Carlito Carvalhosa: Sum of Days

Through Nov. 14

Turning the “upended Kleenex-box-shaped” atrium at MoMA into a gauzy cathedral is no small feat, said Dan Bischoff in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Brazilian artist Carlito Carval­hosa’s transformation of the space invites museum visitors to step inside a 60-foot-tall “billowy white maze” hung from the ceiling. “The curtains, made of a gossamer-light fabric,” are hung in an oval pattern; “finding your way through to the central space is like winding through an inner ear.” Fittingly, there’s an aural aspect to the installation. Each day, as viewers stroll about, overhead microphones record their shuffling, oohing, and aahing, while speakers play back similar sounds recorded the day before. Eventually, the layered tracks become “a susurrus of whispers.” Soothed by this soundtrack and immersed in the space’s beautiful white light, “you see yourself as you are—the last note in a long, unending chant.”

Is that what that was? said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. To my ears, the sounds were an uninspiring muddle, and the spiral maze seemed dull and derivative—watered-down Richard Serra. “To appreciate all this, you will have to be in a state of exceptionally receptive attentiveness” because this installation captures “little of the incredible lightness of being” found in older, similar works. And that, in a nutshell, is Carvalhosa’s problem: Over the last four decades, conceptual artists from Bruce Nauman to Christo to Tino Seghal have “raised the bar for the minimalist, consciousness-expanding genre,” while Carvalhosa remains stuck in the ’60s. Which is not to say that “Sum of Days” lacks subtlety or stylishness. It simply needs “a more surprising twist.”

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