The recently revealed plans for the new campuses of Google, in Mountain View, Calif., designed by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, and Apple, in Cupertino, from Sir Norman Foster, are so striking: They, like the companies they will house, point to the future — the future, that is, as it looked in the 1960s. Images of the projected Apple campus — a four-tiered ringlike structure nestled in a thickly wooded landscape — evoke the landing of an alien spaceship. The central structure in Ingels’s and Heatherwick’s design is canopied by a sinuous glass membrane, a protective bubble or amniotic sac, shielding an entire section of the campus — not just buildings but bike paths and desks — while letting the abundant Northern California light stream in. In aerial renderings it looks like larvae, incubating a new and possibly terrifying future.
The new unearthly Silicon Valley campuses represent the triumph of privatized commons, of a verdant natural world sheltered for the few. Neither the Google nor Apple campus is open to the public, nor are their designs replicable on the scale that the ’60s utopians imagined for their designs. Well after the orchards of Northern California were overwhelmed by glass boxes and suburban tracts, the tech companies find themselves looking longingly at an Edenic, prelapsarian moment, when it seemed that — to adapt a more recent slogan — another world was possible. But what was originally borne from improvisation and a desire to live simply is now borne from unimaginable mountains of cash. The new Apple office will cost an estimated $5 billion, making it possibly the most expensive office building in history. We are dealing with a bubble of a different kind.
The following images are from structures still existing in Kassel Germany adjacent to the (former) School Architecture. Neglected but solidly standing.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
A (lot) Few (hopefully not too meandering) Clear Thoughts with a Title:
The Pratfalls of Resurrection
Since 2015, my ongoing
research and projects have centered on re-performance and resurrection. Not
resurrection in the ecclesiastical sense, but in a more George A. Romero way:
the walking dead, and all the connotations that go with that. Zombies, on account
of their cerebral dissonance, get a fairly bad rap: to be called a “zombie” is
to essentially say, “you’re brainless.” Yet, the walking dead surround us, and
they appear to be perfectly functional, some downright brilliant, or at least
called so on paper. Let’s consider Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces a performance series in which the artist covered
the canon: Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974); Vito Acconci’s Seed Bed (1972); Valie Export’s Action
Pants: Genital Panic (1969); Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (1973); Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) (the other two
pieces, were, in a fit of assumed modesty among this group, Abamovic’s own).
Abramovic’s rationale for doing this series: "There's nobody to keep the history
straight…I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do
it."[i]
When the history seems
to be out of control the compulsion is to get out the broom and dustpan and
tidy it all up. Of course, this is to assume that there is a mess that needs
cleaning to begin with. In the case of Abramovic, it’s unclear what, other than
an (admittedly pretty boring) post-structural stroll in the park was being
achieved – who wasn’t safely keeping the legacy of these performers straight (with
the exception of Export, who, like most female artists, gets historically
overlapped by their male counterparts)? That Abramovic had to go through estate
approval to perform these pieces is a testament to just how preserved these works are and how their gestures have changed
over the course of art history (read: institutionalized). Yet, all the problems
with Abramovic’s motives doesn’t make her gesture worth inquiry. That she feels
the need to pluck into history and try to sort it out is a maneuver that
increasingly finds artistic practices sharing space with art history.
Hal Foster, who wrote
the influential “Archival Impulse” in the late 1990s writes of archival artists
as an avant garde today today:
Not heroic, this avant garde will not
pretend that it can break absolutely with the old order or found a new one;
rather it will seek to trace fractures that already exist with the given order,
to pressure them further to activate them somehow. Neither avant nor rear, this
grade will assume a position of immanent critique, and often it will adopt a
posture of mimetic exacerbation in doing so…Perhaps, the paranoid dimension of
archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition - its desire to turn
belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature,
philosophy, and life into possible scenarios for alternative kinds of social
relations, to transform the no place of an archive into the new place of a
utopia.
To sum up: the
archive lives and breathes for revision and revisiting. Which is why we see
things like Kanye West tinker with his new album – if it can be called such a
thing given its elasticity – for the foreseeable future, or the headlines of
articles change throughout the day, or why composer Glenn Gould, who
re-performed classical music from the comfort of his home, disavowing live
performance for the recording, have his works programmed into a player piano,
where a sold out audience watched a ghost play music by very dead composers.
All
of this amounts for what I would consider as a condition – not in a negative
sense, but one that is popularized through our archival daily (social media,
camera phones, etc.). What I’m looking at when I think about re-performances or
revisiting old styles or works of art, while I, as some sort of art historian,
walk what feels like Philippe Petit on his tightrope between the two towers of
the World Trade Center (itself now ghosts that walk among the United States as
harbingers of fin-de-sicle 21st century hubris/the end of late
capital/infinite partisanal squawking that bankrupts American propensity for
ingenuity), the game of peddling preservation acts vs. responsible caring for
the canon, deciding the worth of what art gets talked about and what doesn’t,
enlightenment idea(lism) vs. the struggle of the real, etc.
Hippie Modernism had the brilliant subtitle: “the
struggle for Utopia.” Perhaps on account of the failures of the utopic
movements and moments of the 1960s and 1970s – bringing us the focus group,
individualism that somehow still doesn’t account for black lives but wraths
enough anti-authoritarian to posit Donald Trump as a viable presidential
candidate, not to mention co-opting such maneuvers into new types of freedom as
the basis for selling us shit, or making fast food choices easier, etc. – we don’t
believe in utopia anymore, or sincerity, or that there can actually be anything
mined out of the 1960s that doesn’t just jettison us into a cynicism. But this
is, of course, a generalizing at worst, a standard argument from the Left at
best. Re-peformance or revisiting or archival impulses or dipping into the
canon or social practice art or net art or resurrection, zombie or no, shouldn’t
be discounted strictly as an ouroboric postmodernism. Doing these things act as
a break of sorts, even if they are failed from the get-go or derivative. What I
mean is, as Foster aptly points out, there’s potential in recouping the losses
of the past, even if it ultimately leads to a wall – like Abramovic’s Beuys or
Gould’s reanimation. The struggle for utopia is not just limited to hippie
modernism, or a psychedelic aesthetic, but it’s likely the call for our today.
I don’t know how to break the cycle of jadedness that comes with 40 plus years
of postmodernism, or why, when we see someone cry over a tree being chopped
down, it’s pretty damn funny. The hope is that, through constant
reconsideration, the art historian’s task, but increasingly, more and more
present in art making (whether the artist may know it or not), we inevitably
stumble over something new, our consider a utopia plausible again.
With this in mind, I’ll
accidentally advertise while simultaneously invite:
Tentatively, May 11th,
will be the final installation (at least for this current term) of my organized
series Expanded Art History for Plants, a lecture series generously given
hosting allowance by Aaron & Grace (Uptool) at the UIC Greenhouse. The
night’s iteration will be titled “The Sounds of Utopia” and amongst other
speakers, I’d like to open with a non-cynical performance of Bob Dylan’s “The
Times They Are-A Changin.’” It would be my privilege to ask anyone in this
class, or reading this, or who knows a guy who knows a guy, to perform it with
me, be it in voice, banjo, harmonium, some kinda old Renaissance era harp, an
old jug, whatever. The reason for this song is its prescience as well as the
reminder of the time of which it originated, as well as its pertinence for my
own personal research projects: can we summon the ghosts of the past, no matter
how jaded we might be with their message, and make them feel sincere, or that
they still matter? We clearly want to, so why not?
If the 11th
doesn’t work we’ll try try try try again for a different date.
[i]New York
Times in
an interview published in early November 2005.
