![]() ![]() Smudged windowpanes and the blocky mullions between them pass with comparative speed. Distant mountains and nearer skyscrapers creep by. For about three-quarters of an hour, the platform turns slowly clockwise. The artist's camera is aimed from the aerie of a revolving restaurant out at the cityscape of her home town of Vancouver. The first, "La La City" by Allyson Clay, runs for the next two weeks. Numark introduces an annual summer series of video art with two installations that play in the front room and will be visible from the street 24 hours a day. Their cautionary tales employ for their moral lever not horror but exhilaration. The Carceri exist at the intersection of personal duty and megalomaniacal fantasy. ![]() What Piranesi understood is that to answer the call of the state and to find one's place amid its architecture can be an awesome thing. The impetus for anyone in the lower reaches of the chain of command was not simply to avoid the wrath of the higher-ups but to participate in the grand drama of the exercise of power. Just as Muniz labored in service to Piranesi, the builders of these grandiose dungeons would have labored in service to their designers. ![]() Muniz flattens the spaces - making them less illusionistic, less theatrical - at the same time that he re-rationalizes the effort that brought them into being - both Piranesi's own and that of the imagined powers behind these monuments to state cruelty. For all the skill in evidence, the work has often seemed gimmicky.īut when he undertook, in 2002, to rework the Carceri, outlining the pictures with straight pins, then winding black thread between them to mimic Piranesi's scratched line, he hit upon a technique that makes us regard the prisons anew. He has drawn with dust, chocolate, sugar, fake blood and skywriting smoke. The Brazilian-born, New York-based Muniz is known for photographs of images he makes with quirky, often fugitive substances. Other workers still were required to build them and staff them. Underlying the brooding, dizzying grandeur is an Enlightenment-era understanding that for "Abandon All Hope" to be emblazoned above the gates of Hell, somebody had to inscribe it there. Their vastness connotes not so much a sublime terror as the notion of Hell as an enormous bureaucracy. Regardless of the diagnosis, evidence of a proto-romantic sensibility can be found in the sheer outlandishness of the scale of Piranesi's spaces. It was amid the ancient ruins of Rome, however, that his imagination found a platform on which to play out its schemes.Īs legend has it, the Carceri are the stuff of fever dreams, conceived during a bout of malaria. Born a Venetian, with all the love of theatricality that implies, he was a student of stage design as well as architecture. Piranesi (1720-78) was in his twenties when he made the first edition of plates for what he would later call his Carceri d'Invenzione. It's on view at the National Academy of Sciences. Successive generations just naturally find their way through the twisting staircases and cavernous vaults to walk among the ropes and chains and thrill to the smoking braziers, spiked wheels and other instruments of torture.īut an installation that pairs the portfolio of 18th-century etchings with new photos of string-art re-creations of them by contemporary artist Vik Muniz offers a timely reinterpretation of Piranesi's architectural allegories of power. The dark, dreamlike images are broadly circulated, widely reproduced and possessed of great visual appeal and narrative implication. Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Prisons of the Imagination aren't exactly begging to have new life breathed into them. ![]()
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