Archive for the ‘objects’ Category
Snuff Architecture
A request for a drawing, a drawing that qualified as both visionary and architectural. I had to ask myself what sort of visions was I capable of? Marginal, dystopic, reckless, unsustainable phantasms that fleece you while they feel you. Those kind.
These visions generated in the lost structures I came across in the Mojave Desert when hiking with my father as a child- roofless adobes, handmade cattle troughs, carved stone pits used in ancient fertility rites, abandoned mines and crumbling homesteader’s shacks. On ridges overlooking the desert we sometimes sighted newer structures, hand built by drug dealers and sex traders, and bereft of any vegetation for hundreds of feet. The ground floors were windowless. It was related that once, in the wet concrete of a fresh driveway, ladies in negligees stumbled out, pressing their breasts and buttocks into fresh concrete.
Despite my inexperience, I could deduce that was I was seeing was no home; but what I couldn’t tell was whether what I saw was more fortress or dead house. I’d hazard now, that its denizens were haunting a space that was simultaneously crypt and fortified compound. For me, the conundrum of the dead house has transformed into a sly command with strings attached: Undo professional architecture but do not undo human beings. So, given that imperative, what built gesture points away from Negative Architecture (be it dangerously professional or professionally illicit)? What can operate within the unheimlich- a house unhinged from home, a genital unhinged from gender?
Given its formal properties (dimensions, materials, texture), the provenience of this object hovers somewhere between gravestone and doorstep. An impression of a modest penis (uncircumcised and flaccid) has left a trace on the surface of the concrete and serves as signature/epitaph/animal track. It is an artifact from the future past— a vernacular architecture, hand built and humble.
She Doesn’t Know Its Shape (2002)
She Doesn’t Know Its Shape, textile, run of ten. (2002)
Perhaps you are able to conjure up the geo-political boundaries of Iraq––that is, how it appears on a world map. The chances of recognition are greater now then ever… recognition through bombing…knowledge via invasion. But still, I find there are many who do not know Iraq’s shape: “Texas? Alaska? Somewhere in Africa?” is a common response when faced with its unlabeled perimeters. Strangely, we are for and against actions in places we cannot recognize.
What if this instance of blindness, this place of not knowing is a lush opportunity to instigate dialogue? Dialogue, because our internal and eternal monologues about this war eventually numb, shrink, and deaden our ability to speak. And act. And what of a dialogue that temporarily abandons words in favor of the starkly visual? And what of spoken words trailing the visual, transforming abstractions into solid places and flesh and breath interaction?
This simple geo-political garment was created in collaboration with a tailor shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The boundaries of Iraq have been stitched on to the front of formal clothing (read: not t-shirts). There are no accompanying slogans or data. The image is roughly 7 by 5 inches and the color of the thread is dependent on the color of the shirt.
Despite the availability and cost effectiveness of t-shirts, they are already too much of the fashion vernacular of protest. A more formal selection undermines common assumptions about how we design for protest and how we dress to communicate. This element of surprise allows me to imagine that an outline of Iraq could potentially surface on any garment on any body in the crowd, a textile apparition, a geo-political ghost made material.
[Ultimately ten were made, ranging from a baby's 'onesie' to a man's sweater vest. By now, 2008, people recognize the shape of Iraq.]
