Reviews: Rhode Island

Arnie Zimmerman and Tiago Montepegado: Inner City
RISD Museum • Providence, RI • www.risdmuseum.org • Through January 3, 2010

The third iteration of Inner City arrived in Providence after previous stops in Lisbon and the Netherlands. The RISD exhibition is the largest yet, featuring two hundred figurative and architectural components (eighty more than previously shown), constructed from clay by Zimmerman and uniquely arranged and adapted to the exhibition site by Montepegado.

It is a work of staggering imagination and stunning execution. In Zimmerman’s vision, the city is presented in its archetypal state as a place of constant destruction and remaking, built and maintained on the backs of laborers lifting bricks, steel girders, and CEOs to dazzling heights. A roomful of diminutive tenements, skyscrapers, overflowing dumpsters, ladders, smokestacks, walls, and trashcans depict the set pieces of city streets. The work has the quality of a three-dimensional fable, presenting a world of relentless energy and force that is also dehumanizing and, perhaps, ultimately doomed.

The Providence version of Inner City is organized in a taped grid pattern across the floor, divided by pedestals of varying heights and details scattered across the walls. The architect added a four-foot ramp to provide an alternative vantage, which has the ironic consequence of making the room’s four neon-green “exit” signs more prominent. New pieces include a charcoal-black, ten-foot-long bridge that looks like a series of double-stacked oil wells topped by arches (in other words, it’s a bridge designed by a poet, rather than an engineer). There’s also a collection of sixty pieces grouped together as Walled City that was previously shown independently at the Katonah Museum in New York.

Using a salt kiln, the artist created clay forms that suggest the texture of metal, stone, and concrete, and figures that are animated by expressions and gestures. While whimsical on the surface, there is an underlying sense of the existential and the absurd, with characters careening or hanging acrobatically off I-beams and dangling from the tops of skyscrapers. They labor and suffer, nap and brawl. Some are shackled together, prisoners in a chain gang. Others are absorbed into the materials they build with, headless workers mutating into the brick they carry.

—Doug Norris