The MET is served...

1:27 p.m.

05/22/17 - On the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas (1980) (literally) serves the artworks from the museum's permanent collection. He transformed that open space in a cultural banquet that includes pieces from all times, but without names, dates or other identifications, as if all sorting systems had vanished.

The Theater of Disappearance, by Adrián Villar Rojas

Roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The installation is entitled "The Theater of Disappearance" and it reshapes the way Art History is exhibited in this traditional museum, but with a touch of drama, suggested in the title, and ready to be digested. Certain questions are then in order:

- Is today's society of consumerism hungry for culture, but it's approach to the art world rather too grotesque?

- Are nomenclatures and classic naming systems to categorize Art becoming obsolete?

- Do we need more time to understand culture and art, time to "chew" the history of this world in constant evolution?

We are spectators of a new era, in which culture becomes ruins. The curators of the museum, however, explain that the aim of this installation is to help us learn about the collection of the MET (¿).

The Theater of Disappearance, by Adrián Villar Rojas

Roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The installation itself is made of perfect replicas of a hundred pieces found in the museum. The originals were 3D scanned and then replicated in urethane sponge covered with industrial white or black paint. Villar Rojas assembled and distributed these objects to create 16 hybrid contemporary art sculptures made with artworks from the Middle Ages, Africa and Antiquity, specially Egypt.

The artist was inspired by writer Jorge Luis Borges and so he considers the museum not as an institution protecting cultural heritage but as a labyrinth, where all listings have disappeared or been erased and only interpretations remain. Borges, explains Villas Rojas, imagined a Kingdom so obsessed with cartography that it even produced a real-scale map. When the map breaks, it hangs from the trees as a ghost or flies rolled up in the desert. What would happen if the MET was that desert with a real scale Theatre of Disappearance?