Niklas Goldbach + Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastugue

DAWN
Video Loop, 1:12 min, HD Video, silent, 2008

DAWN was filmed in the abandoned basement floor of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Originally designed by Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastugue, the Palais was completed for the International Exhibition of 1937. Though the palace's 30s classicism exterior remained intact, the interior has undergone a succession of alterations. This had advanced to a point at which the building had been made structurally unsafe, and the interior come to resemble a ruin. In 2001 the Palais got partly reconstructed: the architects Lacaton & Vassal generated 8000 square metres for a contemporary art gallery space, a bookshop and a restaurant.
The video shows around 60 people lying motionless on sleeping bags in the still unrenovated basement floor of the Palais de Tokyo while a disco ball is slowly rotating.

Niklas Goldbach + MVRDV

GAN EDEN
Video, 10:00 min, DV PAL, Stereo, 2006

Video excerpt here

With: Niklas Goldbach, Viktor Neumann
Camera, Editing, Postproduction: Niklas Goldbach
Assistance: Viktor Neumann
Foley Artist: Martin Langenbach
Sound Design by Christian Obermaier
Sound Mix by Poleposition D.C.

The second in a series of videos about utopia in urban culture, GAN EDEN was filmed in 2005 in the pavilion of the Netherlands, built by MVRDV for the World EXPO 2000 in Hanover, Germany.
Meant as both a critique of consumer society and as an example of environmentally-sustainable architecture, the Dutch entry for the World’s Fair was an exploration of the idea of limited space, engaged with the question of whether increasing population density can co-exist with an increase in the quality of life, and what role nature will play in that dynamic. Abandoned at the end of the World EXPO, the pavilion has already fallen into disrepair.
The video shows two men engaged in an ambiguous movement, both walking and cruising, through the space of this contemporary ruin.
The Biblical word gan (as in GAN EDEN) means walled garden.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster + Niemeyer

Double Terrain de Jeu (Pavillon-Marquise) [Double playground (pavilion-marquise)], 2006, Site specific environment with plywood columns made for the 27th São Paulo Biennial, 2006

Pablo Bronstein Drawings

Design for Monument after Paulus Decker
2005
ink on paper
35x20cm
Stage Design in the Style of Francisco Bibiena
2005
ink on paper
20x30cm
Large Centralized Pavillion in the Style of Filippo Juvarra
2005
Ink & pencil on paper
32x25.2cm
Two Architectural Studies in the Style of Jean Jacques Lequeu
2005
Ink on paper
32x48cm

Monument In The Style Of Michael Graves On The Debris Of The Bastille
2006
Ink & gouache on paper in artist's frame
22 x 31 cm

Andrea Fraser + Wright

Little Frank and His Carp
2001
Video, colour, sound
Durée : 6'

Passing for a journalist for an international biennale, giving a lecture-cum-striptease caricaturing the obsequious collector-artist relationship to patrons, or, disguised as a museum docent, take the public of a museum off on a subversive tour, Andrea Fraser is constantly challenging the position of the artist within the institutional, economic and marketing field of art. Beyond their direct inscription in this specific reality, these reactive mini-scenarios, which she plays herself, nevertheless inject a structural critique into the wider political and social issues. In the short video-performance Little Frank and His Carp (2001), filmed with a hidden camera, the artist plays a visitor to the Guggenheim Bilbao, reacting naively and emotionally to the refined celebratory injunctions of the suave voice of an audio-guide praising the merits of Franck Gehry’s architecture. This is one way of indicating the institutional art space as a consumer venue, but also as a power place seeking to create and guide our emotions towards the utmost vulgarity. Exaggeratedly subjected to a cultural order of things (fetischization of the container rather than the content, the display case more than the object, the museum over the works) which ultimately controls both bodies and imaginations, the artist goes as far as rubbing up erotically against one of the pillars of the building. These unverifiable physical symptoms are due to an invisible parasitic contamination by propagandist rhetoric associating contemporary architecture with a sacred kind of fascination; (sex) tourism in Art-land. Working, as so often, on the professional language and rhetoric of her own circle, using this simple gesture, Fraser denounces through her deeds a direct transposition of marketing and advertising semantics to the art sector, a priori the space of intelligence and knowledge supposedly escaping from the coarse formalism of the market. Here, as in most of her other work, Fraser’s strength and effectiveness lie in using only unmanipulated real speech, with an injunctive logic taken to absurd lengths; the institutional readymade. Resolutely and simply engaged, with feigned ingenuity and enlightening idiocy, this in-situationist intervention questions that fundamental political opposition between celebration and critique (as discussed, for example, by the philosopher Luc Boltanski), now disputed by a consensual postmodernity, more and more readily confusing art and culture.

^{Guillaume Désanges}

Wolf Vostell + Mies van der Rohe

Michael Asher, Moca Chicago, 1979

For this installation, Asher proposed that the two horizontal rows of aluminum panels on either side of and on the same level as the Bergman Gallery windows should be removed from the facade and placed on an interior wall of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

Felipe Dulzaide + Gottardi

Utopia Posible, 2008
Model, Wall-theater, digital slide projection, photographs, drawings, single channel video projection
Dimensions variable
ⓒ Felipe Dulzaides & Roberto Gottardi Courtesy the artists

Text taken from the Gwangju Biennale

The work of Felipe Dulzaides ranges from video and performance, installations, and public art works. The staging of a “proof,” the verifiable accounting or archiving of what seems impossible, is a recurrent theme throughout most of his pieces. The project Utopia posible is composed of several components. Each of these components addresses different aspects of a compelling story about an unfinished dramatic art school, its architect and the evolution of the design that will complete it. The story of this unfinished school and its architect echoes the story of a utopian social project. In 1961 Fidel Castro and Che Guevara envisioned the creation of an art school complex, now named Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), to be located on the grounds of an exclusive country club in Havana. Among the group of architects commissioned to the project in 1961 was Roberto Gottardi.
He was charged with designing the Dramatic Arts School. The
construction of this building was drastically interrupted in 1965. It
remains unfinished to this day. The building complex that this school is part is now considered to be the architecture that best captures the Utopian spirit of the Cuban revolution.

Simon Starling + Antonelli

1:1 scale model of the 5th Floor of 9 Via Giulia di Barolo,
Turin (La Fetta di Polenta) built at Uferstrasse 8, Berlin 2007
mixed media, 2,5 x 3,7 x 10,4 m
Copyright: Courtesy the artist and
Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

See here.

This text comes from e-flux

Simon Starling: Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations

The Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest presents a solo exhibition by the British artist Simon Starling. The project Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations draws on a number of different, both real and fictitious, versions of the same story – the story of a European architect being employed by a Maharajah to realise an ambitious building project in India.

Simon Starling is best known on the international art scene for his site-specific projects and interventions that address the reinterpretation of existing objects, and the circumstances of their creation and usage. Starling's work is always based on his own interdisciplinary research. The exhibited installations appear as complex, sculptural objects in which he creates a narrative through a wide range of cultural and historical references, comprising seemingly disparate elements.

The project on exhibit in Budapest brings together the manifold ramifications of a story that spread geographically from continent to continent over a period of a few decades in the middle of the 20th century. In 1929, the young European-educated Maharajah of Indore, Yeswant Rao Holkar (1908-1961) commissioned the German architect Eckart Muthesius (1904-1989) to design and build him a palace; this ultimately turned out to represent the best of European modernist design and technology, including many works of the best practitioners of contemporary design (Le Corbusier, Eileen Grey, Marcel Breuer, Lilly Reich, and Constantin Brancusi) most of which were produced in Berlin. The palace also sported the first domestic air conditioning system in India, built and installed by Heinz Riefenstahl, the Berlin-based plumber and brother of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

The installation Starling presents stresses the interplay between factual information and fictitious elements, underlying the ways in which the construction of a narrative is the result of subjective, culturally determined but very often unconscious motives. In this endeavour, he relies on a range of cultural products that have a large variety of origins and subsequent histories of their own. One interesting and telling example is the way Muthesius himself 'fictionalised' his own involvement in the design of the Maharajah's palace. When he presented the project to a European public, the images of the building were retouched, hiding the unfashionable sloping roof. When, in 1959, Fritz Lang eventually realized his version of a script he had co-written in 1921 with the title The India Tomb, Muthesius was brought in as a consultant for the film.

Starling's work allows the viewers to construct their own stories based on the rich array of fragments he puts on display. The artist does not privilege any one reading over other possible readings; indeed he even implicitly encourages the viewer's construction of his or her story beyond the constraints of the exhibition space.

The exhibition in Budapest is, in a certain sense, the 'unpacked' version of the project as it was realised in Turin earlier this year in the unique location of the "La Fetta di Polenta" (The Slice of Polenta) – an extraordinary house with seven floors built on a tiny slither of land in the city centre. In the Ludwig Museum a one to one walk in reconstruction of the fifth floor of this building is shown along with original drawings of Brancusi (from the collection of the MNAM – Centre Georges Pompidou) for an unrealised temple commissioned by the Maharaja of Indore, photographs of the Manik Bagh Palace by Emil Leitner and Eckart Muthesius (from the Galerie Doria, Paris), and projections of the films The India Tomb and The Tiger of Eschnapur by Joe May (1921), Richard Eichberg (1938) and Fritz Lang (1959)

Ai Weiwei + Tatlin

Ai Wei Wei and Fake Studio
Work in Progress (Fountain of Light), 2007.
First displayed at the exhibition "The Real Thing".

Simon Starling + Muthesius

Simon Starling
Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations
2008
platinum/palladium photographic prints
cm 40,5 x 50,8
courtesy Simon Starling and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino

A seven-story story

Antonelli’s building known as the “Fetta di Polenta” (the “Slice of Polenta”) becomes the new exhibit area of the Galleria Franco Noero and is inaugurated with an exhibit that brings to Torino an ambitious story from India.

In the mid-19th century, the architect Alessandro Antonelli built one of his most ambitious projects in Torino: a trapezoidal-shaped building that is 16 meters long, just over 4 meters wide on one side and only 57 cm wide on the other. It is 7 stories high plus two underground floors.

This building - better known as the “Fetta di Polenta” - located at the intersection of Via Giulia di Barolo and Corso San Maurizio has always been considered a foolhardy act on a solid architectural base; it has now become the new exhibit space of the Galleria Franco Noero. More than just a simple exhibit space, it is a structure that has been posed as a challenge to the gallery artists because they have been invited to create not just projects to be exhibited there but also a work – decorative, structural or providing domestic functions – that will become a patrimony of the house.

The first artist to take on Antonelli’s building is Simon Starling, the winner of the 2005 Turner Prize and, not by chance, an artist who labels his work “the physical manifestation of a thought process.” His exhibit “Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations” will run from April 3 to June 28.

If one of the fundamental aspects of Starling’s work is the surfacing of stories and hidden relationships, here, too, there is a relationship underlying the artist’s work. There is a tie between the audacious “Fetta di Polenta” and the unusual example of rationalist architecture in India, the Manik Bagh Palace (Jewel Garden), which the Maharajah of Indore commissioned the German architect Eckart Muthesius to build in 1929. Starling has discovered two portraits in Torino of the Maharajah and his wife in wedding finery.
“Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations” unfolds vertically along a transfer of ideas and forms – from one building to another, from one material to another - throughout the seven stories of the building, bringing the history of the ambitious project in India inside the ambitious building in Torino. A full circle of reflections on events that is both real and imaginary.

Carsten Höller + Krutikov

Kompaktes Kommunehaus (2001).

Tobias Putrih + Fuller

QR Reshaping, C-print, 2003, courtesy of Max Protetch

Simon Dybbroe Møller + Superstudio

Material of memory and the broken beat (Superstudio in the Via delle Mantellate office), 2005. Glass, inkjet print, framed75 x 85 cm. Photo: Thomas Neumann. Courtesy: Simon Dybbroe Møller and Michael Heins, Herzogenrath

Simon Dybbroe Møller, Installation view, Art Forum Berlin 2004. Courtesy: Simon Dybbroe Møller and Galerie Kamm, Berlin

José Davila + Mies van der Rohe

Chinese whispers, Dyptich, Lambda print, 2006.

Angela Ferreira + Jean Prouvé

Maison Tropicale, 2007.

Beate Gütschow

Text taken here.

They could be a view into the future where modernistic architecture is a wrecked background with some extant [urban elements]. I wanted to create images which seem familiar to what we know from media, but at the same time it is impossible to recognize the place/site/country or time. – Beate Gütschow, 2005

Beate Gütschow’s panoramic landscapes are digital assemblages of details from the artist’s archive of images of trees, fields, knolls, clouds, people, and shadows. The interface between separate elements is invisible and seamless, however, the colors are eerily saturated and her use of light and shadow often contradictory. Consciously drawing on the history of landscape painting to create her tableaux, Gütschow’s photographs resemble the pastoral scenes painted by artists such as Claude Lorrain, John Constable, and Nicolas Poussin.

In an overlapping series, Gütschow continues to work by montaging multiple image files but the color landscapes have given way to a series of black and white urban settings. Mixing the architecture of many places, she brings together pictures from books and archives, as well as her own photographs from across Europe, Japan, and the United States (Los Angeles in particular). The human figures Gütschow includes in these works are either homeless people or tourists, as placeless as the constructed spaces they occupy. Where the lush pastorals of her earlier work reference idyllic painting, the new series employs view points and subject matter more suited to black-and-white documentary photography, rendering these post-apocalyptic scenes all the more stark and yet all the more familiar.

Gütschow studied at the School of Fine Arts, Hamburg and at the School of Fine Arts, Oslo, Norway. She has participated in one-person and group exhibitions at venues in Germany including Stadtische Galerie, Nordhorn; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg; Kunsthistotisches Institut, Bonn; and Bundeskunsthalle Bonn. Her work is in numerous collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of numerous awards such as a Pixel Award, an Otto-Dix-Prize of New Media, and a Villa Aurora fellowship in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Berlin.

- edited by Kendra Greene

James Welling + Johnson

Glass House (2007 - 2008)

Doug Aitken "Plateau"

Doug Aitken, Plateau (2002).
Light box (52” x 10’ x 14”)

Doug Aitken refers to Plateau as a “meta-city.” The composite photograph represents an overwhelming, convoluted, and claustrophobic megalopolis made entirely of FedEx boxes. Other images in the series feature futuristic cities composed of IBM, Macintosh, or Coca-Cola boxes, populated, if at all, by swans, sparrows, and other birds. The buildings are designed to replicate a number of twentieth and twenty-first century buildings in brutalist, fascist, and utopian styles. Emblazoned with corporate logos and built in an apparent frenzy of construction from the waste of consumerist lifestyles, Aitken's city is chaotic, sanitized, and anonymous, humbled by the indifference and the curiosity of the disproportionately large birds. Their presence evokes Darwinian questions of natural selection, rendering the empty corporate city an artifact of an almost desperate will to build, conquer, and survive.

Images courtesy Doug Aitken Workshop / 303 Gallery New York