Simon Starling

Simon Starling, Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (A House of a Song Bird), 2002, wood, iron, tree trunks, and birds, 133” x 122” x 140.” Collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Dennis and Debra Scholl. © Simon Starling. Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.

Perez Art Museum Miami

By Ashley Knight

Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird) by British conceptual artist Simon Starling is a recent PAMM acquisition. It takes as starting point a housing project developed in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, by Austrian architect Simon Schmiderer (1911-2001) in the 1960s for International Basic Economy Corporation. Schmiderer’s architectural design of those houses was inspired by Modernist musician Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and by Mies van der Rohe’s legacy, particularly his Barcelona Pavilion, designed to house the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition, whose architecture promoted the use of perpendicular lines and open spaces. In Bayamon, Schmiderer created a model of a house without doors or windows in order to integrate the outside and inside spaces in a harmonic composition that pretended to facilitate a dialogue between the tropical landscape and architecture of the house. Unfortunately, his utopian dreams had no happy end, because in the 1970s the increase of the drug trade, crime and violence changed the structure of these houses as their inhabitants added fences and barriers to close the open areas of Schmiderer’s original design.

In his project, Starling re-created two of the existing Bayamon homes on a smaller scale and inverted them like birdcages, which then he placed atop tree trunks. His work reflects on how the utopia of Modernism could fail when confronted with Caribbean social reality. Through September 14, 2014.