| If architecture and urbanism,
as means of planning, have been the traditional sites for utopian
projection in imagining ideal cities, the work in Adaptations draws
attention to processes that fit within neither the plan nor
the ideal: the flourishing of the black market and its impact
on built space, the establishment and failure of experimental
communities, randomized construction, and the necessity of
makeshift solutions. Although at the margins of planned space,
and at the narrowing end of modernity's long shadow, these
works do not give up on the prospect or project of articulating
a utopian horizon. Rather, they shift the discussion away from
traditions of development based on the tabula rasa,
and toward processes of adaptive transformation. The frictions
between centralized controls and autonomous initiatives, between
regulated frameworks and dispersed systems, are not approached
with ready-made design solutions, but are engaged as forces
enabling an analysis and rethinking of both lived and built
space.
Nils Norman's Proposal for an Entropy Information Kiosk (Church & Lispenard
Streets) will appear for the duration of the show as a poster
placed in a phonebooth kiosk near the gallery. Norman's project
is a proposal for a new kiosk in downtown Manhattan. A center
for observing the effects of global warming, Norman's proposed
kiosk updates global temperature change, forecasts local weather,
enables storm and drought tracking, monitors global oil consumption,
and provides webcam views focused on prime glacial-shelf disintegration.
While all the component parts of this kiosk are fully functional,
together they create an unwieldy, unworkable fusion of agit-prop
and the entertainment industry. So seemingly of Manhattans delirious
multi-functionality and yet impossible within it, the Entropy
Information Kiosk raises questions as to the limits of contemporary
urban space, as well as to the instrumentalization of public
art in its redevelopment.
The Wild City: Genetics of Uncontrolled Urban Processes,
a collaborative work by the STEALTH group (Ana Dzokic, Milica Topalovic,
Marc Neelen, and Ivan Kucina), examines the explosion of unregulated
and illegal architectures stemming from Belgrade's economic and
political crises in the 1990s. While such building was decried
in the press as wild, chaotic, and destructive of Belgrade's planned
urban fabric, the STEALTH group developed a visual and verbal vocabulary
for the regularities and patterns in struggles underlying processes
like black-market street trade, urban transport, and roadside gasoline-selling.
In their case studies, plastic kiosks grow coffee shops, concrete
basements, and living spaces; entirely new shopping districts form
along formerly empty pedestrian routes; and state department stores
stay afloat by renting out vacant space to black-market vendors.
Analyzing the complexities and contradictions relating top-down
to bottom-up forces, the STEALTH group has developed this research
into Processmatter, a design computing program whose algorithms
formulate the possible outcomes of these interactions.
The agonistic conflict of desires and designs is also a key concern
of Gardar Eide Einarsson, who uses commercial wall paint to reproduce
the signature orange-pink tones of the Financial Times newspaper.
As a source of information on global industry, economics, and finance,
the Financial Times adopts an editorially "neutral" tone,
reporting facts and data for the global investor. In Einarsson's
painting, the neutrality of this tone tends to be institutionally
suspended. On the one hand, as the artist writes, the painting "rids
the space of the (mock) neutrality of gallery white." On the
other it can easily be misrecognized as a curatorial accent-color.
As a material support that tends to disappear while in plain view,
the work subtly suggests the subsistence of alternative economies
and black-market processes within more dominant economic forces.
Phrases from the "civil war between the master plan and the
moment" make up a part of 28´28" N. / 77´15" E.
The Coordinates of Everyday Life, by Raqs Media Collective
(Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta). The
texts are lifted from Delhis official and unofficial sticker cultures-ranging
from warnings on city walls and bus seats, offers of sex, employment,
or training, to slogans that hover ambiguously between the buzzwords
of contemporary theory and advertisements for the "new" economies
of electronic capitalism. Slightly re-scripted, translated into
several languages, and placed in an endless sequence, they offer
no coherent message and no continuous idiom. Alluding to a relationship
between prohibition and incitement as one that is subject to adaptation
and redefinition, the texts engage a linguistic strain of the public
sphere where one finds conflicting visions of what it means to
inhabit not only Delhi, but also any number of other cities.
Video is a tool for interrogating settlement and lived history
in the work of the Arnait Video Collective (including Marie-Hélène
Cousineau, Mary Kunuk, Madeleine Ivalu, Susan Avingaq, Rachel Uruyasuk,
and Katarina Soukup). The video Anaana (Mother) features
Vivi Kunuk and her extended family, whose stories recount the family's
experiences of living on the land in Igloolik, Canada, during a
period where there was significant pressure to adopt settlement
life. Filmed at outpost camps during a hunting trip, the film was
the starting point for the Nunatinnit Mobile Media Lab, a project
that further explored the relationship between settlement and camp
life by temporarily transplanting the video production and distribution
processes to a remote location.
Oscar Tuazon has collaborated with the designer and dome builder
Richard Fischbeck to produce an aluminum structure poised between
randomness and order, called a Randome. Fischbeck's technique
involves using identical panels placed in a loose arrangement to
create a geodesic structure without complex calculations or extensive
pre-planning. If geodesic domes bear the stains of a failed counterculture
legacy, Tuazon positions the iconic form at a crossroads where
ideologically opposed groups-from techno-futurists to neo-luddites,
cold war strategists to disenchanted youthwere momentarily drawn
to the same forms. In engaging with the continuance of something
commonly seen as a failed gambit, Tuazon risks being seen as a
revivalist. His intentions run closer to an archaeologist of the
contemporary, examining how the visionary ambitions for creating
what he calls a "city without a ghetto" confront their
complicity with the more mundane realities of urban flight, slum
clearance, and real-estate speculation.
The reconfigured vehicles, adapted houses, makeshift monuments,
and abstract machines that Kim Adams comes across in his travels
are an essential part of the production of his large-scale public
sculptures. They are pieces of a commodity world that has been
taken apart and pieced together again along different lines: a
pedestal in Manila holds wreckage from the daily flows of traffic
around it; a sedan is turned into a hunter's cabin, complete with
stove, boat dock, and sleeping quarters; a house is built around
a summer camper like a body constructed from a prosthetic limb.
With these slides (from an archive numbering close to a thousand)
and his 1:87 scale models, Adams mines the apparatus of contemporary
productionlong-haul trucking vehicles, farming supplies, work
sheds, garden equipment, construction gearand re-assembles it
into public objects whose apparent functionality conceals the fact
that they refuse to do any of the things we expect them to.
The paraSITE shelter, a double-membraned structure that
latches onto exhaust ducts, capturing the flow of waste air in
order to inflate itself, takes advantage of the overlooked infrastructures
that keep cities running smoothly. Michael Rakowitz initiated the paraSITE project
in 1998 in response to the aggressive anti-homeless measures (such
as homeless-"proof" vents and benches, along with the
enforcement of anti-camping laws) being taken in Boston and New
York. Each paraSITE (of which there are approximately
30 in existence) is the result of a design process that involves
working directly with the homeless person who will use the shelter.
Variations have included pockets for messages and belongings, extended
necks to reach upper-story vents, a shelter shaped after the Star
Wars character Jabba the Hutt, and a low-slung tube designed to
fall within a loophole in New York's anti-tent laws. In this sense,
the paraSITE project is as much a tactic of visibility
as a functional shelter, a means of a collaborative addressing
of the visibility of unacceptable circumstances that continue to
exist within the carefully policed space of the city.
A corporation founded in 1981, Ocean Earth Development Corporation
views dependence on fossil fuels as an unacceptable circumstance.
Seizing on the recent scuttling of the Concorde supersonic transport,
Ocean Earth (George Chaikin, Peter Fend, Sarah Peschel, and Eve
Vaterlaus) has returned to a previously interrupted research proposal
for the waters surrounding JFK airport and the contentious 1971
Concorde runway extension. In conjunction with the University of
Plymouth in the United Kingdom, they are proposing an algae bio-mass
harvesting unit that would be a source of sustainable, clean energy
and a program for the bio-remediation of the affected area. Focusing
on big-picture initiatives, Ocean Earth links local ecological
struggle directly to current geo-political conflicts.
While they are based in different fields--architectural research,
collective video and new-media production, urban planning, environmental
design, and project-based art practice--what the documents, hypotheses,
and projects of Adaptations all share is an approach to
process that emphasizes the productive possibilities of moving
back and forth between the existing and the imagined. In the end,
if humanist ideals enabled modernist attempts to design for the
common good, the conflicting desires and designs reflected in the
built spaces of Adaptations pose the question of how to
envision collective transformation when such a humanist ideal no
longer seems workable.
Craig Buckley
© January 2004
PRESS RELEASE:
Adaptations examines the complex, sometimes contradictory
relationships between forms of independence and infrastructures
rooted in existing social relations. While architecture
and planning have often been privileged as sites for utopian
projection, the potential of small scale adaptations has
remained largely overlooked. The initiatives in this exhibition
use such adaptations to re-function existing features of
their environment, highlighting the struggle between improvised
designs and centralized planning. A mixture of emerging
and established artists and architects, Adaptations brings
together first-hand investigations, practical projects
and hypothetical models, all of which bring to light the
everyday scale of technological and social change.
Several projects examine seemingly minor transformations that create
greater alterations in an environment. Others reflect upon the drive
to become independent of systems of centralized control, a key aspect
of many of the grass-roots utopian projects of the twentieth century.
Cutting across traditional definitions of center and periphery, other
projects look at the possibilities and limitations attending new infrastructures
in the sphere of communication. The project aims to create productive
debate about the direction and political status of adaptive strategies
in various environments.
This exhibition is supported in part
by The Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, and the Mondriaan Foundation. The public programs
are supported in part by public funds from the New York State
Council on Arts, a State agency.
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