Theaster Gates’s Serpentine Pavilion: Black Chapel review – a bit too slick

The artist has built a space for quiet contemplation in homage to his roofer father, but the materials seem too clean-cut and corporate to fit the idea

A tolling church bell has joined the summer sounds of birdsong and tinkling fountains in Kensington Gardens, announcing the arrival of an unusual sacred space. Standing among the trees as a brooding black cylinder, this year’s Serpentine pavilion, titled Black Chapel, is one of the more sombre structures built for the annual commission so far, designed as a place for quiet contemplation, meditation and sacred music (and a bit of raucous dancing, too).

“I want it to be somewhere where people can be together in silence, be with their thoughts and rest,” said Theaster Gates, the Chicago-based artist behind this year’s pavilion. “But it can also be an amplifier and a resonator, a place where great music can happen, where we can sing together and dance.”

Part industrial, part spiritual, the pavilion feels like a funerary chapel built inside a converted gasometer. A narrow black boardwalk slices across the freshly-laid lawn outside the gallery, leading towards a tall thin doorway cut into the momentous timber drum, beckoning visitors within. Inside, a continuous bench runs around the edge of the vast cylindrical volume, while vertical wooden trusses support plywood panelled walls, rising to a shallow domed roof punctured by a single gaping oculus.

Every surface is drenched with inky black stain, creating an atmospheric backdrop for seven square panels that shimmer in the gloom, hanging on the wall like an enigmatic altarpiece. A late addition to the pavilion, these are some of Gates’s tar paintings, made from layers of blowtorched silvery bitumen roofing material (known as “torch down” in the US), prompted in part by the recent death of his father, who was a roofer by trade.

“The pavilion feels like a kind of memorial to his life, and to the transmission of this skill from him to me,” said Gates, who is the first artist to be solely awarded the Serpentine commission, which usually goes to an architect. “Maybe even when I didn’t want the skill, you know – I was just a kid growing up, having to work with my pops. But I now feel really fortunate, and I use his techniques a lot in my work. The whole pavilion is essentially one big roof.”

A roof with a three-metre hole punched through it, that is, which has already put the underfloor drainage system through its paces over the washout weekend. “I’ve been thinking more about the light than I have about the rain,” Gates admits; although being here in a downpour could be its own spectacular performance, akin to when it rains inside the Pantheon in Rome, with droplets reverberating inside the great drum. It will add another sonic dimension to the sound of the big bronze bell, mounted on the ground around the back of the pavilion, which was salvaged from a demolished church on Chicago’s South Side, and will be ceremonially rung throughout the summer’s packed programme of events – set to range from Gregorian chanting to jazz recitals, Japanese tea ceremonies and family clay workshops.

Serpentine Pavilion: Black Chapel is at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from 10 June to 16 October.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/VkKw5nM