Today at mass, at the conclusion of the Eucharist, the Eucharistic ministers gathered at the Mary Altar, as they do every Sunday, and once the mass coordinator placed the ciborium containing consecrated but unconsumed hosts in the tabernacle, the Eucharistic ministers gently, and in unison, bowed. At that moment I was again reminded of a quiet and powerful exhibition–“Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT” at Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens.

        In 1986, performance artist and sculptor Scott Burton installed a commissioned site-specific work in the ground floor lobby of the Equitable Center in Manhattan. Atrium Furnishment consisted of a high-backed, semi-circular, verde larissa marble bench and four pinkish onyx lights, all nearly encircled by a brass band inset in the floor. Contained within the semi-circle was a low circular fountain–also made of verde larissa marble—surrounded by a circular table. Opposite the bench, Burton installed a complimentary semi-circular grove of conifer trees. To anyone visiting this installation it may have felt like a simple, pretty, and polite public work that gave one a place to sit and eat lunch or wait for a meeting, or a landmark at which to rendezvous with a friend. Atrium Furnishment, however, was much more thoughtful—layered with hidden meanings that I feel were intentionally obscure.

        On the one hand, Scott Burton’s work was an aggressive rejection of a minimalist aesthetic which one might associate with Donald Judd. Burton had worked for years as an art critic when he began making art himself, and he disliked what he perceived as a false universality of minimalism. He felt that its hard singular gestures and precious simplicity were a form of machismo that actually provided little room for expression of things that were messier, more intimate, feminine, or even slightly queer. Burton’s philosophical musings about art would eventually inspire him to make art himself. Initially he worked in performance art, using his body, to comment on how one exists and operates within public space. His practice was significantly changed after he took home a wooden chair that was left on the street. From then on, he began to employ simple furniture as tools to coerce a viewer of his work to consider their own agency in a public venue. Is this chair part of the art; am I supposed to sit in it; am I comfortable? Over the course of several years, he would augment existing found pieces of furniture, or fabricate new pieces from scratch. This led Burton to being a prominent artist in the world of artist-made furniture in public spaces, including the aforementioned, Atrium Furnishment.

        In 2020, Atrium Furnishment was permanently removed from the Equitable Center and placed into storage with no clear plan as to its future. However, Álvaro Urbano, a Spanish artist and trained architect based in Berlin, has reinstalled elements of Atrium Furnishment in an eerie, strange, and engaging installation at Sculpture Center. It is funny to someone my age to think of an artist resurrecting a work from the 80s as plumbing the archive, but that is truly what Urbano has done. He has not only borrowed elements of Atrium Furnishment but has given new life to them—a vitality that is almost cinematic. He has introduced new and layered meaning to Scott Burton’s work, while shining a light on his original intentions and ideas.

        In Burton’s original installation, for example, the semicircle was intended to trace the hours between 9am and 5pm–the stereotypical workday for someone clocking in daily in a midtown office. In our post-COVID world of working from home, or wherever, and not being regimented to a clock, Urbano has exploded the circle, keeping the elements focused on a fixed center point, but losing the rigidity of the semicircle, and thus, exposing the rough unhoned edges of the marble. This literal breaking of time also provides a commentary on a certain collapse of the American Dream and the end of the American Century—Urbano reveals the rough, sad edges of a late-twentieth-century idealism, as seen through a twenty-first century lens.

        Urbano has also installed a powerful grid of drop lighting over the entire sculpture. The lighting, the kind found in any high-rise office, at one moment provides a cold surgical theater brightness to the room but then it changes—it becomes amber, like looking through the windows of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, but with a haunted feeling. You notice the lights are filled with detritus like a corporate ruin. Moths dance a moribund flutter to the sounds of an electric buzz. The room suddenly feels like dusk and like the end of time.

        In contrast to the grid of lighting, Urbano echoes the conifers included in the original installation by surrounding the elements of Atrium Furnishment with a number of botanical sculptures. These sculptures are all considered individual works. They are floral, evoking the first blossoms of spring that emerge from the last remaining colorful dried leaves of fall.  Some have straight forward names, TABLEAU VIVANT (Magnolia), or TABLEAU VIVANT (Dogwood). Some have more poetic titles. City of Night references and replicates a copy of a late 80s edition of John Rechy’s novel about a “young man’s” experiences as a hustler. In another part of the gallery, a beautiful accumulation of leaves is titled He would always leave a window open, even at night.

        One of the most poignant elements in the show is Urbano’s work called Zu verschenken. This tucked away piece was very easy to miss. It depicts a cardboard box with a few cigarette butts and the barely-there nest of a pigeon. The German phrase, Zu verschenken, is used the same way a denizen of New York writes “Free to take” on a post-it stuck to a box with unwanted books or an odd vase, left out on the stoop for a neighbor to adopt. This, of course, references Burton’s bringing home of the chair which changed his practice and ultimately lead to the current exhibition at Sculpture Center. It also references the unknown fate of Atrium Furnishment. And it evokes an important reference in the work of Scott Burton: cruising, the strolling through public spaces, lobbies of high-rise office buildings, or the rambles of Central Park, in search of sexual encounters or romantic partners to enjoy in a hidden nook of a public space, or even one that is free to take home.

        If you are standing in front of Zu verschenken, you suddenly have a framed view of Urbano’s installation in full. If someone else is in the exhibition space, you have the opportunity to watch them engage with the art. Do they look up? Look down? Do they sit on the bench? Do they touch one of the many apples, some bitten and rotting, laying around? Do they make eye contact? Will you connect with them in some way? You observe, as a fellow observer, how they observe. Maybe you internally narrate their actions with a private language. You watch for the coded gestures, the gentle bow that might suggest, “yes we are the same and here we are in this space together.” Or maybe you see none of this, which is okay, if you miss it, maybe it wasn’t meant for you. 

Paul Moreno is an artist, designer, and writer working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a founder and organizer of the New York Queer Zine Fair. His work can be found on Instagram @ bathedinaftherthought. He is the New York City editor of the New Art Examiner.