Carbon Form and Content

On Wednesday evening, visitors crowded into Cooper Union’s notoriously unventilated Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery for the opening of Confronting Carbon Form. On one side of the hallway that led to the gallery was painted a sprawling timeline indicating the energetic history of the world; the entirety of the Detrital Fossil Carbon era was crammed into about two inches. The rest of the show—curated by Elisa Iturbe, Stanley Cho, and Alican Taylan—was concerned both with the longue durée and those two inches. Curatorial formats were plentiful. There were physical models, such as those of modernist urban plans (Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse) and their antecedents (Barcelona’s Eixample). There were miniature scenes of the home, whose implements (a washing machine, furniture that someone said was procured from an actual dollhouse) are potent, if unassuming, emblems of carbon form. The juxtaposition was meant to be instructive, said Iturbe. “There is an intention on our part to resituate how we think about some of the climate discourse, or at least carve a new space for it.”