Sick Building, Healthy Room: Michael Rakowitz’s Climate Control

Michael Rakowitz’s contribution to P.S.1’s Special Projects series, an installation titled Climate Control (2000), constitutes a subtle piece of mechanical and museum magic. Apart from the room housing Rakowitz’s piece, P.S.1’s primitive system of winter climate control consists of simply cranking up available radiators to compensate for unheated spaces. Within the room, a hulking complex of ducts and fans maintains the temperature and relative humidity at levels within the narrow range accepted for museum environments. To maintain this range, overheated air from the room’s radiator is conducted outside by carefully proportioned ducts, letting the winter air cool it before bringing it back inside, along with cold outside air; a small humidifier near the door provides moisture. The duct materials are raw and unfinished; in several places, "Mike" is scrawled in magic marker on the ductwork, amusingly indicating technicians setting aside materials for his order. One’s first impressions on entering the room are of a big, clumsy, shiny metal beast; of the fans’ hum, which becomes rather soothing after a while; and of trying to sense in the environment the difference one knows is there.

While climate control systems, when they work well, are often easily taken for granted, it’s strangely impressive that notwithstanding the uncontrolled factors of human traffic, an open door to the hallway, and varying outdoor temperatures, Rakowitz’s simple system works quite well. Similarly, compare the seeming magic of a record player—in which the needle comes in contact with a slab of black vinyl, thereby somehow producing music—with a CD player; lasers’ reading digital signals seems totally natural, at least to a generation raised with computers. But when such mechanisms are simple and visible, they seem all the more wondrous.

Climate controls are, of course, the systems within architecture that create habitable spaces for people, and, in museums, for the valuable objects they are charged with preserving. Designing and maintaining museum environments is therefore an elaborate science in itself. Like many chronically underfunded not-for-profit arts spaces, however, P.S.1 is notably without any centralized climate control system, which in the sprawling building at P.S.1 would require a massive investment. In Rakowitz’s Special Projects gallery alone, other problems with the building are evident: the ducts run past an unsightly hole in the sagging ceiling; and when looking out the window at the pipes running outside, one notices, below, the telltale scaffolding that surrounds P.S.1 and so many crumbling public schools citywide.

In this context, the piece raises questions about the customary give and take between museums and contemporary artists. Most simply, museums provide public spaces in which artists’ works are preserved, exhibited, and studied. More importantly, perhaps, they have traditionally granted artists respectability through their institutional imprimatur, and artists sometimes complain bitterly when their work or that of their colleagues, is not recogized or supported with inclusion in museum collections.

Perhaps less often considered is the other side of what curator Kynaston McShine calls a "peculiar relationship of mutual interdependence." Most obviously, artists provide the objects that give art museums their raison d’être; Rakowitz’s work goes further to address a basic need at P.S.1 that is common to many museums—improvements to their physical plant—and even provides for it in a symbolic way. It’s an act of generosity that the museum might find humbling, as it reverses the customary power relationship between museum and artist by putting the artist in the position of benefactor.

In that way, Climate Control also refers interestingly to a long tradition of artists inspired by museums, which was the subject of McShine’s 1999 exhibition "The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect." To cite only a few examples of works in this tradition: Hubert Robert’s imaginative 1796 painting The Grand Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins foretold future artists’ ambivalence toward the brand-new institution, the public museum; Christo, in 1968, proposed wrapping the Museum of Modern Art, perhaps as a way to neutralize that institution’s power; and in 1986, Chris Burden excavated the foundations of Los Angeles’s Temporary Contemporary, a multivalent gesture of exposure.