ART-PRESENTATION: Adrián Villar Rojas-The Theater of Disappearance
Adrián Villar Rojas is best known for his site-specific, monumental works in unfired clay and other organic materials. His time-based installations build worlds we have never seen before, places we have never been to. Villar Rojas describes his practice as organic. An idea, channelled via discussions and collaborators, grows into a piece, an exhibition, an inclusive performance. All is part of the work, from concept and experiment, to production and final deterioration.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MOCA Los Angeles Archive
Adrián Villar Rojas is based in Rosario, Argentina, but works and travels incessantly with his team of collaborators. Following a period of conceptual work and research a team is tailored for the production at hand, an endeavour that may require months of on-site work. Several of the team members have a background as artists, others are craftsmen – fuelling the developing project with their own creativity. Altering the position of his nomadic studio to that of a theatre stage or film set, Villar Rojas has compared his role to an artistic director or leader of an ensemble. Carefully casting and writing the role of his crew into the script of the work, meanwhile questioning and challenging notions of both ownership and authorship. Adrián Villar Rojas’ site-specific installation “The Theater of Disappearance” is on presentation inside The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA’s warehouse space. For his project at MOCA, Villar Rojas radically transformed the Little Tokyo space (A former police car warehouse in L.A.’s Little Tokyo Historic District, renovated by architect Frank Gehry, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA opened in 1983.), employing dramatic architectural and aesthetic shifts. In preparation for the installation, Villar Rojas spent a great deal of time exploring technologies used in Hollywood special effects and was struck by the universal digitization of the industry. From his perspective, it echoes a kind of post‐human world dominated by technology, and in response, he will create an environment in The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA that is at once tactile and ephemeral, otherworldly and utterly human. Villar Rojas used remaining materials and surviving bits of “art” from projects produced across the globe and recycle them into new “art,” this time tailor-made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Petrified wood from Turin, stratified columns from Sharjah, and silicone molds from Istanbul are not reinstalled as what they once were but instead have a second, unpredictable life. These elements journeyed from “art” to “non-art” and back again to “art,” reinforcing their impermanence and our own in relation to our attempts to ascribe imperishable meanings and values to the world around us.
Info: The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, Duration: 22/10/17-26/2/18, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.moca.org
