Speculative Everything Design
The article starts with something Alfonso Cuaron said in an interview about wanting his
futuristic film Children of Men to be recognizable for a 2005 audience. It’s the opposite of
Bladerunner, which wants to awe the audience with foreign speculative objects that have
not entered into our realm of possibilities and may be more difficult to process but it
encourages the viewer to actively engage. In hindsight, now in the future, we don’t have
a android problem (if you don’t count data harvesting or the inevitable AI takeover), but we
did have a global pandemic predicted by Children of Men in 2008 and then of course in
2020 (which by the way, the vaccine for it caused women to not be able to have children).
“Although the object is presented in hyper-realistic detail, the world it belongs to will be
different for each person who sees it.” Because Patricia Piccinini’ The Young Family
looks so real it is easy to image it existing, even though the viewer does not live in a
reality where this would take place. But it is real all the same because it’s there.
The quote by Timothy Morton comes to mind, “Ideas come from the past, feelings
come from the future.” The Young Family creates a feeling. Morton said something
along the lines of if you feel something, it has already come to be. It reminds me also of
South Park’s imagination land, where all these beings that we have imagined all physically
live in a place.
Cults of transparency: the curtain wall and the show window in the work of Dan Graham
and Josephine Meckseper by Sarah Lookofsky
Lookofsky says one of the primary developments of social modernity is the show window.
Saying it’s “a scene marked by identification, projection, fetishism, and mass desire.
The viewer sees themselves reflected but also transposed onto these objects of desire.
In Dan Graham’s Half Square/Half Crazy pavilion the viewer sees themself in the reflection
but also the reflection over theirs of the people beside them. Lookofsky talks about Josephine
Meckseper’s Blow Up installation which is like a shop window, featuring women’s clothing,
lingerie mostly, but is heavy on the women part of the display. Lookofsky calls it “the fetishistic
fragmentation of the human body” (p214). She references Eugene Atget’s photography which
reminds me of what I learned this semester about the realist artists of Paris 1880s.
They sought out current women’s fashion as the perfect signifier of modernity.
Warhol started out as a shop window designer and throughout his career as an artist he
would say that is the true art. Claus Oldenburg displayed his sculptures in a store with a
shop window. They looked like ordinary purchasable objects but they were made of metal
and ceramics. The Indiana band Mike Adams at his Honest Weight put out an album
designed by a somewhat famous band art designer and had the merchandise photographed
professionally, then when they mass produced the merchandise they put the photo of the
merchandise on the cover. They said it was to capture the feeling of unattainability.
This is like Jean Baudrillard wrote in 1968, “A shop window is at once magical and frustrating
strategy of advertising in epitome.” (Lookofsky, 213)
Album cover of MAAHHW - There is no better feeling
Claes Oldenburg - The Street and the Store 1962
Andy Warhol - Shop Window at Bonwit Teller
The Rise of Forensic Architecture by Andrew Curry
Forensic Architecture is the reconstruction of crime scenes with painstaking details in order to
recreate the past and better understand every detail of what happened. In the past 2 decades
we’ve seen shows like Dexter, who is a blood spatter analysis specialist, and documentaries like
Making a Murderer where each scenario is reenacted with great detail in order to investigate the
investigation, which at that point had long been over.
There is a question in the courts whether this forensic architecture should be used as evidence,
saying the science has an agenda and entering elements are hadn’t or can’t be considered in
the scenario being tested.
These structures are objects created from photos, much like Thomas Damand’s recreations.
The purpose is similar too. They want to capture a moment in time and be in the space.
Like preserving a childhood bedroom or a museum recreating the set of Mr Rogers’
Neighborhood. It is more than a picture, it is the feeling of the space.
Mr Rogers Museum in Pittsburg
Discotheques, Magazines and Plexiglas: Superstudio and the Architecture of Mass
Culture by Ross K. Elfline
The Radical Architecture collective named Superstudio refused to make more buildings
because they “perpetuated existing social and economic divisions.” They instead created
collages incorporating architectural structures that parodied the “pervasiveness of the modern
movement.” Natural landscapes were turned into tourist platforms. Cities were needlessly
covered with structures. A dystopian future was portrayed in order to show the unnatural
tendencies of modern architecture. Many of the images collaged on were taken from postcards
or travel brochures using the language of tourist consumerism to discourage the “fetishization
of the building-as-luxury good.” It reminds me of the collages made by Ellsworth Kelly.
Reinvesting in Fake Estates by Nancy Princenthal
Using the plans preserved by Gordon Matta-Clark widow Jane Crawford and locations
purchased for use, artists stepped up with the funding of museums to realize the plans
for “Fake Estates” posthumuously. In a Kafkaesque way, Matta-Clark wanted to reclaim
the abandoned buildings of a struggling deraliqued New York of the 1970s. Keeping up with
his “respect for marginalized histories,”
What came out was something that can be misread as work of art instead of active illustration
of a perversity. Because “Documentation and the embodiment of an action are two very different
things.”
The Real Simulations of Thomas Demand by Pepe Karmel
The works of Thomas Demand spark a lot of interests I have in memory and valued spaces.
The historically charged recreations of rooms are created from the information within a
photograph and then are photographed and exhibited as photographs only. The rooms
themselves have an uncanny aspect to them because they are made of different materials than
the original, are a simpler version lacking details not in the photo reference, and have
a “lived in” feel to them, as if several people were there using the space only moments
before the photo was taken.
It is a room of the past, like forensic architecture, but is in the present (for the photograph to be
taken). I have always been interested in thinking about a place in different times. The perfect
example being the graphic novel Here by Richard Mcguire. And another would be my very
important first visit to the Royal Theater in Archer City, Texas. A place I had studied for a
decade and had finally stood in.
Les Immateriaux or How to Construct the History of Exhibitions by John Rajchman
El Lizzitzky and Kurt Schwitters initiated a shift from objects to spaces and hence from
spectators to participants. Curators have shifted from curating as artform to curating historical
exhibition of curating. 1930’s formed ideas of presentation, exhibition, showing, and appearance
using - Walter Benjamin’s distinction between Exhibition-value and Cult-value, the distinction
between to present and to construct by Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt’s idea of the public.
Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye, Lizzizsky’s montage technique disrupted the linear perception of
history, called Kino-show. Disrupting narrative is itself an aesthetic idea and that history of
disruption is something to look at as an art movement.
The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of
Photographs by Vilem Flusser
The greek origin of the work object means to throw against, impling to project a subject or
narrative on the thing that you’re looking at. Object approach the subject. Objects changed by
\work are Cultural objects and observed by hands and fingers. Industrial objects are made by
machines and are observed by hands and theory. Post-industrial objects have been made by
software. Pre-cultural is when that system fails and something unique comes out. I think
pre-cultural objects are what interest me. Error cards, misfit toys, offset printing, a scüzzed
collage. The “deviation from programs” is a breath of fresh air from the universal consumer
products.
The person selling this called it the unicorn of error cards. It is a one-of-kind, worth about $100.
100 complete sets of 1990 NBA Hoops wouldn’t be worth $100. In fact every card made in the
year 1990 combined wouldn’t be worth more than this card is worth.
