At first glance, nothing looks amiss in the budding metropolis below. It's a typical day in New York or Tokyo or London. Construction workers are busy assembling the newest skyscrapers. Steel and cement come together to create a new city ripe for progress. Initially, Arnie Zimmerman and Tiago Montepegado's new installation at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, "Inner City," resembles that iconic photograph of New York construction workers taking a lunch break on a beam high above the sidewalks — all ease and comfortable camaraderie.
Take a closer look, though, and Zimmerman and Montepegado's tiny world is far from ideal. It is a dangerous place intent on covering up the past. What no one in this urban microcosm seems to realize is that it is the here and now that requires attention.
"Inner City" tells the story of a metropolis on the verge of transformation from the days of florid Victorian and Baroque architecture to clean modern lines of the 20th century. It's out with the old and in with the new in this collaborative work.
This is the first time "Inner City" has been shown in the United States, with previous installments in museums in the Netherlands and Portugal. The display at the RISD Museum is the largest to date, arranging Zimmerman's figurines through the 4,000-square-foot space so museumgoers feel as though they are walking across town, taking in the sites as the city is built up around them. Zimmerman's ceramics on display are beautifully executed and highly detailed.
Montepegado flew in from Portugal to design the installation. He adapted the museum's Chace Center to fit the almost 200 figurative and architectural ceramic pieces and built a viewing platform so that, after wandering through the streets of the city, visitors can take in the metropolis as a whole.
The result is quite dramatic. The bird's-eye view transports viewers to a playful world of skyscrapers, bridges and tenements where anything can happen. The problem is anything does happen, and the results are not pretty. Brawls erupt between workers, people fall down shafts and into waste bins spilling over with rubble.
Zimmerman has lived and worked in New York for the past 25 years, according to a museum press release. While in the city, he was able to see the effects of the building boom of the last two decades. He saw firsthand how older buildings were razed to be replaced by the bland, corporate buildings of today. Gone is the individuality of the architecture and the connection to the city's history. It's all about modernity.
This has created plenty of problems, not just in New York but all across the globe, as cities find themselves striving to shed their skins in favor of a new, more sophisticated look. The burden of actually building these megacities falls on the shoulders of workers who are left to grapple amongst themselves and wonder just when enough will be enough.
Looking at the figurines, one cannot help feeling for the characters Zimmerman has created. They are entwined with the buildings themselves, becoming one with their creations. Some even lack a head as they march materials from one construction site to another, leaving viewers to ask themselves what price they are willing to pay for progress.
Each figure is at once different and yet remarkably similar, lumping everyone into the same category of worker in this industrious city. They are nameless and faceless because they are telling a story collectively — a story about the changing dynamics of a city bent on modernizing and washing away remnants of a diverse past.
Zimmerman's aesthetic is also deliberately rough around the edges, giving the figures an even more realistic feel. Their physical imperfections make the scene somehow more relatable. These are real people hard at work in a merciless city set on pushing its limits.
This would not have been accomplished if Zimmerman had employed traditional methods of ceramic work, glossing over the details to the make the figures smooth, pretty and graceful. There is nothing graceful about dangling from a 10-story building or pushing a shopping cart down the crowded city streets. Zimmerman understands this and, according to the press release, allowed firing accidents to take place when he was drying the clay, providing a more accurate depiction of city life, no matter how bleak that image might be.
"Inner City" will be on display at the RISD Museum through Jan. 3.
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