Scaled Down

For his recent HBO series, The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder, the comedian who adopts the persona of an absurdist life and business coach, constructed a life-sized model of the Williamsburg dive bar The Alligator Lounge in a local warehouse. Fielder’s Alligator Lounge, reproduced meticulously with torn vinyl seats and identical drinking glasses, was a stage set for Fielder’s counselee, a trivia-buff named Kor, to rehearse a difficult conversation that he planned to have at the real Alligator Lounge. Rationalizing his time-consuming and costly commitment to replicating the bar, Fielder explained, “Any aspect of this space could radically transform his big moment … and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”

I was thinking of Fielder’s theory of architecture as I walked through Model Behavior, a disarmingly ambitious exhibition curated by the Anyone Corporation. Model Behavior, as the title suggests, is as much about behavior as it is about models. And like Fielder,…