HOPERAPERTA

 Six in Four:

Richard Artswager al Whitney Museum of American Art

by Patrizia Catalano

The doors open more or less slowly, the elevator greets us, we select the destination floor and off we go: it's not bad if we find ourselves alone going up to the chosen floor. More problematic is sharing the space with strangers. An example for all? When using a hotel elevator where at each floor, inexorably it stops to accommodate other guests. Within seconds a quick x-ray is taken of the newcomer, the intruder or intruders: single, couple, young, old, foreigner (and from which country, continent), how he/she dresses, what suitcases he/she carries, and the journey continues until entering the lives of these perfect strangers, even going so far as to mind their own business, overhearing a few phrases and imagining who knows what.

Of course, today we have our ballast, a.k.a. cell phone: if we immerse our face in the screen of the smart phone, for exactly those handfuls of seconds needed to land on the destination floor, it's done and boring embarrassments and catchphrases are avoided. This is why we can serenely say that the elevator, an indispensable scenic machine of contemporary architecture, is not a socializing space, far from it.

Although, precisely because it is an environment that belongs to everyone and no one-it rightfully enters the noble list compiled by French sociologist Marc Augé of 'nonplaces'-it is a space that can be played with.

Let's take cinema, it's the easiest thing. How many times has the lift featured in epic scenes giving us magnificent thrills in the theater? From Hichcock-style thrillers to Charlie Chaplin comedies, a predestined space for love encounters, scenes of eroticism, ordinary news events and fantastic worlds. A space of cinematic and literary narrative but which in everyday life continues to be a no-man's-land, cold and inhospitable. Art's task is often to intervene in the direction of transforming places, particularly public spaces.

Richard Artschwager's authorial design for the Whitney museum goes exactly in this direction: when the museum was moved from its historic Madison location to the Meatpacking District in the Renzo Piano-designed building, its then-director Adam D. Weinberg envisioned that in addition to the permanent American art collections and traditional temporary exhibition activity there would be a major work by Richard Artschwager, "Six in Four," which was designed precisely for the four 'elevators' of the new museum.

It was 2012, and at that time Artschwager was 90 years old. The artist, to whom the Whitney had already dedicated two solo shows, was chosen by Weimberg for his authorial talent but also for his character, "He was kind of a trickster," Weimberg says in an interview produced for the museum, "Curious and enigmatic ... one of the smartest people I've ever met." Artschwager had created in an earlier exhibition of his, a fake elevator that also reproduced the ascending and descending sounds that real elevators have when they are in operation. So when it came to making the four installations for the Whirtney, Weimberg had no doubt: they had to be Richard Artschwager's.

The inspiration came from a catalog of drawings the artist had made in 1976 for an exhibition at Leo Castelli's. The 53 drawings were a study of how images of the objects his work has always focused on can be pulled, twisted, pushed, squeezed. More than 4 meters wide each, Richard Artschwager's (1923-2013) elevators allow visitors an immersive experience even before they enter the exhibition floors. Each installation features one or more of the six subjects that have occupied Artschwager's imagination for decades: door, window, table, basket, mirror and rug, Six in Four in fact. Everything was made ad hoc: the laminate panels were made in Brooklyn, while the elevator cabins were made by a company in Miami, and the steel etchings, on the other hand, were made in Ohio by expert engravers.

The elevators were the last major work of the artist who passed away shortly before the museum opened and are the only permanent commission in the new building.

An important project because it demonstrates how a building can be an opportunity to make art. and for art to become part of everyday life.