Fake Estates, Superstudio, Cults of Transparency, The Rise of FA

 Cults of Transparency 

 

I find it interesting that in this grand and overbearing use of glass, architects, artists and city managers were all able to create a new way of thinking that is lasting. 

 Architecturally the use of glass in buildings as being a testament to accessibility and a salute to the transparency of business dealings. Creating invisible barries or non-barriers between the outside world and corporations clearly became a great way to gain trust and make them look approachable. It is fraud on a very deep level.  

“Emphasizing values of clarity and transparency, the glazed cupola is a new landmark for Berlin, and a symbol of the vigour of the German democratic process.” 

This architectural scam was helping officials make political statements and work agendas to gain trust.  

The shop window is another psychological trust fail. Another non-barrier creating the illusion of closeness, but this time with product. From the Casa del Fascio to the Apple Store, the use of glass to sway public reaction and interaction is still in use and successful today.  

 

Fake Estates  

The reckoning of one man’s; Gordon Matt-Clarks, vision. After purchasing fifteen irregular New York City lots, Matta-Clark hoped to revive the lots and make use of them with some sort of art. This idea not being fully realized by Matta-Clark before his death was reimagined by the Cabinet magazine who initially invited 3 artists to make proposals in 2003. What was shown were fifteen proposals coming from artists who spanned generations: one being Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Making use of space, commenting on world events, cultural norms and connection.  

Honestly a beautiful project. To find the use for that original idea by matta-Clarke and then bringing it to life. If the original idea for “Fake Estates” was to have these city lots redeemed by art from the existence and ownership of the State and into a realm of play and imagination, then I think they were successful.  

 

Superstudio 

This group of “architects” run into the dilemma where they find innovation begets inequality. They hold a stance against design because as design continues to stand today does not call to answer the basic needs of the many. They beg that if a system does not work for the good of the masses then we should reject it, yet they stayed active within the field without creating any buildings. They remained within the design world by making different sculptural objects, like their furniture designs. They critiqued the craft primarily with their collage work, reimagining cities with a Black Mirror style exaggeration 

The Rise of Forensic Architecture  

Forensic Architecture, a company founded by Eyal Weizman is a London based studio that specializes in reconstruction models. The article opens with Weizmann and a team of experts gathering to recreate an internet café where a murder and alleged terrorist attack occurred. They are reconstructing the sight, with an exact as possible layout, smell, and sound. The company's reconstructions have been used in court cases due to the accuracy of their work. Weizman’s goal with Forensic Architecture is justice and their team attempts to find the truth with their work. This is an amazing testament to the many uses of art and design throughout fields. 

Transparency/Forensic/Superstudio/Fake Estates Response - Chandler Damrill

Cult of Transparency

“It involves the encounter between consumers and objects, in which the former transpose aspects of selfhood and desire on the latter through the barrier between them that is both transparent and reflective.”

The shop window is the idea of vanity at its highest potential. In the first example this writer mentions, the apple store entrance of New York is that of a shop entrance that seems to lure people to its mysterious underneath. She relates this to the work of Josephine Meckseper and her piece Blow Up. The ways that Meckseper displays her work is by fetishizing of mannequin representations of the female body through a display window. The inorganic commodity of fetishism transforms women into objects. The combining of art and commerce brings forth a humanization of these transparent and reflective surfaces. When these store fronts are given these personas, the glass that emerges from the ground of the apple store becomes an ominous and perverted sight. Particularly in Mecksepers work, this writer explains that these pieces act as garbage cans for the past and present. This collective unconscious idea that is expressed relates to Timothy Morton’s idea of hyper space. This hyper space being a milky combination of the past, present and future manifesting into feelings. The use of an outdated idea like showcase windows allows the artist to use the past to bring up subconscious emotions within the viewer.        

Forensic Architecture

Weizmen takes forensic architecture and uses it as a perfect tool for activism. These models of explosions bring the viewer into a unique perspective. This is enacted in the same way with the three dimensional walkthrough of a controversial prison. These recreations of environments remind me of Thomas Demand’s work. These are sacred depictions that allow the average person to see the past. Weizmen also has started using his ambitious depictions to raise awareness about the environment. “There is the violence of architecture, planning that slowly encroaches, envelops, and suffocates the life out of an area.” These models are crucial to raising awareness of these issues. As the writer states, this work brings a new language to justice.  

Super-studio

“…by failing to meet humankind’s ‘primary needs’, architecture had become increasingly removed from the core concerns of humanity.”

Superstudio. A group of “architects” that resist design because of what society has caused it to become. This group believe that if architecture, design and city planning is not aimed at the peoples primary needs, then it must be rejected. This studio goes on to creating hypotheical models of what the future of design could be. Creating a work that has the potential of being for the people instead of being for mass culture. Their ideas morphed into an even further dissension from architecture by creating designs that were immaterial, infeasible and dysfunctional works. One idea that struck me was the never ending moment of glass and steel. A single massive high rise that stretched across the Earth. Thus declaring complete domination over the landscape. This unique parody of the modern movement takes the skill of architects and uses it to comment on social structures. The studio, using their knowledge of aqueducts, highways and infrastructural passageways that allows for a realistic decision of this monument. Superstudios idea of a grid encompassing the planet, where people are rendered as nomads that stop to plug into the grid is something I find very contemporary. The idea that because of this over arching web of technological connection, there would be no more alienation. Everyone would be connected. This reminds me of social media and the idea that everyone can be watched at all times creating the illusion of connection and relationship. Though a hollow screen looks back at the use, further pushing them into loneliness. 

Fake Estates

These artist banded together to create whimsical and unrealistic architectural advancements that both commented on the social climate of the time but also allowed for creativity to seep into the existing forces at play. “The city as a reaction to, rather than a containment of, the society that passes through it is a common insistence; yet experientially it often remains difficult to coalesce the cool façade of architecture with warmblooded psychogeography.” This writer describes the exhibition as portraying the dichotomy of urbanization. The multitude of ephemeral pieces allows for the viewers to experience a reclamation of perverse urbanism.

The Cult of Transparency, Super Studio, Fake Estate and Forensic Architecture

Cults of Transparency, Dan Graham, Josephine Meckseper

I find is very fascinating that the mirror has multiple roles in art in the context of art aesthetics. I see the mirror as Meckseper's work as a kind of protection for valuable objects and as also as a form of seduction by allowing the viewers see the objects within the transparent glass which holds the fetishized items. In the context of transparency, the mirror becomes a metaphor for the process of having access to other cultures. I think of that cultural consumerism in the museum context of art or even in global context of anthropological study. We are always feeling the necessity to embrace new and multiple cultures, as an integument of civilization. 

Josephine Meckseper Tout Va Bien, 2005 (Saatchi Gallery)

At the beginning of contemporary art, the term commodity had become an inspiring tool in the production of art. The decision for consumers and as spectators and the control of the market which tended to influence artist, began the change the meaning of art and value. Today, art in its aesthetics has inevitably become political. 

Sarah Lookofsky said, "The viewer is caught quite literally by the mirrored backing in Meckseper’s vitrines, which causes a disorienting doubling of the objects on display as well as viewers’ inclusion among them". Meckseper’s vitrines give a critical response to this issue. Dan Graham’s half square is fascinating in terms of how the architecture of the glass tends loose its protective ideology and yet functions in a different context as it makes viewers see themselves in the reflection. I see Dan's glass as a statement of that culture is accessible but it is also commodified. The reflection of the spectators contextualized as the way the people as a society could see themselves shaped by cultures. The author quoted Paul Scheerbart, "Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture".

Dan Graham, Half Square/Half Crazy 2004 (Source, Chaotic Entity)

Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta Clark's Fake Estate and Reinvesting in Fake Estate - White Columns New York (October 15) and Nancy Princenthal 

The article explores Matta Clark’s idea that he used to purchase a plot for projects that were never realized became embraced by a group of artists who decided to activate the space by producing work in the context of marginalized histories and the ambitions of Matta Clark. This reminds me of Robert Smithson’s idea of the Amarrilo Ramp project which he wasn’t able the realize before he died but was later completed by his wife Nancy Holt and artist Richard Serra. In this context, the authorship of a work becomes complex. The question is, does Robert Smithson still hold authorship to the work or Nancy Holt and Richard Serra? In the context of conceptual art, Robert Smithson is the author of the work because he designed the  project. 

A visitor to Amarillo Ramp approaches the earthwork’s highest point. Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni, © Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

The Cabinet editors Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najaii and Frances Richard and a contributing artist such Mark Dion took the project on the level as a source of inspiration from the urban design by Matta Clark to produce work which could be viewed as art responding to historical issues, ideas and cultural experiences. The author stated, "Involving maps, receipts and photographs that relate to the purchases of the lots, three of the 14 collages assembled by Matta-Clark’s widow Jane Crawford appeared at the Queens Museum along with Jaime Davidovich’s 1975 documentary video, Queen Project" (Nancy Princenthal)

The projects present the estates as though Gordon Clark is dead, his ideas and ambitions are explored as if he is still alive. This idea also makes me think of Gina Pane’s performance which was restaged by Marina Abramovic’s and Thomas Demand’s Room inspired by the founder of scientology L. Ron Hubbard’s hotel room where he used to live and write.( MOMA Learning)

Room (Zimmer)

Thomas Demand

1996. Chromogenic color print, 67 3/4 x 7' 7 3/8" (172 x 232 cm)

Marina Abramovic, The Conditioning, 2005

Gina Pane, The Conditioning 1973 

Discotheques, Magazines and Plexiglas: Superstudio and the Architecture of Mass Culture

Ross K. Elline

In Ross Elline's view, architecture needs to conform to human need before it is considered as the functional to the society. The Superstudio tends to be a radical intention of using architecture as tool to reform the expectation of the society through the realization of the mass culture, and popular culture. In 1960s the writer Mario Tronti influenced the Italian artists and architects with book, Workers and Capital where the theory impacted the artists and architects’ decisions in terms of how to be self critical about objects and images.

 

BLOX Copenhagen designed by Rm Koolhas

The super studio uses the identity of place and mass production to explore the logics of modern architecture as a commodified object. It gave rise to the critical speculation of life and freedom in resonance of architecture as something that defines the symbolism of a city - a way through which an expected life could be fully experienced. Art institutions invest highly into renowned architects to build museums that would even be interacted as an object. The author mentioned that, with the super studio, architecture is based on system of the capitalist market. This makes me see buildings not only as monuments but also as objects with seductive capabilities of pulling consumers for the culture with which that building holds.

 

Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

 JUSTICE: The Rise of Forensic Architecture by Andrew Curry

It is fascinating that the forensic architecture is an involvement of critical analysis of movement, perception, smelling and hearing. The architect needs to be creative along with logics and understanding as source of inspiration for the design project. This reading makes me think of the speculative design by Anthony Duane and Fiona Raby where the designer becomes creative in the way that, with the space he or she creates,  the viewer tends to contemplate between the real and unreal while reimagining the experience of the space in terms of the past, present and the future.  The author quoted, to “ground truth” or verify the computer model’s accuracy, FA built the café replica". Wiezman’s work is also a restaging of a space just like Thomas Demand but architectural design approach like Thomas Demand. 

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Vault (detail)
2012
C-Print / Perspex
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

The architect Eyal Weizman’s is not just an architect but also thinks as an artist by constructing architectural model as an art that gives one an access to interact with the created space and reimage an action in the context of a past experience. Weizman  says. “On the one hand they open up new political or technological possibilities and on the other, they are relevant—they are where the political edge is.” I see Weizman’s forensic studio approach as a combination of architecture and art in terms of how it contributes to social roles in a community as it explores the nature of justice for humanity in a critical manner.