Artist Installs ‘Psycho’ House Replica at The Met
New York City cinephiles will have a new place to congregate this summer, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art is opening a new installation sure to strike fear in the hearts of showering Manhattanites.
Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), a commission from British artist Cornelia Parker, is a replica of the Bates family home as seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 film Psycho and is the newest draw to the Met museum’s Roof Garden. The Bates home has become somewhat iconic in decades since the film’s release, being featured in several sequels, a remake, and numerous iterations of Universal Studios theme parks.
The “house” installation is actually a propped up wooden facade. Parker and her team built the structure from the remnants of an abandoned dairy barn.
Parker, whose been sculpting pieces that celebrate unstable architecture and material transformations since the early 1990’s, had this to say to Vogue about the installation:
“What I most wanted to do was to add something to the New York City skyline—something quite incongruous and that felt like a boiled-down essence, combining the romanticism of the red barn with its opposite.”
She later elaborated that the house was “a curious hybrid, that exists in a kind of limbo” between materiality and fiction.
The structure sits on top of the Met’s rooftop garden, and features views of the New York City skyline and Central Park. When speaking of the location, Parker joked about the model’s real estate potential saying “Well, we could list it on Airbnb. It looks very substantial and convincing, as you enter the roof. But the illusion is shattered pretty quickly.”
Transitional Object: PsychoBarn will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop until October 31.
