For visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago, especially those approaching the Modern Wing on East Monroe Street, engagement with its current suite of exhibits begins before entry. Stretched across the hatched crosswalk leading to the museum is a bright pink rectangular print, quickly identifiable as a speck of light refracted through a series of colored windows lining the rooftop terrace above. With the facade of the building transformed into a lens or optical instrument on an architectural scale, Shahryar Nashat’s installation Raw is the red2022, makes the Art Institute a producer rather than a conditioner of aesthetic experiences, coordinated with the natural cycles of sun and shade.
Dan Flavin also used pink light to manipulate the design of the museum, installing his 1963 sculpture rose from a corner (to Jasper Johns) along the vertical seam of a gallery, destroying the corner, in the words of the artist, by “glare and double shadow”. While Flavin, like other minimalists, refers first and foremost to the interior of the gallery, Nashat’s lighting apparatus goes beyond the scope of walls, intersections, doorways and interior volumes to incorporate supposedly non-artistic terrain into its analytical reach, marking the institution’s continued entanglement in the production of urban space outdoors. As a result, pedestrians and art viewers are interpolated by Nashat’s work; the distinctions between the two audiences are becoming increasingly blurred.
After entering the museum and gaining access to the roof in question, we encounter the second element of the Nashat installation. On a raised section of the Marmoleum floor stands a vertical display case encrusted with a UV print of raw sternal flesh on powder coated stainless steel coated with a layer of lard-like acrylic gel. This “meat object”, in the words of the artist, is placed in front of a stone sculpture, tapered so as to suggest the general contours of a head, shoulders and slightly apart legs. Indeed, the latter recalls the portrait of Honoré de Balzac by Auguste Rodin in 1898, if the voluminous antifigural mantle of this earlier work had been raised above the writer’s head like a body bag.
The mechanisms of abstraction that push Nashat’s sculpture to the hazy confines of bodily representation are, however, betrayed by the somatic display placed before it. Due to the way Nashat has arranged these elements, the perimeter of the display case roughly lines up with the outlines of the “figure” just behind, looking like a makeshift x-ray of her potential chest. As he does with the windows that line the building’s exterior, Nashat configures the physical elements of the museum and museological practice as aesthetic conduits inherent in the conceptual circuits of his installation, rescripting this rooftop showcase as a primed medical instrument for laparoscopic vision. Pressuring these supposedly neutral elements of the institution to function otherwise, Nashat identifies its programmed grammar of detachment by undermining it, vivifying the architectural and visual infrastructures that sustain fantasies of disembodied perception and unmotivated display.
Behind its sculptural vignette, the floating, blushing membrane that animates the museum’s display cases serves on the one hand as a theatrical backdrop and on the other as a monochrome filter for the Chicago skyline, dominating Millennium Park. With the transparency of the windows negated by Nashat’s intervention, the Art Institute is again highlighted as a screen, a complex mediation of the outside world, decidedly affective, given the artist’s exuberant choice of colors. This eerily unsettling perspective on the city, colored pink but framed by Nashat like a mirage manipulated from the outside, reinforces how the artist’s critical ambition maintains an outward orientation despite his series of displacements and site-specific distortions. In Nashat’s installation, the space outside the museum, just as much as the display devices inside, always remains in view as a constituent element of the artist’s tactical counter-staging.
