Photo: Installation view of The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. Photography by Hyla Skopitz, The Photograph Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Copyright 2016.
“We all go a little mad…sometimes,” Norman Bates observed in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho (1960). It was an eerily calm, self-aware moment from a man who staged life. Once the façade had fallen, there was nothing left. It was all a shell game, nothing more, nothing less—as madness proves, more often than not, unsustainable.
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But there was a time before things fell apart, and a place where it all began. Turner Prize-nominated British artist Cornelia Parker (b. 1956) explores this space in an incredible site-specific work commissioned for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Fashioned in the form of the Bates family home crossed with the classic red barn of American architecture, with a tip of the cap to the great painter Edward Hopper, Parker presents The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn).
Installation view of The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. Photography by Hyla Skopitz, The Photograph Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Copyright 2016.
Nearly 30 feet high, the sculpture consists of two facades propped up from behind with scaffolding, fabricated from a deconstructed red barn that had spent a century as part of a farm in upstate New York. Blood-red siding, wood floors, whitewashed posts, ad corrugated steel roofing are exquisitely produced to dazzling effect, as reality becomes illusive. Indeed, this is a set, one designed with New York in mind, as the PsychoBarn sits like a gem in the New York skyline. In the light of the sun or sitting quietly under the moon, Parker’s work transforms Fifth Avenue into a storybook come alive. At times it is like being in a painting; at others it’s like being in a film. It is as though the PsychoBarn understands the need to see all the world as a stage, like Shakespeare said.
Parker’s title, Transitional Object, references the psychoanalytic theory of transitional objects used by children to help negotiate their self-identity as separate from their parents. Our dear Mr. Bates did not fare so well and as a result his mental health was deeply compromised. What is the transitional space we negotiate here?
Installation view of The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. Photographed by Alex Fradkin, Photo courtesy the artist.
Perhaps it is this. The red barn represents classic American values, of the agrarian past that has long faded away, invoking the spirit of Emerson’s Self-Reliance—whereas the Bates home represents a new America, one that is built upon facades, and something darker still. It’s the inability to keep it together, to eventually fall apart. PsychoBarn asks which way will we go: towards the illusions or towards the truth, the quick fix or the long haul.
Naturally, the exhibition is on view through October 31, 2016, because it wouldn’t be Halloween without a treat or two.
Installation view of The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. Photographed by Alex Fradkin, Photo courtesy the artist.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
