Support Structures
Ed. Céline Condorelli (Sternberg Press, New York, 2009)
Watch almost any new building under construction and you’ll see a process of occlusion: a concrete lift core will emerge first, followed by a concrete or steel frame, then fluffy pads of insulation. Finally, the surface, the glass, wood, tile or titanium skin, is applied to hide what actually keeps the thing up. This is all very 19th-century. Writing about Victorian architecture (in a later era that fetishized displayed supports), Siegfried Giedion claimed that the obscured or (occasionally) daringly uncovered iron frames were ‘the unconscious of architecture’.
With the sheathing of these supports comes the hiding of labour and technology, providing a false, seamless image of both. These hidden support structures are among those listed and catalogued in the enormous anthology, or rather ‘manual’, Support Structures. The book is often literal and figural about these supports. There are images of the wooden structures that hold up buildings in the shadow of Mount Etna, archive texts by Friedrich Kiesler and El Lissitzky that imagine an architecture of nothing but frames, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s structure-baring carvings into the skin of buildings. Elsewhere, the definition is more elliptical, referring to generalized ideas about care, framing, arts funding and ‘community’ art. The ungainliness of the expanded definition can be gleaned from the fact that editor Céline Condorelli includes no less than six explanatory prefaces.
Much of Support Structures exemplifies a currently rather common art discourse which is hard to criticize – it’s so ingenuous in its soft-left politics and so careful in its avoidance of grand claims or potentially divisive opinions that it actively discourages critical engagement. The structure behind the prose here is the influence of Structuralism and its successors: and ‘in a Foucauldian sense’ is a common prefix – but the harshness of a writer like Foucault is missing. A similar language is used whether writing about multicultural art projects in Portsmouth or the framing systems used by various Old Master painters. It’s eventually frustrating, a relentless pleasantness which verges on piety and vapidity, partly because of its vague, gauzy intangibility.
Accordingly, the most interesting contributions show the authors snapping out of this style, into something more, well, structured. A dialogue between Eyal Weizman and Rony Brauman on the military implications of ‘Humanitarian Support’ is practically alarming after being lulled by chic photos and elliptical prose; similarly, Jaime Stapleton’s ‘Support for Culture’ is a sharp, rueful discussion of art, copyright and neo-liberalism. Both pieces have abundant and intriguing footnotes, as per the anthology’s focus on underpinnings and frames.
Support Structures’ combination of theory, interviews and (occasionally rather canonical) archive material, balanced with some more concrete attempts to put its ideas into practice, has much potential, but never quite fuses into something coherent. Perhaps what it’s missing is the willingness to pare down extraneous features. One of the documents excerpted here is The Economist’s ‘Style Book’, a series of draconian rules for writers, to encourage clarity of expression. Most likely it’s here as another example of hidden ‘supports’ – but a few of its more ruthless recommendations would not have gone amiss.
Owen Hatherley
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