The Brooklyn Rail

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
—T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

It was early November when I came across Álvaro Urbano’s exhibition TABLEAU VIVANT at SculptureCenter. A time in late autumn when what lingers and what is lost exist in the same breath. Leaves loosely clung to half-barren branches while others, windswept, lay amassing, shuffled into corners, edges, crevices. The felled leaves curl inward, and through their tumbling, create lattices of miniature sculptural canopies, connecting and dispersing.

Walking into the installation, I felt as though the wind had dragged the city’s debris into the interior space of the gallery. A thought came over me and recurred in different phases of the experience: everything is not what it seems. Seen through the building’s monumental steel columns, a drop ceiling of gridded lights emits an orange glow upon a circular arrangement of stone fragments. The light’s soft reflection on the polished concrete floor casts an eerie, diffused warmth interrupted by the spontaneous growth of plants and vines emerging between the cracks. The lights, partially veiled by the ghostly silhouettes of dispersed leaves, pooling rain water, moving insects, and stray bits of debris, shift in color from a blue-white to a deep orange, animating all below it as its mercurial sky.

As if in a state of random abandon, half-eaten apples lay on the ground, oxidizing as if just bitten; a book is left behind on a seat, and magnolia branches shed their pink flowers while frozen in bloom. These realistic botanic and synthetic elements are carefully crafted in thin painted metal, fooling the eye and blurring the senses between the ordinary and the surreal, hardness and softness. In a sparse and scattered circular arrangement, the installation features fragments of Scott Burton’s Atrium Furnishment (1986): a semicircular marble seating area, four pink onyx lamps, and a marble centerpiece. The stone pieces were originally encircled by podocarpus trees and demarcated by a polished bronze ring. Their arrangement was designed to evoke the choreography of a clock moving from nine to five as a metaphor for the rigid cadence and structure of corporate life.

By incorporating pieces of Scott Burton’s Atrium Furnishment, the installation presents itself as a ruin in progress, existing in a frozen temporality that bifurcates in two directions, offering both a glimpse into the past and a vision of the future. Ruins have long served as potent metaphors of unperceivable notions of time, both speculative and abstract. In Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings, vines, mosses, and overgrown vegetation engulf crumbling columns and toppled arches; the abundance of plant life depicts nature as triumphantly reclaiming what civilization left behind. The presence of lush, untamed plant life in his drawings reinforces the immense passage of time (trees growing from temple remains and roots breaking through stone hint at centuries of abandonment). Similarly, in Urbano’s installation the plants serve as a temporal marker. In both instances, the depictions of lush, untamed plant life emphasize the passage of time (trees sprouting from temple remains, magnolia tree branches growing from the plaster walls) that speak to decades or even centuries of abandonment.

The structural geometry of Burton’s stone pieces contrasted with the organic, unpredictable forms of plant growth juxtaposes the tension between human ambition and natural entropy. In ruins, the abandonment of human interaction invites new opportunities for highly complex, self-organizing ecosystems. In the 1850s, botanists discovered more than 420 local and exotic plant species in the Colosseum, making it one of the highest known concentrations of plant diversity in a single archaeological site, rivaling botanical gardens of its time and even exceeding many wild ecosystems of similar size. In the case of the Colosseum, a combination of time, dust, animal droppings, and decomposed plant matter created the perfect combination for pockets of fertile soil to emerge in the cracks and on horizontal surfaces. Birds carrying seeds from nearby fields, animals transporting seeds, and the openness of the structure allowing for wind tunnels to trap airborne seeds furthered this process. The Colosseum’s design, size, variety of exposures, and microhabitats created a perfect breeding ground for plant diversity and the formation of a new fertile landscape.

In TABLEAU VIVANT, the scene plays out as if one were an archeologist encountering relics of our time, strolling through streets clad with vacant luxury storefronts, office buildings, parking lots, and ruins of corporate ambition through the consequence of time, distance, and the renewal of a new kind of terrain—one that is neither synthetic nor natural but a synthesis of the two. It is a terrain where the disturbances of human impact and its absence have allowed for a new kind of disturbance through the cyclical processes of decay. Nature’s capacity to regenerate reminds us that the constant renewal of ecosystems, as in the second law of thermodynamics, tends toward greater disorder over time, but in doing so, creates the conditions for new, self-organizing systems to emerge.

As the lights flickered and dimmed, and what appeared to be a leaf circled around the horizontal plane above me, I wondered, how did this moth get to be here?

TABLEAU VIVANT references two contrasting sites in New York City. The botanical elements of the exhibition reference species within the Ramble, a Central Park woodland between 73rd and 79th streets, dubbed by Frederick Law Olmsted the “wild garden” for its contrast to formal styles of landscaping across the park. Scott Burton’s Atrium Furnishment was originally designed and installed for the Equitable Center building in midtown Manhattan in 1986, and dismantled in 2020 due to a renovation. Their pairing evokes a tension in opposing psychogeographies of place, as Guy Debord defines it, the examination of the “specific effects of the geographical environment … on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

The practice of defamiliarization and the choice of encounters, the sense of incompleteness and ephemerality, the love of speed transposed onto the plane of the mind, together with inventiveness and forgetting are among the elements of an ethics of drifting we have already begun to test in the poverty of the cities of our time.