by Stephen Slaughter

“Buildering, Misbehaving the City”
and
KniveandFork
Questions and Answers
Space and Place

The Ordinary and the Banal

The objective of architecture is works of art that are lived in.  The city is the largest, and at present the worst of such works of art.

Functionalism (to speak roughly of the heroic period of modern architecture) was a new dream exploiting a new source of geometric and organizational procedures, not a change of objective.

That the architecture of the next step is in pursuit of the ordinary and the banal does not mean that it has lost sight of its objective. Ordinariness and banality are the art-source of the new situation. The kinds of repetition and control that offered to building by industry can be edged towards a kind of dreamy neutrality”

“18 Posters,” Wiebke Grösch & Frank Metzger, “Buildering, Misbehaving the City,”
Original quote, Alison and Peter Smithson

Spoon Boy;
“Do not try to bend the spoon, that is impossible, instead try to realize the truth.”
Neo;
“What truth?”
Spoon Boy;
“There is no spoon.”
Neo;
“There is no spoon.”

Excerpt from “The Matrix,” the Wachowski Brothers, Warner Brothers, 1999

KnifeandFork, an art collaborative know for site-specific installations led by Brian House and Sue Huang’s choice of Modest Mussorgsky’s adapted “Pictures at an Exhibition,” most notably known for the closing theme to PBS’ American Masters Series, struck an appropriate chord as I made my way through the Contemporary Art Center’s opening of “Buildering, Misbehaving the City,” held the final Friday of February. The piece, as fractured and incomplete as the average patron’s understanding of the institution they were asked to traverse in experiencing it, was performance by an “orchestra” composed of 11 CCM musicians, disparately distributed throughout the entirety of the CAC.  Each performance, segregated by the walls and space of Zaha Hadid’s architecture, was at times haunting, at times silly, but mostly fractured and intangible given the inability to produce coherent harmony or melody due to its staging.  Remotely networked through headset, it was the musicians’ disembodied yet synchronize performance that served as an appropriate, albeit eerie, counterpoint to the evenings featured work.

Curated by Steven Matijcio, “Buildering, Misbehaving the City,” is the premier exhibition in the Contemporary Art Center’s 75^th anniversary season, and represents, in a not so subtle way, the institution’s latent desire to shift public consciousness and behavior by transforming, for a time, the institution itself.  “Buildering” a “…term coined for the unsanctioned use of architecture, fusing the words “building” and the rock-climbing term “bouldering,”” borrows part of its potency from the urban phenomena know as parkour.  This hybridized notion, represented by the show’s stance almost as conviction, seeks to revive from the not so distant past the project of the Situationists International, a European art collaborative interested in bringing to an end the notion that art and culture are separate activities and sought, by their work, to transform them into part of everyday life. As such we are presented with the city as a dormant, banal, nondescript product of the efficiencies of capitalistic industrial production, and its inhabitants as an alienated, mass media suppressed horde of drones in need of agitation.  Cincinnati?  It’s not so clear?  But to keep things “contemporary” the Situationists’ concept of “play” and “dérive” is fused with the body, the active body in the city, and parkour as practice, as art, as political action is evoked.

Morpheus;
“Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Neo;
“The Matrix.”
Morpheus;
“Do you want to know what it is?”
Neo;
“Yes.”
Morpheus;
“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
Neo;
“What truth?”
Morpheus;
“That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.”

Ibid

The first place I journeyed on my odyssey through the gallery, was the building’s penthouse, where a lone trombonist sat amongst the air handling units, array of ducting and odd assortment of derelict furniture, cast off as if the populous of the Island of Misfit Toys. The musician, as poised to answer questions and engage in chitchat as he was to play, awaited his in-ear cue to begin the opening flourish to “Promenade,” the first movement to “Pictures at an Exhibition.”  As the performance began and my anticipation and angst abated, my attention went immediately to the penthouse itself and its inhabitants who, like me, struck out on self-guided tours through the nooks and crannies of what was essentially the building’s machine room. As I wandered about I wondered about its place in the everyday goings-on of the institution.  Was this a storage space? Did the furniture and bric-à-brac belong here? Was it staged or curated as the rest of the galleries, and if not, was it legal?  The answers weren’t soon coming but if I was to make my way to see both the show and the performances I had to keep moving.

The strongest piece in the “Buildering” show that represents both a clear registration of the placelessness of the modern urban condition and facelessness of its inhabitants, is Iman Issa’s series, “Making Places.” Here the artist presents a series of photographs depicting a lone figure without identity engaging urban landmarks without distinction in an almost binary relationship that relies on the pose of the figure and the scale of the landmark to produce a narrative when taken as a whole.  The figure’s pose or action gives the appearance of giving homage, care or tribute to the landmark before them, while the enormity, banality and stark character of the landmark itself renders the figure and its gesture, ridiculous by comparison.  The humor of the piece requires us the audience to personify or make animate the inanimate urban objects the figure is seemingly trying to deify or make omnipotent, giving character to the characterless by virtue of the action of the figure who does so without stated cause, need or credit.  Like parkour, the series uses the body to transform the city.

Morpheus;
“This is a sparring program, similar to the programmed reality of the Matrix. It has the same basic rules, rules like gravity. What you must learn is that these rules are no different that the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken. Understand?”
Neo;
Nods in agreement.
Morpheus;
“… Then hit me, if you can.”

Ibid

My second glimpse of “Pictures” happened when the massive doors of the main elevator opened and the sound of a sole cellist could be heard colluding, ever so faintly with the violinist on the floor above and a clarinetist somewhere in the distance, to provide the performance with its first discernable harmony of the evening. It was a treat.  The scatter of the musicians and the temporal, episodic nature of the performances made the experience ephemeral and somewhat frustrating.  But the massive space of what was in effect the institution’s freight elevator provided the opportunity to briefly piece the picture back together, and enjoy, for once, more than one musical part simultaneously. The experience, more than just heightening the age-old thrill of effortlessly rising vertically in the city, allowed for a new understanding of possibility with regard of what can take place in a massive mechanized movable space. And with that singular programmatic shift, from freight elevator to moving stage and dance floor, the idea that space can be appropriated for uses other than its initial intention became manifest.

It’s an interesting premise for any institution to put forward; that the city can change and you can change it and the space you occupy is provisional based on circumstance or desire, but Sebastian Stumpf’s “Bridges,” added yet another perspective on the body and public space.  Stumpf’s work was a series of videos documenting a man, without fanfare or warning, casually leaping off an urban bridge into a torrent of water.  Just as most of the work in the show, the piece deals with the unauthorized and unorthodox use of public space, but unlike Issa’s work where the landmarks of the city were given authority by the actions of a body or Karnila Szejnoch’s photo series entitled “Swing” which uses the spectacle of juxtaposing monuments to sovereignty with acts of insubordination to reveal the hypocrisy inherent in the authority of symbology, Stumpf uses the body and spectacle to comment on spectacle itself.  In Stumpf’s videos it’s unknown exactly how staged it is or exactly who’s in on the trick.  The camera is trained on a spot on a bridge recording cars and pedestrians casually pass by, then a man in mid trot jumps the guardrail to the bridge and into the water to little attention paid by onlookers to what could have easily been assumed to be a suicide attempt.  And then we wait, we wait to see what the onlookers do and if he’ll reemerge safely from the water and after a long pause the video ends.  There is no resolution to the events just witnessed, and without such the viewer is left to question the credibility of the entire account, and it is that issue of credibility that transforms the video as document into video as performance art.  Here the city is the stage, the bridge is the prop and the cast is the jumper and his witnesses.  Regardless the audience the point is the same, the city’s a stage and the body in the act of transgression sets the performance in motion.

Neo;
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
Morpheus;
“I’m trying to free your mind Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it… You have to let it all go Neo, fear, doubt, disbelief. Free, your mind.”
Neo;
“Whoa.”

Ibid

“A community is by definition a comprehensible thing.  And comprehensibility should therefore be a characteristic of the parts.”

“18 Posters,” Wiebke Grösch & Frank Metzger, “Buildering, Misbehaving the City,”
Original quote, Team 10, Alison and Peter Smithson

Over and over both the performances in the building and the work in the galleries reaffirmed the idea that the audience had the power, through their acts or actions, to change the condition of the city at large and the space of the institution they occupy.  This revolutionary notion through the prism of the work of the Situationists sparked the “May ’68” protests in France, and stands as a testament to art’s ability to sponsor social change by public agitation and making conscious the role of the body in space.  Why would an institution, by virtue of its function as a purveyor of art, want to compromise its authority by insinuating its space, and the space of the city, can be transformed? Their interest, it appears, is to dissolve the institution by rendering the building invisible and redefine the city by rendering its inhabitants unwarranted, thereby producing both a new city and a new citizenry… Or maybe not, but it is clear the collective work of “Buildering, Misbehaving the City,” and the performances in the building organized by KnifeandFork seeks to challenge us, the patron, to think differently about the power our bodies and presence possesses and our ability to change not only ourselves, but the world around us.

Spoon Boy;
“… Then you’ll see, it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

Excerpt from “The Matrix,” the Wachowski Brothers, Warner Brothers, 1999