The Room Has Taken Over: Shiv Kotecha Reviews MOCA's Décor

At Frieze, poet and critic Shiv Kotecha—author of The Switch, forthcoming from Wonder—reviews Décor: Barbara Bloom, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, on view until July 15 at MOCA Los Angeles's Pacific Design Center. The show invokes Virginia Woolf 's infamous room of one's own: "[C]urator Rebecca Matalon repeats Woolf’s conceit so as to reframe what ‘one’s own room’ might signify," writes Kotecha. "Rather than reflecting back their ‘owners’ faithfully, the rooms in the exhibition – centred around Bloom’s haunting installation, The Reign of Narcissism (1988–89) – draw attention to their extremely composed ‘arrangement’ (in Lawler’s term) within a museum context." More:

Upstairs, [Barbara] Bloom’s hexagonal installation, The Reign of Narcissism, with its pistachio walls – a pigment that reads a bit like bile, or, as an abject saturation of Lawler’s jade – takes us directly into the private museum collection. This eerie, rarely shown full-scale, faux-Victorian parlour is broken into disparate fragments, each of which refer to a fictional set of Barbara Blooms: bas-reliefs depict ‘Bloom’ among hovering cherubs; two Greek-style busts of ‘Bloom’s’ head sit on demi-columns; in the centre of the room, white silken flowers are literally mid-bloom in an opaque white vase. In one vitrine, 30 leather-bound volumes entitled The Complete Works of Barbara Bloom (1989); on the facing wall, three tombstones with vaguely artsy epitaphs – ‘She traveled the world to seek beauty’ – memorialize ‘Bloom’, proliferating the artist’s presence in her after-life. Looking around the room more closely, one notices that the walls of the installation itself have ‘Bloom’s’ name, etched into them, near the base of the entrance into the space. Bloom doubles down on the extant strategies of conceptual installation and their contextual ironies, blurring the lines between ‘herself’ and the context of collecting.  

Standing within Bloom’s installation for a few minutes, Woolf’s double warning echoes: in this room, as in Lawler’s and Fraser’s, it becomes clear that you’re not standing in a room of one’s own; instead, the room itself has taken over, its artist becoming the very ornaments that comprises it...

Do read on at Frieze.