Benjamin H. Sutton: February 2009

Wicked Artsy: Whatever Remains

In the latest edition of my L Magazine art column I take a look at three exhibitions on the Lower East Side that ask us to picture events and the systems that produced them based on their aftermath. The image at right is from Andrea Tese's photography exhibition Boats Against the Current at Heist Gallery. Read about it here.

Reading Response 3 (Week 5)

One of the recurring tensions in Lynn Spiegel's Make Room For TV is the relationship between lived and mediated experiences of class. She explains that the television's "rapid dissemination to the middle and even lower classes after 1948 transformed it into a poor person's luxury" (49-50). In these early stages, then, television was incorporated into the fairly stable class structure of 1930s and 1940s America. As the medium's influence spread and the economic boom of the 1950s offered many a suburban lifestyle, however, television took on a more active role in shaping the ways Americans thought about and experienced class. As she writes on page 84: "The television producer could educate the housewife beyond her means, but only through mixing upper-class fantasies with tropes of averageness." Already here, Spiegel identifies a way in which television – to borrow an idea from Umberto Eco – opens a window between working-class and upper-class households.

Suddenly, although the archetypal nuclear family model of the period lives in a private suburban home, the television opens these enclosed households up to the fictionalized private home on the studio set. More often than not – both in Spiegel's examples and in more recent television – the fictional television show home presents the working-class viewer with a fantasy home. Television's relationship to America's class-coded household architecture presents a fascinating example of the manner in which the mediated spaces of televisual homes can impact the lived experience, construction and decoration of lower- and middle-class homes (and later vice-versa as programs set in working-class milieus developed their own consumable class-coded iconography).

With television, the three-walled, big-budgeted soundstage home of the prime-time family becomes the model home for millions of viewers, peering every week into a mediated upper-class fantasy through their televisual windows. Television, then, doesn't simply offer the vicarious experience of living in a more comfortable class position, it opens the upper-class home up to consumption by the lower- and middle-income families. Perhaps the larger home represented in prime-time family programming isn't affordable to working-class viewers, but its design, decoration, layout and modes of use are suddenly closer at hand. Television doesn't just offer a vision of another class, it offers an adaptable version of class experience. In this way, the opening of windows onto all manner of class-coded homes – including the palatial Los Angeles mansion of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the elegant condo in Frasier (pictured above) and the comfortable apartment on Seinfeld, but also the working class homes of Roseanne and The Drew Carey Show – blurs distinctions between architectural styles.

The iconography of the wealthy household, once ensconced in the private residence, is now available for plundering every evening at 8pm. Likewise, the charms of the working-class home – however faithfully represented – offer a readily available architectural fantasy. The American home, since the spread of television, has become a field of class-coded signifiers increasingly detached from an identifiable class experience, available for consumption in, and assimilation through the home.

Crossing Over

Don't miss my review of the latest superficial Hollywood engagement with timely immigration policies, Crossing Over, at The L Magazine. The film stars Harrison Ford playing a worn out immigration officer and the multicultural cast of immigrants chasing the American Dream all over L.A. Read the review here.

Wicked Artsy: Fashionably Artsy

In this week's edition of my art column Wicked Artsy – since this week is New York Fashion Week – I address three exhibitions that feature or deal with fashion photography and iconography. Miles Aldridge, whose work is featured at right, is one of the artists in the exhibition Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now at the International Center of Photography. Click here to read my article.

I LEGO N.Y.

In a recent post to his New York Times blog Abstract City, Christoph Niemann posted a series of pictures he'd taken at his home in Germany of New York City landmarks big and small that he'd recreated out of LEGO. Though it may seem innocuous, this little project speaks volumes about how fluent New Yorkers are with the visual iconography and language of architecture and urbanism (and LEGO). The whole series is here.

Reading Response 2 (Week 4)

Beatriz Colomina's claim in the first week's reading that the house is "the most important vehicle for the investigation of architectural ideas in th[e twentieth] century" immediately stood out as a claim worth thoughtful debate. As the century that saw the rise (and peaking and beginnings of decline) of the American empire and its variety of predatory capitalism, perhaps its attendant architecture of choice – the office building – merits serious consideration for this dubious title. The high-rise office, unlike many homes, functions on two architectural fronts that are increasingly inseparable: the symbolic and the physical.

We encounter office buildings through representations (in media coverage, official literature, online discussions, etc.) and through personal experience (as a construction worker, employee, tourist, passerby, etc.). All this week's writers grappled with the massive ambitions represented in the architectural forms of corporate headquarters and the general dissatisfaction with working conditions within these structures. How do architects, developers, executives and employees negotiate the shifting borders between buildings intended as symbolic vehicles of corporate identity and as spaces for working employees? This problem arises especially in the new media offices visited by Andrew Ross in Silicon Alley and in the tensions between old- and new-media office archetypes found at the IAC headquarters in Shannon Mattern's article.

It seems almost fitting that the faltering American media industry should be the focus of these studies of buildings where the use of architecture as a medium has superseded its function as an inhabited space. Perhaps an ideal solution to this dichotomy, which Reinhold Martin shows has an architecturally rich history and evolution that includes Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Lever House building (seen under construction in 1952 above), lies in the digital landscapes where these companies do the majority of their work. As many of last week's writers suggested, digital architecture provides infinitely more possibilities than – and nearly none of the risks of – built environments. Rather than build a costly, inflexible structure for vast sums of money – as companies covered in Mattern and Martin's articles have done – a digital building with adjustable proportions, layouts, ornaments and designs might offer many new media companies a more appropriate architectural symbol.

Employees could have access to all areas of this virtual environment, freedom to pick where the information related to their job is displayed and have a say in the constantly adjusted appearance of the building on the company's website. Similarly, users, readers and customers could travel through this space to access products and information, and could even be consulted in the ongoing redesign process. The building could be structured around some original architect's vision – or not – but once inaugurated its functioning, layout and appearance would respond to the needs and preferences of its most frequent users. Evidently, this virtual solution doesn't solve the problem of an actual physical office from where media labor is done, but it seems capable of solving certain problems that lead companies to focus on architecture's representational function at the expense of its physical usability.

Filmscene: Friday the 13th

Check out the massive review-by-way-of-discussion that Henry Stewart and I wrote for The L Magazine about the latest (and 12th) installment in Jason Voorhees's Friday the 13th franchise (which, of course, opens today).

Wicked Artsy: Placeless Places

Check out this week's edition of my art column Wicked Artsy for The L Magazine. In it I review three exhibitions currently on show in Williamsburg, including Bernard Williams's show at Slate Gallery (pictured at right).

Brian Dewan: Housed at Pierogi Gallery

The delightful exhibition currently on view at Williamsburg's Pierogi gallery (177 North 9th Street, between Bedford and Driggs Avenues) takes a parodic look at a very specific genre of building: the retirement home. Dewan has not only built a model showroom for his ficitonal assisted living facility Williams Meadow, but has constructed an entire narrative around its founder and a truly ridiculous social experiment conducted through the facility's incredibly hierarchical and absurd operations. The slideshow presentation that runs on a loop in the gallery is hilarious, and turns a critical eye on an architectural institution that is rarely investigated yet completely central to our socio-cultural values and norms. Brian Dewan's Housed is on display until March 8.

Reading Response 1 (Week 3)

This week's readings engaged in very different, and between them very comprehensive, analyses of the affinities between modern media and architecture. Discussions of circuitry, televisions, computers and networks all seemed to point more or less hopefully in the direction of a digital democracy founded on dematerialized forms with modular reassembly capabilities.

One topic I found especially interesting and that was taken up especially in Mark Wigley's "The Architectural Brain" and Aaron Betsky's "A virtual reality" is the idea that in our hyper-mediated society the surfaces and forms of bodies, buildings and networks become indistinguishable. Or rather, as Betsky has it, architects strive to make their designs indistinguishable from the digital tools with which they were created. While he views this trend towards architecture as an expression of our digital times poorly formulated, indulgent and as a process that seldom produces a successful building, Wigley posits a much more hopeful diagnosis, albeit arrived at via the investigation of artifacts and manifestos rather than completed building projects. The questions both seem to arrive at, questions Lev Manovich's article addresses more hopefully, are: "How does our total devotion to digital media and knowledge impact our relationship to space, and how should our spaces be constructed differently in light of that changing relationship?"

Interestingly, I found one of Paul Virilio's examples provided maybe the best way of thinking of this relationship between built environment and digital technology. His discussion of the television as a window from the living room onto the entire world that facilitates viewers' atrophy provides a helpful precedent in understanding how architecture might respond more cautiously to media technology. In the case of the suburban home, whose television and garage are its structuring elements, technology effectively eclipsed centuries of traditional home design in favor of completely unsustainable communities. Clearly, the stakes are very high, and to re-organize our entire system for living around a technology that is constantly evolving and perpetually consuming energy seems imprudent. Perhaps, as Manovich and Betsky seem to be advocating, the most elaborate and experimental adaptations of digital technology into architecture belong in public spaces and art galleries, where they are open to contemplation, experimentation and public scrutiny, rather than in spheres of direct influence like the home and office.

Many writers and architects seem over-eager to adapt the newest technologies to their latest building projects, and there is an unfortunate impulse towards throwing caution to the wind in favor of the new. Not to sound like a pessimist, but a little patience and planning will go a long way towards making our mediated architectural hybrids more livable, durable and sustainable.

Make It Work. Engineering Possibilities

The current exhibition at the Center for Architecture chronicles the ways in which new architecture and design technologies are bringing together the long-separated roles of architect and engineer. It's a fascinating look at an extremely concrete way that new media and technology are shaping architectural practice. Throughout there are also a few examples of projects by non-architects created using architectural software and technology, offering an optimistic diagnosis of the digital age's democratic possibilities. The exhibition at the Center for Architecture continues until April 25.

It's been forever and a day since I posted anything to this blog, but I'm trying to be better about staying updated and linking to my work elsewhere.

I've been writing full time for the list-themed blog Listicles.

I've been writing my usual slate of film, music and art reviews for The L Magazine (Taken, The Lodger, Serbis, Donkey Punch, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Notorious, Top 10 of 2008, Dust, Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak, Beyonce's I Am... Sasha Fierce).

I've begun a weekly art column Wicked Artsy for The L Magazine's blog (first installment: Meaning in Saturation).

An article I wrote about Chelsea's elevated public park The High Line appeared on the cover of the latest issue of ARTisSpectrum Magazine.

And a recent academic article on hip hop and Busta Rhymes will be posted soon.

Also, as I begin a new class entitled "Media and Architecture" I will be posting related materials on a regular basis.