CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/4/2019

"Transcendental homelessness" in 'Siah Armajani: Follow This Line'

"Fallujah" (2004–2005) is reproduced from Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, the rich and beautifully designed clothbound exhibition catalogue published to accompany the current show at the Met Breuer (en route from the Walker Art Center)—reviewed this week in Hyperallergic and The New Yorker. "Until 1999, my sculpture was participatory in the sense that I built reading rooms, reading gardens, bridges, workers' lounges, etc," the Iranian-born artist writes. "Previously, I knew architecture not as a 'thing between four walls in a spatial sense, but as a place for resting, sleeping, working.' But since then I have enclosed the sculptures so that people cannot enter; they have to walk around the sculpture and view it. Adorno's ironic statemen—'it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home'—now guides my work. Outside of these enclosed spaces, we are out of place, as though banished, estranged, expelled, or as Lukács says, experiencing a 'transcendental homelessness.'"