Reading Response 5 (Week 9)

Jean-Louis Cohen and Beatriz Colomina's analyses of Le Corbusier's integration of various media to further his architectural projects underlined something we often forget: the various distortions that images of a building or project can introduce to the actual design. Colomina puts this most bluntly on page 15 of "Le Corbusier and Photography", writing: "Images are not used to 'illustrate' the text; rather they construct the text." Nicolai Ouroussoff's New York Times article of April 20, 2008 entitled "Now You See It, Now You Don't" addresses similar concerns: the manipulative digital constructions and pseudo-photographic representations architects and developers use to promote their projects. Here, as in Colomina's Le Corbusier examples, doctored images hold as much weight as buildings themselves: the distinction between sign and referent, object and image breaks down.

Ouroussof's larger argument – something Colomina avoids in favor of portraying Le Corbusier as a pioneering guru of photography and advertising – was that completed constructions can be extremely disappointing if these representations are looked at uncritically. This is clearly a problem in New York today, where luxury condo developments come with high-concept visual campaigns. Finished, some look passable at a distance, but they're often poorly constructed and designed from street level and inside. This same problem – prioritizing mediated views over embodied experience – struck me in the two Le Corbusier buildings I'm most familiar with: the Unité d'Habitation housing project in Marseille (1952) and the Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp (1954).

Both are in relatively isolated settings, nearly "eliminating the site," and "mak[ing] architecture into an object relatively independent of place" (Colomina 4). In Ronchamp this isn't so problematic. Ascending a steep hill from the village towards the building turns the visit into a kind of pilgrimage, and the beautiful site offers terrific vistas onto the surrounding valley. Even here, though, architecture seems organized especially for photographic and filmic vision. Observed from the access road or village below (as seen at top), the chapel appears as it was intended to be seen: a building both dominant and soft, posturing while peeling back its roof and corners with inviting curves. From the other side (only accessible on foot), the building is completely mediocre (as seen above).

The shortcomings of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation are much greater. The building features over 300 apartments, housing a veritable village within its suspended structure. Located off a six-lane parkway far from the dense city grid, the building's cast concrete structure sits on pylons, lifting it off the ground (as seen at right). This impressive feat of engineering isolates inhabitants from the surrounding geography, forcing all community activities onto a roof terrace (seen below) that features beautiful views but fosters insularity. Here, again, what Le Corbusier dubbed "machines for living" may actually be "machines for seeing." How ironic that one of New York's most spectacular buildings under construction – Jean Nouvel's 100 Eleventh Avenue – was dubbed "the vision machine" but will, judging from the site and structure so far, be a disappointing living machine. Such discrepancies are the highest stake in this art of architectural representation.

Filmscene: Monsters vs. Aliens

Check out Henry Stewart and I's Filmscene double-review of Monsters vs. Aliens on The L Magazine's blog. In our back-and-forth e-discussion we look at the new Dreamworks 3D IMAX digital extravaganza as an allegory for homosexuality, a coded engagement with Guantanamo Bay and terrorism, ableism, sexism and nostalgia. Check out the entire review here.

The Secret Agenda of Trees

Check out my review of the current production at The Wild Project, The Secret Agenda of Trees. Set in a rural meat-packing plant, the play offers a bleak, but thankfully not dire and hopeless rendering of abject American poverty. Though its performances are not completely even and its pacing suffers some in the second half, eloquent set, lighting and sound design, and a stellar lead performance make this well worthwhile. Read my whole review here.

Wicked Artsy: Picturing Cultural Memory

Check out the latest edition of my weekly art column for The L Magazine, Wicked Artsy, in which I discuss three exhibitions that question how art reflects and shapes the ways we create, preserve and re-evaluate cultural heritage and memories. To say that art is simply a way of preserving a culture is incredibly naive, and all three exhibitions I addressed seemed aware – to one degree or another – that to mediate cultural memory is immediately to change and adapt it. The most sophisticated engagement with this double-edged impulse towards conservation was undertaken by Yeondoo Jung in his current show Handmade Memories (pictured at right) at Tina Kim Gallery. Read the whole article here.

Sin Nombre

Don't miss my review of Sin Nombre, the latest Sundance-wooing immigration movie. In this kinetic and beautiful Western-updating chase film, Cary Joji Fukunaga keeps the action coming and renders it all with beautiful cinematography and sharp editing. Sadly, this doesn't leave much time for us to pause and ask whether this deathrace to the border is worthwhile. Are the hardships of illegal immigration worth the supposed pay-off? Is making a movie about said hardships without asking the broader questions worthwhile? Read my review to find out.

Goodbye Solo

Check out my review of Rahmin Bahrani's latest film, Goodbye Solo, for The L Magazine. Continuing his stories of cultural outsiders struggling to achieve some scrap of the American Dream that's brought them so far, Solo tells the story of a Senegalese cab driver in Bahrani's hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As always, a subtle visual beauty and sense of craft makes Bahrani's humble films so much more than their synopses might suggest. Avoiding moral consecension or overblown story archs, they present simple stories of lives eeked out on the peripheries of brutally alienating systems. Read my whole review here.

Wicked Artsy: Fantasy Lives

Three current exhibitions throughout the city question our cultural ability to create, maintain and inhabit fantasies. Is there any room left for imaginary escape in a social context of pessimism and realism buffered with plentiful helpings of sarcasm? None of these artists have a surefire response, but the fantasy solutions they offer betray various degrees of hope, skepticism and uncertainty.

At Chelsea’s Gladstone Gallery, Thomas Hirschhorn has turned the traditional white cube space on its head with his DIY fitness center installation Universal Gym (above). Amidst mirrors, TV screens and magazine cutouts of airbrushed and bulging models, Hirschhorn finds our fantasies alive and fit, chasing imaginary bodies on treadmills. Everything here is satire and hyperbole: nonsensical fitness machines are made of duct tapped cardboard, empty plastic water bottles coalesce in clusters at certain stations and a giant black gym ball dominates the room. We’re still capable of fantasizing, Hirschhorn answers, but these days we only dream what we’re told to dream.


Visiting the exhibition of early Kenneth Anger shorts at P.S.1 – the visionary director’s first U.S. retrospective in over a decade – also approximates a journey into fantasy space. The repressed desires of his films are brilliantly installed in a room that feels like a gallery-sized collective unconscious. Every surface is covered in red rubber, with three screens hanging from the ceiling and three TVs on the floor. Two additional rooms are draped in more muted rubber wrapping and feature quieter pieces. In films from 1947 to 1981, Anger mobilizes a variety of narrative, visual and musical techniques to undermine the norms of the times. He turns the automobile iconography of syrupy postwar suburban nuclear family dreams into a gay musical by way of creepy car fetishism with Kustom Kar Komandos (1964-65, above). Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), meanwhile, seems critical of both the countercultural dreams it documents and the dominant culture it attacks. Anger’s fantasies and anti-fantasies have aged terrifically, and encountered in P.S.1’s primal red chamber, they return with all the force of forgotten dreams.


Back in Chelsea at David Zwirner, Lisa Yuskavage (above) doesn’t subvert the white cube convention, but offers a constructive, contemporary solution to the fantasy problem. Her oil paintings drip with sexuality, and mingle childhood and adult desires for discovery and pleasure. In what look like an acid-fueled updating of Gulliver’s Travels, backpack-sporting hikers head towards hill-sized nudes under ominous chemical skies. Like the carnivalesque body politics of that early English epic, Yuskavage’s bodies are spaces of pleasure and play but also colonization and danger. Her spectacular visions alternate between ecstasy and pain, and the feeling that gradually emerges is a reluctance to indulge the former for fear of causing the latter. The glistening bodies and pregnant landscapes of her paintings suggest – like Anger’s films – that the journey to fantasyland is worth the hardship. At least it’s healthier than the oppressive fantasies parodied in Hirschhorn’s work.

Thomas Hirschhorn: Universal Gym at Gladstone Gallery (gladstonegallery.com), 530 W 21st St (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), until April 11

Kenneth Anger at P.S.1 (ps1.org), 22-25 Jackson Ave (at 46th Ave, Long Island City), until September 14

Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner (davidzwirner.com), 533 W 19th St (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), until March 28

Red-Haired Thomas

Check out my first theater review for The L Magazine, of Soho Think Tank's production of Robert Lyons's Red-Haired Thomas at the Ohio Theatre. Though charming and clever at times, its project of interrogating the competing American ideals of democracy and capitalism eventually devolves into fetishism of the former. Democracy isn't so much a topic for debate here (although that's basically exactly what democracy is) as the supposed golden ideal from which our national experiment originated. Read the whole review here. (Photo by Carl Skutsch)

Wicked Artsy: Get Installed

Check out the latest edition of my weekly art blog Wicked Artsy for The L Magazine. In it I discuss three current exhibitions of installation art around New York City: Lisselot van der Heijden at LMAKProjects on the Lower East Side, The Bruce High Quality Foundation at Chelsea's Cueto Project (pictured at right) and the group show The Space of the Work and the Place of the Object at Scultpure Center in Long Island City. These three shows illustrate the way that installation art has re-defined the ways we think about art and provide examples of self-critical contemporary art that investigates not only the nature of installation art but all media and the way they interact with viewers and gallery spaces. Read the whole article here.

Fados

Don't miss my review of Spanish director Carlos Saura's latest film, Fados, about the genre of Portuguese music fado whose origins come from 19th century Lisbon's working class port-side neighborhoods. The music has undergone several adaptations over the 20th century, most notably the difficult assimilation of influences brought by immigrants from Portugal's American colonies, and occasional incorporation into the ghettoizing category of "World Music." Rather than smooth over these and other tensions, Saura presents the music in a very stripped studio landscape of strong warm colors and monumental mirrors. Rather than using interviews and archival footage, the story emerges from the music itself. Keep reading about Fados in my full review.

Tokyo!

Check out my review of the new Michel Gondry-Leos Carax-Bong Joon-Ho movie triptych Tokyo! over at The L Magazine. A mix of childish escape fantasy, return-of-the-repressed invasion from beneath nightmare and cultural paralisis, the film doesn't seek to offer some intangible insight into its city setting (like Paris je t'aime and the like). Instead, through Tokyo! we get a glimpse of Japan as a place of contradictory cultural impulses towards a kind of reactionary nationalism and a globalism-embracing liberalism. Each vignette offers a different solution to these coliding socio-political agendas. Read my review here.

Reading Response 4 (Week 6)

While Sergei Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer lay impressive theoretical groundwork for an understanding of how our experiences of architecture and film inform one another in this week's readings, I found Giuliana Bruno and Joan Ockman's work more constructive. They offered useful critical terms for suggesting how the exploration of architecture within and around cinema could offer solutions to the oppressive lived realities of urban design and corporate architecture. In a manner perhaps more satisfying or convincing than the digital environments we discussed earlier in the semester, film allows us to experience existing architectures from new perspectives (as in Bruno) and offers the possibility of exploring unbuilt spaces created for film sets (as in Ockman).


I especially enjoyed Bruno's suggestion that within the private-public place of the darkened movie theater, mobility within the coded-male city is opened up to female viewers ("voyageuses" rather than "voyeurs"). Although the point is less valid now, as modes of film viewership and urban travel have evolved (I'd argue) along less starkly gendered paths, it is interesting to apply this concept to the work of filmmakers working at Jacques Tati's time. I'm especially thinking of Jean-Luc Godard, whose films demonstrate a keen and adventurous attitude towards urban spaces and architecture and invest spaces with particularly strong symbolic values. His attitude towards gendered spaces, I'd say, carries from the same ambiguity his films do in general: it's never clear to what degree the misogyny he depicts is being criticized and indulged. Similarly, Paris (and other locales to a lesser extent) figures in Godard films as a male space by definition.


As one of the first members of the French New Wave to use location shooting for films from Breathless (top image) onward, it's hard to determine to what extent Paris was gendered male before the cameras started rolling and what amount of this masculine urbanism is the result of Godard's particular cinematic gaze. From Jean Seberg walking down the Champs-Elysées in Breathless (1960) to Anna Karina forced into prostitution by the city's phallocentric urban economy of My Life to Live (1962, pictured above) to Karina's entrapment in a dangerous love triangle in Band of Outsiders (1964), and several others, Godard's female leads are often depicted as women trapped in Paris's male gaze. And yet Godard's point of view isn't completely complicit in this objectification, and he shows women negotiating the coded-male city by stopping in cafes (My Life to Live), relaxing in the privacy of their apartments (Breathless, Band of Outsiders) and, fittingly, escaping into cinemas (Breathless). This productive ambiguity in Godard's gendered treatment of space – between the organizing male gaze of the city and its buildings and the folds, cracks and blind spots it affords his female characters – echoes some of the ways of reading urban forms opened up by Bruno, and offers the added lens of auteuristic intent and evolution. Certainly, by the time he made Pierrot le Fou (1964), Alphaville (1964) and La Chinoise (1967), Godard's visions of space and architecture had already evolved radically.