This installation makes a folly of a closet, celebrating the uncloseted in a time of legislative follies.
In his 1994 Essay “Closets, Clothes, DisClosures”, Henry Urbach (SFMOMA’s then-curator) describes the moment, historically, when the closet as we know it today became architecture. In plans that date back to the 19th century in America, the stand-alone furniture slowly became part of the thickness of the wall – almost vanishing in sight. This gave birth to the closet as “built-in” and solidified it as a part of the “servant” spaces of a room. This architectural arrival of the closet coincided with the growing cultural capital of ideas revolving
around “cleanliness” – strongly embedded within 19th century Christian values centered around morality. Since homosexuality – taken as obscene, intrinsically pornographic - works against the values of “cleanliness”, it is, in this lens, best stored away. More than a century later, echoes of this discourse resurface to erase, or store away once again, LGBTQ+ identities from public view –(bathrooms, classrooms, etc…).
In this lens, the installation asks the closet to misbehave. By relocating the closet as built-in from the periphery to the center, it questions its vernacular conception as ancillary storage space. Severing four
existing room plans away from their origin and compressing them towards a focal point, the closet creates a site of congestion where internal circulation and roof geometries collide.What happens when the closet becomes a threshold? When it surprisingly opens onto other rooms? What happens when we leave the door open, see through it to the spaces beyond? Bad Built-ins then become great architecture… hidden in plain sight.
