Theaster Gates @ Serpentine Pavilion

During a surrealⁱ week in London in which I had breakfast with [redacted!] in Fitz,ⁱⁱ drinks with Horology Ancienne in Belgravia,ⁱⁱⁱ tea with philosophy friends in the literal Ivory Tower,^iv coffee with Sam Spike and a chat with Billy Zane at Tate, a standing meeting with Kevin Rose at W1 Curates,^v a lovely rendezvous with Maria Paula at Outernet, a stirring conversation with Shumon Basar at Serpentine North, a private tour of the inaugural Hirst Currency burn event,^vi attended the opening day of the megalithic Battersea Power Plant,^vii crushed the Proof Roadshow party, and soaked up countless other Frieze events and exhibits, one standout experience from this all-but-unbelievable week was visiting the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion at Hyde Park.

Entitled Black Chapel with design lead by artist Theaster Gates, the seemingly simple structure is steeped in layers of meaning and power. As a potter,^viii musician, painter, sculptor, and community revitaliser, the multi-disciplinary Gates is a gentle giant, a soft-hearted soul and singular force for good in the world. When he talks about “community,” it isn’t as a salve for our anxiety-crippled internet-addled world of digital fantasy and globalised finance, it’s as a warrior for his neighbourhood: the war-torn, downtrodden streets of his native Chicago. Bringing that story and struggle front-and-centre – lifting onto the world’s stage – is what Black Chapel is all about.^ix In this aspirational proposition at this difficult estuarial moment, there’s little doubt that Gates can succeed, but how about the physical execution?

Stepping inside at the exhibition space as it opened to the public at 10am on a quiet weekday morning during Frieze London, the long mid-October shadows extended the darkness of the tall cylindrical structure onto the crisp green lawns. As the morning sunlight pierced through the building’s 20′ rectangular doorways and its round unglazed oculus in the roof, the stage was set for a morning prayer. The bronze bell on the northwest side, salvaged from St. Laurence Catholic Church on Chicago’s South Side, didn’t ring but it didn’t need to. The charred black structure rang true.

With a restrained palate of materials, primarily blackened wood with just steel zigzag joists for vertical bracing, my initial impression of the structure was just how bloody refined the architecture was in terms of proportion, plan, and site orientation. Had Theaster gone to architecture school like his former friend and fellow Chicago luminary Virgil Abloh and maybe I’d missed that link? Turns out not (though he did study urban planning!). What I’d momentarily forgotten was that Sir David Adjaye OBE was also involved in the architecture and that Adjaye is not only Ghanaian like Virgil, but similarly influenced by a staggering breadth of historical African vernaculars.^x At only 56 years old, Sir David is every bit the equal of Bjarke Ingels^xi though in many ways with a stronger sense of monumentality (if perhaps less joyful and whimsical).

So what is the architecture trying to say? And what does it say? Much of what it attempts to convey will be embodied in its references and influences, for which I’ll quote the literature here because there’s no other way to do it justice:

The structure, realised with the support of Adjaye Associates, references the bottle kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the beehive kilns of Western United States, San Pietro and Roman tempiettos, and traditional African structures, such as the Musgum mud huts of Cameroon, and the Kasubi Tombs of Kampala, Uganda. The Pavilion’s circularity and volume echo the sacred forms of Hungarian round churches and the ring shouts, voodoo circles and roda de capoeira witnessed in the sacred practices of the African diaspora

Does it succeed on this architectural basis? I’d say so! The strength of eternity in the structural design and detailed refinement is unmistakeable. Artistically, it’s perhaps not quite as strong as it could be. Inside Black Chapel are presented seven tar^xii paintings inspired by Rothko’s Chapel in Houston, Texas.^xiii Certainly if awe, grandeur, spirituality, and all the other “chapel”-like impressions are the north star here, then why make such relatively small paintings? Why make them only 6′ tall instead of 16′ tall? Anselm Kiefer certainly got the memo with his triumphal intervention at the Doge’s Palace in Venice, but apparently not so here  in London. The scale of Seven Songs for Black Chapel – the title of this series – is just a bit lost in the overall volume of the space. Where’s the gravitas? Not that I had the gall to mention as much to Theaster when I happened to run into him at the V&A Ceramics Room where he was setting-up for an unadvertised music recording beneath the permanent installation of fellow potter Edmund de Waal.^xiv But I guess that’s why blogs exist!

The detail and execution are still more than worthy of contemplation and appreciation. But size matters! Didn’t Virgil teach us anything?

Back to the architectural for a minute. The structural details were overall even more sublime than expected. It’s not easy to do minimalism, kids! Mies van der Rohe taught us that and Adjaye reminds us yet again. You actually don’t see steel joists on wood construction like this in North America, at least not commonly today. It used to be a thing but contractors seem to be lazier now; so it’s usually either all-wood or all-steel, not this beautiful and elegant mix. At once light and substantial, the sombreness and solemnity of the space is evident, but so is its brightness. Strong, tall ceilings imbue the building with a sense of permanence and endurance belying its actual 4-month lifespan. So dark but so bright — so brief but so lasting — this is the enduring impression of Black Chapel.

I hope to visit the Serpentine Galleries again some day. They’re really magical experiments in ephemeral architecture. There’s little doubt in my mind that Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist is a living legend, as are Gates and Adjaye, so I still can’t recommend it enough, especially if you can catch one of the concerts (or at least a recording of one).

The 2022 Serpentine Pavilion is open until, well, hate to do this again, but today, October 16, 2022. I guess there’s always next year… surreal as it seems.

1. Surrealism is definitely in the air innit! ↩
2. Thanks to my main man NooNe0x.eth (@phon_ro) for the hook-ups! ↩
3. Two hours 1-on-1 with the living legend, one of the top 5 watch collectors in the world. Talk about surreal! ↩
4. Aka All Souls College at Oxford where a dear family friend and one of the smartest people I know is teaching philosophy of law. Her husband also teaches there. They’re quite the twosome!

   
   

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5. W1 Curates presents Disruption features the collections of Cozomo de’ Medici and 33NFT. On now until October 20th! ↩
6. Thanks again to my amigo NooNe0x!

   

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7. A GBP 9 billion project!!!! One that took no less than 40 years(!) when you count how long the former coal-fired power plant sat vacant since its decommissioning. Repurposing existing buildings, even ones as spiritually rich as Battersea, is hard af.

   

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8. It’s amazing how distorting time has been during the pandemic (and the crazy 2021 bull run). It was less than 2 years ago that Theaster even came across my radar for his ceramics practice when Gagosian featured him in conversation with Sir Edmund. So lest you think I was born knowing this stuff, I wasn’t! We’re all just learning as we go, cultivating ourselves and honing our crafts:
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9. “Black Chapel” is just a great name too, not only as a recognition of our tragic Nietzschean era, but also a great counter-point to Whitechapel (Gallery) also based in London.  ↩
10. Place matters!
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11. Bjarke also designed a slinky Serpentine Pavilion in 2016, which was then purchased by Ian Gillepsie and used to promote Westbank’s King Street project in Toronto in 2018. ↩
12. Theaster’s father was a roofer in Chicago, thus the connection to these sculptural “paintings” that utilise and elevate readymade materials in new ways. At least they should be durable! Conservators must love these… ↩
13. Rothko Chapel, note the scale of the paintings relative to the humans:

    

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14. de Waal’s Signs & Wonders (2009) installation at the V&A is breathtaking, not just for the opportunity for a living artist to engage with such historical artifacts, but also for the fact that de Waal white porcelain vessels are suspended by nothing but the Donald Judd-ian red steel C-frame, no glass vitrine cover, and with some of the pieces cantilevering ever so slightly over the edge!

    
    
    
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