As visual storytelling pushes to new technological heights, it’s worth remembering that some of the oldest and richest tactics of illusion—from foreground arches Robert Wilson’s Renaissance lintels and lightboxes — came from the stage.
Over the past 20 years, many spatial and conceptual sets have come from British artist Es Devlin, set designer for Adele, The Weeknd and U2, at the maiden show of The Sphere, Las Vegas’ new 160,000 square foot venue. LED screen dome.
when no concert display could impress enough Last year, Devlin’s billboard for Beyoncé was delivered as something of a wrap-up from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Tucked into the center of the screen, a giant tray housed strategic elements from the singer’s three-hour video—disco balls, an amniotic fluid womb, a fembot birth canal. Before this ever-changing aperture, Beyoncé emerged between her costume changes like Christ from the tomb.
Beyoncé screen and numerous other plans for stadiums, theaters and arts institutions are currently being documented “An Atlas of H. Devlin” a text-heavy exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Manhattan, incorporating some 300 items from the designer’s archive and studio.
Curated by the museum’s Andrea Lipps and Julie Pastor in conjunction with Devlin, these archival drawings and studies, presented alongside models of the final installations constructed for this show, aim to demystify how her complex, often architectural productions take shape. .
Arranged in roughly chronological sections, it’s the first compendium of her work in retrospective mode and gives a glimpse, during our craze for augmented reality and immersive rooms, of just how far you can push the spectacle while still calling it built .
Humble enough is the origin: Devlin’s series for the band Wire in 2003 – her foray from theater design into concerts – locked each member of the quartet in a separate chamber, covered in a gauze screen and projected with pre-recorded video of their mouths and EKG readings.
This set is represented here by black-and-white sketches, slides, and cue sheets for the projections. Models star in this show, and the one for Wire’s stage, lit by one of the spotlights on the gallery’s ceiling, looks like an office with lighting befitting their postpunk failure.
Budgets grew with time and fame. Her set for the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show in Los Angeles, a revue with Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige and other hip-hop luminaries, reproduced a town complex of nearby Compton, the birthplace of Dre’s group NWA, over a Google Earth-style map of the neighborhood.
In the current exhibit—which is housed in a white, windowless workshop of sorts housed, almost ironically, inside Andrew Carnegie’s brick and wood-paneled Victorian mansion—the Super Bowl scene is depicted by a clean, life-size model and shape the said leather ball, with its architecture and urban grid lit from within like a jack-o-lantern.
As scale models, some of these small resin creations, such as her bifurcated architecture for the “Lehman Trilogy” of the National Theater (2018)scratch an itch between document and surrogate, similar to Narcissa Thorne’s tiny rooms in Chicago.
As objects of art, they draw from 60s minimalism: her monoliths, prisms, cubes, spheres, matrices, labyrinths and French curves are finished in white porcelain, each a pristine, flat specimen . (See the gently motorized white cone representing Devlin’s massive, spinning chess rook for the Production of “Parsifal” by the Royal Danish Opera, 2012.) Following the artist Richard Hamiltonwhich housed the Beatles’ longest and most varied LP in a blank white sleevethe conceptual quality of Devlin’s sets reflects the respect that pop music has evolved to demand.
But they’re also boats, many of them designed to accept external projections or built-in video screens, and in that they’re reminiscent of Apple’s designs. The edges of the built-in screen and seamless housing remind us that Devlin, born in 1971, has worked largely in the camera phone era. (Her magazine review of Nokia’s first such device, in 2002, attracted her first Wire panel.) Like the glass iPhone, when Devlin’s sculptural screens of digital animation seem designed to accommodate increasing levels of personal viewership.
There’s no doubting it, though: Beyoncé’s billboard doesn’t translate to miniature, nor does Miley Cyrus’ massive slide from her 2014 tour. (Paper drawings, shown here, document how Devlin adapted it infamous mechanical instrument after logistical failures.)
However, the re-creation does not seem to be the point. These models aim to show how concepts are created on a large scale. The paper maps ofPalace of Memory” (2019), her room-sized topographical installation of historical sites—including the Pyramids of Giza and the fig tree of Siddhartha—at the neoclassical Pitzhanger Manor in London also explored transgenerational responsibility. It revealed the artist’s interest in geographical metaphors for the mind – one of her conceptual strengths.
Less ambitious curators might have relied on built-in floor-to-ceiling projections or virtual reality stations in hopes of replicating Devlin’s signature scale — techniques used elsewhere in the projections Diego Rivera’s last retrospective mural at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which succeeded) or the immersive artist galleries that sweep through tourist sectors (which divide the art world).
While video and lighting are no strangers to the Cooper Hewitt, and while the show’s foyer boasts an immersion room for our moment (a facility called the “Studio,” where highly accurate registered projections play on a scale replica of Devlin’s workshop), you’ll find that most of “An Atlas of Es Devlin” looks like an old school illustration of drawing and sculpture: rows of small objects alluding to real objects, with sketches on paper offering commentary.
It’s intentionally antiquated, existentially clumsy — and fascinating. A large wall gathers around 200 of Devlin’s drawings and sketchbooks from her teenage years and time at Central Saint Martins, London. It’s a set you’d expect in a retrospective of artist Tracey Emin, but within such mega-futurism he hopes to convey another irony: Devlin’s elaborate ideas, to quote the show’s promotional copy, each “begin with a line on a piece of paper.”
The driving of this subject is excessive list, a door designed by Devlin and Lipps with Thames & Hudson approaching 1,000 pages and containing thousands of words from the artist, herself a lucid and generous writer, who provided the show’s extensive wall text. It documents many more works from the exhibition – including Damien Hirst LED cubes for Jay-Z and Ye (formerly Kanye West, a frequent collaborator absent from this show) — the book serves as both a hatchling and an egg.
Hundreds of glossy photographs correspond to numerous visual and alphabetical indexes. (An installation in the show’s final gallery, “Volume Unbound,” lays these assemblages flat, end-to-end.) Between them are facsimiles of related ephemera bound in incongruous shapes: folding drawings, transparencies, cutouts, and pamphlets whose archival the relevance you have to browse to ascertain.
Web designers call this “skeuomorphism”: using old technologies to understand new ones. An example is the trash can logo on your computer, which represents the deletion of immaterial data. Another is “An Atlas of Es Devlin”. Explaining a whole new perspective on the spectacle evolving around the demands of personal technology, this exhibition demonstrates the human element by recruiting relics of the past – the humble code, the map and the page.
Historians will ask what this time looked like when we wrote shopping lists in letters back then paid with our palms. After predictions have been lowered and growing pains subsided at Cooper Hewitt, Es Devlin’s genuinely interesting and aggressively tactile catalog will help them answer.
An Atlas by H. Devlin
Through Aug. 11, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st St., Manhattan, 212-849-8400; cooperhewitt.com.