Marcus Herse

Catalog publication for Your Shell is Made of Air, with Chris Burden, Molly Corey, Cayetano Ferrer, Dan Graham, Lia Halloran, Olga Koumoundouros, Aaron Garber Maikovska, Alex McDowell, Isaac Resnikoff, Geoff Tuck

January 27-February 28, 2014, Chapman University

Drifting between the Shells: Of Magnetic Levitation, Silent Spectacles and Psychological Derives

A long time before Geoff Tuck began to follow the local art scene and to write about art in Los Angeles on his blog Notes on Looking, he was looking around without taking too many notes. The territory of his journeys was the Hollywood of the late 70s, where as a youthful man he was indulging in the activity of cruising for other men: younger, older, same age, same difference. His installation I was young at night, and now it’s morning (curriculum vita)” (2011-2013) presents to us a multiple dimensional view of the reflections of these explorations into a man’s mind, and the gay Hollywood night. The mural-size, childlike painting on the wall, a hand drawn map of the area, presents a psycho-geographical transcript of the corresponding YouTube videos that we can watch on our cell phone. Scribbly black lines stand in for roads and mix with arrows pointing to street names and comments: “here I fell in Love”, “handcuffed and questioned in 1973 hustling and drug use”, and “other cooler braver guys hang out here”. The accompanying series of photos of the ground was taken mostly before and after studio visits. Some have dedications on the back, such as: ”On the day Mike Kelley died, Julian Hoeber posted the news on fb”. They are Take-Away’s, fleeting like the moments Geoff relates them to. 

Shot in the unusual upright format, the artist’s shadow on the sidewalk enters the video’s frame for a long moment, filling it vertically and emphasizing that the street cannot be thought of by itself, but only in relation to human experience. As he walks and remembers, we hear about guys, cute and pursuable, others dangerous and better not to mingle with. In Tuck’s humorously self-deprecating c’est la vie kind of tone, we hear about sexual activities in back allies, his cultural snobbism, namely his disapproval of the quintessentially gay sound of disco, and his preference for the young punk movement. He remembers these nights 30 years later in the broad daylight of an L.A. afternoon, sobered up, humble, and older. Wiser? Probably. 

The gaze onto the ground reveals a highly dynamic, shifting composition while the point-of-view video and soliloquy audio slings us inside his head, making the retrospective introspection a first-hand experience for the viewer. A bit like staring into fire, the changing patterns and colors on the sidewalk turn abstract. The shadow of a metal fence. A bright yellow curb cuts in, and competes with the slicing sunlight. Traces of spray paint delineating objects that once lay here imply the memory of the street, carrying indexical information. Tuck’s walk is as much a literal one as it is a representation; It is travel as the image of passing through life. With his squiggling floor-o-rama, he may be paying homage to Sol LeWitt’s series of “Manhole Covers”, part of a collection of photos published in the 1978 book PhotoGrids, (1) showing a phenomenology of these metal plates found on the sidewalk, as he virtually uncovers some manholes from his past. As much as his boyishly charming revelations of intimate encounters with strangers give away, most of what is being said does not have the descriptive detail to form a cohesive narrative. Instead, the images he conjures stay pleasantly blurry, like memories do, dreamlike. His drifting becomes our drifting. In the truest sense of the Duchampian demand that the viewer may complete the work, our mental drifting completes the work while the video lays out a field that allows for the drift, concealed as a soliloquy. Geoff Tuck’s installation is an example for a psychologicalspin-off of this Situationist technique, performed in thevery urban environment that has produced the world’smost spectacular ongoing spectacle, the entertainmentindustry of Hollywood. Drifting and the inflationaryre-re-reproduction of images were the core of theanalysis set forth by Situationist International primetheoretician Guy Debord in his critical essay TheSociety of the Spectacle.

Published in 1967, the text constitutes a radical accusation of western industrial society, capitalism and the subjection to the commodity fetishism implied in it. Philosophically based on Hegel and Marx the book was a major influence on the French Student revolt in Paris in 1968. Debord was an advocate of the abolition of art, or of representation by and large, which he saw as part of the capitalist spectacle of mass media, movies and the abundance of images. The poetry that up until then resided in art, and in all representation, was supposed to break out and enter everyday life, therefore rendering representation and art useless altogether. This poetry taken to the street was also to be found in a new way of approaching urban space.

“In psychogeography, a dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, on which the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct the travellers, with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience. Situationist theorist Guy Debord defines the dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” (3)

Back in the 1950’s, when this claim was first made, no one could anticipate the imminent arrival of a new kind of flaneur, who sprung like the movie world from Los Angeles, and who would give new meaning to the adjective “rapid” in the description of the dérive.

“..the theoretical approach skateboarding encourages is one of possibility. Think of a dynamic design by Rem Koolhaas, one which is open to a myriad of appropriations and improvisations by the user – a design approach which frankly rejects established uses and accepted intentions.” (4)

In her series Dark Skate  Lia Halloran, who has been skating since her youth and was as a teenager featured in Thrasher Magazine, skates through urban structures along the non-spaces of L.A., its rivers, run offs, riverbanks, and dams. Equipped with a bicyclist’s light strapped around her wrist, and photographed by a companion in an extended exposure, the wiggling, ghostlike inscriptions imprinted on the picture are traces of her movement through these otherwise dead urban spaces, and are all that remain of her performative intervention. Vanishing right after their creation, the streaks of light remind us little of flashes, but of the elegant curves and swirls that resemble the illustrations of quarks and other subatomic particles, when collided. A visual echo of the fleetingness of human passage through the structures they create. Aside the beauty and the technical sophistication of these exposures there are subtle political overtones to them. Halloran, a proponent of queer rights, lovingly mocks both the patronizing über-masculine, testosterone-ridden painter Pablo Picasso, who made this use of light and photography iconic in 1949 (with the help of LIFE Magazine Photographer Gjon Mili) as well as the cool seriousness of the predominantly male sport of skateboarding. In a refreshingly lighthearted incarnation, her photo-skate-painting merges the aforementioned with the technoid look of Tron and the free-associated scribbles of Abstract Expressionism. The large exposure in the exhibition, however, is not taken in L.A., but in Vienna, Austria, and shows the Stephansdom in the background, which has a building history reaching back to the 1230’s. In the foreground we see a skate park, which is safe to say does not pre-date the second World War, in which Vienna was bombed 52 times. 87,000 houses of the city were lost, 20 percent of the entire city.

Modernism placed all its hopes into architecture. Here more than in the fields of painting or sculpture was the possibility for man to find reconciliation with the world he had parted with. After the War and the destruction of large parts of existing urban structures, there was a chance for architects to realize modernist concepts on a massive scale previously unknown. Unfortunately these architects were not all equipped with Mies van der Rohe’s high standards in choice of material, nor could they live up to the ethical statutes of a Le Corbusier. This readily available mass produced type of postwar architecture, derivative of the international style we see today in cities all over Europe, has as much in common with the modernistic creeds as does ikea furniture with Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair.

“Compared to older avant-garde movements the Situationist International was equipped with a highly differentiated economical, sociological and political analysis of late capitalism, which enabled them to critique the architecture of modernism, and its new urbanism under whose flag the expropriation and mutilation of modern everyday life is addressed.”(2)Formed in 1957, the Situationist International subsumeda number of postwar and neo-avant-gardemovements, such as the Lettrists International, theDutch C.O.B.R.A.-Group, as well a the ItalianM.I.B.I. (Mouvement International pour un BauhausImaginist), all of which were interested in changingsocietal realities through aesthetic concepts and aconsequential life-practical application. After onlytwo years, from 1957 to 1959, Dutch artist ConstantNiewenhuis left the group. Influenced by theS.I.’s thoughts about city environments, he beganthe work on a utopian architectural vision of monumentalintellectual scale, which would occupy hisartistic output for the next decade. Between 1959and 1969 he laid out his design for a postindustrial urban infrastructure, in which future man would reside or rather trek as nomads from sector to sector of this engineered web that was eventually thought to span the entire globe. The project was called New Babylon and its inhabitants conceived as a new type of human being, Homo Ludens, the playing man. Freed from the burdens of labor by an automatized economy, this new breed was thought to indulge in the endless possibilities of creative play that the structure would offer. For Constant, the arrival of New Babylon was inevitable, a societal necessity born out of the newly formed mechanism of a postindustrial culture of mass production, and the belief that architecture itself would instigate the transformation of everyday life. To illustrate the idea of the situationist city, Constant made plexiglas and wire models as well as paintings, and despite the fuzziness of the actual activities that were to be realized in the structure, this vision originally termed Drift City (Dériville)proposes radical utopian sentiment. Constant, like Le Corbusier and other modernist architects, shared the belief that architecturepossesses a healing power that would curesociety. The housing silos that were erected in thename of modernism in postwar Europe are witness toa diametrically opposite reality.

Production designer Alex McDowell is an heir to this reality of postwar and contemporary residential construction. His two part installation Drives the World(Prototype) 2044,  and Drives the World (Narrative)2050,  shows the elaborate magnetic levitation traffic system in a proposed future Washington. Restricted by zoning laws, the suburban parts of the city move across the Potomac River to sprout vertically, giving way to the idea of a magnetic freeway system that propels traffic through the city in a truly 3-dimensional way. This vision of future urban transportation, with its swirling on and off ramps, distribution tracks and humungous circular gyratory systems, owes as much to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,  as it does to the utopian 60’s visions of urban development from Superstudio to Archigram.

In the video loop, the Maglev Lexus Vehicle (MagLev, short for Magnetic Levitation)  becomes a skateboard onsteroids, a designer rodeo ride for the fugitive heroof this Spielberg movie, Tom Cruise, who can’t helpbecoming something of an involuntary skater in ascene that reads like homage to Chaplin’s Modern Times, or Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last.  We rememberthe iconic ballet in which Chaplin is being swallowedby a conveyer belt into the innards of themachine, the giant cogged wheels caressing Chaplinin a full body massage, while he, as if to say “thankyou”, simultaneously tightens the machines’ nuts andbolts. Likewise in Lloyd’s vertiginous performanceon the ledge outside a high rise, the arm of a giantclock comes in handy as Lloyd reaches for it justbefore he falls.

Cruise on the contrary doesn’t find much of a grip on McDowell’s streamlined, much sleeker, “armless” machine. It’s a slippery nucleus, whose luxuriousness is radiating a sort of malicious joy. If this capsule doesn’t contain you like an egg, it won’t let you quite near it, and so we see Cruise barely holding on as the Lexus descends down a staggering waterfall of cars. The comparison of Chaplin and Lloyd with Cruise’s cliffhanger is analogous to the shift in our image of machines from the enthusiastic and utopian outlook of early internationalism to a utilitarian, unromantic view of machines and computers in the globalized present. Who is the driver in Drives theWorld?  It is not the human subject that is in control here, but the forces of late capitalism, which disclose themselves in the invisible hands of computerized transportation and command the fugitive’s vehicle back to his pursuers. This may be a prophetic outlook into a future, where control by legislative forces is as common as retinal scans and  personalized commercials in the shopping mall, and doesn’t stir much protest any more. It is portrayed as daily life and lacking the dystopian accusation of say 1984  or Brazil. McDowells’ vehicle proposes a submission to the machine, to the efficiency of technology, stripped of the dystopian horrors that were once inscribed in them, and hereby creating a whole new one, which is: The spectacle has merged with the spectator. In automated commuting there is no human interference needed, and the driver is condemned to passivity and becomes driven by the system.

This however is not purely McDowell’s artistic vision, but the design for a movie that unfolds according to the rules of its story. Unlike the contemporary studio artist whose primary objective is thought to be to question the conditions and status of his inquiry, McDowell puts his work in the service of the story. In the case of Minority Report  it was a group of experts from the fields of science to economy, who helped develop this future world. Herein, however, we can insinuate that in an ensemble of creative people, visions are being developed collaboratively, and exactly within this creative fellowship we see a reflection of Constant’s maximum demand of New Babylon. In the twisted way that the prophecy always comes true, the entertainment industry is perhaps one step closer than everybody else to the realization of Constant’s nomadic playing man. McDowell has underlined the importance of Minority Report  for his design practice in countless interviews, not just remarking on the usual transference from an analog to a digital workflow, but on the possibilities it implies. Much of this is owed to the use of the previsualization software introduced into McDowell’s practice with Minority Report,  and the way it releases all the departments from the linear top to bottom workflow of development, pre-production, production, postproduction, distribution. This permeable workflow allows alterations to the film from more participants at more given moments. Even if this evolution to a truly collaborative process is incomplete, it constitutes at the very least a process unrivaled in collaborative potential. It is in its consequence an audacious vision, which art has dreamed of since the beginnings of modernism, but couldn’t yet realize.

In Aaron Garber Maikovska’s Video Installation a department store and its parking lot serve as the backdrop for the artist’s tête-à-tête with a tree island in what could be a re-interpretation of Chaplin’s Modern Times  titled Post-Postmodern Times.  The patch of concrete delineated soil with the tree at its center is Garber Maikovska’s stage. Here the artist goes through a set of motions, a dance routine, a series of moves in a game, as he trips over the concrete, placing invisible elements in the air, operating an imagined interface, planning a grand scheme, stretching, rehearsing. Garber Maikovska goes through the moves as if in preparation for a forthcoming event, indicating the model character of this silent spectacle that never shifts into the theatrical or dramatic, but sojourns quietly and transitionally. Like the moves themselves, the performance seems provisional, not beginning or ending. What appears to be something of a language tilts into the simple presence of the moves, the artist and the world. The grace of his performance lies in its utter seriousness, while simultaneously evoking a comedy that doesn’t develop a punch line. Remember Kippenberger’s “the art of telling a joke?” It’s the art that avoids the punch line at all costs, and always finds a new loophole in the story, drawing it out longer and longer, much to the displeasure of the listener (Think of Lieutenant Columbo’s technique). Aaron Garber Maikovska’s improvisational videos owe much to silent cinema, from Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd to French filmmaker Jaques Tati and his character Monsieur Hulot and Jerry Lewis. He carries on the tradition of the character of the misfit, not quite belonging in the scene he finds himself in, but in his improvisation demonstrates an unexpected purpose and intelligence. Chaplin’s hogged wheel, Lloyd’s clock, and maybe Cruise’s Lexus have been exchanged for Kitchens, Fast Food Restaurants,  and Department Stores, which serve as the sets for an exploration of human potential off of the predetermined tracks offered by the spectacle we are consuming and are consumed by today; another possible phenotype of Constant’s playing man. As quiet and private as the performance comes in, the structure which incorporates the video monitor is intrusive, a toppled over stand of sorts that elongates the artist’s performance into the exhibition space by inviting or even forcing the viewer to face the problem of interacting with it, much like Garber Maikovska encounters the world.

The search for a new life that would manifest in a corresponding architecture is the topic of Molly Corey’s Installation The Dome Project.  Consisting of the video Home Movies, The Redrocks, 1969-1972,and a series of geodesic domes, constructed out of photographic images from the artist’s families archive and her own ongoing image production. The protagonists of the video namely the artist’s mother Mary Corey and her father John Eddy decided together with a dozen or so other people to venture out to the open planes of Huerfano Valley in Southern Colorado, where they began to construct the largest geodesic dome ever erected by a group of amateurs. Her parents belonged to a generation that came of age in the politically charged and utopia-rich climate of the late 60’s, and were more than sympathetic to the progressive and revolutionary political ideas that circulated at the time. The super-8 footage shows the familiar images of longhaired idealists, playing guitar, discussing, cooking and working with the confidence and awareness of dreaming up something as profound as the acropolis. The interviews with her parents and their friend David Ansen that underlie the super-8 footage and were conducted some 30 years later in the early 2000s, reveal an almost antithetical picture of a sobered up awareness, as the former societal drop outs confront their past with great austerity. The geodesic dome as a revolutionary structure re-introduces the idea of architecture possessing healing powers, and the images of the community sharing an admittedly humungous interior, even though there are no walls to provide private space, display the group’s dedication to the experiment of a communal and shared life world permeable and open in all conceivable ways. The most important insight for the group however came with the advent of their children (of which Corey was one) as the ultimate reality, which disrupted all preconceived notions of how life had to be and proved any theoretical system to be inadequate. Quintessentially Corey’s installation is testament to the amazing revolutionary, yet evanescent energy that burst over the globe in the years between ‘68-‘72, and that disappeared as quickly as it arrived.

In an abstracted poetic maneuver, Isaac Resnikoff plays on the experiment character of settlements and representation in his 5 photo series Making a Town.The same cardboard facades are dispersed on a soft hill slope vegetated with weeds and grasses, each of the photos showing a different configuration of the “town” that never definitely manifests, but stays in an aggregate and potential state. Because the photos are widely spaced, it is impossible to see all of the incarnations at once, and we have to rely on our memory to unite the 5 photos to one work. Does it matter that there are different configurations? This can be said to be Resnikoff’s main inquiry, which extends beyond this series. Most recently he served an alcoholic beverage at one of his gallery openings that can only be called Franken-Wine. Chemically identical with “real” wine, this product was the result of assembling the chemical building blocks in a way that would produce the “illusion” of “real” wine. Wine as sculpture. In Making a Town  the question is not, if the work is convincing as a reality, but rather what we choose to accept as our limitations, thinking about the “real” reality. When Cardboard doubles stand in for another double, the façade, essentially a mask for a building, to simulate the possibility of a configuration of a settlement not in one, but in five versions we are confronted with the drama of our freedom and confinement in our nature as symbol making creatures. Thinking as sculpture.

Thinking about architecture in terms of representation has a similar twist, since it is a representation that is always a reality at the same time. What does it represent? The image that the human mind creates of how we want the world to welcome us. Herein lies a crucial point and the reason why urbanism and architecture are fields that were and are fought over so fiercely, from the situationist critique on modernist architecture and the corbusian belief that architecture can and will make a better society to contemporary concepts of organic forms or intelligence based design. Rather than a product of human civilization, architecture is one of the elemental conditions of human civilization, and as such inextricably connected to the body of humans, to society at large, like a mollusk to its shell.

1.PhotoGrids. Sol LeWitt. David Paul Press/ Rizzoli, New York, 1977.

2.Juri Steiner New Babylon. Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Paris Zwischen Second

Empire und 1968, (translated from German to English by the author)

3.Wikipedia

4.Quirk, Vanessa. “Why Skateboarding Matters to Architecture” 21

Jun 2012. ArchDaily. Accessed