Over the years, the Met's rooftop installations have been hit-and-miss and have included Jeff Koons doing his shiny thing there in 2008 and Dan Graham building one of his typical translucent pavilions there in 2014. The high point was easily Mike and Doug Starn's incredible Big Bambu (2010), a huge hand-cobbled-together bamboo castle-tower that viewers moved through like some fantasy termite mound. Tie for the low points go to Tomás Saraceno's 2012 metallic jungle gym last year and Pierre Huyghe's overintellectualized yawn featuring removed paving stones and an aquarium. The rule of thumb for a successful rooftop piece seems to be a combination of actively engaging viewers, not just doing something arty that only the art crowd gets (Graham), and looking like you really tried. The Starns' worked because the material, scale, look, and feel of the overall structure was so imaginative; Saraceno flopped because it was just a slick silly playground device for adults.
This time, I left the Met roof with my typical Parker middling admiring reaction — a shrug, but not an annoyed one. Then I decided to circumnavigate the Met and watch Transitional Object in transition. I started on Fifth Avenue, where I couldn’t see anything. So I got a hot dog and went into the park looking; I kept walking and looking but didn’t see anything until I got to an old favorite spot, Cleopatra’s Needle, where I sat and had my hot dog. Maybe it was the Sabrett and the squawking crows. I looked up, and there it was — super-strange, incongruous, stranded in spatial purgatory, seemingly afloat on the Met’s roof, phantasmagoric, and scary. Psycho in the city! This uncanny, Oedipal mansion of crazed obsession became part of the skyline, making the Met below seem like a modern ossuary of bodies and bones.
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