders—or platforms. This choreographed, workman-like activity culminates in a dance within and along the top edge of the two commodes, conjoined to form an open-top box—a tomb. A boombox plays a Baroque harpsichord score while the performer postures in a three-minute mechanical ballet, climaxing with a slumped death pose, after which she silently returns the mise en scène to its original, closed state, and repeats the action.
Bronstein’s “Discourse” is a potentially rich and dynamic inquiry. He maps out the fundamental impulse to build. And while his arrangement evinces a living room while inert, during the performance the metamorphosed furniture creates a kind of public plaza. Such shifts invite viewers to experience his theories through different registers of space. However, this “staged essay,” as curator Ruth Estévez coins it, feels unevenly developed. The performance only fully activates and explains the commode-tomb’s function. Instead, a supplementary checklist-essay details the objects’ multiple uses and elucidates significant ideas that bodily gestures could have more fittingly articulated. On the gallery’s two walls, five immense and exquisite drawings show permutations of decorative windows and mouse-scaled doors on a fictive building façade, offering a more concise argument that the universal demands for architecture are always particular.
A version of this article appears in the May 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
