What's a Manhattan Government Waiting Room Doing in a Brooklyn Garage?
Much has been made of the power of art to take its observer to magical, faraway places. In Northwestern Expansion, an installation currently on view in Park Slope, the artist Corina Reynolds takes an opposite tack, precisely replicating the mundane, fluorescent-lit waiting room of a Manhattan government building.
Viewed in photos, Northwestern Expansion presents a closed-off alternate reality, sealed off from the world outside. It's meant to closely mimic a specific room on the 31st floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, and while I can't speak to that space in particular, the exhibition nails a certain dreadful bureaucratic ambience. Blue plastic chairs all sit empty in a line and a potted rubber plant adorns the counter. On the wall, there's an unnecessary slab of pegboard and two analog clocks. Hyperallergic's Benjamin Sutton compares it to the 7 1/2 floor in Being John Malkovich, a short-ceilinged nightmare where everyone wears bad suits and no one communicates.
This kind of ironic repurposing of dated corporate or government aesthetics is currently pretty popular among art-world types, and if that's all Reynolds were doing, it would be among the more interesting recent examples of the trend. But there's also something about, uh, 15th-century explorers. From Hyperallergic:
Reynolds likens time spent sitting in a waiting room to the waiting that European captains were left to do in the 1400s when, while searching for the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, their ships became surrounded by ice. In both situations, the artist sees the enforced waiting as a kind of invisible or immobile progress. Time spent waiting, in other words, is not time lost.
As if to drive this point home, she has retroactively bestowed degrees — from Northwestern University, get it? — upon famous explorers including Henry Hudson, Sir Francis Drake, René-Robert Cavelier, and James Cook. The framed, faux diplomas hang in an impossibly narrow office hallway tucked behind the waiting room installation.
I don't really get that part, but hey, maybe I need to visit in person. Northwestern Expansion closes tomorrow.
