The Brooklyn Rail

Drawing on a school desk is a performance without a live audience. It is not “allowed.” Evading the eyesight of the nearest adult, students act out unknowns and newly-knowns through the idiosyncratic language of line. The lines play, denoting a place, a daydream, a folly. They reflect a bored habit, a song, or a nightmare. At times, they are simply proof, for example, that a Superman “S” can take shape from two sets of three vertical stripes. A drawn image is imbued into a piece of furniture that sits still while its artist wrestles with growing up. The desk accumulates in its stillness, and always welcomes the next class. In this way, the desk drawing is a scratched message to an unknown inheritor.

In 2012, that inheritor was artist Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kostërrc), who had returned to his elementary school in Runik, Kosovo on the day it was being demolished. The building was one of the last remaining in the village after the Kosovo Wars, which had destroyed the artist’s childhood home in the late 1990s. To one side of the school’s unraveled structure were its emerald desks, stacked and discarded. Halilaj intervened, saving many of the desks and beginning, that day, to trace and collect myriad drawings students had left on them. A master of hybrid forms, the artist began articulating the drawings in steel and bronze, scaling them up and combining them. The resulting artworks have tagged architectures in Cologne and Paris. This summer, sculptures shaped from student drawings frame terrace and sky on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.

Titled Abetare after an illustrated textbook that teaches the Albanian alphabet, Halilaj’s rooftop commission expands its sources beyond Kosovo to desk scratchings from other countries that were formerly part of Yugoslavia, reframing the drawings as a borderless shared language and history. What results is a remixed archive in constant interaction with its surroundings. Just ahead of the roof’s glass entry doors, Batman peers down amidst a waterfall of blooming wisteria. To either side of a nearby security camera, twin birds consult with one another. In the shadow of a bench where onlookers sit together in conversation, a smiling dot with fangs, a toupée, and a tail nearly goes unnoticed. There is comedy here, along with sex, pride, and fear, all carefully maneuvered by Halilaj so that the lines of each sculpture feel freshly drawn in the air. The effect is anything but two-dimensional. Completed by their viewers, the sculptures groove and intertwine with each change in perspective.

Looming large above this cacophony of graphic configurations is Halilaj’s centerpiece: an over-20-foot tall spider situated directly in front of the rooftop’s prized view. With its jack-o-lantern eyes and outstretched arms, it is locked in a state of arrival. In an interview with the curator of the commission, Iria Candela, Halilaj talked about finding the spider drawing on a desk in North Macedonia and immediately connecting it to the work of Louise Bourgeois. It’s a reference that signals the artist’s self-recognition amid the vastness of his convened lexicon of drawn forms. A young Halilaj, living in a refugee camp in Albania at the age of thirteen, was given felt tip pens and pieces of A4 paper by the psychologist Giacomo Poli and drew to process his trauma, reflecting on the beauty of Runik. Today, Halilaj has created large-scale installations for some of the most renowned biennials and institutions in the world. The spider maps his braided personal and art histories. In the tradition of Bourgeois, Halilaj’s arachnid is a complicated protagonist, neither friend nor foe, admired for its artistry but feared for its cunning. Uniquely, it grins towards its onlookers: viewers cannot be sure if its next move is to spin a web or carry us all away for lunch.

The Abetare textbook is filled with illustrations of everyday life, including an image of a child churning wire into a cursive “A,” making a structure from the language of things. Crucial to Abetare the commission is an examination of home through networks of belonging. From the central point of Halilaj’s choreographed space, an outline of a house is covered in clouds, stick figures, and a star. It’s one of the few drawings that visitors can enter and experience from within, and it recalls one of Halilaj’s most ambitious installations, a to-scale outline of the home his family built in Pristina after the war, titled The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real (2010/23). This complex work most recently floated at the intersection of three of Museo Tamayo’s galleries, nested into the iconic museum’s walls as if they were hinged branches. The drawn residence in Abetare, like The places I’m looking for, invites potentiality and contingency to the structure of the house. It continues Halilaj’s ongoing personal elaboration of what a home really is—the vantage points it can bridge, the nationalisms it can reject.

Beside the rooftop overlooking Central Park, there is a small sign that reads “Please do not touch the installation. No smoking or electronic cigarette use.” Right next to it, an oversized cigarette, traced from bent metal, “burns” into the terrace’s floor, its smoke a curlicue of flamboyant billows. It serves as a humorous reminder that desk drawing necessarily breaks the rules. It’s a visual side eye, entropic by design. At the end of the summer, the strips of bent metal that hook the cigarette to the wall of the roof garden will allow for its removal with the fall of autumn leaves. Spending time with Abetare, it’s hard not to wonder what students today would scratch into the Met’s rooftop if, in the spirit of the commission’s source material, they inherited the web that Halilaj has left for them. Would their drawings be celebrated by their inheritors, or erased?