Uncategorised – Page 2 – BILLIE MURABEN

Maharam Stories
A HOUSE BUILT OUT OF CARPETS
In The Principle of Cladding, one of many polemics by Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect defined the profession’s task as “providing a warm and liveable space”. One evolving from the tradition of the coverings of early built structures — made from animal skins or textiles. “Carpets are warm and liveable”…

In The Principle of Cladding, one of many polemics by Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect defined the profession’s task as “providing a warm and liveable space”. One evolving from the tradition of the coverings of early built structures — made from animal skins or textiles. “Carpets are warm and liveable,” Loos wrote. “He [the architect] decides for this reason to spread out one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls.”

In 1903, five years after publishing the essay, Loos designed a bedroom for his wife, Lina. Within the white walls was a layer of ‘cladding’: white linen curtains strung on a rail that circled the room, a white Angora sheepskin rug that stretched over the bed frame like moss, with linen curtains and ‘skirts’ masking wardrobes, and draping bedside tables. The interior looks warm, soft, and contained — enveloping the body in a “bag of fur and cloth” — while the semi-sheer curtains also present the bedroom as a sort-of stage, or frame for observation.

Loos saw architecture and interiors as theatrical, and the inhabitants of his buildings both the observer and observed. While seeking comfort and warmth through architecture, Loos’s environments maintained a degree of detachment that meant any softness was balanced with a sense of control. The house was to be designed in harmony with the character of its inhabitants, that character split between the public and private spaces, the social and intimate being.

While his public statements were clear to the point of dogmatic, in reality Loos was a mess of contradictions. He argued for the task of the architect being to not “imitate” or dress up materials as something else, and was defensive of the idea that a living space constructed from rugs would be classed an imitation: “The walls are not really built out of carpets! Certainly not. But these carpets are meant only to be carpets and not building stones.” Loos was tyrannical in his disdain for “imitation and surrogate art”, artificial stone tiles, or painted inlays, and would often hurl his critiques as sexist slurs. He warned against ornament and decor as women’s work, women being “primitive, ignoble savages” in comparison to the “cool and detached” modern man. But the soft, fluffy, bedroom of Lina Loos, with its curved edges, sheer fabric and shining silver metal, is neither cool or detached. It embraces ornament, high camp and decor, and as is often true, Lina likely had more to do with it than the record shows.

But this split between the public and private self, of the self in principle and in practice, was a constant in Loos’s life. In public his judgements and moralism led to a rift with the Secession movement, long diatribes, and many drawn-out, public arguments; while in private he had three short marriages to women at least half his age, and was found guilty of child sexual abuse. In ‘Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt’, architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina wrote: “Loos’ public moralism denouncing ornament as a savage perversion is perhaps a pathological symptom of what it attacks, a disguise, a displacement.”

Loos sought the control of the senses within his architecture, and the formal order of the theatre box became the frame within which he worked. A space that is both private and a setting understood for performance or at least a position from which you will be viewed and projected onto. In the house Loos designed for Josephine Baker, she became the ‘primary object’, with reflective surfaces and openings between rooms shifting attention consistently back on her. But the primacy of the visual is denied through his writing, where he focuses on the “mind’s eye” of the architect, and his sense of what “he [the architect] wishes to exert upon the spectator”. The principle that the person inhabiting the house is the spectator, and not he — the architect — the external voice, shows how Loos thought about the people he designed for. Loos saw his role as providing a “warm and liveable space”, but the way that he detached life from work, theory from practice, interior from exterior, dislocated the potential for his work to contain a sense of ease, as the home becomes a stage.

Maharam Stories
Cinzia Ruggeri
Straddling fashion, architecture, interior and furniture design, performance, sculpture, and print, Italian designer Cinzia Ruggeri imbued her surrealist works with a playful, experimental, provocative energy infused with elegance and glamor. Whether presenting a mirror with arms that reach out in an embrace or a dress shaped like a flight of stairs…

Straddling fashion, architecture, interior and furniture design, performance, sculpture, and print, Italian designer Cinzia Ruggeri imbued her surrealist works with a playful, experimental, provocative energy infused with elegance and glamor. Whether presenting a mirror with arms that reach out in an embrace or a dress shaped like a flight of stairs, Ruggeri reframed everyday objects and the architectural and social dimensions of the body, drawing out the potential for narrative and performance in everything she touched.

Born in Milan in 1942 and inspired by Arte Povera and the feminist groups of the 1960s, Ruggeri intently avoided easy definition, side-stepping the spotlight whenever she felt the mainstream closing in on her. Overwhelmed by the press attention surrounding her first solo exhibition of abstract paintings, held in 1960 at Milan’s Galleria del Prisma when she was just seventeen, Ruggeri stepped away from her art practice to study at Milan’s Scuola di Arti Applicate. After moving to Paris to apprentice at fashion house Carven, she returned to Milan as design director of her father’s company producing women’s suits and coats, where she researched the material potential of textiles as well as new manufacturing techniques. And after founding her own clothing line, Bloom SpA, in 1977, to which she added an eponymous label and a menswear collection, she abruptly closed it in the mid-’80s, at the peak of its renown and commercial success, pivoting back to contemporary art and teaching fashion design at Milan’s Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti. Although affiliated with the 1970s architecture and design movement Radical Design, which propelled designers including Superstudio and Alessandro Mendini, and Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Group in the 1980s, Ruggeri never formally joined these collectives, maintaining an elasticity that allowed her to stretch and spring away as she desired.

Fashion, industrial design, and print media were produced and consumed almost on top of each other in 1980s Milan, creating fertile ground for collaboration, multidisciplinary cross-pollination, and experimental design that challenged convention. Pushing against the clarity and efficiency of Italian postwar design, Ruggeri sought to complicate the field with ambiguous objects laced with both irony and tenderness. She made glassware with pendant drops that jangled when you drank; an armchair upholstered with stuffed cat toys; a shower-head shaped like hands so the bather is caressed by water. A jagged, asymmetrical ziggurat dress, paraded down a runway staged in the Church of San Carpoforo, was accompanied by a sound piece made in collaboration with Brian Eno. The confusion, or promise, of whether a piece should be sold in a store or shown in a museum was part of the point.

But for all of Ruggeri’s efforts to not comply to any form of predictability, she did admit to a few recurring motifs: “Eggs, dogs, dogs’ noses, pigs, pearls, glass, chickens, chameleons, octopuses and rays, nautiluses, flamingos, and other free (spontaneous) subjects, and then velvet and silk georgette and linen.”

Ruggeri’s fascination with the potential of textiles wove a continuous thread through her career, and her avant-garde clothing designs are sculptural objects—both on and off the body. Sheer gauze is pulled into a stepped skirt. A giant stuffed hand addresses the room. A tie pulls sideways, defying gravity. A bunch of fabric orchids drape across the body to form a dress. A pair of green leather knee-high boots take the shape of the Italian peninsula—accompanied by Sicily and Sardinia clutch bags. Each piece is surreal, embodying both the lightness of fabric and Ruggeri’s tenacious desire to push the limits of form and function and her seemingly limitless faith in material. As curator Kari Rittenbach noted in Mousse, “[For Ruggeri], the dress is both an architecture, or shelter for the body, and more significantly, a screen; that is, a means of revealing or, conversely, obscuring the emotions through shape and form.”

Renowned by fashion historians and respected by her peers, Ruggeri exhibited regularly until her death in 2019. But she wasn’t granted a museum survey until after her passing, nor was she written into the broader canon of design history. Perhaps her determination to avoid constraints made the work hard to contain; perhaps her being a woman meant her maverick approach was dismissed as unserious. Ruggeri strove to redefine the form and function of everyday objects, from clothing to accessories, furniture to lighting. ”There are already enough useful objects designed to perfectly fulfil their function; what I am looking for is to communicate and interact with [them].”

Maharam Stories
CHARLOTTE PERRIAND’S LES ARCS
Les Arcs, a ski resort in the Savoie region of France, mostly disappears into its surroundings. Hotels and apartments lean into and cantilever out from the mountainside. Building levels are staggered and clusters of chalets follow the contours of the slopes.

Les Arcs, a ski resort in the Savoie region of France, mostly disappears into its surroundings. Hotels and apartments lean into and cantilever out from the mountainside. Building levels are staggered and clusters of chalets follow the contours of the slopes. Le Versant Sud, the resort’s largest building, is almost invisible from above thanks to its snow-dappled flat roofs even though, when approached from below, the curtains drawn across its full-height windows form a bright color-block grid.

Charlotte Perriand, who designed the resort with the Atelier d’Architecture en Montagne between the late 1960s and early 1980s, grew up visiting her grandparents in the region. She was a keen sportswoman and off-piste skier who sought to make the “possibility of self-transcendence” she found on the slopes accessible to the masses. Paid leave in France had been legally extended by the postwar government, expanding leisure time to a broader section of the population. Les Arcs became the project where Perriand’s knowledge, experience, and beliefs could coalesce as a fully realized vision.

Les Arcs’ apartments, whose flat roofs double as terraces, are of equal size and receive equal amounts of sun. Hotel rooms are as compact as possible to maximize the available affordable accommodation. Inspired by her time in Japan in the early 1940s, Perriand designed interiors that are either open plan or separated by screens, with a flexible relationship between indoors and out. She established transitions rather than boundaries, and both literally and symbolically brought the kitchen into the living space, in turn bringing the housewife into the social life of the home.

Perriand celebrated new materials and technology, especially when it promised the potential for more equitable housing. Informed by shipbuilding techniques, she used mold-formed polyester to make easily reproducible kitchens and bathrooms for Les Arcs. A “plug-and-play” design meant they could be craned into place and quickly hooked up to water and electricity. Perriand designed high-quality, prefabricated housing and interior architecture, combining raw materials and advanced modular techniques, balancing pine with fiberglass. Holding these contrasts—of design, of material, of experience—was integral to her practice.

While Perriand despised looking back, seeing nostalgia as “a failure of nerve,” she was able to reflect on the consequences of modernism and its overlap with the true impact of industrialization: the chemical pollution of rivers, soil, and air; the decline of skilled labor due to mass production; and the increase in income and housing inequality. “We were utopian in the sense that we didn’t see where our ideas would take us,” said Perriand. “We thought that society would change, that mankind was going to improve. That’s where we made our mistake.”

Perriand still saw hope in the potential for architecture to transform society, but on the condition that practitioners team up with other experts—sociologists, scientists, economists—to exchange ideas, embrace the challenges and opportunities of the day, and look to the future. In embracing new typologies, Perriand became a force of innovation who made her century sing. And in being open to critique, she was able to recognize the naivete that so often hinders visions of the future. Perhaps her legacy is in her ability to embrace her surroundings—the diverse landscapes, people, materials, and potential of the present moment. Perriand remained committed to moving forward. “In every important decision, there is one option that represents life, and that is what you must choose. Life is something in motion.”

Maharam Stories
BETTY WOODMAN
Betty Woodman’s first foray into ceramics was a high school pottery class, which set off a career-long relationship with clay, moving from the potential of functional pottery — “the cup you drink from… can change your life!” — to the abstracted vessels of her later work.

Betty Woodman’s first foray into ceramics was a high school pottery class, which set off a career-long relationship with clay, moving from the potential of functional pottery — “the cup you drink from… can change your life!” — to the abstracted vessels of her later work.

Woodman studied ceramics at the School for American Craftsman at Alfred University, where she produced a custard cup as her graduating project; it was a post-graduation summer in Italy that would form her idiosyncratic outlook on and approach to making ceramics. She was excited by how frescoes and Etruscan pottery overlapped with and stood among everyday life: how a room could be brought to life by painting scenes over the walls, or how ceramics can be “a marriage of painting and form.” She saw pots depicted in Roman and Egyptian wall paintings, and worlds portrayed on pots; in Woodman’s eyes, “the vessel is always there, throughout the history of man.” She understood functional pottery as a practice that could idealistically serve society — what we use and handle in our day-to-day lives impacting our quality of life. But, in addition to embracing pottery’s potential to transform the everyday, Woodman fought for the recognition of ceramics as a legitimate art form through a balance of commitment to and transformation of her medium.

While these two impulses — of embracing tradition and transformation — may seem to be at odds, they share a motivation for ceramics to be understood. Woodman challenged herself with clay throughout her career, from early tableware collections to winged vases and ceramic mosaic “wallpapers,” where offcuts of vessels are mounted on walls or over painted papers. A 2006 review in The New York Times listed Woodman’s creative output as including: “Vessels in the shapes of pillows, bodies (human and animal), flowers and plants; vessels that range in form from Greek to Chinese to Aztec; vessels as baskets, cups, soup tureens and letter holders; vessels inspired by architecture and clothing; vessels that cast ceramic shadows of themselves; vessels that hug a wall or sit on a shelf; ceremonial vessels; even one in the form of an erotic burrito.”

For all their variety, Woodman’s vessels held an interest in domesticity, and—as with her desire to mould clay into new forms and scenes—she played with the physical setting and historical context of the home itself. It was important for Woodman to move domesticity, ceramics, and women’s labor out of the perceived sphere of hobby-craft without compromising on their artistic integrity. She maintained her material focus while continuing to challenge herself and her audience: “For me, as an artist, what’s important is not necessarily the piece I made yesterday, it’s the piece I’m going to make tomorrow.”

One constant throughout Woodman’s life and work was her home in Antella, south of Florence, which allowed her to return to the frescoes and pottery that excited her. The stone farmhouse that she bought with her husband, George Woodman, became a refuge for them – “an artist residency for two”- where they would spend a few months each year, experimenting with ideas and techniques, for pottery and domesticity, and enjoying the space of a slower pace of life.

While she moved away from making traditional pots, Woodman continued to use the visual vocabulary of vases and vessels as figure, woman, and container. She was interested in how far she could go away from the form of the pot or vessel while still providing “an implied function, a central ‘piece’ holding it together.” In her 2016 exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, titled Theatre of the Domestic, Woodman painted a series of backdrops or settings to demarcate “rooms” for her painted vessels to sit within. Her work sat on tables in heavily patterned, abstracted domestic spaces — where walls extrude 3D forms — or stood in front of rooms, where painted clouds filtered in through windows, and vessels took on the wobbling form of their own shadow. “I do like extravagance,” Woodman once said. “I usually err in that directions of too much, rather than too little.”

Emergent
“ARE THEY ALL EQUALLY REPULSIVE?”
‘While New York was cool, Chicago was hot’, is the short answer Suellen Rocca regularly gave to the question of the difference between New York’s Pop and Chicago’s Imagism. While Pop Art was deadpan, the work of the Chicago Imagists…

‘While New York was cool, Chicago was hot’, is the short answer Suellen Rocca regularly gave to the question of the difference between New York’s Pop and Chicago’s Imagism. While Pop Art was deadpan, the work of the Chicago Imagists — or the Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, the Artful Codgers, Chicago Antigua, or Monster Roster, as they were variously known in the two-year stint of collective shows — took pop culture references a step further, and processed them in a personal way, warts and all. They expressed and reflected the grotesque, hysterical and at times psychotic nature of life in 1960s America; in pieces of noisy, psychedelic, social commentary.

Neither a formal group or designation of style, the artists who fell under the title of Chicago Imagists shifted and changed over the years; generally only gathering for collective exhibitions, as friends, and partners in both fictional and legal marriages. They met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and first exhibited together at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Centre in 1966, as The Hairy Who. Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Falconer, Art Green, Karl Wirsum and Suellen Rocca had all been mentored by Whitney Halstead and Ray Yoshida, who encouraged their interest in commercial culture and counter-culture, in vernacular forms, cartoons and tattoos; Renaissance painting, ancient Egyptian painting and indigenous Southern crafts. Their references were broad and involved, and they never shied away from messiness, complexity or holding multiple truths at once. Their work was funny and light, vibrant and vulgar, challenging and transgressive. In a review for a 1982 show at New York’s Pace Gallery, John Russell wrote in The New York Times: “There is about many of these works a relentlessly gabby, arm-twisting, eyeball-contacting quality that comes as a great surprise in a gallery that we associate with the spare statements of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden. Why are they so repulsive? Are they all equally repulsive? Are we wrong not to like them? These are fair questions, and they deserve an answer.” Russell didn’t really get an answer, because as much as the Imagists were denounced for being “regional” and repulsive, they didn’t care about being considered suitable or important — the cold, closed, coastal critics weren’t who the work was for.

In an obituary for Sullen Rocca, who died in March 2020 at 76, Randy Kennedy described how her “hieroglyphic, phantasmagoric work poked a finger in the eye of late-20th-century modernist purities”. She ignored the distance enforced by Pop, Abstract and Conceptual art, instead placing herself, and her own experiences, at the centre of her representations of contemporary society; maintaining a sense of freedom by grounding her work in what she knew and what she could imagine. She painted palm trees, the diamond rings and bra styles in the Sears catalogue, the dancing couples and fancy haircuts featured in ads at the back pages of magazines; hats, handbags, knee-high boots, lamps, “ooh-ahh’s” and “mmm-mmm’s”, hands, hairy legs, and houses blowing smoke into wobbly, naked, fuzzy bodies. Her palate ran from neon to pastel, her compositions often made up of various and overlapping elements; zooming in and out, telling different parts of Suellen Rocca’s story, or the stories that she had been told about herself.

She was interested in the many, and considerable efforts made to promise (and/or sell) happiness to young women in the 1960s and 70s, the Women’s Movement and the shifting boundaries of domestic life; organising her often repeating imagery, symbols, doodles and annotations in abstract patterns and graphic compositions, inspired by hieroglyphs, children’s pre-readers and store catalogues — all forms of sort-of-picture-writing. Handbags feature as both objects and signifiers for holding in things we don’t want to get out, characters appear often as outlines or faceless forms — everything is laid out for the world to see, but as much as Rocca work reveals, it also conceals. In Bare-Shouldered Beauty, Rocca paints icons and small vignettes around a central silhouette of a woman’s figure, painted out in grey. In such a busy, layered and chaotic landscape, it’s hard to comprehend how or if the story progresses. There are dogs, ice creams, suburban and wild landscapes; people dancing, sunbathing, running and floating in the sea — it’s unclear whether they are running towards or away from something, and whether they are swimming or drowning, just like it can be hard to tell whether someone is laughing or crying.

In Palm Finger, Rocca balances intimacy with surrealism; it’s less busy, and in some ways feels immediately more generous because of that, but that initial hit is subverted by the detail of the work. It’s a palm tree balancing on the tip of someone’s finger, surrounded by a repeat pattern of forms, the canvas bound by rope. The palm, an easy symbol of holidays, leisure and exotic locations, is recognisable by its outline, painted in with the colours of a tropical sunset and standing on a cloud. It’s surrounded by what could be extruding sun rays, dropping from the aforementioned sunset, onto orange amoebae-like things and a repeat pattern of a high-heeled leg standing on something that from its form, could either be hard or soft. The finger is swollen, pink and veined, and most likely isn’t a finger at all.

Rocca’s pictorial vocabulary shifted and changed throughout her life, but it was consistently dismissive of anything austere or detached. The mood of her work reflected her own and that of the time, and had the clarity we should expect from someone who is willing to really face themselves, (which is little). It’s decorative and complicated, joyful and weird, light and dark, beautiful and kinda gross. As Jean Genet wrote in The Thief’s Journal, “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”

Emergent
FOLLOWING A FUNCTIONAL IDEA IS FINE
In 2019, at a New York museum building due renovation, Gaetano Pesce performed a chair. Pesce and a group of collaborators worked among an installation of his Brooklyn studio, transplanted for the first exhibition at Salon 94’s new space, after moving from its long-time set-up

In 2019, at a New York museum building due renovation, Gaetano Pesce performed a chair. Pesce and a group of collaborators worked among an installation of his Brooklyn studio, transplanted for the first exhibition at Salon 94’s new space, after moving from its long-time set-up at the founder’s home. A series of squishy, long-limbed, balancing, hanging, and flopping pieces were settled around the gallery; with Pesce performing a daily ritual of dripping pigment into a pot, and having colours mixed with spatulas, before pouring them into marbling ponds of resin in up-turned rubber moulds.

In performing his daily chair, Pesce exceeded the dimensionality of paint, and playfully undermined the exactitude of furniture. Working with pigment in 3D — each chair transformed by a shift in gesture — Pesce locked the ‘heat of the moment’ into each piece. As the thick, popping soup solidified, it could go on to be regarded as a piece of art, sat on, climbed up, tucked under, or jumped over. Pesce’s work follows neither the tradition of painting, or of design, and it is all the richer for it. Dismissive of things that appear elegant or nice, of abstraction and restraint, Pesce has sought instead to communicate; to open up the process of making, show how the crude application of paint, the use of supposedly strange materials, or focus on humour over reverence can bring out the beauty in the chaos of our time. ”Colour, not style, is what we need to be stimulated, energised,’’ he once said.

Influenced by his teacher Carlo Scarpa — a Venetian architect and practitioner of organic Modernism, which maintained the mark of the hand — and Arte Povera — a radical art movement popular across Italy in the 1960s and 70s, where artists explored the use of throwaway materials — Pesce fuses high and low, industrial and organic, technical and everyday. His work can feel like a chance encounter, on viewing it, but also in and of the fact that it exists; as if it all came together by accident (which is often true). He paints on tables, doors, and chairs, or makes them out of paint; using heavily-laden sculpting knives and murky colours, escaping the pursuit of beauty or purity of form. Pesce abandons Modernist ideals and materials in favour of polyurethane and resin, the mark of the hand and the weight of the body — he once designed a complex of buildings in the shape of a running child, “following a functional idea is fine…”

Pesce’s Pratt chair was designed as a series with what same shape, but each had a different formula of resin. “The formula of the #1 was jelly — as soon as we opened the mould, the chair collapsed — like a body with no bones”, you can no longer use the chair, only look at it, “as we do with art”. The second chair was stronger, “if you touch it, it collapses”; the third could take the weight of a child, “but it also gives the child a kind of insecurity, because the chair wobbles”; the fourth, fifth and sixth chairs can hold the human form, after that “[they] are so rigid that they become uncomfortable.” Depending on the chemical formula, the chair becomes a sculpture, a piece of design, or more simply remains a chair. Rather than defining his practice, or defining his output, Pesce lets the chemical formula — how things turn out — define each object.

For an exhibition at Collective design fair, New York, in 2013, Pesce had an assistant develop a scent that would fill the room; the air surrounding his furniture, sculptures, architectural designs, and sketches was full of the warm flavours of minestrone, meant to represent his multi-faceted output (and the many flavours required to make a good soup). In an interview about the show, Pesce told a reporter: “If I can try to give a name to the materials of our time, it would be feminine: translucent, soft, warm, colourful, sensual.” Like the ponds of pigment and resin, he defined the material of our time as liquid: “Our historical moment is liquid. We have values that one day go up, down, like the wave of the water.”

Emergent
MARIE ANTOINETTE IN A HIGH-RISE APARTMENT
“Ornament, function, unlikely colour palettes, impulsive design choices, and juxtapositions of elements from contrasting eras and cultures all come together to create a kind of folk architecture. It’s fresh…

“Ornament, function, unlikely colour palettes, impulsive design choices, and juxtapositions of elements from contrasting eras and cultures all come together to create a kind of folk architecture. It’s fresh, and such a contrast to the contemporary design aesthetic we are bombarded with through social media”, says Ekin Ozbicer, of her project @hurriyetemlakblues, an Instagram account where she uploads screenshots from a growing archive of pictures from real estate sales ads.

Ozbicer is a photographer, and regularly took pictures of people in their homes: “I was always interested in the relationship between people and their environment, and the unlikely aesthetic choices they make”. With the pandemic, house visits came to a halt, and the novelty of exploring homes moved online. “I had been browsing real estate sites for fun and fantasy, looking at amazing houses that we could never afford, and places that were plain outrageous in their disregard for all cultural conventions”, Ozbicer says. While scrolling, she came across a place on Istanbul’s Bosphorus coast, in an affluent area populated with villas, palaces, and embassies, which has a painting of Turgut Özal, “a Turkish president from the 1980s, and a still politically controversial figure”. She took a screenshot to share with family and friends, which became the starting point of a sort-of archive of “oddities and peculiarities”. “There are a few main drivers for the archive. It’s based on my personal tastes and interests, and my main motivation for continuing with the project is the possibility of encountering — any given day — the vast potential of people to create aesthetics that have absolutely no place in the continuum of the history of art and design.”

Amber, tortoiseshell and marble -effect plastic, whirring fans, pattern on pattern, gold on gold, lace, velvet, tassels, wood polished up to a high gloss, chairs set up ready to receive. The look is maximalist, diametrically opposed to the sparse “mattress on the floor + one plant” Instagram aesthetic, and all the better for it. Many of the pictures on @hurriyetemlakblues are of communal areas, or rooms that guests are likely to see (the bathroom). They are made up like a scene from a film, dressed to impress, to entertain, and with hosting and generosity in mind. Living rooms have a formality to them that mimics reception rooms in palaces and grand villas, firm chairs and shallow sofas set up in a round for conversation, rather than cushions slouching back towards a TV.

The rooms on display are heavily-populated with furniture, objects, pictures on walls, pictures as walls, clashing colours or fully-committed-to themes, surfaces overlaid with surfaces. Those that lean towards sparse functionality don’t shy away from a throne chair or blousy bouquet, like Marie Antoinette in a high-rise apartment. To say it’s kitsch would be an understatement, it would also be reductive.

Tropical island wallpaper, a dome-effect mural of a growling leopard, or a stiletto chair, aren’t practical choices, but they are choices led by a desire to bring theatre into everyday life, to excite guests, to create a transportive setting. Such elaborate interiors are popular across the socio-economic spectrum (although there is also, obviously, a spectrum of tastes, as there is anywhere else), informed by celebrity homes photographed in magazines, houses on TV, the popular home stores of the time, or what’s available at markets. “It is easy to write these off as ‘kitsch’ or ‘camp’, but they are mostly choices made according to what had been readily available at a particular time, given their circumstances. The colours, lights and ornaments add life and joy to these rooms, and they are cultural artefacts; documenting the availability and abundance of Chinese products, witnessing cultural influences from a popular tv series, or a reflection of a social or political ideology.”

Driving along A-roads on the outskirts of town, you’ll see pile-ups of plastic statues and garden ornaments, bootlegged Louis XIV furniture; markets selling fake flowers, elaborate plastic kitchenware and lace. At my aunt’s apartment in Istanbul, the living room is set up like the set from an 80s drama, all white leather, carved wood, clear plastic and marble-effect. Coffee shows up on a tray, with rose Turkish Delight dusted in sugar and almond biscuits on a paper doily on a gold-trimmed plate, Turkish coffee in a tiny decorated cup, on a saucer. (Like an espresso, but with the opposite intention — it’s not designed to be quick — and with coffee grounds sat at the bottom of the cup, waiting for you to take a sip too far, and to be tipped out for your fortune read.) I’m part of the family, but every guest is met with the same offering of coffee (or chai), a generous theatre of hospitality. It’s a performance, but one rooted in the want to have guests feel celebrated and comfortable, welcomed into the home.

The smaller details, the air conditioning units, electric fans, layers of lace, plastic containers and protective coverings really feel like home. When the living room is “off duty”, or in the rest of the house — the kitchen, the bedrooms — the setting is often more sparse, focused on cleanliness and ventilation, and preserving high-impact furniture. The ‘Scarface-chic’ aesthetic that my aunt adores is dated, it’s also fun and light and envelops you in that one particular setting. The mishmash of references, eras and cultures meet in the kind of “folk architecture” Ozbicer describes, where interiors are informed by tastes, finances, experiences, histories, and traditions, not designed to fit with the ascribed aesthetic of the day. The homes on @hurriyetemlakblues have an emotional pull; of the soap opera, high drama variety, but also one rooted in the vulnerability of expressing your desires through your surroundings, and welcoming people into your home. “The images become truly unique and fascinating when they give these insights about the social and cultural circumstances that create them” Ozbicer says. “They are artefacts that deserve further reflection than an ironic smile.”

Elephant
IMITATION AND AMBIGUITY
Shanzhai Lyric had intended on “tracing the pathway of a shanzhai T-shirt”, with visits to informal markets in South China, and the Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, but as was the theme of 2020, “all our plans were cancelled”. Founded by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tarkovsky in 2015, their research practice started…

Shanzhai Lyric had intended on “tracing the pathway of a shanzhai T-shirt”, with visits to informal markets in South China, and the Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, but as was the theme of 2020, “all our plans were cancelled”.

Founded by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tarkovsky in 2015, their research practice started in Beijing; where they collected “shanzhai lyrics” found on T-Shirts during their daily visits to a multi-level women’s clothing market. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism meaning “counterfeit, replica, knock off or rip off”, describing bootleg clothing, phones, perfume, and bags; but shanzhai more precisely translates to ‘mountain hamlet’. “In reference to this enclave on the outskirts of empire, where bandits stockpile goods to redistribute among people living on those margins, or in the mountain stronghold area”, says Shanzhai Lyric.

Describing their research practice as “parasitical and responsive”, Shanzhai Lyric invented the Canal Street Research Association — a “temporary centre of operations” — in direct response to an opportunity to work from an empty retail space. They dug into how aesthetics signal what’s going on in a space, and sought to exist “ambiguously between categories”. They got to know long-time residents, passers by, and street vendors, who would come in to see their archive of poetic garments, various versions of Statue of Liberty crowns, bootleg Mickey M(ice), caricature portraits, postcards, and other collected ephemera; contribute to a photographic timeline of every building on Canal Street — adding personal anecdotes about places they recognised or once were — watch performances, film screenings or attend lessons. People would come back several times a day “checking in on us, or to drop off ephemera. Anybody who was intrigued really became a close collaborator”.

Adopting the space had been proposed to them by curators Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, who had been offered it as Canal Street emptied out during the pandemic. Despite its central location, Canal Street, and particularly the strip west of the intersection with Broadway, had long resisted the kind of “upscaling” that property owners, and city bureaucrats, sought. Since an operation against counterfeit merchandise in 2008 — when Mayor Bloomberg shifted the financial liability of illicit trade onto landlords — the practice of shops operating as souvenir shops in the front, and warehousing for counterfeit goods in the back, had largely been eliminated. Spaces stood empty until the potential of ‘art as advertisement’ entered the mix, as a spatial placeholder and deliberate strategy that both allows landlords to appear generous — as if they are contributing to the arts — and in most cases, add value to their properties. ‘Artwashing’ rinsing off as gentrification. The landlords, United American Land, had been operating a pop-up model — alongside other property owners on the street — with creative agency Wallplay, which closed in early 2020, leaving many spaces unoccupied, open to interpretation, and ripe for spatial ‘subversion’. “The project has always been like an open research question of how it might be possible to take resources that are available, and redistribute them, while also attempting to subvert the very circumstances that made it possible for us to access those resources” says Shanzhai Lyric. But the CSRA ultimately became a “depressing, but also interesting” dialogue with their landlord, which concluded in them being kicked out. “[They] became the arbiter of aesthetics and art. Our aesthetics didn’t fit the scheme he’d imagined, which was a validating process for his property.”

While working from their storefront, Shanzhai Lyric continued their research into the etymology of the poetic phrasing of shanzhai garments, and found that they could chart “the evolution and disappearance of experimental English, as proportional to the homogenisation of cities”, an observation distilled by their space on Canal Street. “We both grew up nearby, and feel very connected to the block” Shanzhai Lyric tells me, “It became a chance to reflect more deeply on how the global flows and trade routes we had planned on following around the world, could actually be found on one block of Canal, between Mercer and Greene Street. We think of Canal Street as a hamlet of sorts”.

Like many places around the world, New York was — albeit, temporarily — unrecognisable during the first months of the pandemic. With lockdowns in place, offices emptied out, shops were boarded up, businesses permanently closed, advertisers went quiet; street life shifted from one shaped by consumerism and the privatisation of public space, to one where it was possible to take in the city anew. “Many people who have lived in New York for a long time remarked that during Covid the city felt in some ways more similar to a city they remembered from many years ago. Without business owners around to police and criminalise the act of gathering in front of their spaces, street life became possible again”.

Right across from their shop space was Little Senegal, where street vendors set up shop. “We met Khadim Sene, who’s a vendor, musician and teacher, and we held outdoor lessons with him. Khalifa Thiam, another vendor, who’s trained as a film maker shared hours of footage recorded on Canal Street between 2008-12. He’s captured this former era of [the street], which he considers the best years of his life in the US, because that’s when Obama was president”. After meeting street vendor Leo Liu, a caricaturist, they learnt that portrait art can be pursued without a vendors licence, as it’s covered under freedom of expression laws. “Following that line of the possibility of redistribution, we were interested in how art could be operational. How could we [mimic these strategies] of skirting legal parameters [by citing artistic expression]?”

Adopting shanzhai strategies — and knowing they were about to lose the space — the CSRA became a “store in drag”; ’ripping off’ the aesthetic language of retail — “making something shiny to cover up the real mechanisms of redistribution, and so-called theft, that might be going on”. They enjoyed a final round of adaptive ambiguity, which also functioned as an homage to the history of the neighbourhood: “of artists using retail as an experimental medium to disseminate experimental ideas to the masses”. One of the objects in their shop, as an offering and proposal of how to make use of loopholes and the privileges afforded to art objects, was a counterfeit bag: “which is technically illegal, but in this case was categorised as a ready-made art object, thereby skirting that legal parameter.”

All these interactions, relationships and adaptations happened quite naturally, a consequence of just being in one place for a long time — also a consequence of the pandemic. There was a period of several months on Canal Street that had a sense of freedom and calm, before the city worked out how to monetise outside space through permits, and hide communal life. “There had been a lot less police presence” says Shanzhai Lyric, “until around Christmas when raids started again.” Since then, police presence had increased and permanent surveillance apparatus was installed, making it dangerous to be conducting street trade. “It’s really something to think about, how the threat of genuine class mobility is what needs to be actively destroyed by the state.”

Canal Street has always been in flux, and people adapt, “strategically shape-shifting as a survival mechanism and tactic”. Although the CSRA lost it’s retail space, Shanzhai Lyric has moved up the street to an idle office, where they plan to enter the realm their collaborators operate in, “doing your work on the street, en plein air”. “We’re in the planning phases of thinking through how there could be a street school, a collaborative film crew, or market.”

Reflecting on the past year, and the time and space that opened up as commercial units became available, street life became possible and government financial support provided temporary respite from a system that characteristically lacks a safety net, Shanzhai Lyric considered how “precarity, high rent and financial anxiety make experimentation really difficult in a city”. “It begins to seem very deliberate, right, that people are too exhausted and too anxious to indulge in open exploration that’s really about time, being without a goal, and welcoming whatever happens.”

Aperture
ALICE RAWSTHORN
Design writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn has always counted László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, where he argued for the connections between art and life, and how design and the profession of the designer “has to be transformed from…”

Design writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn has always counted László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, where he argued for the connections between art and life, and how design and the profession of the designer “has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness”. An attitude that connects projects with the needs of the community.

This principle carries through Rawsthorn’s work, where she consistently champions design’s potential to address complex social, political and ecological challenges. In 2020, Rawsthorn co-founded the Design Emergency project with curator Paola Antonelli, to investigate and present the design response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project started with an Instagram account, where Antonelli and Rawsthorn would post projects, and host interviews on ‘Live’, and it is now also a podcast, and a book, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future.

The project soon expanded from its focus on the pandemic to tell stories of how designers are responding to ecological and socio-political emergencies, and how advances in communication and technology are influencing change. Themes that Rawsthorn has previously investigated in Design as an Attitude, in Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, and in her journalistic writing for the Financial Times and The New York Times. Billie Muraben met the writer at her London home, where they spoke about the role of photography and open source intelligence in design, how rigour is essential to improvisation, and the appeal of fetishised, or impossible projects.

Billie Muraben: With Design Emergency, why was it important for you and Paola Antonelli to have an open definition, or interpretation, of what design is and who designers are?

Alice Rawsthorn: Well, I can’t think of any other way of defining design. And Design Emergency really reflects the vision of design that I’ve shared as a writer, and that Paola has shared in her exhibitions, in a world where design means life. The book, Design as an Attitude, was predicated on the notion that affordable, easily accessible, incredibly powerful digital technology was transforming, or had transformed, the practice and possibilities of design. It liberated designers from the restricted roles they played during the industrial age when design was routinely stereotyped as a styling and promotional tool, generally under the instruction of someone else. Designers have been liberated to work independently and to pursue their own social, political, and ecological goals. We developed the idea for Design Emergency initially as a response to the COVID-19 crisis, to investigate the design response to that, which we did at the start of the first COVID lockdown.

BM: Design Emergency has a balance of different forms of rigor in terms of research and practice. Both that of trained, highly skilled designers, and many brilliant examples of improvisation from people working in the moment with available resources, being very responsive to their context, whether that is the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, or socio-political turmoil.

AR: We began by identifying what we saw as the key areas of all of our lives, in the broadest possible sense, that needed positive design interventions. We then identified the people who, we believe, were at the forefront of innovation in those fields and who, crucially, had already delivered practical projects. While they might also engage in a lot of purely experimental or conceptual work, they had to have proven that their approach would work because we wanted to reach a general audience beyond the committed design community.
We drew a list of all the pretty gloomy problems that we face, but also the opportunities, and then identified who was tackling them. One of the joys of design, particularly if you write about it, is A: it’s a ubiquitous force in our lives, so it touches absolutely everything and B: it can be interpreted in so many different ways by different people. Some of the people we interviewed work in what could be seen as a more conventional form of design, but they have all done so in a really exemplary, innovative, original, and iconoclastic way. A wonderful example is Irma Boom, the book designer. Book design is one of the oldest conventional areas of design with centuries of rich and inspiring history. And Irma is so brilliant, she has reinvented it completely.

BM: How does photography come into Design Emergency as a research tool, or otherwise?

AR: All sorts of new photographic technologies have been made available, many of which have enriched and empowered design. Also, many of them are particularly pertinent to terrible emergencies of different types. If you think of the climate emergency and photography’s impact on that in terms of design, until recently, photography, other than in photojournalism, played a relatively restricted role. But that has changed dramatically, partly because the technological changes of satellite images, drones, and advances in geospatial imagery have completely transformed the way that we can visualize the climate emergency. One strategic design project I’m interested in is the Great Green Wall in Africa, which is the epic design endeavor to cultivate vegetation across a five-thousand-mile strip of the southern edge of the Sahara Desert from Senegal to Djibouti. That is very difficult to portray at scale, but the satellite imagery, particularly from the ESA [European Space Agency], has done so brilliantly.

BM: And what about individual photographers?

AR: One example would be the Bangladeshi photographer Asif Salman, who works with Marina Tabassum, the humanitarian architect. Bangladesh is a country at the forefront of reinventing the design of flood defenses by moving away from the gray infrastructure of concrete dams, which we know doesn’t work, to literally letting flooding flow naturally to irrigate the land and, ultimately, cause far less damage. His photography of Marina’s work has not only made people realize how effective that has been, but he humanizes all her projects. Similarly, Iwan Baan—who is a famous architectural photographer and has produced very intelligent, but sort of fetishized images of works by architects including Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, and so on—recently did a body of photographs for the Room for the River project in the Netherlands, which, again, is all about the switch from gray infrastructure to naturalistic flood defenses.

BM: How can photography contribute to investigative design research, and respond to emergency contexts like refugee crises?

AR: There’s been incredible photojournalism in that field, with large-scale satellite images showing the sheer scale of refugee settlements like the Za’atari camp in Jordan and the Cox’s Bazar settlements in Bangladesh, which, I think, have over a million people living there. But also the work of photographers such as Asif Salman, who’s humanized the crisis, and the Italian photographer Matteo de Mayda, who for years has traveled to Africa to refugee settlements but has also done a lot of photography of the support for refugees and migrants in Italy.
If you look at investigative design research, which is a hugely important, rapidly expanding new area of design, photography is absolutely integral. Groups like Formafantasma, the Italian design studio run by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, have mounted long-term investigations of complex and contentious areas of our lives that have seldom been explored.

BM: Forensic Architecture, the multidisciplinary research group that investigates state violence and human rights violations, makes use of photography to reconstruct crime scenes, sites of conflict, and other architectural spaces to communicate evidence.

AR: Forensic Architecture has been one of the great design phenomena of recent years, and one of the first people I wanted to interview was Eyal Weizmann. He’s absolutely extraordinary. He says that it’s all down not just to smartphones, but to the first feeble cell phones that could make photographs with just a few kilobytes, which basically empowered citizens to witness instances of abuse and criminality, and to provide evidence that could be used for government policy reviews and legal cases to secure justice for the victims.
And it’s not just photography that has formed part of this, it’s the whole phenomenon of open-source intelligence, everything from CCTV-footage apps such as Find My, satellite imagery, and video clips. All of this is analyzed by Forensic Architecture and the teams of relevant specialists that it assembles to investigate climate crimes, miscarriages of justice, contested killings, and so on.

BM:Open-source intelligence is being made use of and analysed more widely, as a way to prove or contest claims during conflict.

AR: At the New York Times, or even BBC Verify, where journalists share their evidence gathering, there are less complex and sophisticated investigations than Forensic Architecture’s, but there are important ones, particularly at a time of such horrific catastrophes and emergencies as those we have now. You see the impact that open-source intelligence has had on Russia’s war against Ukraine. The number of claims and counterclaims that the Ukrainians were able to verify because they did have CCTV footage of what actually happened, or people had recorded it, or snapped it on their phones has been very moving. It’s been absolutely essential in Gaza from which international journalists were expelled at a very early part of the crisis. Both sides release information that’s immediately contested and contradicted by the other.

BM: Your book Design as an Attitude (2018) explores design as an agent of social, political, and ecological change. The title is drawn from a quote from László Moholy-Nagy’s book Vision in Motion, how has he been important to your thinking?

AR: Moholy-Nagy has always been one of my design heroes. I’ve always found him to be this really thrilling, charismatic, dynamic figure, constantly committed to experimentation and intellectual inquiry, very open and generous. And, also, his first wife, Lucia Moholy, I find her fascinating too. She was, of course, a highly influential photographer. He was responsible for many great feats, not least championing the then-new media of film, and new approaches to photography—and also developing an early cultural critique about them. He saw them having a huge influence over cultural change in years to come, and that was something he worked on with Lucia Moholy very closely. He completely reconceptualized design by identifying a relevant and productive role that liberated it from the constraints of industrial design.

BM: Lucia Moholy’s photographs have influenced how the Bauhaus Dessau has been seen and understood.

AR: She’s a fascinating example of the old-school relationship of design and photography, demonstrating how a photographer who is really passionate about a particular city at a particular time, or a particular movement, or another phenomenon, can produce work that’s so powerful and so compelling that it goes on to dominate—not in a negative sense but in a very positive sense, an enlivening sense—public perceptions of that phenomenon. You could also think of people like Julius Shulman on midcentury Modernist architecture in the Los Angeles area, and Berenice Abbott on Modernism in early twentieth-century New York. Lucia Moholy cataloged the daily life of the Bauhaus. It’s very interesting that in her photography of the buildings and the interiors, they look like impeccably framed stage sets. They are generally devoid of people. They are incredibly seductive. She also pioneered what became the dominant typology for industrial-design photography for the twentieth century because Laszlo Moholy-Nagy really championed the industrialization of product design. They are beautifully composed. They are very fetishized. They are in black and white. There are no shadows. And industrial objects have been photographed in the same fetishistic, generally no-shadows manner ever since.

BM: The work of Alessandro Mendini and Superstudio are similarly characterized by photography. For example, when Mendini designed the Lassù chair and then set fire to it with a photographer capturing the event. And Superstudio’s photo collages of unbuildable buildings and scenes that imagined utopian futures, or poked fun at the status quo. The ideas are kept alive through documentation.

AR: You are absolutely right. Many of Superstudio’s projects were wholly unrealized and became increasingly unrealizable and fantastical, which is very appealing but also very sad.

BM: And then, a completely different but related point is Wolfgang Tillmans’s interest in photographing man-made objects and structures. I went to see him interview Rem Koolhaas a few years ago and Tillmans asked him, “You’ve designed so many buildings, yet still, I’ll go to your public buildings and the queue for the women’s loos is a mile long, and there’s no queue for the men’s loos. Why haven’t you just started designing your buildings with twice the number of loos for women?”

AR: Wow. Full marks to Wolfgang for asking such an incisive question, which doesn’t surprise me at all. There are a number of artists over the years who have interrogated design in a particularly intelligent and imaginative way. Richard Hamilton would be another example, and Wolfgang is undoubtedly among them. One of the things I really love about his work is the way that he investigates the materiality of daily life. He will do extraordinary images of, say, door keys, digital interfaces. He’s very interested in technology. But my favorite of all these projects was a series of photographs he made of car lights, which have been a minor obsession of mine for a really long time. Over the last ten years, there’s been an explosion of technological development in car lighting. As a result, automotive designers have become ever more theatrical, flamboyant, and sophisticated in their treatment of them. It’s a very jugular interpretation of industrial design that I’ve found really interesting—and it certainly enlivened night-time drives around London. So, I was thrilled to discover that Wolfgang is a fellow obsessive.

Chateau International: Récit
Eau!
The ‘dancing’ fountain was first described by Hero of Alexandria, a mathematician and engineer from Roman Egypt: “A bird made to whistle by flowing water. A trumpet sounded by flowing water. Birds made to sing and be silent alternately by flowing water.”

“There’s something extraordinarily emotional about that fountain… The water is so alive—it is life. And people get very emotional around it. You see people crying—just overwhelmed by the spectacle.”

Transparent medusas rose to the sea’s surface, throbbed there a moment, then flew off, swaying toward the Moon. Harmonising with the medusas, the sea itself would rise too, far beyond the summit of the mountain’s peak, attracted by the heavenly stars. In each display the water would narrowly avoid skimming the edge of the Earth’s plate – countering the effects of gravity in its daily show of flair and finesse.

The ‘dancing’ fountain was first described by Hero of Alexandria, a mathematician and engineer from Roman Egypt: “A bird made to whistle by flowing water. A trumpet sounded by flowing water. Birds made to sing and be silent alternately by flowing water.” From here, through recollections of the fountain at the centre of the garden of Eden, the parting seas and Aphrodite’s Botticellian scallop-shell debut; alien mechanisms, the Pillars of Hercules and Louis XIV’s will to demonstrate his power over nature, we eventually meet in Los Angeles, at the headquarters of WET – or, Water Entertainment Technologies – the firm behind the world’s largest, most dynamic and hi-tech water features. Experience Passion. Experience WET.

WET, founded by former Disney Imagineers Mark Fuller, Melanie Simon and Alan Robinson in 1983, has designed hundreds of fountains and water features around the world, using water, fire, ice, fog and lights, alongside music. Perhaps its most renowned work is the Fountains of the Bellagio, which front Steve Wynn’s Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, and are considered by Steven Spielberg to be, “the greatest single piece of public entertainment on planet Earth”. In terms of physical scale, WET’s most impressive creation is the Dubai Fountain, the world’s largest choreographed fountain system set on a 30-acre manmade lake at the centre of Downtown Dubai.

In the ‘Finale’ to Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates describes Tartarus, the deep abyss, a chasm bored right through the earth – quite the opposite to a shallow manmade lake in Dubai, but with a similar effect – where all rivers flow together: “This fluid has no bottom or resting place: it simply pulsates upwards and downwards, and the air and the wind round about it does the same… as the breath that men breathe is always exhaled and inhaled in succession, so the wind pulsates in unison with the fluid, creating terrible, unimaginable blasts as it enters and as it comes out.”

Tartarus evokes the drama of the contemporary fountain, but the opposite expression. Being caught among its waters would only be in punishment, the axis of its abyss covering the axis of the *only recently identified!* spherical Earth. Swayed by his study of Pythagorean mathematics, Plato declared the world was declared “round as from a lathe” –although at the time, the word ‘world’ commonly referred to the heavens: Tarturus’ “unimaginable blasts” took in all the ‘world’s’ horrors.

…

As the contemporary fountain reaches its peak in the desert of the United Arab Emirates, it also returns to its source, the desert – although over a couple of thousand years the fountain has shifted a couple of thousand kilometres east, from Roman Egypt to the Arabian Gulf. While what might be considered the main source of desert water is a mirage, or a contradiction in terms, underground springs, rivers and lakes aren’t uncommon, and wells and oases – either dug or naturally formed – can support plant and animal life. Lakes occasionally form above ground in desert basins, from the precipitation or meltwater of glaciers above. They tend to be shallow, and consequently strong winds cause them to glide – like a stone skimming water – across low-lying land. When they evaporate off, the clay, salt or sand left behind forms in shallow plates, known as playa; and in North America many of the playa are relics of Lake Bonneville, which covered much of Utah, Nevada and Idaho during the last ice age. In 1912, an area of the Bonneville Salt Flats was marked out for motor sports – the Bonneville Speedway – and since then it has been the location for a number of land speed records. The first was Sir Malcom Campbell’s 1935 record of 301.129mph in the “Blue Bird”, and most recently Roger Schroer’s 2016 record of 341.264mph, in the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3, an electric car specifically designed to break the land speed record on the Bonneville Speedway.

Although the playa continue to erode, the various muscle cars, modified aircraft belly tanks and Harley Davidson Road Glides are having considerably less impact than climate change on the shifts in surface. In The Endless Summer – the 1964 surf movie where narrator Bruce Brown follows two surfers as they circumnavigate the globe, following the summer, and searching out “the perfect wave” – the trio ride the desert dunes on their route towards the water off South Africa’s Cape St. Francis. Shifting the sands of time, they worked with the rhythm of the folds in the same way that they’d later ride the curl of each wave. Brown, describes the sensations the camera couldn’t record:

“The thing you can’t show is the fantastic speed and the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach. It’s the kind of a wave that makes you talk to yourself. I couldn’t help but think of the hundreds of years these waves must have been breaking here, but until this day no one had ever ridden one.”

Both the drivers pursuing land speed records, and the surfers seeking out the perfect wave, are attempting to defy the laws of physics. They are also, to differing extents, working with nature, letting it hold power over them, and define the terms. Neither are working against the laws of gravity.

…

In the Idea Playground, WET’s R&D lab, their equivalent of Imagineers work to make water do the seemingly impossible, or at least the improbable. In “Water Music”, published in a 2010 edition of The New Yorker, writer John Seabrook considered the roots of the work of WET’s innovators, and what came before their compressed-air cannons, which conquer the problem of gravity:

“Water is heavy, and fountain designers through the ages have been preoccupied with finding ways to counter the effects of gravity. The ancient Romans figured out how to use gravity to their advantage, by forcing water into fountains from high aqueducts; the weight of the down-rushing water created the head. During the Renaissance, the ancients’ hydraulic innovations were rediscovered, and the Popes restored and embellished the fountains of Rome, commissioning the great sculptors of the day, who used water to give their figures the liquid glue of life. In the nineteenth century, mechanical water pumps began to be used in fountains, which made fountaineering easier, and today anyone with an electrical outlet can run one in his back yard.”

As well as being heavy, water is unruly. While surfers work with the wave, and submit to the unknown, the fountaineer works against it, asserting their power over nature. A fountain can ‘dignify the water’ and as Seabrook wrote, give stone sculpture “the liquid glue of life”; fountains patiently give lessons in transience, and choreographed drama, in a way that is diametrically opposed to the true nature of cascading, or undulating water. They symbolise both the emergence and disappearance of fresh, or chlorinated water, and mark the jubilant entry of water into a city. Mimicking the nature of a spring, the fountains and wells of ancient Rome would have been the primary source of fresh water in the city, before the advent of modern plumbing. Having figured out aqueducts, they channelled water towards the city for the sake of supply rather than performance, and the gleaming, often decorated stone wellsprings would form the centre of social life.

…

The channeling of water, via aqueducts, hydraulics or pumps, contains the ungraspable rush, while maintaining the wonder in its lively, life-giving swirl. As the moon invented natural rhythm, civilisation uninvented it, and in its place built altars to Man’s influence. A prime example is Louis XIV’s commissioning of Les Grandes Eaux Musicales at the Château de Versailles. In doing so he invented the modern musical fountain, which synchronised the dancing water with music and fireworks. Sculpture formed the principal element, the water jets animating and enlivening the stone and lead forms, caught in the midst of victory or loss. There are fountains dedicated to: the four seasons, animal fights, dragons, the story of Latona, Apollo and Neptune; each representing Louis XIV’s vision of his own confidence and power.

The jets d’eau, berceaux, nappes, cascades, grottes, bassins, gerbes, armes d’eau, grilles, champignons, buffets, fontaines and théâtres, wreaked havoc with the château’s water supply. Initially, water had to be pumped from ponds and reservoirs close to the château; and in 1671, when the Grand Canal was completed, a system of windmills pumped water back into the garden, but never enough to keep the fountains in full-play. The king nevertheless demanded that every fountain be frolicking at all times, and those in view of the château danced with the dedication of Fred Astaire. Further along the garden, fountaineers would signal each other with whistles to switch fountains on and off as the king paraded through his grounds – giving the impression of life everlasting. The fountains would later be supplied by water lifted from the Seine, by the Machine de Marly, and even with the château’s equivalent of austerity measures, the gardens consumed more water per day than the entire city of Paris.

…

When hotelier Steve Wynn opened the Fountains of Bellagio in 1998, he described being hit by the tricksy water’s spray as akin to “being baptised”; as the jets, pumps and music dignified the water – which was Louis XIV’s belief – the water dignified its people. For the king and his swanky contemporaries, fountains call to mind something altogether larger, something Nicola Salvi, architect of Rome’s Trevi fountain, articulated as: “the only everlasting source of continuous being”. But as much as water can be coaxed, shaped and transformed, what makes it a (not actually everlasting) source of (comparatively short-lived) being is really the fact that it can’t be stilled. It inspires and dissolves, it’s life-giving and purifying, it spoils and drowns; its uncanny movement ungraspable and uncontainable.

Published in 2018 by Chateau International, with contributions from Soft Baroque and Bryony Quinn.

PIN—UP
Thriving, Puckering, Adoring, Warping, Glowing, Scorching: Soft Baroque’s Sun City
Tanning salons — Eternal Summer, Brazil Bronze, Healthy Glow, Sun City — and their offerings — sprays and sun-bed sessions in shades of ‘Exotic Dancer’, ‘WASP Housewife’, ‘Skinny Tan’, or ‘Chocolate Brown’ (“great for body builders and ballroom dancers!”) — rose in popularity through the 1970s and 80s

Tanning salons — Eternal Summer, Brazil Bronze, Healthy Glow, Sun City — and their offerings — sprays and sun-bed sessions in shades of ‘Exotic Dancer’, ‘WASP Housewife’, ‘Skinny Tan’, or ‘Chocolate Brown’ (“great for body builders and ballroom dancers!”) — rose in popularity through the 1970s and 80s; the experience being likened to going into orbit, and sun-beds hailed as the healthy alternative to sunbathing, as the UV light “only let the good rays in”. Any fears relating to indoor tanning had less to do with the potential of leathery skin, malignant melanomas, and death (“What’s a little skin cancer, anyway, when you’ve smoked four packs a day for most of your life?”), which could be abated in the interests of ‘sexy good health’, and more to do with the potential of what had been a slow, communal, outdoor pursuit becoming private, optimised, and feeding into a growing culture of instant gratification and disconnection.

Apollo, the Greek god of seemingly everything, including the sun (after Helios’ legacy was cruelly and lazily sidelined) inspired Louis XIV to appoint himself as “the Sun King”, and commission the Fountain of Apollo at Versailles. The fountain, and nomenclature, symbolised the sun’s power over nature, as a life-giving force, a potentially destructive element, and as a site of worship — all qualities that Louis XIV humbly saw as being reflected in his own sphere of influence. But defining your status and identity according to your proximity to the sun isn’t exclusive to self-satisfied royals; actors, musicians, stars of reality TV and politicians (and those who move between the two), still seek to envelop themselves in a golden glow. Jersey Shore’s Snooki, who is Chilean-American, describes tan as her “race”, a Donatella-Versace-level tan communicates camp pomp and circumstance; tanning is associated with a dated expression of hotness, but it also has something of an an enviable laissez-faire vibe. It’s hard to deny the draw of reclining on a lounger, facing straight into the sun.

In Marsèll’s limonaia, the Italian term for a conservatory where lemon trees are grown, Soft Baroque have installed a sun lounger, which sits on a plush carpet, as if in a suburban salon, surrounded by a bright, yellow glow. Made from a wooden body covered in patches of polyurethane rubber, which were poured at pressure points corresponding with a relaxed body — where wet swimwear hits the surface, or sweat trickles down from our supine bodies — the lounger is covered in Marsèll’s classic yellow calfskin leather, which acts as an ersatz for human skin, puckering as it’s pulled tight over rubber patches, reflecting the possible, probable future of our skin.

The UV rays that emanate from the sun, and sun-beds, stimulate growth, can be used as a treatment for disease, and sustains all forms of life. Grow lights imitate the life-giving potential of the sun, installed in domestic grow cabinets and ‘stealth grow boxes’, which take the form of wardrobes, elaborate desk set-ups, and chests of drawers, emitting a Repo Man glow. The UV-A and UV-B light improve THC and CBD production in cannabis, and encourages plants to produce their own protective ‘sunscreen’. The artificial blue or toxic magenta glow associated with grow-ops reinforces chlorophyll production, strong, healthy stems and leaves. This relationship between nature and technology, DIY solutions and design, is reflected in the materiality of the pieces that furnish the basement of the Marcèll space. A hybrid of an homage to grow cabinets, Donald Judd’s panelled furniture, and the idea of taking a big Exacto Knife to IKEA’s single-sheet products, Soft Baroque’s bamboo wardrobe, acrylic and stone plinths, and aluminium table are sliced wth drastic cuts, plants growing out from gaps that emanate an artificial glow.

The baby blue log chair is the exception to the rule, a reflection of their affection for log furniture, which is seen as dorky, but is an economical and environmentally friendly approach to making furniture with wood. Log furniture makes use of the shoots and branches that grow quickly from tree stumps, which are often used in developing thicker brush in a forest, or cultivating hedgerows, but aren’t used for timber because of their unpredictable scale and form. It has a strong connection to its raw material form, and is a symbol of growth — of the branches, and understanding how to work productively with your environment.

The potential of sun-dappled, perfect weather is sold to us via films, tv, literature, billboards, perfume ads and promotional videos encouraging us to move to California — where reinvention, prosperity and fulfilment are only a hike away, and wildfires burn through forests, towns and across highways every year. SAD lamps, introduced as a light therapy to help ease Seasonal Affective Disorder, mimic the bright morning sunlight that’s lacking in winter, or the year-round sun of CA. Thought to encourage our brains to produce less melatonin and more serotonin, they improve moods and boost energy levels; but like the sun, staring directly at them is a bad idea. As it creates and sustains life, the sun holds an equal potential to be destructive. Droughts and wildfires, escalating with the climate crisis, decimate land and destabilise communities; melting, bubbling, bleaching, and scorching materials, leaving behind dry earth. Soft Baroque’s installation of stacked loungers atop a coir carpet (like the material of a doormat) with patches painted in chroma green (the shade used in digital cleaning out, substitution, and generic ‘green screen’ backgrounds) faces up to a balloon light — like those used to flood construction sites — in an homage to the sun’s ability to warp, blister, and dissolve. A formal acknowledgement of the force of the sun, stacked pyramid-like, the Tan structure evokes pre-Christian sites of worship; setting up sunbathers as reclining, vulnerable offerings, lovingly facing towards the object of their affection, sweating like pigs. Meanwhile, a TV plays a 7-second video on loop. A close-up of the surface of the sun, which bubbles and writhes for its audience, transfixed, as they sit back in the aluminium lounge chair — folded from a single sheet, its form slumped as if it’s melting before the screen.

Light lends drama to what we see. A defining feature of architecture — from Stonehenge and the pyramids, to Modernist villas and the accidental ‘Manhattanhenge’ — the sun casts shade, shadows and spotlights, emphasises features, structures and corners, it can create a steamy mirage, and a transfixing glow. An understanding of the arc of the sun was critical for ancient cultures, who depended on that knowledge for successful harvests, and it defined the form and orientation of buildings and ceremonial structures. Summer solstice — when the sun reaches its highest point, and, in the pagan religion, the summer king gives way to the winter king — is a turning point that’s significant across time and religious beliefs. The ‘standing still’ of the sun is thought to open doors between worlds, release magic, and allow the barriers between humans and spirits to fall. People gather in forests, on mountains, or among ancient structures, they draw protective rings around cattle and crops, engage in communal worship and public theatre. Like sunflowers, crowds engage in their own romance with the sun.

At the highest point of Sun City, where light dapples the room, Soft Baroque’s dancing armchair faces the alter, a throne performing a trance-like wiggle at its central sacred brass object. Playing on the tradition, and interior architecture of sites of worship, Soft Baroque set up a space for relaxation, where wheat grows inside lipos wood chests and carbon fibre hi-performance vases; brass, cut with a chainsaw-like motion from sheets, is bent into soft, graphic curves, formed into a bookstand, coat hook and candlestick, a series of disturbed religious objects. Referencing Quaker and Shaker traditions — the Tufnol Shaker chair made from carved plastic, with layers of compressed material revealed like woodgrain — known (and fetishised) for their egalitarianism and belief in simplicity, conservatism and puritanical nature, combining of principles of design and religion. The furniture in the space takes on some of their ideals of form, and exaggerates them to symbolic breaking point; taking high-minded ideas of function and turning them into inflated decoration, taking materials associated with decorating suped-up cars, and turning them into functional objects. While the furniture in Sun City is animated in narrative and form/structure, engaging in a sort-of theatre, it’s fundamentally rooted in an empathic relationship to material. Responding to the needs, reality and magic of how metal bends and leather curves, how wood, stone or plastic can be carved, Soft Baroque give in to their material, as if laying back in the sun.

Published on the occasion of Soft Baroque’s solo show, SUN CITY, at Marsèll, Milan, curated by PIN UP magazine.

Occasional Table: Distributed
Life is Good and Good For You in New York
It’s dry with a dash of satire – knowing and sarcastic, without losing the magic of the unreal. Gossip Girl embraced the truth of our never really leaving high school, and festooned it with the perks of adulthood…

As Rufus Humphrey prepares for the opening of the latest exhibition at his eponymous gallery, for which no one has RSVP’d, Lily van der Woodsen-Bass – née Rhodes, and formerly Humphrey and Bass – is arranging the final details for her Sotheby’s auction, to benefit the Art Production Fund. Scandal ensues.

Gossip Girl was broadcast from 2007 ’til 2012, and produced by Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz – of The OC – for the television network, The CW. The ruling passion is power. It’s dry with a dash of satire – knowing and sarcastic, without losing the magic of the unreal. Gossip Girl embraced the truth of our never really leaving high school, and festooned it with the perks of adulthood.

The teen drama focused on exactly that: the trials and tribulations of insufferable, privileged teenagers as they navigate addiction, affairs, murder and property empires, and dip in and out of being related to each other. Rampantly jealous and wildly loyal, the central characters – Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf, Nate Archibald, Chuck Bass, and Dan Humphrey – oscillate around each other, twisting and turning between love and hate. The story goes that an anonymous blogger, Gossip Girl, is tracking the every move of the senior class at a prep school on New York’s Upper East Side; and the show opens with the mysterious return of former ‘Queen Bee’ Serena, who disappeared to a Connecticut boarding school after sleeping with the boyfriend of Blair (her BFF), among other dramas.

Gossip Girl may be one of the first programmes to engage so enthusiastically with the inanimate as character. The disembodied voice of Gossip Girl – who turns out to be a man – is a woman, who plays what may be considered the central role, and is not ‘seen’ or ‘known’ until the final episode. She/he/it lives in the mobile phones and on the screens of the characters, and directs their lives. Arguably, the animated inanimate precedes the animate.

Through each season the characters speed through relationships, surnames, jobs, colleges, and principalities, and although the teen amateur oligarchs are certainly busy, the central characters populating Gossip Girl’s New York aren’t always the teen idols. First, there’s the aforementioned disembodied narrative voice of Gossip Girl and second the artwork – closely followed by the borderline hysterical product placement.

In 2007, the executive producers behind Gossip Girl worked with the Art Production Fund – a non-profit organisation which produces public art projects – on one of the first instances of a collaboration between a TV series and contemporary artists. In consultation with the Gossip Girl team, APF chose works by artists such as Kiki Smith, Marilyn Minter, Ryan McGinley and Richard Phillips, which were hung in the penthouse apartments and hotel suites populated by the key screen families.

The main location was Lily van der Woodsen’s apartment, and her ‘collection’ was unveiled in the fifth episode of Season 2. She enters the apartment already in conversation with her art consultant, Bex, who, on exiting the lift, introduces Lily to her newly adorned surroundings:

Bex: Kiki Smith greeting you in the foyer, Elm & Drag pulling you into the main room…
Lily: Oh, I love that…
Bex: And making a statement on the stairwell, Richard Phillips.
Lily: … isn’t it just breathtaking?
Bex: Any museum would be thrilled.

Richard Phillips’ Spectrum is the star piece. Hung at the centre of the space, above the glass stairwell, it features not only in conversation but also as a central character. Known by the core gang as ‘the rainbow woman’, in the final season the painting is embroiled in an elaborate scheme.

It’s the sixth episode of Season 6, otherwise known as ‘Where the Vile Things Are’, and Spectrum is at centre stage. Nate, the local all-American, dead-behind-the-eyes good guy, has a rare brainwave and steals the phone of the financial advisor to Bart Bass (the formerly dead, hotelier father of Chuck, Nate’s best friend), in the hope of unearthing the secret of where Bart has hidden a suspicious envelope – the records of an illegal oil deal with a Sudanese sheikh. (Really.)

Nate and Chuck trawl the phone for clues and find one in its calendar: ‘Bass, Traffic’. It turns out that the advisor records each of his money-saving plots with the name of a film, and in this case it’s Traffic, a film in which, as Chuck kindly explains, ‘the head of the drug cartel stored his illegal account information in the back of a painting’. But Chuck has been banned from his sort-of familial home – his mother may or may not have died soon after giving birth to him, and his father had been long dead before he unceremoniously reappeared in the back room of a brothel in upstate New York, only to commandeer his real estate empire from Chuck who, at 19 and in the midst of grief, had continued his father’s legacy – so Nate takes on the responsibility of “paying them a visit”.

On entering the apartment, Nate realises that “The rainbow woman is gone!” It is in fact at Lily van der Woodsen’s Sotheby’s art auction for the APF, where Rufus Humphrey is wreaking havoc with his current spouse, and former step-daughter (scandal), Ivy Dickens. Ivy inherited half of Lily van der Woodsen’s mother’s estate, having been employed by Lily’s sister to impersonate her daughter, with the aim of commandeering her trust fund. She is now masquerading as Rufus’s girlfriend, but is actually in cahoots with Lily’s ex-husband, William van der Woodsen, to destroy Lily – or so she thinks…

Back at the auction, in an effort to resolve the gallery panic, Ivy has bought every painting, and made a deal with Sotheby’s to display the work from Rufus’s gallery. Lily panics at the thought of sharing the spotlight with both Ivy and her ex-husband, and so enters Spectrum for auction. The painting – behind which Bart Bass has hidden the aforementioned microfilm – stars in a live auction, a battle between Lily, Ivy, and Chuck, which ends at a crescendo of one million dollars. From here, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump through promises of ruin and sex games before the evidence goes up in flames. It’s really very straightforward.

Snobbery is looked down upon.

The distinction, or lack thereof, between the animate and inanimate in Gossip Girl, is the only aspect of the series in which the hierarchy is flat, if not non-existent. The characters’ clothes speak with more clarity and purpose than the characters can seem to portray; they trade each other as often as they sell stories or hotels (and occasionally for hotels), and the art that surrounds them has a life of its own – in and out of the show.

After the collaboration between Gossip Girl and the APF came to fruition, a series of prints went into production, selling at 250 dollars apiece, and APF co-founder Doreen Remen – who also guest-starred in ‘Where the Vile Things Are’ – waxed lyrical about the impact of displaying work on screen: “Exhibiting artworks in this context is a way to engage people in their daily lives; a chance to generate a spark of interest that may grow into something thought-provoking and mind-opening”. In the episode, Remen reflected this statement, and Richard Phillips went along with Humphrey’s questionable interpretation of art history:

Doreen Remen: I like that your art is reflecting the same socially relevant projects we commission at the Art Production Fund.
Rufus Humphrey: And I like that you can see the street art influence. I’m not talking about the ’80s, but the ’40s. Dubuffet, Pollock, Ray Johnson.
Richard Phillips: When artists were the stars of New York, instead of celebutantes.

In this star turn, Gossip Girl did what it did best, layering references upon references. Phillips’ comment makes a joke of the show, and somewhat of himself. By having artworks ‘starring’ in a network show, and guest-starring in the show himself, he reaches the apex of Pop, and somehow brings Gossip Girl into its history. In an interview with The New York Times, Phillips said: “It’s so wonderful how my work has been able to reach out, Warhol would never have been able to dream of such a thing”.

Not unlike Andy Warhol’s Factory, Gossip Girl attracted a wild mix of personalities while it mass-produced images – of artworks, of themselves, of New York – and moving images. The show regularly spliced the realms of fact and fiction, the plausible with the implausible, and was somehow just dry enough to convince established artists and organisations to go along with its high jinks. Politicians, ballet dancers, designers, and musicians both star and are referenced, and real-world scandals are accounted for. New York plays itself. Mayor Bloomberg plays himself. Sonic Youth play a special set for Rufus and Lily’s wedding.

The inner circle’s relationships crossed over in reality and on the show, and gossip about the actors was as popular as gossip about and between the characters. Real-life columnists reviewing Gossip Girl appeared as characters, and character arcs appeared in real-world expressions. Serena and Dan dated on the New York set while Blake Lively and Penn Badgley, who played the aforementioned characters, dated on the New York streets.

Every episode would reach a crescendo at a high-production gala, auction, or masked ball, with the characters walking the red carpet, being chased by paparazzi and featured on Page Six. Every week would close with a mirroring reality for Gossip Girl’s stars, often in the same elaborate outfits, on the same marble steps. In a conversation with New York magazine, Penn Badgley (Dan Humphrey) said: “Look, the show that we’re on, it wants us to be celebrities, it’s trying to launch us into the media like a project. You know. Like a social experiment”.

Gossip Girl was distributed internationally and spawned a number of spin-offs, but it was the way that it permeated and was scattered across New York that was most remarkable. In a bizarre, regurgitating food chain, Gossip Girl would be consumed by New York, and New York would be consumed by Gossip Girl. Like pigs in shit. The show went high and low, far and wide, extolling the virtues of VitaminWater, Windows phones, and Chanel make-up, with the regularity and fervour of an underfunded lifestyle magazine. In addition to featuring figures such as publisher Jonathan Cape, critic Charles Isherwood, novelist Jay McInerney, and journalist Hamish Bowles, the show also coupled up n+1’s former editor Keith Gessen with Elizabeth Hurley, when she was moonlighting as a newspaper editor at The New York Spectator, sleeping with Nate and pretending to be Chuck’s mother.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa sign, which holds a prime spot in Lily van der Woodsen’s apartment, was made especially for the show – as a precursor to the permanent Prada Marfa sculpture in Texas, which was made in partnership with the Art Production Fund. The print, known on APF’s site as ‘Elmgreen & Dragset – Prada Marfa Sign (Prop Art)’ can be bought for as little as $149.99 on Art.com. It has also spawned countless imitations, including images of signs pointing to Paris, New York, and London, and a variety of ‘PRADA’ signs in a mix of typefaces, printed in gold, on marble and in millennial pink.

In 1977, Printed Matter was founded in Tribeca, New York, by Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, with the intention of disseminating artists’ books. To quote from details of the organisation’s history on Printed Matter’s website:

Large-edition and economically produced publications allowed for experimentation with artworks that were democratically accessible, affordable, collaborative, and could circulate outside of the mainstream gallery system. Printed Matter provided a space that championed artists’ books as complex and meaningful artworks, helping bring broader visibility to a medium that was not widely embraced at the time.

Why shouldn’t the next logical step be dissemination in the background – and foreground – of teen drama?

There were few – if any – redeeming features of the characters who made up Gossip Girl’s New York – and that was their best quality. If anyone had a virtue, it was in their total, uncompromising embrace of viciousness and vacuity. This doomed bourgeoisie, in ‘love’, addressed culture and politics with the same confident lack of care they inflicted upon each other. If an art of and for the people is what we want and need, here’s a playbook. To quote Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal: “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance”.

XOXO, Gossip Girl

2018

Originally published by Open Editions, in the anthology Occasional Table: Distributed

Port
The flexible radicality of the Camaleonda
Camaleonda is a portmanteau of camaleonte, meaning chameleon, and onda, meaning wave; two bodies that shift and change according to the conditions of their environment. The Camaleonda sofa…

Camaleonda is a portmanteau of camaleonte, meaning chameleon, and onda, meaning wave; two bodies that shift and change according to the conditions of their environment. The Camaleonda sofa, designed by Mario Bellini for B&B Italia in 1970, was part of a collective shift in Italian design against bourgeois, establishment practices. The radical design movement, which engaged with Italy’s socio-political context through its utopian ideals and material experimentation, pushed for new ways of inhabiting space, while maintaining a productive relationship to nature. The Camaleonda went a step further, by grounding its radically in the day-to-day realities of peoples homes; challenging the relationship between the evolution of new patterns of behaviour in the home, and the limitations of furniture available at the time.

The Camaleonda is a modular sofa made up of padded, capitonné, 90x90cm seats, with detachable back- and armrests; individual parts strung together by a system of cables, hooks and rings, which can be unhooked and recombined in potentially infinite configurations. It quickly became popular, and was adopted by many households — including New York’s Gracie Mansion, where ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, alongside another dancer, was photographed performing a naked handstand on the Camaleonda in the “champagne room”, during a reception for the Russian Winter Olympics team.

Despite its early popularity, the sofa was only manufactured for eight years, until 1978, and has since become one of the most sought-after sofas on the secondary market. This year, B&B Italia reissued the Camaleonda in celebration of its 50-year anniversary. The new edition honours the original design, B&B Italia’s Research & Development Centre — which was established when Busnelli, B&B’s co-founder, built what was once called the most fully automated furniture factory in the world — has finessed the balance between the rigorous geometry of the seating, and roundness of the padding, and replaced materials to be representative of new technologies and requirements. They’ve maintained, and progressed, the Camaleonda’s reputation for adapting to shifting conditions, lifestyles, and new ways of inhabiting space; recognising that the only permanent state should be a constant will to transform.

Originally published in Port.

Port
Formal Poetry: Commemorating Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery
Giuseppe Brion, the founder of Brionvega – the electronics company famous for the Cubo television – died in 1968. His wife Onorina, wanting to memorialise her husband, extended the family plot at the local cemetery…

Giuseppe Brion, the founder of Brionvega – the electronics company famous for the Cubo television – died in 1968. His wife Onorina, wanting to memorialise her husband, extended the family plot at the local cemetery of San Vito d’Altivole, the village in the shadow of the Dolomites where Brion was born, and approached the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa to design his tomb.

Scarpa stood between the ancient and modern; in Venice – the old, crumbling city where he was born and lived – the architect introduced a modernism sympathetic to the canals and palazzi: the Olivetti showroom on St Mark’s Square; the Biennale ticket booths and the Venezuelan pavilion in the Giardini; the renovations of the Gallerie Dell’Accademia and the Fondazione Masieri. But it is his work with the Brion family, the only project he would “go to look at with pleasure”, that is his most studied and visited, and, ultimately, the place where he would be buried.

It started, simply, as a tomb, but between 1970 and 1978 the memorial would grow to include a chapel and meditation pavilion, all set around pools of water and surrounded by a garden, approached and enclosed by tall cypress trees. Rendered in concrete and ornamented with tile and glass and metal, the elaborate stepped surfaces evoke ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats, which raised temples closer to the heavens – a motif that echoes throughout the cemetery, creating bands of light and shadow, cutting through and framing rooms, corridors, and terraces. The steps, submerged in water, moulded into concrete, seem either to lead to something or nothing; it’s disorienting, but in a way that appeals to the subconscious, inviting you to move through the space. Scarpa described the complex as being designed with a sense of “poetic imagination”: “Not in order to create poetic architecture, but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry.”

It’s a place rich in material symbolism, from the use of interlocking circles, which represent husband and wife; to the bodies of water, between and beneath the cemetery buildings, both life giving and morbid, the Nile and the Styx; and the way nature is left to grow over and around the structures. “The place for the dead is a garden,” Scarpa said. “I wanted to… approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life – other than these shoe boxes.”

Originally published in Port.

Maharam Stories
A State of National Recline
Eero Saarinen had been experimenting with the idea of conversation pits for a few years when he received a commission from industrialist J. Irwin Miller to design a family home in Columbus, Indiana, in 1953…

Eero Saarinen had been experimenting with the idea of conversation pits for a few years when he received a commission from industrialist J. Irwin Miller to design a family home in Columbus, Indiana, in 1953. Saarinen was interested in the potential for sunken living rooms to create productive divisions in open-space floor plans—informal, intimate spaces within large expanses, which would solve “the problem of furniture, with its inevitable ‘slum of legs’”—and the Miller House provided an opportunity to test his solution.

In 1959, the house appeared in a twenty-page feature in House & Garden, where the conversation pit was described as a “brilliantly cushioned well”—the back cushions made thicker than standard to help people get in and out more easily, the steps angled so sitters couldn’t see up women’s skirts, and the underside of the piano painted pillar-box red—an intimate, low-profile setting where guests could lounge and look at nothing but each other. Creating a dedicated space for conversation might have been less unusual at the time than it would be now, particularly considering current suspicion around technology entering the home, but it was undeniably decadent and challenged ideas around social decorum and propriety. In a 1963 edition of TIME, an argument against conversation pits, and their many dangers, was published:

“At cocktail parties, late-staying guests tended to fall in. Those in the pit found themselves bombarded with bits of hors d’oeuvres from up above, looked out on a field of trouser cuffs, ankles and shoes. Ladies shied away from the edges, fearing up-skirt exposure. Bars or fencing of sorts had to be constructed to keep dogs and children from daily concussions.”

In an April 1964 edition of the New York Times Magazine, writer Sylvia Wright described them as an “anti-chair,” a “transitional device backed by many architects who lack the courage openly to advocate lying down.” She argued that, rather than too radical, they could go further to accommodate modern America, a “uniquely non-chair sitting people,” who “only sit when engaged in activities of great importance, those which identify them as men of position and substance” and prefer lying down or standing. “There seems to this writer, however, to be overwhelming evidence that [. . .] the United States is gradually ceasing to be a chair-sitting nation,” she writes. It “is becoming instead a nation where one of the most characteristic positions is a state of collapse.”

Conversation pits appeared at a time of broader cultural shifts and upheaval, when “the vogue for suntans brought the freedom to lie down in places our parents wouldn’t have thought of,” and with so much up in the air, rolling down or climbing over seats seemed just as plausible as any other future. They featured in various homes, in projects by Saarinen, Girard, Goff, and Paul Rudolph, both domestic and in the exciting new realm of the airport—such as Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center at JFK. However, by 1960, Saarinen decried them as a cliché, fearing they were overdone and lamenting that he hadn’t come up with a better way to restructure the formal parlor. And so, for a while at least, they disappeared. Then, in the 1980s, conversation pits had a resurgence amid New York’s boom in Midtown lofts and bachelor pads. When architect Janusz Gottwald designed a loft interior for a wealthy consultant who “wanted to be freed from the limitations of ordinary seating,” Gottwald realized the versatility of the form—“you can even lie on it as if it were a grassy knoll.”

Originally published by Maharam Stories

Port
Anti-Morality Tales: Famous Artists from Chicago at Milan’s Fondazione Prada
Artist and curator Don Baum had been teaching at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center for close to a decade when he started exhibiting the work of under-represented Chicago artists. It was the early 1960s and…

Artist and curator Don Baum had been teaching at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center for close to a decade when he started exhibiting the work of under-represented Chicago artists. It was the early 1960s and Baum’s exhibitions – a mix of group shows, with themes including ‘Animal’, ‘Vegetable’, and ‘Mineral’ – were put together on a shoestring, the focus being on the community that surrounded the artists, as well as the work itself.

The Hairy Who (and/or The Monster Roster, Nonplussed Some and Chicago Imagists, as they were also known) was founded as a group – and as an exhibition title – when Baum offered Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, James Falconer, Art Green and Karl Wirsum a show at the Art Center in 1966. Their work was both aesthetically and thematically in opposition to the New York School, and while those artists were delving further into abstraction and although satirical, nonetheless glossy, escapist Pop; the Hairy Who, and their Chicago contemporaries, were engaging with the grotesque, hysterical and at times psychotic nature of life in post-war America.

For the Art Center exhibition, The Hairy Who – and later their 1969 exhibition, Don Baum says ‘Chicago Needs Famous Artists’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago – the artists covered the walls with a flower-patterned linoleum, with the express intention of having their audience experience the work in visually complex circumstances. For Fondazione Prada’s newly opened exhibition, Famous Artists from Chicago, the curator – and the Fondazione’s Artistic Director – Germano Celant mirrored the original setting.

On entering the gallery, you are met with a secondary route through to a room that has been built within the gallery walls, in which the group’s work is shown as a collective entity. A mass of wobbly, naked, fuzzy bodies; psychedelic stagings of suburbia; elaborate, flaming dreamscapes; and graphic expressions of delusion and dare; beyond the collective introduction, the exhibition peels off into individual sections, in considerably more ordered, traditional gallery settings. In doing so, each artist is given their moment at centre-stage, but the calm belies what was the strength of The Hairy Who: their focus on collective, noisy social commentary.

In an interview for the accompanying exhibition publication, Germano Celant spoke of how: “They did not passively accept reality like mechanical recorders in the manner of Warhol, but rather explored contemporary society with malice and irony.” He continues, “… they created visual subversions that contemplated the destruction of the body, and the ambiguity of existence leading to inhuman transformations. They focus solely on a moral argument, but attempt[ed] to push forward, awake and aware…”

In the surrounding galleries, above and adjacent to Famous Artists from Chicago, Celant curated concurrent exhibitions of the work of Leon Golub and H. C. Westermann, both of whom lived and worked in Chicago after the second world war. Westermann, born in 1922, studied applied arts at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, after serving in the U. S. Army as a Marine. Initially stationed in the South Pacific, and later in Korea, through his work Westermann recorded his traumatic experiences and anti-war politics. Working predominately in wood, in which he carved parts and images of boats, as well as assemblages and hallucinatory narratives, the forms in his work, as they are described in Celant’s essay in the exhibition catalogue: “oscillate between humour and ambiguity”. “On one hand, between a diving airplane and an atomic bomb, a penetrating penis and a figure with arms open in a gesture of surrender; and on the other, between a collapsing building and a book immersed in a void, heralding the end of the world and a return to the life of a savage.”

As is the case in Famous, the interior architecture of the Fondazione is utilised here, too. Westermann’s larger, sculptural works – in wood, metal and enamel – form a sort-of army, or front, defending the more revealing narrative works in wood and on paper, which are mostly hidden on entry. His practice embodies both a criticality of the brutality of war and its motivations, and a nostalgia for the fantastical stories of old Hollywood; and Westermann’s titles speak to that. They include, A Piece for the Museum of Shattered Dreams, Swingin’ Red King and the Silver Queen, Coffin for a Crooked Man and Where Angels Fear to Tread; and while his work is known for its craftsmanship, Westermann qualified in an interview with gallery director Martin Freedman and art critic Dennis Adrian in 1966, that: “To me craftsmanship is very secondary, actually”. “As I said, I like quality, but I like quality of ideas first, quality in politics, or quality in business. What the hell’s the difference?”

Golub’s concerns were rooted in his experience of American imperialism, but not limited to the conflicts the U.S had been involved with. He was equally interested in those that had gone unnoticed, developing timelines of concurrent wars and conflicts through his lifetime, and proving the interchangeability of the global paramilitary condition. In his installation works – where he manipulated and altered images of conflict, and presented them on layered photographic transparencies – Golub spliced recognised historical narratives, from the tragedies of the antiquity to the first televised war.

At the close of the second world war, figurative, expressionist practice was conflated with Socialist Realism and, particularly in the U.S, an aesthetic was sought that would assert the concepts of individual freedom and personal enterprise (i.e. The American Dream). This saw the onset of New Abstraction and Pop, and a so-called “depoliticised radical practice”. But Golub, as Celant describes: “Avoid[ed] the whisper in order to denounce loudly the terrible and dark situation in which the world itself.” And with H. C. Westermann, The Hairy Who, and countless other artists working outside of the New York School, he avoided the futile and the frivolous.

Although, “I would dare to claim that despite the apparent pessimism or negativity of the subject matter, in the reportage, retains a residual optimism”, as Golub said in 1996. “It’s in the very freedom to tell. In the freedom to make and exhibit these paintings.”

Originally published by Port.