CAMBRIDGE, MA.- On the occasion of the Carpenter Center’s 60th anniversary, This Machine Creates Opacities restages four major works by artists Robert Fulton, Renée Green, Pierre Huyghe, and Pope.L that examine the ways buildings can choreograph social life, learning, and culture. With its title borrowed from statements made by artist Pope.L about navigating the Carpenter Center when invited to create a new commission, the exhibition reflects on the history, activities, and affects of Le Corbusier’s iconic design—the architect’s only building in North America.

The selected projects were each made in direct response to the Carpenter Center as an institutional site and explore architecture through the lenses of experimental cinematography and performance, employing the expansive formal and technological possibilities of video installation to excavate a building’s aesthetic and social functions. This Machine Creates Opacities presents Pierre Huyghe’s video installation This is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004) alongside documentation of the performance and sculptural elements from Pope.L’s Corbu Pops (2009) on Level 3, while the films Reality’s Invisible by Robert Fulton (1971) and Americas : Veritas by Renée Green (2018) are installed on Level 1.

This is Not a Time for Dreaming

Commissioned for the Carpenter Center’s 40th anniversary, Pierre Huyghe’s video This is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004) is a meta–puppet show that draws from the artist’s own experiences with the Carpenter Center to retell the history of Le Corbusier’s efforts to construct the building while navigating a complicated institution and protagonists. The poetic, allegorical fable that unfolds in the puppet play shifts between historical, contemporary, and fantastical events to explore the struggles and compromises that occur when creating a new work in response to a loaded site.

Corbu Pops

As he created his commission Corbu Pops (2009) for the Carpenter Center’s Level 1 space, Pope.L referred to the building as a “confusing machine,” one that “manufactures disorientation in the form of a dark, viscous liquid. Unlike a washing machine, this machine creates opacity.” In its original form, the site-specific project consisted of an elevated stage with holes for actors’ heads, “Corbu” masks and signature glasses, a video documenting Dada-inspired performance rehearsals, photocopies of modernist architectural critique, cast scale models of the Carpenter Center mounted on sticks like popsicles, a glass of water on a shelf, sound, and drawings on stationary. Pope.L has restaged sculptural elements and video from this pivotal work, reinserting it into the Carpenter’s Center’s historic space and current psyche.

Reality's Invisible

Robert Fulton’s 16 mm film Reality’s Invisible (1971)—made while the pioneering cinematographer was teaching in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at the Carpenter Center (now the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies)—layers candid interviews with students, faculty lectures, student artworks, and swooping, lingering shots of the building’s architecture. The intimate yet frenetic footage captures classroom and studio activities along with students’ intellectual and political concerns, creating a disorienting, sometimes dissonant portrait of a building and the communities that it choreographs.

Americans : Veritas

In Americas : Veritas (2018), Renée Green—artist, filmmaker, writer, and professor in MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology program—places in dialogue Le Corbusier’s only two structures built in the Americas: the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge and Casa Curutchet in La Plata, Argentina. The work melds the architectures of both buildings, distorting and blending their purportedly universalist structures, using surveillance-drone technology and optical deformations through a 360° camera, to interrogate the frameworks that continue to shape the various embodied experiences defined by iconic modernist architecture.

This Machine Creates Opacities revives these important site-specific commissions to celebrate the building’s capacity to inspire as well as reflect on the Carpenter Center’s institutional memory since the building—an immediate lightning rod for some audiences—opened in 1963. By restaging these site-specific works, This Machine Creates Opacities engages with ongoing questions around the complex nature of creativity within pedagogical institutions.

Carpenter Center
This Machine Creates Opacities
October 6 - December 22, 2023
Levels 1 and 3
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 5, 2023

This Machine Creates Opacities is curated by Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, with Danni Shen, Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant.