loud paper

architecture gone wild

I have to give props to the good folks at the slightly mysterious LVHRD organization. They certainly know how to create spectacle out of the lowliest of spectator sports: model building. Last night was the fourth installment of Master-Disaster Architecture Duel. (I have left off the Dewar’s branding opportunity.) It pitted the brutes against the boutiques: James Adams and Paul Kim of FXFOWLE versus Sean Bailey and
David Iseri of Konyk.

One could describe it as Iron Chef for architects, but really, that doesn’t quite capture the thrill of watching four architects hunched over tables, slicing at drinking straws in the middle of the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Did I mention that it was lumberjack themed?

Ostensibly this was to coordinate with the project brief: some sort of futuristic Alaskan Wilderness outpost constructed from repurposed oil pipeline (hence the drinking straws.) But really it was step one in creating spectacle. Ask people to dress up as lumberjacks and woodland creatures and already things are festive.

Step two, provide free booze. Step three, invite the media. (I ran into half dozen bloggers and journalists. Archinect was reporting live via camera phone and text messages.) Actually, don’t just invite the media, but create a buzz of media. Hire photographers and videographers to endlessly document the event and project it back to itself on large screens at the venue. As we all know, images always make things exciting.

They also encourage viewers to become participants, to snap their own pics. I’m reminded of the classically postmodern "most photographed barn in America" section in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. The line of the evening goes to an enigmatic gentleman named Seamus who cheered on a young woman with a digital video camera, “Fill that hard drive. Fill it.” Do not underestimate the need to document anything architectural.

Sadly, and predictably, the models completed didn’t live up to their hype. I voted for FXFOWLE’s trussed scheme only to find that from the right angle it looked like a happy face. (A frown upside down.) The guy drunkenly chanting best-described Konyk’s entry: “Cheeseburger penis. Cheeseburger penis.” Cheeseburger penis won. Ah, the discourse.

You can just barely see me sporting my Fiction frames in Aaron's snapshot below:

fortified

Do a Google image search for “Iraq” and a homemade pin-up of Miss Iraq immediately comes up, second after a photograph of a man with a limb blown off. Frankly, I was prepared for the gory war documents: the pools of blood, the disfigured bodies, the mugging Marines, but a corseted woman seated on what I assume is a table draped in a lace cloth? She stares at the camera with provocative exhaustion. Almost to say, “What, you too? Come on already, let’s get this over with.”

I have to admit; I have sheltered myself from this war that keeps on going. I listen to the reports, which lately have gone missing in favor of the presidential campaign, on National Public Radio. Blissfully image free. I know the visuals are out there, I just choose not to look.

So, when a dear friend sent over photographs taken by her young husband who recently shipped out to Iraq, I was struck, rather guiltily, by their banal beauty. A photograph of portable offices protected by concrete blast shields is Kahn-ish, Marfa-like, or even Eisenmanesque. My own cultural affectations buffer me from the reality of a fortified encampment just outside Baghdad.

My friend writes that there is good news: Her husband sits behind a computer all day, so he doesn’t have leave the base. Does that mean he is safe?

rewind and play

Photo via Wollaeger’s blog.

Albus Cavus, an artist collective headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, sends news that it is collecting films for its upcoming Street Art Film Fest 2008. This year it’s screening in NJ, DC, and CA. Several films are already listed on the program including a couple by stenciler and performance artist Peat Wollaeger: Casa Del Luchador and Bill Hilly the Stencilbilly.

Not on the program is the apparently well-known (10,000 YouTube hits since it was posted in December) but new-to-my-eyes piece, My Tribute to Keith Haring…Miami 2007. In a subculture that routinely stresses hidden identity and cool posturing, what amazes me is that Wollaeger transforms himself into a Haring doppelganger—hair, eyeglasses, jeans, sneakers—before stenciling a mural in the artist’s likeness. All of which is captured on film. The lines between representation, re-representation, and the pure pleasure of fandom are all blurred.

In an interview at ourartsite.com Wollaeger has this to say about the piece:

The mural is a large scale mural project called Primary Flight in the Wynwood arts district being curated by Blackbooks stencils and will feature murals by Logan Hicks, Michael De Fo, David Choe, Futura, Lady Pink, Andy Howell and many more! I am doing a very special tribute piece to Keith Haring for three reasons. One...he is probably one of my favorite artists of all time. Two...December is AIDS awareness month, and Keth died of AIDS In 1990. Three...because Keith would have turned 50 this year. I am doing a pile of his figures in the background to represent all that have been lost to AIDS and then over the top is a large portrait of Keith Haring in my style. I have cut off all my hair and I will be dressing as the Artist as a tribute...I even purchased 3 pairs of vintage Air Force ones, just to make sure I found the right pair that he would have worn.

 

new old, old new

Best to admit it right now: the New Museum is old news. I was in San Francisco way back when it opened in early December. On return, I lallygagged getting over there. Yeah, I was excited, but then again, I had already read a bunch of commentary. My faves include Kazys’ review over at varnelis.net and Sam Jacobs' scathing photo essay at Strange Harvest that documents twenty fundraising plaques throughout the space. Memorial water fountain anyone?

I made my pilgrimage to the SANAA addition to the Bowery a couple weeks ago. At 4pm, the light was too low for the skylights to work, so the effect of the stacked boxes was lost on me. Collage, the second (and more promising) installment of Unmonumental just opened, so I’ll try to return earlier in the day. Overall, the big spaces didn’t seem big enough. Perhaps unmonumental sums up the building, too. The assemblage art was installed too close together, and little of it made use of the lofty ceiling heights. My favorite moments in the building were the tiny, tiny spaces along the rear stair. Oddball niches no bigger than a closet, they seemed a bit illicit, as if the architects had gotten away with something—an alcove where art lovers can sneak away for a snog.

Much of the criticism of the New Museum frets over what a cultural institution located next to the Bowery Mission is doing to the Bowery. That bringing the arts to the neighborhood is really just giving up the ghost to gentrification. That a beloved grubby street historically dotted by bums and kitchen suppliers represents authentic New York. Sure, I see their point. I too enjoy a bit of grit and a little subcultural tourism. I might even follow it with a vegan BLT at Moby’s Teany. But I also wonder if the artistic commoditization of the Bowery is something that’s been going on since it was Skid Row.

Recently, at closing party of NYNYNY (photos of this great mini-urban assemblage show here), Flux Factory screened the 1956 film On The Bowery by Lionel Rogosin. The award-winning, quasi-documentary tracks real down-and-outers as they try to shake the bottle and get back on their feet. It is true Beat verite filmed under the shadow of the El. The New Museum with its industrial loft gallery spaces and mesh clad façade (to be blackened soon) is just another entry trying to capture some of that patina.

pretty ugly

It looks like am not the only one obsessed with “ugly” these days. (Yes, I’ve developed an improbable Bourdain crush. He won my heart with snide digs at Rachel Ray and boy, can he lap up the bone marrow.) Dystopic dreamer Lebbeus Woods just posted a screed regarding the relationship between new and ugly. Musing over Jackson Pollock, he ponders how some ideas, artworks, architecture, once considered nauseous-making are assimilated into aesthetic taste, and how some continue to challenge that status quo. I’ll fold it into the “Not Nice” file.

Woods writes:

The art critic Clement Greenberg once wrote that the new is always ugly. This is because it confronts us with experiences and ideas that we haven’t encountered before and don’t understand, or, at least, are not accustomed to. It follows that, because we live in a society, and an urban landscape, driven by the new, we are in for substantial, even perpetual, ugliness. His concern was the aesthetic, but also the ethical. He wrote in a post-WWII period not only of rapid expansion of American cities and the social landscape they create, but also of Existentialism, which made ugliness—if it was ‘authentic,’ that is, if it emerged from the inner nature of a thing—a virtue. Prettiness was conventional, easily acceptable, and, in a time of rapid change, an ethical crime against truth. Prettiness was used as a cosmetic by advertisers and other commercial—and political—interests to disguise the difficult, even tragic, struggles that social, economic and technological changes were forcing upon people and their ways of thinking and living. Prettiness was used by the powers-that-be not to make the new more digestible, but to disguise its deeper implications and ethical imperatives. It was a way of saying, ‘Don’t worry, everything is normal–just go on as you always have.’ In other words, 'Just let us keep running the world as we always have.’

Continue reading.

look out, look back

It is no freak coincidence that the Spice Girls announced their reunion tour (complete with Ginger Spice) within weeks of the release of Todd Haynes’ wonderfully arty Dylan biopic “I’m Not There.” At least not to me. A million years ago I wrote piece for loud paper chronicling the intersection of snarl and sass, pop and posturing, bubblegum and cigarettes. The confluent point: the bulbous Royal Albert Hall. A space that brings together “Don’t Look Back” and “Spice World.”

Inspired by Haynes film, which skillfully interweaves genre, poetry, and identity, I’ll subject you to my early, somewhat lushy, ramblings:

There is a revolution brewing in “Don't Look Back.” It seeps out of the architecture, out of spaces with one too many people sitting on a dirty Danish sofa. When one mixes the great unwashed with modern furniture, trouble is bound to happen. The cameraman, Pennebaker, is pushed up against the corner of those close rooms. He is approved to get the entire atmosphere on film. He takes it all in - the excitement, the existential bullshit, the kohl eyeliner on be-bobbed girls. The lens implies a scent: it smells like cinders and cooked cabbage. Steam comes from the kitchen up through the floorboards and, like a draft, encircles the familiar mop of curly hair and hangers on in striped shirts.

The film is composed of seething interiors. Even the walls, wrapped in flaky floral paper, reflect the heaviness of an ancient Victorian status quo and a post-war angst. Although the film was made in the mid-sixties, Modernism is not evident. There is no free plan, no ribbon windows and the closest thing to transparency is Donavan, who is touring simultaneously. All the hallways, the hotel rooms and the dressing rooms make for just about all the claustrophobia one can handle on an El Niño Valentine's night at the Roxie Theater.

The entire piece is here. Also, don't miss David Cross as an inspired Allen Ginsberg.

back to...

Happy New Year. I'm back from Dublin and my jet lag/lingering hangover has cleared. For those of you who follow Gaelic football, you’ll be excited to know that the undefeated Crossmaglen Rangers filled Delta flight 160. Since I was unfamiliar with the sport, the player seated next to me said it was like soccer, but you can use your hands. Maybe like rugby? They were on their way to Orlando to celebrate at Disneyworld.

Speaking of theme parks, I was surprised how Dublin (endlessly pedestrian and cleaned up due to techboom money) was not a prepackaged luck-of-the-Irish E-ticket ride. Sure there were gift shops with woolly sweaters, tour buses, and a Molly Malone statue, but the city seemed to be used by its resident “Dubs.” I wandered as much of the city as I could possibly traverse on foot.

The area around the Grand Canal, the district that’s seen the bulk of rapid development, especially struck me: lots of not bad modern lofts and office buildings. U2 is planning a tower and Libeskind is signed up for a performing arts center. The checkerboard hotel by Portuguese architect Aires Mateus & Associados (project architect McCauley Daye O'Connell) wasn’t open, but looked pretty cool. The strangest thing about this area is how placeless the architecture felt. Modern buildings that could be anywhere: San Jose, South of Market, or Chelsea. My favorite moments were where the new construction bumped up against the old making strange juxtapositions between crumbling warehouses and cheery glass facades.

The city’s rich literary past is inescapable. Statues and historical plaques of Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Stoker, and Beckett are everywhere. It seems that Beckett has followed me back to New York. Still delirious from my travels, I caught a collection of four of his short plays staring Mikhail Baryshnikov at New York Theater Workshop. Existential and spare, the pieces are accompanied by a Philip Glass score and a set designed by Russian architect Alexander Brodsky (of Brodsky and Utkin) Thirteen tons of sand fill a stage framed by mini-blinds and fluorescent tube lights. It sure isn’t a Celtic green, but strangely, my ears picked up an Irish lilt in the meditations on the human condition.

Dublin snapshots here.