Time happens to be Otero-Pailos’ subject. Back in 2010, Artangel, the London-based arts nonprofit, commissioned Otero-Pailos, the Spanish-born architect, artist and Columbia University professor of historic preservation, to collect dust from Westminster Hall, the oldest building at Britain’s Parliament.
A storied space with immense stone walls and a hammer-beam roof commissioned by Richard II, Westminster Hall is where the English established a court system, held Anne Boleyn’s coronation banquet and tried Charles I for treason.
Otero-Pailos’ medium is natural liquid latex, a conservator’s tool. At Westminster, he applied it to the hall’s east wall, the latex acting like a sponge, absorbing dirt and other particles. Reinforced with fabric and peeled off in long sheets, it skinned, or cleaned, the wall, returning the stone to its original color.
But the sticky latex also collected residue — smoke, tobacco, sweat, dirt — left over centuries. Cast, the latex created a kind of ghostly double of the wall — a skin, made via a skinning process, which collected, among other things, particles of real skin.
The project preoccupied Otero-Pailos for several years. When he finished, he hung the casts from the hall’s ceiling like two enormous tapestries — honey-colored and translucent, glowing like amber in the light coming through Westminster’s tall, arched windows.
That exhibition, presented by Artangel, opened in 2016, just after Britain voted to leave the European Union, and not surprisingly it provoked some Britons to interpret the latex tapestries, with their odor and hints of flaying, as a metaphor for national martyrdom and decay.
Over the years, various artists like Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread have traversed similar terrain using latex casts. For Otero-Pailos, the goal is to capture architecture’s “intangible heritage,” as he calls it. His works save not a building’s walls, floors, windows or doors but remains of architectural habitation: whisperingly faint but still visceral remnants of actual bodies that occupied real space.
Westminster belonged to a series of projects Otero-Pailos has undertaken called “The Ethics of Dust,” a phrase borrowed from 19th-century critic John Ruskin. To Ruskin, great historical buildings spoke volumes. Restoration desecrated architecture by removing traces of the past. But properly conserved, a building retains evidence of the passage of time, layered like sediments of the earth.
“Répétiteur,” at City Center, in effect does for Merce Cunningham and dance what “The Ethics of Dust” aimed to do at Westminster. Cunningham rehearsed his dancers in a particular studio at City Center whenever the company performed there. During rehearsals, the troupe would lean against the walls to rest, leaving fingerprints and sweat in the stucco and plaster.
Not long ago, City Center decided to refurbish the room, whitewashing it and refinishing the old wainscoting, so beforehand Otero-Pailos arranged to make latex casts of the woodwork, vents, electrical outlets and so on.
He produced six casts, currently displayed in 4-foot-square light boxes on shin-high platforms or podiums, placed around the studio, now renovated, according to the same grid system that Cunningham used to deploy his dancers, a system based on the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching.
What results is visually minimalist and low-key to a fault. But it’s also kind of haunting. Doubled in number by the mirror that fills one long wall of the room, the light boxes have an accompanying soundtrack: audio clips that Otero-Pailos took from videos of Cunningham preparing his troupe to perform three works — “Exchange” (which premiered at City Center in 1978), “Roaratorio” and “CRWDSPCR.”
And so, like “The Ethics of Dust,” “Répétiteur” involves an act of historical conservation, which in this case meditates on the specific relationship between architecture and dance. Each dance rehearsal or performance, after all, takes place in a particular architectural space from which the dance is as inseparable as it is from its own choreography or dancers. Or as Otero-Pailos has put it, a film of a dance is no more an adequate record of the dance than a photograph of a demolished building can substitute for the actual building.
In essence, “Répétiteur” restores what’s missing from such a film — conjuring up not just the architecture of the practice studio at City Center but also what you might call the architecture of time, study, repetition and pain that went into the making of Cunningham’s art.
We talk about preserving prized buildings and places. But architecture is more than bricks and mortar. It is the spaces we devise in which to live our lives, dream dreams, struggle and invent things. This is the larger point of Otero-Pailos’ work, too, capturing vestiges of steps taken, leaps made.
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‘Répétiteur’
Through Sunday at New York City Center, Harkness Studio, 130 W. 56th St., Manhattan, nycitycenter.org. It is free and open to the public.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.