One balmy Los Angeles night last spring, throngs of architecture aficionados descended on a dingbat motel in the MacArthur Park area for what was billed, alongside amatory promotional material, as a "One-Night Stand for Art and Architecture." For a single evening, the trysting place was transformed into a series of distinct, room-size installations rendered with 3D-mapped projections, robotics, or simple 2x4’s. On May 14 of this year, the project will be reprised in the same location but with different curators and a new roster of participants. I chatted with the organizers to get the low down on what to expect from One-Night Stand LA: the Rendezvous.
Architects William Hu, Ryan Tyler Martinez and Anthony Morey organized and curated last year’s event. For the new iteration, they felt it important to switch curators, and passed the baton along to architectural designer Duygun Inal (who participated last year with Ben Warwas on my favorite of the installations, a heady meditation on gender and identity) as well as architectural designers Debbie Garcia and Jonathan Crisman.
“Duygun, Debbie and Jonathan really have pulled all the weight for this year's show. We've kind of had benchmarkers where we would see what was happening, but we wanted different voices in order to have a different approach for this year's event,” Martinez tells me. “And they've really done all the frontwork in terms of figuring out participants, logistics of things with sites and the work itself.”
“I think we were more of a precedent for them to know how to do things better than what we did last year,” Morey chimes in.Every 'One-Night Stand' is something new, something happening, something different
“[We realized that] if we were going to keep the theme of a one-night stand an active theme then we didn't want to have any participants from last year participate in this year,” Martinez continues. “And so hopefully, next year, we'll have a new group of people. The continuation of something new – every 'One-Night Stand' is something new, something happening, something different.”
While the roster of participants has changed, the organizing structure will largely mirror its precedent. Rendezvous is a one night event and participants have 24 hours to install and remove their projects. “When you leave the motel room it has to be the same as when you got there,” Martinez explains.
The curators, while reticent to preemptively make comparisons before the event occurs, remarked that many of the qualities they prized most about last year’s iteration were, in fact, accidental.
“The amount of people that showed up to the view the work, the energy of the night, the kind of sense that this event had an impact within the architecture and art community – a lot of that, I think, arose out of the night,” Garcia states. “So to recreate that is a challenge in its own right.”
'Rendezvous,' for us, encompassed a lot of those feelings of coming with an expectation but being open to anything that may or may not happenStill, lessons were certainly learned. “Last year, we felt like it was a lot of people who were in the same circles, so this year we tried to get a bunch of people from SCI-Arc's teaching faculty, from UCLA, and from various other locations to make sure we covered a large area,” says Inal.
“Specifically, there are people that are driven by theory, other people more driven by formal aesthetics, so it will be a varied combination of parts exhibited in the same night.”
Rendezvous, the curatorial “theme” for this year, is intended more as an “provocation” than a unifying conceptual apparatus. “'Rendezvous,' for us, encompassed a lot of those feelings of coming with an expectation but being open to anything that may or may not happen,” explains Garcia.
Inal elaborates: “We looked at different motels and we were inclined to change the venue, but then we [ended up renting] the same venue but with a different team, so that's why it's like a rendezvous, like you're meeting up again. And the location, the physical space, is the same but the motel has undergone a renovation so there are certain unexpected moments.”
In part, the ephemeral structure of the project is borne from a reading of typical art or architecture exhibitions. With most exhibits, Inal explains, the opening night is the only time that people actually come. So rather than cater to the trickle of attendants that might follow, they center the singular event and its potential to generate unexpected outcomes.
This was honestly meant to be 'you have an idea, you need a place, you're not sure if it's ready for the world but you're pretty sure it's ready for you to see it'And, unlike most of the many biennials, exhibitions, surveys and showcases that dot each calendar year, One-Night Stand LA isn’t really trying to express a rhetorical point. Its organizers view it as an informal opportunity for young artists and architects to experiment with ideas that may still be unformed. Conversation – rather than, say, cultural capital – motivates the organizers, they contend.
“This was honestly meant to be 'you have an idea, you need a place, you're not sure if it's ready for the world but you're pretty sure it's ready for you to see it,'” states Morey. “And instead of having to have that happen within a private space, you're allowed to put it out there in a way that has very little repercussions, ones that don't come directly entwined with the forms of a gallery or what that connotation means.”
If anything, the project attempts to activate and situate itself within the ever-narrowing divide between architecture and art. “From my experience, personally, I would argue there is something happening between the art and architecture worlds,” says Martinez, echoing the views of Mike Nesbit, a participant in last year’s One-Night Stand. “I think there is this sort of 'thing' happening in Los Angeles, and this event was really a moment for us to reflect the work that's being produced within this moment.”
I think there is this sort of 'thing' happening in Los Angeles, and this event was really a moment for us to reflect the work that's being produced within this momentWith Rendezvous, Inal, Garcia and Crisman are also hoping to pick up where Morey, Hu and Martinez fell short last year. In particular, they’ve managed to produce short teaser films in advance of the event, and are coordinating a symposium described by Inal as “a casual setting of the event night in a kind of verbal description.”
They’ve also managed to get a publication together, which is Crisman’s primary involvement in the project. Eschewing a traditional model, the journals will be printed on site but remain unbound. Visitors will be able to choose the pages they find interesting from each room and collect them into bespoke publications. The material will include individual interviews with each participant as well as a slew of other contributions, some of which were received from an open call.
“A big subject or something that One-Night Stand approaches is this idea of 'What is appropriate?' or the decorum of, let's say, a gallery show or an event or a publication,” states Garcia.
“Our approach to specify the way we want to remember this night – because a publication is pretty much going to be a documentation of what has happened – to document and showcase what may have happened, and what may not happen at all. So that begins to expand the publication to something that will not only include statements and written work from the participants but also narratives, fictions, things that we feel might be encompassed within the kind of larger ideas that One-Night Stand starts to trigger.”A big subject or something that One-Night Stand approaches is this idea of 'What is appropriate?'
United primarily by a desire to shake things up and instigate dialogue, the organizers are unperturbed by the evening’s largely-uncontrollable fate – from how the projects will be realized to who will attend. That being said, Martinez did note that last year they woke up the following day to find people eager to see the projects.
“We had to explain to them that it was really just a one night thing,” he says with a laugh, before transforming his anecdote into a gentle reminder. “Hopefully if people want to come to the event, they'll actually come, because it's just for one night and then it's over.”
That is, until next year.
Video credit: Danny Arrondo
Participants in One-Night Stand LA: the Rendezvous include:
One-Night Stand LA will take place on May 14, 2016 at the Holiday Lodge Motel located at 1631 W 3rd St, Los Angeles, CA 90017. For more information, visit their website.
Interested in other salacious encounters with architecture? Check out more features from Archinect's special April 2016 theme, Sex.
Writer and fake architect, among other feints. Principal at Adjustments Agency. Co-founder of Encyclopedia Inc. Get in touch: nicholas@archinect.com
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