The Guggenheim Gets Renovated: Nicola Lopez’s “Landscape X: Under Construction”

“It’s absolutely beautiful and magical, yet totally overwhelming and completely horrifying.”

Nicola Lopez, Landscape X: Under Construction, 2011. Woodblock-printed Mylar, woodblock-printed Tyvek, vinyl tape, blue painter’s tape, string lights, construction lights, extension cords.  Printed in collaboration with Ten Grand Press.  Photo Credit:  David Heald.  Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The Guggenheim Gets Renovated: Nicola Lopez’s “Landscape X: Under Construction”

Liz Kulze

Construction can elicit a diverse array of reactions. For some, it’s the beginning of an exciting business venture. For others, it’s the dystopian spawn of our commercialism-crazed society. For most, it’s just head-pounding racket. But for Nicola Lopez, it’s a vibrant and stimulating muse.

In her latest installation “Landscape X: Under Construction,” exhibited as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s interstitial “Intervals” series, the Brooklyn-based artist employs everything from cage lights, to danger fencing, to painter’s tape, to extension cords— imagery that, as it turns out, is ripe with aesthetic possibilities. Lopez’s roots are in two-dimensional work, but with “Landscape X,” “It’s as if the paper wraps around you,” the veteran print-maker explains. But to call her work simply paper would be a gross understatement— her provided canvas happens to be the sloping ramps and plaster walls of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic, swirling rotunda. Vacant aside from water fountains, Lopez was given the opportunity to engage the space in her own inventive way.  
Invention, however, is often dictated by circumstance— this case being the scrim placed around the rotunda’s central border, in order to prevent premature peaks at Maurizio Cattelan’s emerging retrospective. Thus, the Guggenheim was, as we’ve never seen it—bereft of the building’s encompassing perspective that often draws more viewers than the art. “Landscape X” launches off of that reality.

“Instead of completely ignoring the fact that everything is the way that it never is, I am going to totally go with it and embrace it,” Lopez commented in a studio clogged with construction material. “The idea is that the other exhibit is under construction. You can’t see it. Well if you can’t see it then I’m going to put up a fence, and now, you really can’t see it.”

This is no stage set mock-reality, but rather a play on urbanity’s design elements and the skeletal, scaffold-flanked buildings we associate with it. And like the city environment itself, “Landscape X” is not one continuous, cohesive environment, but a setting centered around spatial change and aesthetic transformation. “It’s about an unexpected experience and the journey through this sort of fantastical place,” Lopez explains. Entering the Guggenheim was like wandering into an unforeseen urban Narnia.
When the installation opened in mid-October, the buzzing of saws and cacophonous hum of hammers from Cattelan’s emerging exhibit added such an overwhelming element of verisimilitude, it would be easy to dismiss aspects of “Landscape X” as part of the work in progress. But as soon as your eyes note the intricate designs of extension cords, taped road markings that continue across the ceiling, or the filigree-like cutouts of printed chain-link, you realize you’re traversing Lopez’s interpretive cityscape.
It’s a journey that begins like the outskirts of an urban center, man’s hand only subtly discernible from the natural landscape, with white roads winding across the scrim and museum surfaces. As you continue the roads darken into a web of gray and charcoal interspersed with twinkling lights, and pieces of blue and yellow tape that appear almost pixelated. It’s a scene of delicate chaos, like the aerial view of a metropolis from a red-eye plane or what Lopez calls “”the meat of the urban sprawl.”

The central part of the installation seems to take us through the city itself, a varied landscape comprised of both literal and abstract elements, complete with passageways of dense, orange danger fencing, medusa-like clumps of extension cords, stalactite clusters of silver fencing printed with woodblock, unusually placed cage-lights, isolated alleys of printed chain-link, and gravity-defying road markings; amounting to an experience that is as disorienting as a drive through Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction.” The final chapter sets the viewer back in reality by paying homage to the architecture itself, outlining its oft-overlooked, complex contour with blue painter’s tape. It’s a dynamic work, shifting from the oppressive to the surreal and back again, much like the movement from rush hour sidewalks to the places we go to be alone.

The intense ‘meta-ness’ of the project was as much a part of Lopez’s process as it was the finished installation. If you had observed her at work in the month leading up to the show, you would have found an artist overseeing an endless flurry of activity, much like a contractor presides over his team of hardhats. Annotated blue prints of each level and a production calendar could even be found sprawled across her desk. Given a brief moment for reflection, Lopez remarked, “I’ve decided it’s like I am building a fort.”

Building, in the commercial sense of the word, is Lopez’s artistic point of departure. As self-aware urban dwellers we are quick to criticize our material atrocities, but they are also how “we connect and build and achieve ideas,” she confesses transparently. Consumerism has become a source of guilt for our eco-green-grass-fed-organic-minimalist society, but like the seventy-two floor glass condos blocking our views, it’s also kind of magnificent.

Passing over the Triborough Bridge as she drives home from teaching classes at Bard, Lopez often takes a moment to observe the haphazard masterpiece of the Manhattan skyline. “I’m looking at it right here and it’s incredible,” she says into the phone. “This world that we’ve built—It’s absolutely beautiful and magical, yet totally overwhelming and completely horrifying. That contradiction is what’s so fascinating about humanity right now.“

*** This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski.  Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media