Setting the Stage

The Museum of Contemporary Art is on the site of the First Cavalry Armory (designed by Holabird and Roche and built in the 1920s), which was destroyed in 1993 for construction of the current building designed by German architect Josef Paul Kleihues and completed in 1996. The Armory had outlived its military function and was used primarily as an event hall. Yet, rather than rehab the existing building, it was decided to build a modern structure that would create a new character for the neighborhood and attract tourists and businesses.

In the catalogue for Art at the Armory—an exhibition that marked a transition between the old First Cavalry Armory and new MCA—Robert Breugmann begins his essay by describing the state of the Armory in 1993, soon before its destruction:

Buildings that are about to die often have a certain smell: the odor builds up gradually over the years as dirt and wax accumulate, and water slowly soaks into places where it is not supposed to be. Major remodelings periodically arrest this process, but at the very end of a building’s life, owners and managers tend to give up, avoiding expenditures unless absolutely necessary, relying instead on temporary measures to keep disintegration at bay.

It could also describe Valerie Hegarty’s installation Green Bathroom, MCA Chicago. Hegarty’s representation of a decaying bathroom alludes to social, cultural, and personal histories abandoned in the pursuit of progress and modernization. Accelerated change and new construction in urban areas often make once familiar neighborhoods unrecognizable. Capturing the resulting sense of loss and anxiety is at the core of Hegarty’s project.

Rather than depict beautiful spaces that would normally be preserved for their aesthetic value, Hegarty subverts the hierarchy of beauty over function. Her installations, inspired by spaces she is familiar with, have included bathrooms, kitchens, and lobbies. She re-creates decrepit and decaying interiors of Chicago buildings that pre-date modernist architecture’s austere style, adding paper, glue, and paint to the walls and floor, then tearing back these layers. After she builds the installation, she slowly deconstructs it. The tears, cracks, and scratches represent effects of time, simulating the disarray of renovation or demolition.

In her installation for the MCA, the gallery seems empty except for a corner of broken green tiles, cracked bathroom fixtures, and pipes. The gray carpet in the gallery leads into simulated linoleum flooring with detritus scattered around. Although the bathroom in her studio that inspired this work is functional, Hegarty suggests its likely future state of deterioration and her supposition of its eventual fate, its demolition. Echoing a utopian vision of architecture to return to a blank slate, the clean, white gallery walls seem to be gradually encroaching on the decaying institutional bathroom in Green Bathroom, MCA Chicago.

Noticing a similar trend toward replacing buildings rather than maintaining them, Hegarty questions the economy and value of erecting so many new buildings. The slow and laborious process of making her work parallels the process of building structures, while the ephemeral nature of her work-it is destroyed in the process of deinstallation-mirrors the increasingly fleeting life span of buildings. Furthermore, an obsession with the new is a prevalent aspect of American culture; old buildings are destroyed because their style of architecture is out of fashion and does not fulfill the desires and demands of changing lifestyles. Because Hegarty’s subjects are mostly domestic, she is proposing the preservation of not only historically significant buildings, but domestic and personal spaces as well. She does not criticize change itself, but rather the rapid, sometimes random, obliteration of old and familiar places, which evoke memories or historical events, that creates a sense of anxiety.

Buildings set the stage for everyday life and activities. A corner of a room, broken pipes, a crack in the floor, peeling wallpaper-each of these often overlooked details can become triggers for memory. Like Hegarty, other artists such as Do-Ho Suh and Shellburne Thurber use architectural interiors as a way of recovering cultural or historical memories of a specific place. Do-Ho Suh’s silk representation of a bathroom in Seoul Home/L. A. Home: Bathroom (1999) represents for him a way of transporting his Korean home wherever he goes. Shellburne Thurber has photographed the interiors of abandoned homes in the southern United States to capture their spirit. With water-damaged ceilings, peeling paint, and broken windows, the absence of humans in Thurber’s light-filled images creates a psychological charge about what might have happened in each room. Like Thurber, Hegarty offers a memorial to places that recall individual experiences and memories.

—Julie Rodrigues Widholm