i usually try to be generous and to look at things with an empathetic eye. but i've seen this installation twice now and was no more impressed the second time than the first. very few visitors, until told, will recognize that the ACT/grid is not part of the hadid's center itself and they'll miss the wonderful lobby space in its unspoiled state.
the exhibit consists of a dropped ceiling set at a steep angle across the lobby. from below you see a stealth bomber in silhouette (made up of black tile). from above you see all the glory of an above-ceiling ACT installation. there is a constant barrage of noise: piped in radio emission from some cockpit recording.
hadid apparently said that the exhibit was ok/interesting, but i hope she was being polite. what i got from the exhibit was this: generic/dumb everyday material with something exotic/radical/outside-most-people's-experience layered onto it. ta-da! kind of like your coral reef photo on your secretary's pc desktop.
across the street the same artists have done another installation. a bunch of odd rooms made up of 2x framing and board. horrible offgassing from the materials and, every so often a loud noise, but, other than that, couldn't figure out what that one was about at all.
i really don't think these simparch guys are all that.
Yep, I'll have to mostly agree with Steven, having seen the installations (with him) two times also. Personally I have a problem enjoying sound installations of any kind in museums - the noisy chandeliers we saw at 21C a few days later were the same problem for me - the problem being that the sound is annoying, and disrupts other experienes of the space, and usually with very little reward.
I couldn't find a strong enough connection between bomber and ACT for the representation of the plane in a "plane" of ACT to have any resonance for me. The very nice images on the posters of the installation, on the other hand, show a cloudy/blue sky and are much more evocative of disruption of peacefulness for me. The installation in the CAC doesn't look like an intentional disruption, it looks unfinished. I don't know if it's possible to use ACT in a way that overcomes its cheapness, for this architect ACT is a material of compromise, always. The feeling I had here was that it was easier to use ACT than to build it out of some other material, and the resulting view of the "guts" of the installation from above then became content that never quite rang true (for me).
The plywood "house" across the street I found much more interesting from a construction standpoint. I appreciated the "rawness" of the installation as a contrast to the existing environment (a typical office building(?) lobby-ish space). And the construction offers some nice "design" moments in the use of plywood cabinetry with no pulls, just cutouts: I actually photographed those beause they were true to the material selected and were fun, quirky, non-serious details. But the off-gassing and noise didn't make me want to hang around long enough to decipher what the sniper images were about. I liked it on the surface but wasn't intrigued enough to look much deeper.
From a brief browsing of the SIMPARCH website after the frist time I saw the installations - so that would be in mid-May or so? - I recall liking a lot of their ideas, but honestly I would have preferred to have seen the CAC lobby unadorned. I am glad SIMPARCH is a serious collaborative that is taking on interesting issues and getting the installations built is no small feat (I'm married to an artist, I know how much unrewarded work it can be), but as an art consumer I had a only mild reaction to them.
Aug 28, 06 5:15 pm ·
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i usually try to be generous and to look at things with an empathetic eye. but i've seen this installation twice now and was no more impressed the second time than the first. very few visitors, until told, will recognize that the ACT/grid is not part of the hadid's center itself and they'll miss the wonderful lobby space in its unspoiled state.
the exhibit consists of a dropped ceiling set at a steep angle across the lobby. from below you see a stealth bomber in silhouette (made up of black tile). from above you see all the glory of an above-ceiling ACT installation. there is a constant barrage of noise: piped in radio emission from some cockpit recording.
hadid apparently said that the exhibit was ok/interesting, but i hope she was being polite. what i got from the exhibit was this: generic/dumb everyday material with something exotic/radical/outside-most-people's-experience layered onto it. ta-da! kind of like your coral reef photo on your secretary's pc desktop.
across the street the same artists have done another installation. a bunch of odd rooms made up of 2x framing and board. horrible offgassing from the materials and, every so often a loud noise, but, other than that, couldn't figure out what that one was about at all.
i really don't think these simparch guys are all that.
Yep, I'll have to mostly agree with Steven, having seen the installations (with him) two times also. Personally I have a problem enjoying sound installations of any kind in museums - the noisy chandeliers we saw at 21C a few days later were the same problem for me - the problem being that the sound is annoying, and disrupts other experienes of the space, and usually with very little reward.
I couldn't find a strong enough connection between bomber and ACT for the representation of the plane in a "plane" of ACT to have any resonance for me. The very nice images on the posters of the installation, on the other hand, show a cloudy/blue sky and are much more evocative of disruption of peacefulness for me. The installation in the CAC doesn't look like an intentional disruption, it looks unfinished. I don't know if it's possible to use ACT in a way that overcomes its cheapness, for this architect ACT is a material of compromise, always. The feeling I had here was that it was easier to use ACT than to build it out of some other material, and the resulting view of the "guts" of the installation from above then became content that never quite rang true (for me).
The plywood "house" across the street I found much more interesting from a construction standpoint. I appreciated the "rawness" of the installation as a contrast to the existing environment (a typical office building(?) lobby-ish space). And the construction offers some nice "design" moments in the use of plywood cabinetry with no pulls, just cutouts: I actually photographed those beause they were true to the material selected and were fun, quirky, non-serious details. But the off-gassing and noise didn't make me want to hang around long enough to decipher what the sniper images were about. I liked it on the surface but wasn't intrigued enough to look much deeper.
From a brief browsing of the SIMPARCH website after the frist time I saw the installations - so that would be in mid-May or so? - I recall liking a lot of their ideas, but honestly I would have preferred to have seen the CAC lobby unadorned. I am glad SIMPARCH is a serious collaborative that is taking on interesting issues and getting the installations built is no small feat (I'm married to an artist, I know how much unrewarded work it can be), but as an art consumer I had a only mild reaction to them.
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