Alter-Architectures

A curated selection of 100 word reviews from Eutopia for Temporary Art Review.
This month’s selection is curated by Carolyn Sorter.

Clark Richert, View of Drop City, “The Complex” in El Morro, outside Trinidad, CO, Circa 1966. courtesy of Walker Art Center

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle For Utopia
Curated by Andrew Blauvelt
Walker Art Center [link] Minneapolis, Minnesota
October 24, 2015 – February 28, 2016

“Hippie Modernism” offers an engaging combination of sociopolitical, economic and aesthetic inquiries of the 1960’s and 70’s without the pejorative use of terms. Pragmatic, intuitive and political methodologies for a new age include perception-shifting headgear, inflatable architecture, temporary cities on islands, educational literature, “truckitecture”, and negative utopias. Heineken developed bottles for building materials and Info-Gonks were 1968’s Google Glass. The exhibition demonstrates with prescient physicality the creative, freethinking nature often dismissed as a “hippie pipe-dream.” As evidenced in overwhelming detail at the Walker, the era’s core values are still a driving force in current politics, architecture, art, and design.

~ Jake Weigel
images courtesy of Walker Art Center

Claudia Comte
No Melon No Lemon
Gladstone Gallery, Chelsea, NY [link]
January 29-March 21, 2015

No Melon No Lemon proposes a comedic intersection of rigid geometry and playful biomorphism.  Dominant to the space is a rhythmic system of stark, yellow and white-striped mural paintings accompanied by the organic textures of carved reliefs—repeating lines run down the length of the plywood walls’ burnt, black surface.  Murphy bed-like plinths seem to “fold-down” from these partitions, each supporting a highly polished, wooden object. The sculptures, nodding to chunky loops and noodles, pumpernickel bagels, and Brancusi-totems, appear soft to the touch as much as they present a material hardness. The installation’s formal players reinforce a holistic optical vibrancy to its tactile nature.

~ Amie Cunat
images courtesy of Gladstone Gallery

 

 

Markus Schinwald
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
jointly organized with SFMOMA [link] September 09 – December 13, 2014

Like an endoscope moving around a membrane, viewers in Markus Shwinwald’s amusing site-specific installation must proceed around walls, bars and other physical barriers to view a network of objects and images that address interconnected themes of the body. Altered 19^thcentury paintings, adapted table legs, and other bits and pieces morph in and out of each other like muscles, bones and limbs. The objects mystify; the journey through the exhibition can feel aimless, but it rewards those who like to dwell in the imagination creating connections between things that (like disparate body parts) do not stand as strong alone.

~ Janeil Englestad
Images courtesy of Wattis Institute, San Francisco.
Photos by Johnna Arnold.

Alan & Michael Fleming
The Shining
Cydonia, Dallas [link]

Presenting Kubrick’s complicated version of “The Shining” maze the Flemings offer a Cartesian abstraction: a game of self-knowledge from a god’s perspective, notoriously failed by minotaur Jack Torrence. Flanked by ionic columns –architectural follies and figurative proxies— the setting belies stability while implying simulated contrivance as docent to madness. Dialectic knowledge tends to dwell on itself, says Hegel, erecting more elaborate constructions of diversion as a means to avoid sublation. Through the twin artists’ lens of replication and difference self-knowledge must be arrived at through a Lacanian fun-house mirror, where the other is consistently uncanny and each revelation generates occlusion.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Cydonia and the artists

Andres Jaque, “Cosmo” image: Miguel de Guzmán. Imagen Subliminal

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation
COSMO
Young Architects Program
Museum of Modern Art PS1, New York [link]

Galilean orbital irrigation structures are linked to diagrammatic catenary arcs: a cat’s cradle mapping water passage to suspended planetary-plants rising from mobile platforms. Part sci-fi rave aesthetic, part applied –if arcane— ecological science, the device purifies New York’s increasingly toxic water supply under the guise of a futuristic urban, social garden.

Utilizing locally sourced components and plants (to be returned) COSMO exposes previously hidden industrial domains as potentially manageable, vibrant and locally viable systems. Enmeshed within an art-party glamour the glowing, lollipop seduction verifies that ecosystemic infrastructure, when properly manifested, can also serve as a social aggregator and communal purifier.

~ Ryder Richards
images credit: Miguel de Guzmán. Imagen Subliminal