Diller Scofidio + Renfro, “Musings on a Glass Box,” view of screen in right gallery (all photos courtesy Luc Boegly)

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris commemorates its 30th anniversary with “Musings on a Glass Box,” a two-part immersive installation by controversial New York design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro that nearly empties the museum’s ground floor. This huge emptiness, besides signifying a power and grandeur seen before in art museums in Paris, places the Jean Nouvel building — its glass walls, mechanical systems, and acoustics — under closer scrutiny. For its third installation at Fondation Cartier, Diller Scofidio + Renfro plays with the architecture of the building, incorporating a very effective integral sound art component by composer David Lang that offers the most rewarding sensual element to the installation.

Visually, “Musings on a Glass box” looks kind of dumb in its bland emptiness, but it is actually technologically sophisticated, particularly when one learns of the robotics that engineer Marty Chafkin developed for it. The high ceilings and transparent walls of the Fondation Cartier building, made from the best glass technology of the 1990s, are used here as perverse starting points to goof on one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s highest goals: to connect the interior to the exterior world. Diller Scofidio + Renfro takes that ambition to an extreme and presents us with the cliché of a leaky roof when the rain drips in. This is the gag of the left half of the show, where one enters the theatrical setting of a cold, cavernous empty space to encounter only a single red plastic bucket on wheels. The windows have been blurred over with some sort of translucent material. Soon, the bucket begins slowly moving about the space — and suddenly stops — so as to catch a naughty leak from the ceiling. Only three drips drop into the bucket before it starts to move around again. The bucket moves apparently on its own and in random directions, before precisely halting in position to receive three drops more, and so on, elsewhere......Continue Reading

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