Novelists and poets know that the rooms we inhabit are emotionally and psychologically charged: the anthropomorphic dissolution of Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher and the gloomy decay of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables come to mind as examples of how the home has stood in for the most intimate aspects of the body and mind in literature. Visual art is also fascinated with the psychology of architectural space: Paul McCarthy’s intense antics are staged within built rooms that have been described as surrogates for the artist, or for the artist’s brain. But a new exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center extends our interest in the subconscious of architecture beyond the personal and into the realm of social and sexual mores, putting forth the argument that the spaces in which we live and work also have powerful political, gender, and class ramifications.

“Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms,” the first exhibition organized by the List’s new curator, Bill Arning, suggests that our built environment is anything but neutral, even though for most of us architecture exists at the very periphery of perception, functioning as an indifferent container for our daily activities. “Inside Space” presents six installations that direct our attention to the way different architectural and structural forms influence our lives, both privately and as a society. Raising complex political issues in rich and provocative ways, this exhibition shows the boldness of Arning’s vision for the List. At the same time, it is a quiet show, preferring to raise questions rather than spout ideology. For me, the quiet in some cases threatens to deactivate the work. The most engaging installations here are the least self-contained, the ones that take on the particular space and historic moment they find themselves in, the ones that reach out and draw in viewers.

My favorite installation is artist Henrik Olesen’s Untitled (After Kenneth Noland), in which Olesen brings his own ongoing interest in gender and society to bear on artist Noland’s 1985 creation of the enormous geometric mural Here-There, which is located in the Wiesner Building atrium, just outside the List’s doorway. For this show, Olesen constructed a maze of four small rooms, each of which has a impermanent, unfinished feeling — ceilings are only half painted, a stray electrical cord is looped on the ground, an unpainted panel seems to be temporarily filling an opening between two rooms. If the room is a metaphor for the body, this self is unrealized and uncertain. A large black-and-white poster is tacked up on one wall and labeled “Noland, with aluminum panel wall segment.” It’s a straightforward photo of what appears to be Noland working on his mural, with the word masculine scrawled incongruously across the wall. In another room, seven small black-and-white snapshots — old-fashioned in format, coffee-stained and dog-eared — are neatly arrayed just above eye level, each accompanied by a label typed with a simple archival-type identification. For example, “Wiesner Building, atrium.” Or “On site conference. Left to right: Fleischner, Portnoy, Sandi Pei, Kenneth Noland.” These refer to the artists and architects who built the structure that houses MIT’s List, but Olesen has made some minor adjustments in order to highlight his own interests. An African-American woman and a destitute-looking man have been inserted into two of the photographs, subtly altering the original historical cast of characters. And the word feminine has also been inserted as graffiti scrawled across the wall, pointing up the fact that the huge grid-like architectural project and accompanying Noland art project have certain gender associations. Above one wall, Olesen has set out a list of state sodomy laws in varied typefaces with cross-outs, further equating the unfinished, transient quality of his rooms with the politically disenfranchised, in contrast to the bravado of the men who build and adorn large, permanent spaces.

Also showing an interest in gender and architecture, and in the gender of architecture, Juan Maidagan and Dolores Zinny have made a slight change in a large room, turning two corners into curved closets that draw viewers to the perimeters of the space to investigate dark, unknowable spaces. The idea of the “closet” is full of associations, as is the juxtaposition of curves and right angles, interior and exterior spaces. The simplicity with which this piece opens up those ideas for investigation is effective. A simple geometric vocabulary is also employed by Teresita Fernandez in Supernovas, five small pools filled with colorful psychedelic spirals that simulate motion and depth as you walk around the installation. The meditative quality of the space and the hypnotic aspects of the pools are charming, with rich references to the nature of nature in architecture, but I found the more ephemeral interrogation of space here harder to catch hold of.

Monica Bonvicini uses more than a dozen different domestic American fencing materials (mostly found by the artist in a local Home Depot) to enclose and mark off an X-shaped space. The work allows you only an attenuated position as an outsider, but it also turns you into a voyeur, as you peer through chain-link, over high wooden boards, and through hedges to see what has been laid claim to. The various materials, heights, and levels of permeability are intended to point up how we subtly and not so subtly communicate different economic means, æsthetic standards, and feelings about property ownership and neighborly relations through our fences.

In Descending Gallery/Powerless Structures Fig. 145, Elmgreen & Dragset have built an off-kilter room that you view from outside — they turn the familiar white-cube structure of modern-day galleries and museums on end and cause the de rigueur modernist chair and table to topple and the cool gray floor to become uprooted. The collapsing structure seems both humorous and grave, though Glenn Seator’s re-creation of David Ross’s office at the Whitney Museum a couple of Biennials ago comes too readily to mind.

Although focusing your attention on the act of entering an art gallery is the purpose of Oona Stern’s site-specific carpet installation Welcome (MIT), which is located both inside and outside the exhibition space, it’s easy to overlook this inconspicuous work until you’re on your way back out the door. The artist had two identical carpets made for the gallery’s reception area, then flipped one of them so that it lies outside the doors to the List, forming an odd-shaped mat that includes a cut-out portion — the negative space of the reception desk. This diagrammatic carpet can be seen as a form of architectural drawing that is itself functional, providing a place to wipe your feet, softening your step, and offering a gentle transition back out of the realm of culture and into the realm of the flagrantly architectural lobby of the Wiesner Building, with its macho grids and feminine curves. The schematic shape of Welcome (MIT) is further echoed in the Wiesner atrium in the permanent floor plans of the building that are posted next to the elevators to inform visitors as to the location of bathrooms and emergency fire exits.

“Inside Space” is not a warm and fuzzy kind of show — it’s hard-edged, despite some sly curves (in context the few round edges take on a heightened softness, like glorious refugees from the analytical mode). But it is a show that rewards looking and thinking — I recommend reading the wall texts along with diving into the art, and looking very closely into every corner.

Issue Date: March 15-22, 2001