Quasi-architecture

Date:	28 May 2009
Format:	Lecture
Index:	quasi-institution self-organization writing

Context

I gave a talk about "quasi-architecture" at PROGRAM in Berlin on 28 May 2009. There are many occasions where I discuss the way Michel Serres's concept of the quasi-object influenced my practice and understanding of what art might be and this is another iteration of that. It also is a moment where I tried to come to terms with my disappearing self-identification as an architect: quasi-architecture almost sounds like an insult, not even rising to the status of architecture. But this activity in the negative space or dark matter of proper architecture seemed like a generative space worth discussing.

This little excerpt from that talk at PROGRAM could function as an explanation of what I mean by Quasi-institutions.

Transcription (excerpt)

Los Angeles has a pretty strong tradition of self-organized institutions, partly based on a market-driven art context and a general lack of state funding of the arts (the gap left by the NEA was filled by the likes of Creative Capital, which imposes entrepreneurial, project-based standards on what is funded).  I think the self-institutions themselves are their own best project - in that they, in their very nature, propose new models of sociality, of organizing ourselves, new politics, and at a very fundamental level they embody an aesthetics of existence, or what is sometimes called the blurring of art and life. 

What are some of their qualities? Their starting points and ending points are difficult to identify; they involve many people; they are full scale and they really exist in the real world, and at the same time they are models, or possibilities; they function pedagogically, economically, and often through exhibition; they use networks and build networks; they generate their own systems of distribution and support; they produce and redistribute cultural capital; and so on.

Self-institutions are quasi-architectures, no matter how anti-institutional or how much they try to unravel themselves. In fact, the more they sustain the ambivalence between institutionality and their own dissolution, the more agonistic these bureaucratic spaces are. 

Institutionalization has been a resistant artistic strategy for some time, and it continues to be proposed - for example by the collaborative BAVO, who calls it "over-identification." They criticize "positive" social art as filling in for the failures of capitalism, ultimately justifying it. From what I can gather, they are instead proposing satirical institutionalization, in the model of the Yes Men. I don't have as much of a problem with attempts to build autonomous structures, which may function as negation; and I'm not sure the critiques tell us anything we don't already know, even if it is repressed. Non-ironic institutions tend to be invested in the question of what happens beyond critique. 

Another point of reference for this talk and I think a productive place to link Michel Serres, is Mark Wigley's essay, "Whatever Happened to Total Design?," which convincingly portrays a certain tendency of total design to appeal to incompleteness. He mainly uses Walter Gropius as the type of architect who operated not as a draftsman and form-maker, but an organizer or coordinator.

He mentions how Gropius couldn't draw; how Philip Johnson, in his suggestions to Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement, said Gropius shouldn't be included because he's not capable of designing anything. So there's this very real argument over whether what Gropius was doing was properly architectural. And for good reason, given that the Bauhaus, for a long time, didn't actually have a department of architecture, even if it was run by an architect, educated architects, and so on.

Anyways, the main theme that I am taking from his essay, for this talk, is his identification of architects who insist on indeterminacy or incompleteness in order to regain control of those areas that elude them: "incompletion is an aesthetic."

I think that this is an idea we might spend a lot more time with, particularly when we are living in a time in which we are compelled to participate. Rather than forcing us to choose between three mass-produced choices, we're constantly asked to find our niche areas, to make our own playlists, our own bookmarks, and so on. Incompleteness is not an alternative strategy but a normative condition. I think there is a challenge right now of finding emancipatory, self-critical, and truly open-ended forms of incompleteness.

So to wind down, there is one quote near the end of Mark's essay: "indeed, the wonderful thing about architecture is how it so easily escapes those who produce it." I think he means that architects are doing it even when they don't know it, or that they don't get to do what they want to do, or something to that effect. I'm attracted to the idea of escape, to the surplus that a project can have, its capacity to have consequences beyond its intent or initial possibilities. Something that escapes: where does it go, what does it do, who controls it, etc. Hopefully, this is a bigger question than "interpretation."

Published

• Published in the catalog for The Public School (for Architecture) in 2010.