Imaginary architecture has a sturdy foundation of tradition that goes back over two hundred years. Students of architecture might immediately think of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s 18^th-century planned Tomb for Isaac Newton that was so monumental as to be impractical to build. Today, the tradition of fantasy architecture continues in the work of several contemporary artists, but they are more likely indebted to the serious prankster artist Marcel Duchamp and a suitcase he made full of his remanufactured ready-mades or to the fantastic imagination of the surrealists. Such is the hypothesis of Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s curator Robin Clark, who organized the new exhibition Automatic Cities: the Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art now on view at the museum’s La Jolla venue.

Several major league and emerging artists from America and abroad as well as an artist collective from Cuba are presented together in this exhibit focusing on architecture as inspiration and subject for art. Following the museum’s summer exhibition of local San Diego architects, this new exhibition is an academically meatier concept, but one may still leave wanting after consuming it.

Rachel Whiteread, renowned for her design of the stark and weighty Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, here is represented by two smaller-scale sculptures and some works on paper that have the appearance of studies for more monumental projects. Her sculpture “Untitled (Hive) I” (2007–2008) is a thigh-high, amber colored resin sculpture depicting stacked building shapes. This work alludes to the artist’s vocabulary of using large full-scale building projects in sprayed cement, but the artwork here is more a ghost of a work without real presence making one crave Whiteread’s more significant architectural work. Her other sculpture, “Modern Chess Set” (2005), has a playing board made of carpet and linoleum squares with rooks, pawns, and royal court, all played by furnishings appropriated from doll houses.

_{Matthew Ritchie,The Holstein Manifesto (detail),}

2008. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen

Gallery, New York. _{Photo by Pablo Mason.}

Another included artist in the exhibition who has an international reputation is Matthew Ritchie whose installation “The Holstein Manifesto” (2008) depicts a fallen radio tower. Ritchie’s installation looks like a conical scribbled drawing of a fallen space rocket rendered in three-dimensional polished aluminum that has broken up into three large 10-meter pieces. Its shiny surface is pock-marked by shotgun blasts and stained with areas of tar. The structure rests on a ground littered with tarot cards. A painting on canvas and an area of large black looping lines painted directly on the wall completes the environment. The work is situated in a hallway and gallery with windows overlooking the coastline. Being placed in a confined space, the jagged metal of the structure is difficult to navigate, so that a viewer is only able to observe the installation close-up. This lends a certain threatening claustrophobic air; but as there is no grand vista from which to view the work, one is unable to gage if the installation has the dramatic grandeur that the artist is known for.

Subtly rich surfaces can be found in the acrylic and ink images by Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu, who also enjoys an international reputation. Her large scale canvases meld dense overlapping ink lines drawn onto smooth backgrounds impregnated with tone-on-tone abstract shapes in off-white colors. Mehretu’s painting entitled “Projects” (2008) is a dense, drawn overlay of lines describing transparent urban buildings: one in front of another, from condo to townhouse in front of a skyscraper in front of another and another. The multitudinous crisscrossing lines depicting the densely packed city evoke a lush tapestry. Another enjoyable work by Mehretu is “Immanence” (2004). Its swirling vortices of architectural lines cavort around landscape elements spiced with small circles of orange, red, and blue.

_{Sarah Oppenheimer}

_{P-41, 2009.}

_{Courtesy of Duve Berlin and PPOW Gallery,}

New York.

_{Photo by Pablo Mason.}

A scene-stealer is Sarah Oppenheimer’s “P-41” (2009). Using the existing architecture, set one atop another and cut directly into a white gallery wall are two wide openings that open onto an adjoining gallery. When peering through the lower wall opening, one views the lower half of the adjoining gallery and the lower legs and feet of any gallery visitor that may be present there. Through the upper wall opening, one magically views the same exact scene due to a series of mirrors. Peripherally, intricate wood parquetry surrounds the interior of the openings and the mirrors to create a wonderful kaleidoscopic effect. The visual displacement creates an amusing experience that the exhibition’s curator equates with cinema.

Another riveting work is a two-channel video installation by Ann Lislegaard from Norway. The black-and-white animated video was inspired by a James Graham Ballard novel. Lislegaard’s “Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)” depicts a glass house in the Brazilian jungle. The video, made this year, pans through an animated house’s interior with sun streaming through angular paned windows to create perpetually moving high-contrast crystalline patterns. Soon the jungle outside blends with the visual chaos of tipped over furnishings of the building’s interior. Suddenly, the ceiling transforms into a fluid river, and then the walls transform also. The visual narrative of the house akin to the Amazon jungle is rich with poetic allusions and textural juxtapositions.

^{Ann Lislegaard}

^{Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard), 2009.}

Two-channel 3D animation. Courtesy of the

artist and Murray Guy, New York.

Droll videos by Hiraki Sawa are also included in the exhibition. One entitled “Migration” (2003) features the stop-action figures that were originally photographed by Eadweard Muybridge that have been reanimated as tiny characters traveling around someone’s small apartment. A longhorn bull, a camel, and an elephant, along with nude men and women, walk and trot across the kitchen counter, along window mullions, and over the kitchen floor like trails of ants.

Other artists included in the exhibition are Michaël Borremans, Matthew Buckingham, Catharina van Eetvelde, Jakob Kolding, Paul Noble, Katrin Sigurdardóttir, and Saskia Olde Wolbers, along with the artist collective Los Carpinteros.

As proposed by the exhibition curator, a touchstone inspiration for the artist’s in Automatic Cities is Marcel Duchamp’s famous mini-museum in a suitcase entitled “Boîte-en-valise,” and it is on also on display in an accompanying exhibition Museums in Miniature: Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. Duchamp’s suitcase contains sixty-eight miniature reproductions of the artist’s most famous works including “Nude Descending a Staircase” and “Fountain.” Also included in the boutique exhibit are five unique artworks by Joseph Cornell, most notable being his “Pink Chateau”(1944). The opportunity to view these works by Cornell and Duchamp is worth the price of admission in itself.

Unfortunately, immediately placing the group of contemporary artists next to Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, who both hold such esteemed places in history, creates an awkward expectation about the quality of the contemporary artworks in Automatic Cities. The direct comparison exaggerates how one perceives the quality of the more contemporary works. Automatic Cities has an impressive roster of international artists and is worth seeing, but the majority of the work included makes a simple impression of being capable but not overly terrific.