radashi kawamata
Last summer in Tokyo, for the group show “Ripple Across the Water” (curated for the Watarium by Jan Huet), Tadashi Kawamata presented a series of works he called “Prefabrications Tokyo/Kobe.” These “Prefabrications” were nothing but simple small-scale standard aluminum barracks which were assembled completely or incompletely (walls, doors, or ceilings missing). The artist positioned these barracks strategically in the outside space in the trendiest part of the city, Aoyama, where the museum is located. Hiding under bridges, on the pavement, or somewhere in an entrance, or making a useful but helpless impression next to the marble corporate facades, these “Prefabrications” were wonderful and simple fabrications of psychology-, context-, art- and architecture-related tales. As the title suggests, Tokyo is still expecting what Kobe experienced earlier in 1995: a major earthquake. Public space is here a critical screen for the projection of anxiety, reminding us of nature and its power, which are usually banned from the concept of public space. But of course, the way nature and the fear of it are mediated is socially and ideologically constructed: i.e., a psychological route.
matthew mccaslin
Matthew McCaslin stresses with his contribution
what urban and architectonic modernism underwent: endless mass reproduction.
Badly photocopied reproductions from an insignificant book of the 70s
show standard views of midtown Manhattan, a New York housing complex and
a New York factory panorama. In addition to this he added four little
photocopied reproductions of video still out of his work. For these videos
the artist bought canned and endlessly edited video footage from an image
bank, in which modernist buildings are constructed and destroyed by implosion.
For McCaslin, urban public space is completely flattened out like a photocopier
would render it or as in the ideal of painting during the time these buildings
were constructed. It is imploded to a generic icon that has de facto contributed
to the destruction of American cities. But in his symbolic act of distancing
and reducing, the artist doesn’t see for himself so much a dystopian
destruction but a kind of anonymous vanishing point that makes him say
“I love midtown” for its pedestrian (un)quality. Is this a nostalgic
approach that lets us expect a situation without any production, any offices
left in town after having been driven out of the country or into the computer
networks? And are the “masterpieces,” for whom John Ruskin’s
quote was instrumentalized while the book was edited, now breeding sites
where hate and skill work together to put up an ideal topography for a
characterized crime, such as the shooting of eight people by a man living
in such a housing project over a pair of sneakers? Is this a path of nostalgic
distancing?
john miller
John Miller’s series of photographs are entitled “The Middle of the Day,” which he subjectively sees as the most depressing time of the day. From noon to two o’clock is also when the physical limits of the human body are reached, when workers need a lunch break or a siesta (in the South). The photographs grouped under this title attempt to inscribe themselves in the long and important tradition of everyday-life portraits, where a kind of public and private life tries to stand unnoticed for an eternal moment. But precisely this representation and evaluation of insignificant public space and the everyday life it contains is an ideological battlefield occupied by the media. It needs to be constantly reclaimed and renegotiated, something that has been done by Marx, Freud, Lefebvre, in Critical Theory, and by the Situationists, to name just a few. John Miller argues: “What I am interested in, then, is documenting something intangible, something invisible and something that might only attach itself to an image after it has been placed in a system: the problem of valuation”: i.e., the “insignificance” of everyday life.
click image to return to part one