Viewer-Completed Houston Penetrable Is Perfect for Social Media—and Mies
VIDEO AND IMAGES: Some views of Jesús Rafael Soto’s Houston Penetrable in Cullinan Hall, designed by architect Mies van der Rohe. Soto, Houston Penetrable, 2004-14, lacquered aluminum structure, PVC tubes, and water-based silkscreen ink, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. © Estate of Jesús Rafael Soto. Video and photos by Devon Britt-Darby
The Houston Penetrable consists of 24,000 polyvinyl chloride (PVC) tubes hanging 28 feet from the ceiling to the floor. The transparent tubes have been individually hand-painted to create a yellow elliptical volume that hovers in the environment’s 2,600 square feet. By filling the space with all those tubes, Soto meant to call viewers’ attention to space as an autonomous element to be experienced with multiple senses, so it’s essential, of course, to penetrate the Penetrable–to wade right in and push through its sea of tubing and feel it thwack all over your body.
As with architecture, the more vantage points from which you experience the Houston Penetrable, the better, so it’s fitting that eventually Soto calls your attention as much to the building it was designed for–conceptually by Soto, then practically by the six entities who made its realization possible: Balfour Beatty Construction (the general contractor for ceiling work in Cullinan Hall); Berger Iron Works (construction and installation of aluminum supports and grids); Bury CHPA (consulting engineers); Cardno Haynes Whaley (consulting structural engineers); David R. David of Warehouse Associates Development (which provided the warehouse space for installation testing); and Kendall/Heaton Architects (consulting architects). (With Soto’s Penetrables system, the idea may be what Sol LeWitt called “a machine that makes the art,” but not without the heroic efforts of architects and engineers.)
For just as, at one point, you look down at the Penetrable from Upper Brown, at other points you look back at Upper Brown, where fan-shaped walls now echo that of the curtain wall facing the street, either from within the Penetrable or from somewhere along its periphery. You look out into the north foyer, where poorly placed ticket counters once wasted potential exhibition space, into an installation of Soto works in Houston collections. Art now immediately greets visitors who enter the MFAH through the Law Building. The Cullinan Hall ceiling renovations necessitated by the Penetrable‘s seven-ton grid and the eight tons of steel needed to support it have dovetailed beautifully with director Gary Tinterow’s enhancements to the Mies additions, the rejuvenation of which has to be one of the most significant early accomplishments of Tinterow’s MFAH tenure. (Even little gestures like removing the signage from behind the Alexander Calder sculpture out front have reinforced the Law Building’s art-driven sense of purpose.)
Whether by lucky or deliberate coincidence, Nakamori has a small show in Lower Brown called The Will to Architecture about “the desires of artists to investigate the architectonics of space through photography.”
Including images of actual buildings as well as ephemeral and imaginary spaces, The Will to Architecture makes a surprisingly ideal companion to the Soto show, while suggesting an apt alternate title for the Houston Penetrable. Ironically, when I tried to take some snapshots of Nakamori’s collection-based exhibit to share with my Facebook followers, a guard said no photography was allowed.