17 Again

In my review of the new Zac Efron star vehicle 17 Again I discuss the film's tenuous class and sexual politics. Set in a SoCal suburbia where everyone except a mystical Santa-like janitor drives a new car and lives in a palatial home, the film has an outsized devotion to heterosexual monogamy, and the importance of marriage rather than contraception. Efron is set aside early on as much too precious for the mid-life crisis or high school coming-of-age comedy, and becomes little more than the narrative motor in his own star vehicle. Thankfully, a crack team of Reno 911!'s Thomas Lennon and the American Office's Melora Hardin do a formidable job of picking up the slack. Still, 17 Again never rises above the level of target demographic-tuned studio schlock. Read the whole review here.

Site Review: Selling the New Cool(haas)

Located in Manhattan’s fashion, design and gallery district Soho, the sales office for Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s (OMA) new residential tower 23e22 stages itself as an artwork and luxury lifestyle space rather than a home. The choices of design, media and location for the sales office address several marketing and branding problems inherent in the high-rise condominium tower project, and build on Koolhaas’ previous projects in New York. 23e22 – still in the early stages of construction – is located in a relatively quiet area where office employees account for most of the foot traffic and daily activity. The choice of Soho for the sales office maximizes walk-in traffic and visibility. The neighborhood’s various associations with the cutting edge in fashion and design also lend the building a chic glamour that is reflected in the various advertising materials, renderings and related media that have accompanied the building’s marketing campaign. Additionally, the space’s design reflects Koolhaas and OMA’s typically adventurous promotional style and the building’s luxury branding and target demographic.

The 23e22 sales office at 27 Mercer Street (between Canal and Grand Streets) occupies the entire ground floor of a landmarked loft building near the southern edge of Soho. The space is organized in and around a scale model of 23e22 lying on its side. The building’s design starts from a narrow base (33 feet) and rises over the shorter structures to the East as it expands to nearly twice its width (63 feet) before narrowing again in its top floors. As a result, the horizontal model creates a slow staircase in the sales office. Within this grid-marked, sloping space, two models of the building offer details of its exterior surface and its location amid neighbors – including the nearly completed 60-story tower One Madison Park, with which it shares a ground floor multi-purpose space. Copies of Koolhaas’ S, M, L, XL are arranged throughout the space and certain windows give onto the hallway that snakes around the giant model. In some of these windows, small models of the conical ground floor lobby and screening room provide a sense of 23e22’s public entrance. The U-shaped hallway that leads around the outside of the model features a view of the skyline overlaid with 23e22’s metallic grid façade pattern on one side, a small lounge space and kitchen near the back, and a wall of information about the building, its design concept, its relationship to neighboring One Madison Park and the work of OMA.

The 23e22 sales office deploys a variety of media to support and heighten the condominium building’s visual and architectural appeal. Some of the mediated texts incorporated into the design are very traditional: the inclusion of Koolhaas’ famous book S, M, L, XL is a strong signifier of class, educational background and taste that addresses a very specific audience; the prevalence of architectural renderings and models assumes a certain level of literacy for such graphic representations; meanwhile these representations’ frequent repetition throughout the space elevate their status to art objects – another symptom of the sales office’s location in what used to be New York’s foremost art gallery district. The model of the ground floor screening room – a partnership with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the entertainment industry’s foremost talent agencies – invokes another mediation structured around private screenings and exclusive film-related events.

The space’s construction also turns the building model itself into a medium, framing views of a wall-sized skyline photograph that simulates 23e22’s most exclusive views to the North (views only made available by the building’s spectacular 30 foot cantilever). The sales office itself also acts as a medium, representing the official marketing and information campaigns for a building still in the earliest stages of construction. The real building may not be finished yet, but its existence in so many other forms functions as a guarantee. The wall of digital renderings, charts, maps, cross-sections and texts explaining the design apply the language and presentational mode of museum displays, thereby implying the project’s value as art. The rhetoric that develops from the various media in use at the 23e22 sales office frames the building alternately as a luxury good for consumption and an art object for aesthetic appreciation.

That dialectic between art and commerce stems from and informs much more than 23e22’s overt media representations. It also issues from Koolhaas’ portfolio of work – especially in New York – the partnership with CAA, Soho’s fluctuating neighborhood identity and the previous role of the sales office’s building at 27 Mercer Street. 23e22 will be Koolhaas and OMA’s first new building in New York, but the architect and his studio have designed several interiors in the city, all of which are organized for the presentation and consumption of media. Most famously, the Prada store (pictured above) very near the 23e22 sales office in Soho was designed to incorporate a programmable public venue in its staircase-shaped performance venue. Predictably, this hybrid of public and private space and programming has been unsuccessful, and the Prada store maintains the brand’s exclusivity. This stair-shaped performance space is re-cast in 23e22 as a screening room that will be visible from the street, but exclusively for the use of residents and CAA events. Here again, Koolhaas/OMA strikes a tenuous balance between public space and accessibility, and one wonders who will receive priority the day 23e22 residents and CAA clients try to use the screening room at the same time.

Another stair-shaped interior Koolhaas has designed in New York is the Second Stage Theatre at 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue in Midtown (pictured at right). Here the ongoing dialectic between art and commerce inherent to the Prada store and 23e22 sales office’s location in Soho recurs within the dual role of Midtown Manhattan as a business and theater district. Adding to this contrast, the Second Stage Theatre is housed in a landmarked bank building. Rather than refurbish the interior, Koolhaas kept the majority of the building’s details (the box office is inside the old bank vault). By inserting seating into the main bank space, areas behind and in front of the stair-like structure become a lobby and stage. This simple manipulation of negative space creates an incredibly effective space that is an excellent performance venue and highlights the architectural grandeur of the original bank building. A similar rhetorical strategy is at work in the 23e22 sales office, whose gradual stairs evoke both a stage and seating. Here, though, the spectacle on display is the multiplicity of representations of 23e22, shining under elaborately designed lighting. As much as a performance space, the sales office also evokes an art gallery.

Not surprisingly, Koolhaas/OMA’s most similar New York design to the 23e22 sales office is an art gallery in Chelsea – the neighborhood that displaced Soho as the city’s foremost gallery district. For Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea space (at right), Koolhas/OMA inserted a plywood trapezoid into the ground-floor warehouse, creating a main room with adjoining offices, side galleries and reception. By inserting a new construction into the gallery, Koolhaas/OMA effectively turned Lehmann Maupin into a permanent display space for their structure. The distinction between the art and the architecture that organizes it becomes increasingly blurry, an ambiguity the 23e22 sales office takes a step further. At 27 Mercer the space is the artifact being displayed and it organizes the gallery to display itself. However, this paradigm of installation art and architectural modeling works as a sales mechanism, creating an immersive experiential space midway between a gallery and a boutique that doesn’t necessarily give any sense of the homes in 23e22, but mimics its structural daring.

This confluence of the architectural rhetorics of visual art and conspicuous consumption is all the more fitting given the sales office’s location in Soho – once the most vibrant gallery district in the world and now mostly an open-air luxury goods mall. A coincidental but no less telling symptom of Koolhas/OMA’s use of art display paradigms to sell 23e22, one of the previous tenants of 27 Mercer Street was the gift shop of the Guggenheim Museum before it moved to its Frank Lloyd Wright building Uptown. Turning iconic artifacts into objects for consumption is in the space’s walls, as it were. In addition to luxury housing and architectural spectacle, the sales office offers the cultural cachet of Koolhaas/OMA as part of its sales pitch. An entire section of the wall space is devoted to detailing the work and style of the international architectural office – referred to in one section as “a leading international partnership practicing contemporary architecture, urbanism and cultural analysis.” In addition to an exclusive, luxury item and limited edition art object, the 23e22 sales office is selling Koolhaas/OMA.

The sales pitch isn’t completely convincing though, and certain elements of the sales office don’t match the building’s veneer of spectacularly affluent exclusivity. The lack of a typical apartment interior image is striking – the only unit showcased in any detail is the top floor’s $45 million penthouse. The lounge at the back of the sales office (at right) presents a disjuncture between Koolhaas/OMA’s frequent use of neon colors (especially orange and green) and 23e22’s prevalent aesthetic of black, metallic silver and glass. Here, foam chairs in playful shapes and colors break with the self-serious luxury branding of the sales office and building – a mismatched effect furthered by a carpet made to resemble green lawn. The nearby kitchen nook is similarly incongruous, with its neon yellow walls and stack of cookbooks. While the rest of the sales office categorically excludes any details of daily life in its representations of 23e22, here suddenly the effect falls apart. Marketed as a space for looking (its very form is predicated on peeking past its tall neighbor to create views to the North) and being looked at, this slippage admits the very mundane activities like cooking and relaxing that go unmentioned throughout the rest of 23e22’s sales media.

With these various marketing strategies and media displays, the sales office for Rem Koolhaas/OMA’s 23e22 deploys visual and rhetorical strategies familiar from various other media to selling luxury housing. The space alternately recalls an art gallery, a museum, a luxury goods boutique and an art installation. These effects are heightened by the office’s location in Soho and Koolhaas/OMA’s previous projects in New York, all of which are straddled between the worlds of art and commerce, seeing and buying, contemplation and consumption. Despite this formidable marketing machine and spatial-visual experience, certain details bare testament to the very rudimentary functions this art building must fulfill as a functional home for its exclusive clientele.

Trinity 5:29

For my latest theater review in The L Magazine I covered Trinity 5:29 by the Axis Company. The play is set in the days leading up to Robert Oppenheimer's invention and detonation of the very first atomic bomb, named TRINITY. Despite its visual appeal and style, the production seems lost between interests in historical verisimilitude and philosophical rumination. With only 45 minutes to find its way, Trinity 5:29 never really gets anywhere and is instead extremely frustrating. Read my whole review here.

Wicked Artsy: In Dark Humor

For this edition of Wicked Artsy I look at four exhibitions on the Lower East Side that cover a variety of media (video, installation, painting, drawing, sculpture) and use self-criticism and explicitly reflexive gestures to undercut their grandiose gestures. In a contemporary art scene that all too often rewards brash ambition, scandal and noise over thorough and theoretically sound production, work like that of Emmy Mikelson at NY Studio Gallery (pictured at right) is especially refreshing. Read the whole article here.

"The Last Kiss" by Jadakiss

(Def Jam Recordings/Roc-a-Fella Records)

After a tragic several month hiatus from music criticism (largely due to the lack of rap releases in the first quarter), don't miss my first hip hop review of 2009, Jadakiss's The Last Kiss. The MC someone always argues is the best alive offers another frustrating album. The mixture of brilliance and disappointment on the over-long and over-assisted record is all too typical of mid-career rappers these days (I'm thinking of Nas and Busta Rhymes, among others), who can sell enough on name-recognition and one catchy single that they really don't need to try. With some exciting new releases on the horizon (Mos Def, Missy, Mr. Lif, and a host of promising rookies), hopefully 2009 will start looking up after this slow start. Read the whole review here.

Sleep Dealer

Don't miss my review of Alex Rivera's sci-fi immigration movie Sleep Dealer. Now firmly entrenched as one of the most common genres (along with "quirky indie"), immigration narratives have officially begun their fracturing into various sub-generic categories, as evidenced here with this near-future vision of networked outsourcing, eXistenZ-style biological telecommunication, brain-controlled video-blogging and multinational water conglomerate totalitarianism. Read the whole review here.

Wicked Artsy: Private and Public Photography

In this week's edition of my art column for The L Magazine, I take a look at four photography exhibitions currently hanging in Chelsea. In these three solo shows and one group exhibition, I isolate the various ways that photography can be applied to create a sense of isolation or privacy in public spaces and rituals, and can just as effectively render a private narrative public. From the accessibility activism of Jem Cohen at Robert Miller Gallery to the photoessay on teenage angst at ClampArt, via the ominous public landscapes of Matthew Sleeth at Claire Oliver Gallery (above) and Sonnabend's Clay Ketter retrospective, photography introduces avenues through and between boundaries of public and private. Read the whole article here.

Fast and Furious

In my review of the latest entry in the blockbuster street racing franchise, I discuss the mythology that has evolved during the Fast and Furious saga, the integral role of Vin Diesel as the series' much-needed core, and the stripped, sleek approach this new episode takes. Though more entertaining and less worried about creating any semblance of a plot than its three predecessors, Fast and Furious still suffers from the same tragic writing, horrendous acting and delirious self-seriousness. Moreover, its sacrifice of Michelle Rodriguez's character – the only exception to the series' rule that women are objects of slightly less value than cars – makes Fast and Furious's gender politics more dire, and bodes poorly for the inevitable sequel (titled Fast Furious?). Read my whole review here.

Paris 36

In my review of Christophe Barratier's epic period musical Paris 36, I discuss what an annoyingly inoffensive and non-committal pastiche this film about unions, fascism, socialism and democracy manages to be. The details of period set and costumes in its nameless 1936 Parisian neighborhood (rather clearly Montmartre) present a stylized vision of the past, something between the polish of Ratatouille and the Technicolor excess of Les parapluis de Cherbourg. All Paris 36's prettiness can't distract from the cliched story and its masculinist politics, whose grand aspirations seem inspired by Citizen Kane and Cradle Will Rock, but don't have the self-awareness to even compare. Read the rest of my review here.

Theatre Han's The Bus Stop

In my latest theater review I discuss the contemporary resonances of The Bus Stop, an absurdist parody by Nobel-winning author Gao Xingjian being produced in New York for the first time since its publication in 1983. In the Theatre Han production at the Sanford Meisner Theatre, Xingjian's criticism of Chinese communism, its contradictions and inadequacies hint at similar anxities today for an audience in a capitalist country possibly (finally) contemplating socialism. Read the whole review here. (Photo Ho Chang)

Reading Response 6 (Week 10)

I found all this week’s readings extremely interesting, especially Pierluigi Serraino’s discussion of the class-coded visual lexicon used in architectural photography and James S. Ackerman and Robert Ewall’s retracing of the practice’s roots in landscape paintings, travel literature, engravings, and early photography. Most enlightening, though, were the strange similarities and contrasts between Serraino’s discussion of the parallel careers of the architect and her/his photographer, and Ackerman’s allusion to conservation efforts built around architectural photography. These two uses for images of buildings call to mind two opposite impulses: using photography to immortalize a particular vision of architecture; and using photography as part of an argument for the conservation of the actual building. Photography suddenly serves a double purpose with respect to architecture: freezing a building in a specific time and state for diffusion far from its physical location; and providing evidence of a building’s merit in its particular state and place.

This immediately evoked two Roland Barthes analyses, The Death of the Author and Camera Lucida, both of which address an interpretive obsession with authenticity. In the former Barthes questions the necessary validity of authorial intentions, instead arguing that great works of art can and should produce different interpretations upon each reading. In Camera Lucida, Barthes contemplates the strange temporal dislocations introduced by photography, suggesting that its subjects are inherently ghostly because the moment captured on film is immediately gone. The collaborative artwork of architectural photography, and its use in conservation campaigns introduces an interesting ripple to this discussion.

After all, as we’ve discussed since the beginning of the semester, architecture is among the most polysemic of artworks, its interpretation at least slightly different for each viewer. Architectural photography, especially the variety discussed by Serraino, seems aimed at fixing a building’s interpretation based on one or a series of author-approved images. Here, then, the architectural photographer could be said to be imposing a particular interpretive articulation of a building. As Barthes might put it in The Death of the Author, architectural interpretation is focused and restrained by the author’s selective photograph imagery. Meanwhile, photography for conservation purposes presents a different, contradictory interpretive paradigm. Here, the image becomes a kind of argument for the importance of the building itself. By highlighting certain unique features and qualities, the architectural conservation photograph presents an argument for the value of the original building. The photograph isn’t intended as an art object in its own right (though it may become one, as Ackerman shows), but instead serves as proof of a (potentially) lost original. Architectural photography, it seems, substitutes itself for the building as the object of interpretive significance. These disjunctures point to a more fundamental question recurring throughout this class: the inherent un-reproducibility of architecture and the persistent obsession with trying to represent it in various mediated reproductions.