Installation Views
More of us ride the art-architecture axis each year. The academic-designer-theorist-installation-artist (even guerrilla publishing house) model is less the exception, than it is the rule among junior architecture faculty. Twenty years ago, architectural design exhibitions were seen as a purgatory for would-be built work or conceptual side projects in between (or in lieu of) “real” commissions. In this earlier era, two classes of work - the representational model and the full scale pavilion - dominated exhibition strategies; a binary pushed to the point of hyperbole in MOCA’s A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California (2013). Today, galleries (Storefront, NYC), museums (A+D, LA) and other alternative spaces (Materials & Applications’ empty lot in Silverlake) play host to serious architectural wagers that operate representationally (scalar, fragmentary, pictorial), but also engage the corporeal, phenomenologically-charged space of the viewer.
The latter model of engagement has historically been the privileged territory of spatial art theorized alternately by Minimal, Post-Minimal, Conceptual, and Relational Artists or - on the other side of the disciplinary divide - the debased, commercially digestible architecture-pavilion. New categories of work are beginning to emerge at this liminal scale between model/drawing and complex/pavilion that are neither ontological logic problems of virtual vs. real (Dan Graham, Michael Asher, Robert Morris), nor garish celebrations of fabrication, technique, and capital-as-geometry-in-the-city (the Ferrari-showroom-like quality of UN Studio and Zaha Hadid Architects’ Burnham installations in Chicago (2009)).
While Sylvia Lavin’s diagnosis of the pavilion’s fall from “project to party decor” is a sobering portrait of the way architectural discourse is commodified through the installation-format, it’s time something was said about the agency of young artists and designers engaging with the discipline as “alternative practices” exhibiting proto-architectural work through mock-ups, stage sets, ad hoc monuments, and interiors in the last five years.[1]
In art practice, contemporary figures like Alex Da Corte, Hito Steyerl, and Antoine Catala are filling gallery interiors with furniture, neon lighting, wallpaper, screens, inkjet-veneers, projections, and mute-surfaced, digitally-fabricated objects. In these weird junk-piles of digital images and architecturally-scaled props, no claims are made for material authenticity and politically-sanctioned subject-object relations. Instead, these artists reanimate conversations around simulation, virtual reality, ideal geometries, and bourgeois space (DIS’ The Island (KEN)) that began with older generations coming of age in the 1980s (the Neo Geo art of Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, and Haim Steinbach). On the architecture side of the (increasingly blurry) disciplinary divide, similar exercises are playing-out on lawns, in lofts, window displays and athletic fields. In installations like T+E+A+M’s Ragdale Ring, LADG’s Kid Gets out of the Picture (with First Office, Laurel Broughton/Andrew Kovacs, and Jason Payne), and the candy-coated, paired interventions designed by Ania Jaworska and MG. for the Chicago biennial, virtual objects conceived in digital space are realized in cheap materials, faux finishes, wallpapers, LED-lined vitrines, printed films, scrims and screens (Atelier Manferdini’s Inverted Landscapes (2015)). The interstitial space of the alley, the room, the occupiable architectural fragment, the theatrical backdrop, the storefront and the display case flirt with exhibition conventions, but happily dodge the idealized space of the model/drawing and the aggressively-projective architectural futurism of conventional pavilions through their ironic celebration of entertainment venues, cheap construction, image and consumer culture. We’ll take the temporary galleries, fashion week installations, welcome desks and furniture showrooms over white cubes and plazas - ours is a participatory practice, and readymade objects, fast fabrication, pop imagery, and surface finishes constitute our palette.
[1] Lavin, S. (2012, 10). Vanishing point. Artforum International., 51, 212-219. Retrieved from http://proxy.lib.umich.edu/log...
1 Comment
I also think it's time something was said about these alternative practices. But I'm weary of claims that pit DIY alley installations and pop-ups against "white cubes and plazas." Though the art-architecture relationship has always been a difficult one to reconcile, we should probably admit that there are some key distinctions between the two that give each their own agency, but also their own relevance.
I'm thinking here for example of the economic substrate of the work. In MFA and BFA programs, students are required by curricula to learn grant-writing, gallery operations, and curatorial approaches: the economics of the white box. Whereas architects are taught professional architectural practice and the economics of building. This puts us (architects) in a rather peculiar position where we regard the "white box" or the "alley" as something proto-architectural, a place to practice practice. This is particularly why architectural installations are (sometimes) seen as the beginning of something, and art installations are (sometimes) seen as the culmination of something. The way each discipline considers their "project" is usually quite different.
While our use of media is constantly converging (see the iconic Rosalind Krauss diagram), and disciplinary boundaries are increasingly non-existent, I think it's nevertheless important to take stock of the underlying mechanisms of the work itself (Sylvia Lavin's recent lectures point to this mode of thinking, deeply scrutinizing micro-histories of particular artists). Without this, it's hard to tell immediately whether some work is intentionally "commercially digestible" or why exactly someone chose to make it out of "cheap materials." If I'm not mistaken, in a lot of these cases, designers are working on shoestring budgets, and going for the street cred (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that).
In other words, simply because two objects/artworks/installations appear similar or even tagged under the same hashtag, it doesn't mean that they are necessarily related. In fact, I think it's quite interesting when they aren't.
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