metropolis m

In what appear to resemble dated drawings, Pablo Bronstein cleverly combines different building styles, from classicism to postmodernism. He applies this montage technique to create books, theatre performances and even a dance film. As an artist, Pablo Bronstein (b. Buenos Aires, 1977) is equally comfortable taking on the role of architect, choreographer, architectural historian, antique collector and theatre director. It is a freedom that he allows himself in order to look at each situation separately, to see which role is best suited, but at the same time questions the position of the artist towards these professions. In his drawings, Bronstein reworks with equal ease different architectural styles, such as eighteenth-century classicism, Baroque, neo-Gothic and postmodernism, with entrances from such architects as Terry Farrell, Michael Graves and Léon Krier to William Chambers, Filippo Juvarra and Carlo Rainaldi. The dated medium that he employs, his putting of these works in antique frames, and the morbid character of postmodern architecture placed in a landscape of ruins betray a subversive approach. Bronstein plays with the arrangement of eighteenth-century public space, particularly the public square that at the time was still the symbol of democracy and citizenship. Over the last few decades, we have seen how such locations have gradually been privatized and taken over by individual entrepreneurs, whose own buildings often strikingly also refer back to the same eighteenth-century architectural styles, without informing the public of its private character.In the publication Postmodern Architecture in London, a project by Bronstein that was based on a visit to postmodern industrial buildings in London for the Frieze Art Fair in 2006, he consistently presented sketches of industrial complexes alongside their descriptions, which he took off the Internet. By producing summaries of these apparently public buildings and squares within the context and order of an eighteenth-century architectural almanac (it also even includes an A-B-C of postmodern details), he creates, entirely in the spirit of postmodernism, a stack of references and commentaries that cross-reference one another. In the bookshops, his guide often lands in the wrong section, between the city guides and architecture books, a mistake that Bronstein is fully able to appreciate. In his recent drawings, included in this issue of Metropolis M, the artist has opted for a completely idealized picture. Six New Designs for a Clock in the Louis XV Taste, for the Gateway to the British Embassy in Paris (2011) is a majestic project that projects luxury, whereby the scale and decoration of the gateway and the Louis XV clock have been worked in extremis. Because of the superficial treatment of the subject and the hypothetical character of the drawing, it presents itself as purely decorative, with all possible substance and content demonstratively rejected. What is being depicted is a parallel world, whereby the artist puts himself in the shoes of an exaggeratedly optimistic eighteenth-century designer. Bronstein continually engages in rhetorical exercises. By way of the pastiche, a familiar postmodern method, he analyzes and criticizes the manner in which architecture informs passersby and dictates their behaviour. For Bronstein, architecture is capable of directly shaping our actions: ‘You can walk through here, but not through there, or you can come up this way, but you cannot leave that way.’ The ornaments orchestrate the way in which we read architecture, while the structure dictates how we use it. This personal acquisition of the language of form aimed at manipulating the relationship with the viewer is more directly developed in Bronstein’s spatial constructions, such as the large-scale Pompeian triumphal arch that he produced in 2010 for the exhibition Move: Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery. He had a classically trained ballet dancer move through a triumphal arch in a contemporary interpretation of a ‘sprezzatura’, alternated with an ordinary walking pattern. The concept of the sprezzatura evolved during the Italian Renaissance. It represented an effortless elegance intended to demonstrate aristocratic superiority, and later became applied behaviour. In Bronstein’s performances, the relationship between the movements and the architectural, institutional framework is central. In Bronstein’s version of Phèdre, the play written by Jean Racine in 1677, he builds up the performance with an accumulation of sprezzatura. Part of it appears intentionally acted, while another part does not. Bringing this so-called non-acting to the stage visualises the coding of human behaviour. In the repetitive character, the actual repetition of the actions and the dominant symmetry of the performance in distance and time, such as in the way they are literally drawn out in lines on the stage, we recognize the relationship that Bronstein has with drawing. The poses and gestures are like an exercise in power relationships, between the different players, what is being acted and their relationship to the director, who is also visible on the stage. By way of these visibly indicated parameters, the theatre becomes the place where the parallel and the real worlds can fall together.Bronstein is currently working on a theatre presentation for the Dramaten theatre troupe in Stockholm, as well as a book for Xn éditions in France, which focuses on the development of early ballet and sprezzatura, and a ballet film about the emergence of the modern sewer system. His interest in public space extends into the relationships between the visible and the invisible elements that either directly or indirectly determine our behaviour. Pieternel Vermoortel is curator and co-founder of FormContent, LondonTranslated from the Dutch by Mari Shields