Modernism as a Ruin: an Archaeology of the Present
Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria
Imagining New York at the beginning of the 1970s shouldn’t be very hard, as the resemblances to the present day are plenty: the dollar was down; an energy crisis loomed; the middle class was being leached from the city to the suburbs. The dystopian blight they left behind, however, proved to be lush fodder for those contemplating the errant ideals of growth and progress gone wayward. This brings us to the starting point of ‘Modernism as a Ruin: an Archaeology of the Present’, a 12-person group show that spans the last half century.
Curated by Sabine Folie, the exhibition hews mostly to the formal and aesthetic aspects of ruins. There are pseudo-historic etchings, films with the now tiresomely recurrent Socialist housing blocks, an abundance of trash and sculptures out of materials that once promised a brighter future: steel, concrete, glass. The media themselves are redolent of decay: Gordon Matta-Clark’s gritty 16mm films (Fire Child, 1971 and Conical Intersect, 1975) are recently restored, though the cardboard mount of Dan Graham’s collage of corporate glass atriums (Private “Public” Space: The Corporate Atrium Garden, 1987), is yellowing, while Cyprien Gaillard’s recent Polaroids (Geographical Analogies, 2009) seem to fade as we hover over them.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect (1975)
As a result, the show looks so seamless and consistent that quiet doubt begins to creep in. Why does everything seem the same? Is it possible that the exhibition’s stated themes of entropy, ruins and bricolage haven’t evolved in significance over the intervening decades? For example, the anti-hierarchic rules of construction explored by the recycled materials and modular forms of Yona Friedman’s 1959 Ville spatiale sculptures appear similarly valid for Rob Voerman’s industrial highrise-cum-treehouses (Worldviews, 2003 and Ohne Titel, 2004), which seem to materialize from splintered two-by-fours. Elsewhere, Giuseppe Gabellone’s mirror sculpture (Untitled, 2006), in which sword-like protrusions disembody viewers’ reflections and threaten to impale its own surroundings, seems to be Robert Smithson’s 1965 Four-Sided Vortex in reverse.
Giuseppe Gabellone, Untitled (2006)
Certainly, the spectacle of dismantling architecture, the novelty of chronicling its grand failures rather than proposing alternatives, has faded. Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) – a roof loaded with dirt to the point of collapse – and Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect film (1975) – a physical biopsy of a house in a neighborhood slated for destruction in order to make way for the Centre Pompidou, itself marking a new model of transparency – appear as critical, yet intensely personal gestures. But what Matta-Clark criticized architects for – their incapability of acting in a time of urban decline – resounds in Cyprien Gaillard’s three-act film Desniansky Raion (2007). Images of cheap housing blocks on a mass-scale in the Novi Beograd area of Belgrade, an organized street fight in St. Petersburg, a Paris suburb and footage from Kiev are romanticized with music by French composer Koudlam that hovers between a dirge and wistful pop. Failed development is made even more sublime in Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij’s ten-minute film Bantar Gebang (2000). The sun rises over an Indonesian slum built atop a dump, while resident chickens stir to life.
Cyprien Gaillard, Desniansky Raion (2007)
It seems that a fictional sort of architecture is taking the place of once grand visions – this is the point at which architecture goes beyond the notion of a tabula rasa and maybe even beyond itself. Smithson coyly reads the past from the future in Hotel Palenque, his 1969 slideshow lecture on a hotel (under construction yet already decrepit) in the Yucatan. While his students can be heard snickering in the background in a recording that plays alongside the slides, he observes the wreckage through his sci-fi lens and identifies a former moat, a grand dancehall framed by imported Spanish moss and other signs of Mayan Baroque. Gaillard similarly collapses time and place in his Rembrandt-like etchings, where housing blocks are overwhelmed by nature, overgrown with brush. Voerman works like an archaeologist in reverse, using artifacts from the present to fashion a future with what looks like a physical realization of one of his drawings. Commissioned by the Generali Foundation, Voerman used refuse and odds and ends (including stained glass, cardboard, as well as personal effects) to build a hut that fires off associations to everywhere at once: cathedral, bar, favela and bedroom.
Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque (1969)
Perhaps Voerman’s hut best encapsulates the exhibition’s tentative reminder that it is demoralizing – even painful – to abstain from the habit of chasing after change and progress. If his work appears to be camouflaged in the same-looking materials, perhaps it is emblematic of what Ulrich Beck calls a ‘Second Modernism’, which follows the collapse Modernism and incorporates its failings. As Smithson saw it, the inevitable process of entropy should eventually bring the world to a state of ‘all-encompassing’ sameness – a gradual, spontaneous equilibrium that is the stage at which ‘Modernism as a Ruin’ seems to eventually settle in. But at a time when politicians and finance ministers the world over are quietly contemplating no-growth scenarios, agreeing to settle has never seemed so radical.
Helen Chang
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