Lines and Angles on the Meltdown of a System

VENICE -- Every day this week, The Post will look at some of the most notable art at the Venice Biennale.

With communism dead in almost all of Eastern Europe, one of its most visible, perplexing legacies is the grand modern architecture the system built. It was supposed to express communism's success and permanence, and now stands for its failure and continual dismantling. It has also, as it happens, turned out to be the inspiration for some powerful art, including several pieces and pavilions at this year's Venice Biennale.

It was the starting point for the work of Monika Sosnowska, who got to fill the Polish Pavilion. Her project, titled "1:1" (as in a scale of one-to-one, as used by architects to indicate a model the same size as life), may not be the most subtle treatment of the subject, but it is certainly one of the most instantly impressive and compelling.

Sosnowska imagined the simplest modernist structure -- not much more than four walls, a porch and some stairs -- then built a skeleton structure for it in black-painted steel. The crucial catch: She deliberately designed her structure to be just too big to fit into the giant empty space of Poland's pavilion in Venice, so that the whole thing had to be slightly scrunched to get inside. The result is very, very strange.

A structure that ought to be about clean lines and geometric form becomes a jagged muddle. It evokes a building halfway on its way to demolition -- as so many classic modern structures are in Eastern Europe and elsewhere -- but without any of the telltale mess of a true ruin. Sosnowska's steel is absolutely clean, but crumpled. It's a kind of line drawing of decay or disaster, rather than the real thing.

In fact, her project reads more as drawing than as sculpture or architecture, which helps make it so strange. You know you're looking at something that has mass and volume, but because it's been reduced to some black lines on a white ground (the pavilion's walls look newly patched and painted), you could swear that it's a purely graphic work. Something that is very real looks almost virtual, even as you climb around in its reality.

The piece most powerfully evokes what, in computer-aided design, is called a "wire-frame drawing" -- a digital rendering that reduces the smooth, complex, continuous surfaces of a car or building to a simpler grid of lines that stands for its edges, corners and crucial, defining vectors. When car ads want to go high-tech, they often cut to a wire-frame image of the vehicle they're selling. Except when is computer-aided design ever used to build, let alone sell, something as pointless and confused as a crumpled wad of girders?

Of course, the kind of building Sosnowska's project echoes would have been built decades before computer design came along. She's recalling the era when communist governments like Poland's were doing everything to join the modern world, however much it hurt. Leaders legislated cookie-cutter modern buildings, mass-produced and pre-assembled in giant factories, and installed them right across the country, regardless of how well they fit a site or need. Sosnowska's work evokes such structures -- it was assembled on the grounds of such a factory, now lying idle in Poland -- even as it calls up the notion of their imperfect, oversize fit.

The piece works so well as art, however, because it isn't actually messy or oversize at all, neither ruined nor crushed. The whole thing has been carefully considered and constructed, bent with much precision, then disassembled in Poland and again reassembled, with great cost and labor, inside the space in Venice it was perfectly designed for. It's a picture of the strange fate of certain modern buildings, almost a metaphor for it. The piece is far from suffering that fate itself.