Born in 1980, Adrián Villar Rojas is a young Argentine artist who has rapidly achieved major success thanks to his ambition of scale and the deep pockets of his patrons. Judging from his work, he aspires toward the same sort of ruined grandeur admired by Romanticists and National Socialists alike. With The Theater of Disappearance, he harnesses that sensibility to reenvision the Met’s encyclopedic holdings as a series of Frankenstein’s monsters on the museum’s rooftop garden.
Using digital scanning and computer-assisted design, Villar Rojas molds replicas of various objects from the collection, mashing them into seamless assemblages that divide into two groups: statues on pedestals, cast in black; and tableaux in white, blending into facsimiles of banquet tables. Here and there, it seems he’s inserted contemporary figures of his own devising, though to what end is a mystery.
Odd juxtapositions of, say, the lid of a medieval knight’s tomb with an Eskimo mask don’t offer much beyond a dose of Surrealism 101, but visitors are encouraged to go on a scavenger hunt to find their real-life counterparts in the galleries downstairs. The educational pretext of the show, however, masks its essential nihilism, articulated here as a spectacle tossing civilization’s achievements onto attractive garbage heaps of history.
Though not nearly as outré as Jeff Koons, Villar Rojas assumes a similar role as a builder of monumental divertissements for global elites that also appeal to the masses looking for high-culture amusements. Admittedly, he’s very good at what he does, if you’re into that sort of thing.