Nest: Leo Saul Berk
Bellevue Art Museum, 425-519-0770.
Through Sept 7.
In the ongoing Nest series, the Bellevue Art Museum has invited artists to turn what is usually the museum’s library into a living room–“their ideal living room” is how it’s worded, but artists are in general too smart to cop to anything as obvious as “ideal.”
The first installation in the series was Nicola Vruwink’s living-room set, upholstered with wigs in various shades of blonde, which brought to mind not only rows of scalps dangling from a cannibal’s belt but a whole degraded world of nasty domesticity (think of Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup). This was a room that may have been steeped in an ideal, but certainly was not ideal, and was actually not pleasant to sit in on account of the slick synthetic wigs, which made you slide right off the furniture. Which was fine, because pleasantness was emphatically not the point. (The second Nest was created by Amy Rueffert, and was more of a sculptural installation than a living room–with AstroTurf and giant bees and nowhere to sit.)
For the current installment, Leo Saul Berk chose a different angle, which was to reconstruct the room altogether. He collapsed the dimensions of the room by lining it with a new floor and building new walls within the old walls, and furnished it with a couch, armchair, and table (which he also built). The furniture faces a translucent wall of blocks, which functions as a sort of window with no view, only an expanse of diffused light.
Everything in the room–the walls, the floor, the windows, the furniture, the light fixtures–is made of fluted polypropylene, a corrugated plastic that the post office uses to make cartons, but the unity of using one material for all the various elements is only part of what’s happening here. Another part is the installation’s patent unreality–the artifice of its slightly undersized furniture in pastel-ish colors, the unreasonableness of its very hard, uncomfortable edges. To make the furniture, Berk bent and layered the plastic, and then made it all cohere with some kind of supersonic welder; the solidity is apparent when you sit down, because nothing gives. That, plus the gridded structure of the walls and the window blocks, makes for all these hard lines flying off on different axes, so that sitting in this room is like living inside a graph.
Berk has created a very controlled experience, not unlike people who have thought about their décor down to the details in order to leave no question of whatever it is that they feel about themselves. You’re asked to take off your shoes before you enter, in order to keep from damaging the floor, but this has the added effect of making you feel complicit, or at least participatory, in the room’s existence. The furniture points you toward the window, and it’s clearly where your focus should be directed (as in rooms oriented toward a picture window, or a television set), so that the feeling of sitting in a lightbox becomes more and more pervasive.
You’re being oriented toward something quite specific–subtly, because the room-within-a-room is built at an angle to the original footprint, and this supplies a murmur of something like defiance. There is, in fact, more than a whiff of critique of the museum’s design. After all, what is Stephen Holl’s design for the building but a lightbox? (Holl is well known for making the most of small amounts of light in a light-starved region; see, for example, his chapel at Seattle University.) And what is a museum but a controlled, directed experience? And what is BAM but an experience of being shuttled around different configurations of light?
There may be more to it, a more coded critique of how the museum has used its space (critics have called it wasteful, with too much space given over to architectural grandeur and not enough given over to art). Fluted polypropylene is also used by architects for model building, and there is a sense of the model about the whole thing–the perfected experience substituted for the real one, the theory rather than the practice. The living room, after all, is often not where real living takes place.