Knut Henrik Henriksen + Le Corbusier

Scale of Proportions which makes the Bad Difficult and the Good Easy

2006

Wooden beams, planks and styrofoam panels

Unique / KH/I 2006-001

via Standard Oslo

KNUT HENRIK HENRIKSEN
“SCALE OF PROPORTIONS WHICH MAKES THE BAD DIFFICULT AND THE GOOD EASY”
31.08.-01.10.2006 / Opening: Thursday 31.08.2006 / 19.00-21.00 /

-----

STANDARD (OSLO) is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with the Norwegian artist Knut Henrik Henriksen. Since graduating in 1997, Knut Henrik Henriksen’s sculptural works continuously challenge exhibition spaces in which they take place. They seem to be inserting elements of intimacy – and thus also doubt – into spaces that rather are defined by authoritarian or monumental qualities. His first exhibition at STANDARD (OSLO) makes no difference: the gallery is altered to serve as a vehicle for a discussion on the mathematically harmonious and universal standards.

The exhibition “Scale of Proportions Which Makes the Bad Difficult and the Good Easy” takes its starting point from a historical meeting; between the architect Le Corbusier and the physician and mathematician Albert Einstein in 1942. Le Corbusier took this opportunity to introduce Einstein to his work with the “Modulor” – an attempt at locating the Golden Section proportional to the height of a human. If such a system could be devised it would form an ideal basis for universal standardization. Using such a system of corresponding measurements Le Corbusier proposed that architects, engineers and designers would find it relatively simple to produce forms that were both commodious and mathematically harmonic. Einstein’s later response was that such a system would make “the bad difficult and the good easy”, but didn’t necessarily foresee how heroic ideas not automatically translates into heroic design.

Knut Henrik Henriksen’s works are equally driven by a search for mathematical harmony and potentially endless structures, while also remaining conscious how the introduction of universal standards seem to have fuelled the technical and economic rationalization of late Modernism. In the only work in the exhibition this discussion takes form of a deadpan analysis. Lowering the gallery ceiling to Le Corbusier’s idealized 2.26, the architect’s philanthropic ambition of placing man at the centre of building is tested out, but paradoxically done so in a building context that normally places objects at the centre. The anti-septic cleanliness of the gallery is amplified – offering the viewer little more than void and an experience of one’s own scale in relation to the space. The sculpture is rather defined as the space in between the two horizontal layers. Both miming and mocking the whiteness of the gallery space Henriksen is employing white square Styrofoam ceiling panels – bought from a DIY store in the working class area of Berlin. Henriksen keeps returning to these cheap standardized materials from DIY stores – inextricably connected to the tristesse of high-rise office buildings, but also to apartments and the numerous cafés in Henriksen’s home area of Kreuzberg and Neukölln in Berlin. His alterations of this material is kept at an absolute minimum in this work. Rather Henriksen has an interest in the material’s inherent and unadulterated qualities, citing the artist Carl Andre’s early wooden constructions and ‘scatter pieces’ as sources of inspiration.

Knut Henrik Henriksen (b. 1970, Oslo) lives and works in Berlin. His recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at the galleries Elastic in Malmö and Hollybush Gardens in London, and "Longing balloons are floating around the world", Green Light Pavillion in Berlin. During the exhibition period his work can also be seen in exhibitions such as, "Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better", Momentum 2006 in Moss, "Domino" at Air de Paris in Paris, and in "XXe Ateliers Internationaux Du Frac Des Pays De La Loire" at Le Frac des Pays de la Loire in Nantes. Henriksen is also commissioned to do a large-scale public sculpture for the new regional hospital AHUS outside of Oslo to be completed in 2007. The artist will be in Oslo during the mounting of the exhibition.

Rivkah Young + Neutelings Riedijk

via Rivkah Young

Xavier Delory + Le Corbusier

 Dom_ino 07

Dom_ino 03

via Xavier Delory

Karin Kneffel + Mies van der Rohe

Untitled series, 2009.
Inspired by the Krefeld villas by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Untitled series, 2012
inspired by the Four Seasons at the Seagram Building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.


via Karin Kneffel

Kreider and O'Leary + Portman

LA Tapped
Performance, The Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, USA
April 2010

‘I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore ... stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.’
– Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984)


LA Tapped is a spatial enactment of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, CA, performing the building as per Frederic Jameson’s reading of it; that is, as model of postmodern architecture and allegory for the logic of late capital.  The performance entailed moving around the building and tap dancing a set sequence at various locations throughout the Bonaventure including elevators, walkways, hallways, shops, indoor track, outdoor pool and peripheral spaces.
The video work LA Tapped (or the story of a harmless little girl, who had been carried by a cyclone many miles from home; and she had never killed anything in all her life) documents this performance, while becoming a work in its own right. Coupling the footage of the performance LA Tapped at the Bonaventure with sound and image taken from John Pilger’s The War We Did Not See, the work aims to expose an enmeshment of the topologies and representations of our built environment not just with the logic of late capital, but also with the systematic violence that this logic both upholds and reinforces.
Stills from the video work were used in the book: Bonaventure : Hyperspace - Sensorium - Connectivity - War by Kreider + O’Leary (Unnameable Press, 2012).

via Kreider + O'Leary

Liz Glynn + Morris Hunt + Le Corbusier + Piano

Liz Glynn, On the Museum's Ruin (Morris Hunt - Corbusier - Piano) I & II, 2011, rubble from the demolition of the Fogg Museum, lightweight concrete aggregate and stainless steel LC2 chair frame, 30 x 26.5 x 28 inches each.

via Liz Glynn

Mary Ellen Carroll + Mies van der Rohe

act of god, 1999 - mary ellen carroll

using the glass house or the farnsworth house as an emblem of architecture that is subsumed by sculpture, the photographs that mies van der rohe took of the site have been encoded with the memoirs of edith farnsworth using the dataglyph technology of encryption at xerox parc. the plates have a color indicated in the title that would be the color printed from these four plates that are taken from the colors that are noted within the text. the use of the lithographic plates is to make visible the mechanical process within the invisible. the images are positioned on the plate in relation to the photographic perspective. memory and the landscape are used as framing devices for this project to transform the photographic image into pure data.



via Rolu