"The name of the game"
Building Design, Grande-Bretagne, 3 September 1993
An exibition of architcts' art works in Grenoble raised questions about the relationship between new art and old buildings, says Adrian Dannatt.
That the demise of architecture as a paying profession coincided with the expansion of a contemporary art world hungry for new territory was fortuitous. All those practitioners who previously spent their time charming video producers into needing a new studio can now have exhibitions in modish emporia instead. There has always been an élite which has drawn, taught and typed instead of building, and whose eventual construction of a mediatheque in Dusseldorf is greeted by dreary articles entitled " So they can stand up after all ".
But as less and less gets built, more and more gets exhibited. The latest show at Le Magasin in Grenoble was typical; a funky title, Application & Implication, and an array of pan-European semi-celebs whose objects are displayed with the reverence given to Duchampian readymades. These things are a curious new hybrid, grown from the fertile soil of architectural school practice, those dangling, rotating, wire-and-strut-strewn displays beloved of every diploma unit. Far from the po-mo and neo-classical drawings which were gallery fodder in the eighties, and even further from traditional architectural models (not a foam tree or leaning plastic citizen in sight), these objets d'art-itechture occupy deliberately ambiguous territory. Neither sculpture nor habitation, they function as 3D embodiments of theory and experimentation. A previous exhibition, Machines d'Architecture at Fondation Cartier, covered similar ground with some shared participants, but was based around a specific area of architectural investigation, loosely descended from Raymond Roussel and machines of chance and computation.
The Magasin show did not have such a precise agenda, presenting its eight large objects as art works, separated, spread out, with surprisingly little regard to their inter-relation or individual meaning. The subtitle, " modèle de pensée et acte de présence ", was clearly not giving much away. As in much contemporary art, objects are presented which are only legible or interesting in the context of the artist's didactic aims and intellectual processes, none of which are explained or proffered. Thus the object will only have meaning, or anything approximating the intended meaning, for those who have read up on the work or are being guided round by a cultural functionary. Unlike artists, one suspects, architects actively want their things to be understood, to mean something in relation to the rest of their work. But without any information what are we meant to make of these non/neo-models, non/neo-sculptures, non/neo-buildings ? A caricature profile of this genre of architects is easily established. They work in at least three cities simultaneously, preferably far apart, such as Houston and Linz or Geneva and Tokyo, and they have formed a group which operates under a groovy acronym, usually spelt with a mixture of upper and lower case letters. Thus here we see work by CAST (Cosmopolitan Architecture Studio), PAU.HOF, PIA (Productions Investigations Architectures), LoPSiA (Laboratory of Primary Studies in Architecture) and ECOi. More seriously, most of the work on display is curiously similar : the shared angular aggression of Arnod & Herault, Decq & Cornette, Ben van Berkel. We have seen these forms once too often. The real question behind this show is the underlying psychological significance of this long, sharpedged, jagged shape that is still fashionable. What does it really mean, this lethally pointed, aggressively angled geometric motif ? Could it be the result of all the frustration and anger of the profession's demise, a sort of Ninja star flung at an uncaring world, the lethal vectors of suppressed architectural rage ? This sharp-edged futuro-constructivism has surely become a cliché by now, and since its final, victorious arrival at Zaha Hadid's Vitra fire station, can only seem like ornament or decorative pattern.
Dans L'Ombre de Ledoux by Mark Goulthorpe, Zainie Zainul and Yee Pin Tan was the most interesting work on show precisely because it breaks from the convention of the sawtoothed horizontal. In fact it is far more Richard Deacon than DeCon, a rounded, smooth wooden sculpture built in the shape of the shadows, the negative space of two Ledoux projects. It may not convey the space of the vanished monarchic order as they suggest, but there is definitely something regal about its resolute verticality and sexy craftsmanship. It was one of the few such objects that dared the anthropomorphic, fifties feel, sensuality instead of speed, as if Marinetti had been traded in for Barbara Hepworth. There is a great charm to the names of students and assistants embossed in silver letters on the otherwise smooth wooden flanks, whose wood grain can be traced to the spiral loops of its core, a surface that, unlike the others, demands that one run a hand across its generous polish.
Next to it was the other most unusual project, When Fear Strangles the Laugh, by the Viennese team of Michael Hofstatter and Wolfgang Pauzenberger. What looks like an ordinary, monumental metal block springs sly surprises. Embedded in the surface are a group of bottles, literally 12 green bottles hanging on the wall, rather than the usual seven. When you look through these Scottish 700ml whisky bottoms you catch a reflection from a mirror behind them. Only round the side did you realise that the huge thing was supporting itself, apparently unaided. By sneaking illegally into the next room, you could see the holding device that kept the structure in place on the wall, almost more impressive than the work itself, gargantuan engineering in an empty space.
If the other pieces were well-made and mildly attractive merely as aesthetic forms (the textures of Decq & Cornette's layers of bolted cardboard, the Alpine rocks of Bernd Albers looking like Richard Long's storeroom), the question of how these archiobjects should be displayed has yet to be solved in any exhibition. All too easily they appear displaced and unloved, dust tundras worthy of John Ford gathering in their darkest corners, and above all looking uniquely plonked down rather than assembled.
Far worse was the video project Europan, supposedly gathering a new generation of young architects to thrash out the topics of urbanism and city planning. In practice giant silver doors, so chic they were too heavy to open, led to a huge wobbly screen on which it was impossible to make out anything other than the blur of a few architects chatting in a Babel of rumble and static. The room was roped off in claustrophobic dark with rows of empty chairs, without a single visitor, while the video panned in and out the whole time, presumably in an attempt to be avant-garde Utterly unwatchable, the dreariness of the topic was matched by the amateur presentation.
Le Magasin is eager to explain the interesting architectural history of its building, as if to validate such exhibitions. Created by Eiffel for the Paris World's Fair at the same time as his tower, it was taken down to Grenoble and reassembled in the suburbs, a symbol of Parisian engineering sophistication. There is an interesting issue posed by Magasin, never dealt with. Why and how did contemporary art come to need converted industrial space as its trademark ? After all, Grenoble has its own Maison de la Culture, built by Andre Wogenscky, student and disciple of Corbusier. Celebrated in the late sixties, he is the sort of architect who would not have anything to do with a space like Le Magasin.
The idea of Magasin shows being held in the modernist splendour of the circular Maison de la Culture is impossible. Since the early seventies, new art has come to need old industrial space, the two symbiotically linked by their mutual uselessness. Such art centres also tend to be extremely hard to find, which is certainly true of Magasin, discreetly unsignposted, hidden away in a corner in case the uninitiated might stumble on it by accident. These spaces area retreat, if not an admission of defeat, from the idealism of Maison de la Culture, which occupied a prominent civic site in order to attract and convert the largest number of locals. By contrast, most contemporary art spaces can only be found by the dedicated, prepared to read elegant, minute typography on anonymous factory doors. The extremely manual, exaggeratedly physical nature of the toil that used to occupy these spaces, and the equally exaggerated non-functionality and minimal physical effort behind the works now exposed, functions as hyper-metaphor for the dissolution of industry and its replacement by entertainment-culture-media.
Is it mere coincidence that heavy industry started to vanish as artists began to occupy its empty places, or was this possibly a symbolic exchange, a ritual to mark a fundamental transformation in society ? Now there's a theme for a show.