art – Page 165 – greg.org

Breuer’s Whitney: NFSFN

So after the Whitney opens its downtown branch, it’ll sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison?
That’s the way I read the blueprints being unfurled in the NY Times the last couple of months. Buried in a late December story led by the Smithsonian, Robin Pogrebin first floated the idea in this lighter-than-air paragraph. It’s not even a lob; it’s a feather, and so’s the denial:

Rumors have circulated that the Whitney might consider selling its 1966 building by Breuer, but [Whitney director Adam] Weinberg dismissed the idea. “That’s not going to happen, because we love it,” he said.

Then this morning, in Carol Vogel’s piece about Leonard Lauder’s $131 million pledge, the idea of a sale came up again, this time with a time frame:

Mr. Lauder said that the money required the museum not to sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue at 75th Street for an extended period, although he declined to specify how long.

A idea of a Breuer sale is raised repeatedly and without attribution, then quickly, but just as squishily batted down:

Although Mr. Lauder’s donation is likely to quiet rumors that the Whitney might decamp from the Breuer building, the museum’s plans remain an open question. Since the Whitney set its sights on the meatpacking district, the city’s arts world has fretted that the institution might not be able to afford two locations.

Oh, has it? I’m clearly a MoMA fanboi, so maybe I’m just out of the loop–every loop in the city’s art world–but I have never heard a rumor or a plan or even a speculation about the Whitney selling its Madison Avenue building. Nor have I heard anyone fret that the museum, which has operated up to four locations in the city at one time, might be unable to operate two.
So unless these Times reporters are totally making this up, which I doubt, where are they hearing this? From Whitney insiders? Is a deal not to sell the building “for an extended period” substantively different from a plan to sell the building after “an extended period”?
Whitney Museum to Receive $131 Million Gift [nyt]
High five to Elmgreen & Dragset for their 2001 piece, Opening Soon / Powerless Structures, Fig. 242 [via tanyabonakdargallery]

Ceci N’est Pas Un Satelloon

Géode, originally uploaded by zyber.

But darned if it isn’t pretty damn close. La Géode is a mirrored geodesic dome housing a hemispheric Omnimax theatre. It’s part of the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, a science museum opened in 1986 in Parc la Villette, which I confess, I only knew as the site of Bernard Tschumi’s red follies. [There are a couple visible in the background here, and judging from this photo from another angle, they’re rightupthere next to the dome.]

At 34m across, Adrien Fainsilber’s stainless steel-clad Geode is the nearest approximation to the physical presence of a Project Echo satelloon that I’ve found. [Thanks to Stuart, actually, who tipped me to the recent post on extremely impressive shiny balls on deputy dog.]

Fainsilber’s site has more pictures, including the grainy-nice snap of the Geode nearing completion. and this amusing explanation:

Symbole de l’Univers, le reflet des nuages suggère la forme des continents et offre une vision immatérielle de l’environnement.
L’écran hémisphérique de 26m de diamètre de la salle de spectacle a engendré la forme sphérique de l’enveloppe.

Symbol of the Universe, the reflection of clouds suggests the form of continents, and offers an immaterial vision of the environment.
The hemispheric screen of 26m diameter in the salle de spectacle [heh] engendered the spherical form of the envelope

I love it, a loopy mix of grandiose over-symbolism and bureaucrat-pleasing rationalization. As if the shiny steel awesomeness of the dome was somehow just the unavoidable by-product of the program the humble architect received. [Qu’est ce qu’on a pu faire? C’est logique.] Sure beats the “but it’s art!” pitch that was the last straw for the suits backing the Pepsi Pavilion.

Also, it’s an amusing stick in the eye of the deconstructionist, “form before function” conceit that Tschumi and collaborator [sic] Jacques Derrida put forward for the rest of the park.

I don’t know the story of the creation of Parc de la Villette, but Tschumi sounds like the Robert Irwin to Fainsilber’s self-important Richard Meier. Looking at the landscaping, la Geode has gone from being a Symbol of the Universe to just one stop of Tschumi’s David Rockwellian Cinematic Promenade. Or to the electron on a hydrogen atom. Which, as I zoom in with the all-seeing Google Eye to watch the picnickers in the Parc, i realize is so true. What if the whole universe were just an atom under the fingernail of a giant?

extremely impressiv shiny balls [deputydog.com]
Fainsilber > Realisations > CSI [fainsilber.com]
CSI and la Geode, and guests reading Le Monde, apparently, and letting their kids run wild [google maps]
Metaphysics of Parc de la Villette [gardenvisit.com]

Angel Dust, 2000, Jeremy Blake

From “Jeremy Blake in Three Parts,” written by editor/curator Bennett Simpson for PS 1’s “Greater NY” show. In 2000, Blake’s 20-min. digitally animated abstraction titled Angel Dust was in both the harried, hasty “Greater NY” and the Pompidou’s “Elysian Fields”, a sublime show for which Simpson curated an incredible sound program:

I.
In the new art game, machine language is the best kind of pragmatism. Because you’ve never had so many options, your tools should work for you. There is still such an impoverished discourse around art made with “new media” that it benefits everyone to be dexterous (or at least flexible). Jeremy Blake tells me it took months to program his latest digital animation Angel Dust. I believe him. Line for line, the amount of coding, sequencing, and editing involved is staggering. As is more and more the case with art’s flirtation with technology, the hours logged and the efforts involved are right on the surface — and in a way, this is part of the point. Skill is transparent. Insofar as Angel Dust can be called abstract art, its abstraction is one of trial and error, micro-production, shortcuts, good fortune, lots of practice, lots of knowledge, and an appreciation of possibilities. I’m not only speaking about the animation’s formal qualities or its methods of production. If abstraction is now the domain of distributed and integrated systems of information, then the function of Angel Dust’s content — its seething Mondrian grid, its Burbank-rolled narrative tics, and its psychedelia — is no different from its code. Blake makes programmed art works: the what and how are symptomatic of each other.

The other two parts are after the jump. An edition of Angel Dust is coming up at auction at Phillips in a couple of weeks.

Continue reading “Angel Dust, 2000, Jeremy Blake”

Solar Balloons Not Quite Satelloons

So I’m staring at these Solar Balloons by Coolearth Technology, caught like a deer in some headlights [actually, with this pair, maybe it’s “caught like a spring breaker in some headlights, but whatever], and I can’t figure them out.

Then I get it: one half of the balloon is clear; the parabolic–or parabola-like, anyway–reflector part is the inside surface of the other, opaque side of the balloon. 2-meter diameter. Not Satelloon-scale, but still, it’s good to know it’s out there.
Solar Balloons from Coolearth Technology [coolearthsolar via inhabitat]

From A Glimpse To A Panorama

If anyone’s life’s work could have at once so little and so much to show for it, it’s Agnes Martin. From Brian Droitcour for Artforum:

This brisk tour of Agnes Martin’s career–forty years in twenty drawings–is anchored by On a Clear Day, 1973, a series of prints offering thirty ways to regard the square.
…
In the 1970s, Martin pared down an already spare vocabulary. These prints are a glimpse of her shifting priorities, and the drawings around them protract that glimpse into a lifelong panorama.

From the gallery’s press release for the show, a little background:

In the late 1950’s Agnes Martin’s landscapes and biomorphic surrealist works transformed into abstraction and what would eventually become her signature examination of rectangular grids within a square format. Her work ranges from early tight grids to the opening up of forms to wider rectangles. Disillusioned with New York, Martin moved to New Mexico in 1967 and abandoned painting. When she resumed her work around 1974, the earlier primarily black and white palette modified to include monochromatic washes of subtle pastel colors, perhaps influenced by the New Mexico landscape. While Martin’s abstract repetitive forms have been associated with Minimalist style, she considered Minimalism impersonal and over-intellectual, preferring her work to be characterized as Abstract Expressionist due to its more personal and spiritual nature. Inspired by emerging concepts of Taoism and Zen Buddism in the 1950’s, Martin, like many of the Abstract Expressionists, sought a style that transcended the material world and spoke more of the mind and the experience of the sublime.

On A Clear Day was instrumental in Martin’s own retrospective re-evaluation of her work and was apparently a catalyst of sorts for her resumption of painting in 1974. For details, check out Lynne Cooke’s essay accompanying the Dia’s exhibition of pivotal paintings from 1974 – 1979.
Though it might be tempting, in the absence of any apparent content beyond the grids, to investigate and catalog the variations and details that were surely deliberate decisions on Martin’s part, Cooke argues that this is not what Martin was after when she began painting again:

her endeavor would not be to mobilize the viewer in a process of “looking for” but to immerse the solitary, stationary spectator in an indeterminate, luminous space, in attentive contemplation, “looking at.”

Brian Droitcour reviewing “Agnes Martin, Works On Paper” at Peter Blum Soho trough March 15 [artforum]
Peter Blum Gallery Soho [peterblumgallery]
“To The Islands, Agnes Martin Paintings, 1974-1979 [diacenter.org]
[image via portlandart.net]

To See This Weekend: John Powers @ Virgil deVoldere Gallery

john_powers.us.jpg
As he was working on it the last few months, my friend John Powers kept hinting that his upcoming show would have a bit of the Deathstar and a bit of the disintegrating disco ball. He’s not kidding. The Force is strong with this one.
Empire, 45-in diameter, styrofoam and anodized aluminum, at Virgil de Voldere Gallery, the Chelsea Arts Bldg on 26th st through Mar. 29 [virgilgallery.com]
John Powers’ portfolio site [johnpowers.us]

The Moon Museum

Holy ^%$&! Man Smuggles Art To The &%#$ing Moon!
In 2003, Craig Kalpakjian proposed a series of Earthworks-style drawings that would be executed on the surface of the moon, like the Nazca Lines or 60’s bad boys Michael Heizer’s and Dennis Oppenheim’s desert drawings. He called them Moonworks.
Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.
I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA’s official channels were unsuccessful.
Myers revealed the exhibition’s existence to the New York Times, which published the story Nov. 22, 1969, two days after the Apollo 12 crew had left the moon–and the Intrepid–and two days before they arrived back on earth. Here’s the photo from the story:

According to Myers, who was involved with E.A.T. on the Pepsi Pavilion project at the time, the six drawings were miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4″ x 1/2″ x 1/40″, with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.
According to the Times, the artworks are, clockwise from the top center: Rauschenberg’s wavy line; Novros’ black square bisected by thin white lines [in 1969, Novros also created the incredibly rich, minimalist fresco on the second floor of Judd’s 101 Spring St]; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg, “the subject of a sculpture in his current show at the Museum of Modern Art” [a sculpture which is in MoMA’s permanent collection, btw]; and a template pattern by Chamberlain, “similar to one he used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer.” Warhol’s contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as “a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature.”
Actually, it’s a drawing of a penis. Here are some other photos by Frosty Myers, published, I believe, with a 1985 Omni Magazine article by the arts writer Phoebe Hoban. That would be the Warhol Penis there in the upper right.

As the NASA spokesman told the Times when asked about the Museum infiltration, “I don’t know about it. If we had been asked, it sounds like something we’d have very much interested in [sic]. If it is true that they’ve succeeded in doing it by some clandestine means, I hope that the work represents the best in contemporary American art.”
[emphasis added for ironic amusement, though to Myers’ credit, it turned out to be a pretty good grouping of artists to have involved.]
But is it conceivable that someone could have smuggled dirty pictures onto a mission to the moon? Actually, yes. Even if Warhol hadn’t sent that penis to the moon, Apollo 12 would still have achieved the first known incident of lunar nudity.
The back-up crew for the A12 mission surreptitiously inserted reduced photos of Playboy centerfolds into the flight crew’s fireproof plastic cuff checklists which were only discovered about 2.5 hours into their first moon walk. [if you’re at work, that first link is to nasa.gov, and the second is to playboy.com. The same scans are available at both sites, though NASA has conveniently embedded theirs in a PDF.]

In addition to the six drawings, the Moon Museum also acquired a large collection of photographs; astronaut Alan Bean accidentally left several rolls of undeveloped film behind on the lunar surface. The checklists came back with the astronauts.
Related: Frosty Myers, the SoHo pioneer, had a retrospective exhibition last November-December at Friedman Benda Gallery in Chelsea. [friedmanbenda.com]
Also, he had a sitdown with my favorite crazy at The Grey Lady, design/home writer Joyce Wadler. [nyt]

No Kidding, It’s A Small World

After riding the It’s a Small World ride half a dozen times on my first trip to Disneyland, I sent off for information on how to become an Imagineer. I was seven.
Yet somehow it’s taken me until this week to realize that the treacly animatronic Mary Blair masterpiece was originally created by Walt Disney at the behest of the Pepsi-Cola Corporation, which wanted a popular pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Disney was apparently commissioned to design four corporate pavilions that fair.
According to Billy Kluver’s long, rambling account/apologia published in the 1972 book, Pavilion, Pepsi was in talks with Disney to produce the 1970 pavilion in Osaka, too, but Disney’s budgets were orders of magnitude too high. Disney’s withdrawal in late 1968 left Pepsi with an empty pavilion to fill, and it created the opportunity for E.A.T. to get involved.
It’s a small world after all.

Joep van Lieshout: Those Who Can’t Do, Make Art

Now I’ve been a fan of Joep van Lieshout’s work for a long time, even if a lot of it’s too irreverent or too bombastically oversexualized to evangelize about regularly. [“You see, mom, he builds these room-sized uteruses with built-in bars…”]
But listening to his talk at Tate Modern last fall, it wasn’t his successes so much as his failures that stuck in my mind. The arc of the interview with curator Marcus Verhagen was the failure of AVL-Ville, Atelier Van Lieshout’s attempt to turn its Rotterdam waterfront studio complex into an independent, anarchic state, and how that flirtation with utopianism eventually led to the artist’s current dystopian fascination. The artist then explained his concept for a hyper-capitalist, sustainable, totalitarian slave city with a population of 200,000 that produces EUR7 billion in profits each year. So far so good [sic].
When it got to the Q&A, though, someone asked van Lieshout if his zero-impact utopia, with its organic urban farming, &c., was so great, why not keep developing it? He dismissed the idea, since it would involve actually running the thing, then it’d take expertise, and attention, and involvement with the bureaucracy, and anyway, who knows if it really works? [Obviously, I’m paraphrasing here.]
The gist of his reply, though, was reality’s too hard, so he’s leaving it as art.
Then when someone lobbed a generous softball of a question by describing his structures and installations as “cinematic,” van Lieshout punted again. Though he, too, conceives of his work as the sets upon which some unspecified drama unfolds, he never makes films, because he “doesn’t know how.”
I’d always thought of AVL-Ville as something of a conceit, but I had no idea how utterly dependent it was on the benign neglect of Dutch bureaucrats, and I certainly didn’t know how quickly and utterly it folded when faced with the most rudimentary challenge. And similarly, when even a clueless yahoo like me can figure out how to make a movie, expertise and technology just are not credible obstacles anymore.
Sure, art is not, by definition, the real world, but I’d always somehow considered it to be superior in its distinctiveness. And yet here was van Lieshout’s art being defined by its impractical, unproved inferiority in one case, and as the refuge for ignorance in another. We unconsciously give Art a presumption of cultural significance that, what do you know, it may not automatically deserve.
Too often, it gets considered only on its own terms, in a bubble, a world [sic] apart from the real world. It’s why the mediocrity of an artist like Mariko Mori gets taken seriously when it’s dwarfed technically and philosophically by CG and narratives of the best films and video games. Or why a piddly little spiral jetty is raised to masterpiece status while the US Army’s vast earthworks at the nearby Dugway Proving Grounds are ignored and detested. There’ll be a reckoning some day, a reality check, and a lot of art that was considered intrinsically valuable or important will end up as worthless oddities, like 19th century jewelry made from that most rare of metals at the time, aluminum.
Talking Art | Joep van Lieshout [tate.org.uk via imomus]

You Look Marvelous

LACMA director Michael Govan and photographer Terry Richardson–who looks great, by the way, has he had work done?–at the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum last week.
Broad and Butter [artforum]

Meanwhile, In The American Pavilion…

Here’s a description of the American Pavilion at the Osaka ’70 Expo from an online exhibit at Columbia called, “Housing The Spectacle: The Emergence of America’s Domed Stadiums”:

Trying to best R. Buckminister Fuller’s Geodesic Dome built for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, the architects of the Expo 70 Pavilion first envisioned it as a huge floating sphere, inspired by NASA’s Apollo 11 mission that put the first man on the moon. This spherical scheme was the winning entry (submitted by Davis – Brody Architects and deHarak, Chermayeff & Geismar, Designers) in a competition sponsored by its future owner, the United States Information Agency (USIA). The competition scheme would have included exhibition space inside the sphere, and used its inner surface as a giant projection screen for continuously played film clips. The Pavilion ultimately erected at Osaka marked the birth of a new structural building type — the longspan, cable stiffened pneumatic dome — which would for a time become the predominant roof system over America’s emerging sports palaces. Remarkably, the U.S. Pavilion’s pneumatically supported 465 foot by 265 foot clear span dome was developed largely in response to Congress’ 50% reduction in the project’s budget. The completed Pavilion cost $450,000, which was about half the cost of the Montreal dome.

Those budget cuts meant The Great Balloon was replaced by a flat, quilted dome derided as “the world’s largest bunion pad.”
“Space balloons” were a prominent element in another of designs invited by the US Information Agency. According to an exasperated-sounding 1968 Architectural Forum review of ten of the eleven invitees, Isamu Noguchi proposed an underground exhibition space topped by a “vividly colored” and contoured playground landscape, comfortably shaded by a giant balloon. A space balloon.

Davis Brody’s winning plan for the Great Balloon originally included a spiral exhibition-filled ramp leading up to a panoramic platform where films would be projected on the entire upper half of the dome.

When that didn’t work out, the quest for giant, space exploration-evoking spheres, though, seems to have been moved inside. I can’t make much sense of the exhibition design or its purpose from photographs [the clearest picture I’ve seen so far is a tourist’s snapshot], but there were certainly some Project Echo-esque Mylar spheres floating in there.

Also, the entire surface of the earth berm walls were covered in silver Mylar.

Especially with the dot-covered spheres, you see how short a trip it is from the Triumph of the Cold War and the Space Race to the Age of Disco.
There are more and larger images at the Columbia site. [columbia.edu]
The US at Osaka, Arch Forum, Oct. 1968 [hosted at columbia.edu]
Previously considered unrelated. Now? Helmut Lang’s self-portrait, a scavenged, battered disco ball

Q: Was The Pepsi Pavilion Art?

Of course, I’d only need to recreate The Pepsi Pavilion from Osaka 70 if it didn’t exist anymore. Does it? No. As relations between Pepsi and Billy Kluver, the engineer founder of E.A.T., deteriorated over issues of budget and esoteric programming [Pepsi had originally envisioned their dome-shaped pavilion as a site of a string of rock concerts to entertain The Pepsi Generation coming to the Expo], Kluver argued that the entire Pavilion was a work of art and thus, a success, and thus, worthy of continued expenditure and preservation. Pepsi, literally, wasn’t buying:

As an artistic experiment, though, it can be considered a success, and according to Klüver deserved to be treated as an art work.
In the case of the Pavilion, he therefore suggested to Pepsi-Cola to officially recognize the total work as an art work, in order to give it a legal structure. In a letter to Donald Kendall, President of Pepsi-Cola, Inc., he wrote “Our legal relationship to Pepsi Cola has developed so that the artists are put in the category of commercial artists designing a commercial product. One consequence of this is that we must obtain rights from all artists and engineers and others involved, particularly with regard to use of the Pavilion after Expo ’70. Of course, there is no question of Pepsi’s ownership and right to use and exhibit the Pavilion. Our dilemma is whether the artists have created a work of art or a work of commercial art to which there are rights which must be guaranteed… A decision to recognize the Pepsi Pavilion as a work of art and to treat it as such will set a much needed precedent in this area.” Pepsi-Cola never took this step and eventually the Pavilion was left in a state of gradual desolation and decay. This was certainly due to the fact that the relationship between E.A.T. and Pepsi-Cola had considerably cooled down, to the point that the company, the sole sponsor of the project, withdrew its support when E.A.T. presented a maintenance contract for $405,000, instead of the proposed sum of $185,000.

Too bad the strategy didn’t work; art seemed to be the only ticket to surviving the end of Expo 70. Today, almost all that’s left of Expo ’70 are Taro Okamoto’s massive sculpture, Tower of The Sun, and Kiyoshi Kawasaki’s International Art Pavilion, which until four years ago, housed the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Whoops, never mind: “The old museum was demolished and turned into a car park.”
From Ch. 2, “The Nine Evenings,” of M.J.M Bijvoets’ Art As Inquiry [stichting-mai.de]
No museums, but m-louis’s Expo70 photos do have sweet pavilions and the Tower of The Sun [flickr]

E.A.T. It Up: The Pepsi Pavilion

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I’m a Diet Coke guy. The very fact that The Pepsi Generation existed in 1970 should blow a hole in their brand’s supposed youthy credibility big enough to drive a 90-foot mirrored dome though. Oh, and what do we have here?

Holy freakin’ crap, why has no one told me The Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka was an origami rendition of a geodesic dome; obscured in a giant mist cloud produced by an all-encompassing capillary net; surrounded by Robert Breer’s motorized, minimalist pod sculptures; entered through an audio-responsive, 4-color laser show–yes, using actual, frickin’ lasers– and culminating in a 90-foot mirrored mylar dome, which hosted concerts, happenings, and some 2 million slightly disoriented Japanese visitors?

And that large chunks of it were conceived, developed, and programmed by E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology, the pioneering art/engineering collaborate founded by [among others] Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs’ Billy Kluver? And that the four artists working with Kluver–Breer, Frosty Myers, Robert Whitman, and David Tudor–had planned months of even freakier happenings for the Pavilion, but the Pepsi gave them the boot for being too freaky–and for going significantly over budget? Still.

The least you could’ve done is tell me that Raven Industries made a full-size replica of the Pavilion out of Mylar and test-inflated it in a disused blimp hangar in Santa Ana, CA? Apparently, all it took was a 1/1,000th of an atmosphere difference in air pressure to keep the mirror inflated within the outer structure.
Because, of course, you know that Kluver was the guy at Bell Labs who helped Warhol with his seminal “Silver Flotations” exhibit in 1966 [seen here in Willard Maas’s film poem on Ubu]. And Bell Labs was involved in Project Echo, which launched and tracked two gigantic mylar spheres, satelloons, a couple of years earlier. Which makes the Pavilion’s similarities to the satellite below purely non-coincidental.
Which means that after recreating these two, earliest NASA missions as art projects, I’ll have to recreate the Pepsi Pavilion, too.
I’ve ordered by copy of Kluver et al’s dense-sounding 1972 catalogue, Pavilion and expect to be revisiting this topic in some depth within 5-7 business days. Meanwhile, if there are any other giant, mylar spheres of tremendous-yet-overlooked artistic and historical importance lurking out there, now’s your chance to come clean.
E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology «Pepsi Pavilion for the Expo ’70» [mediaartnet.org]
Previously: Must. Find. The Satelloons Of Project Echo
D’oh, or else I must make the satelloons of Project Echo, which would mean I’m an artist, freak, or both

Best Gallery Press Release Of The Year, And It’s Only February

Now I’m probably biased because we’ve been longtime fans and collectors of Ruth Root’s work, but damned if this isn’t the most incredible press release for a gallery exhibition that you will see this year, last year, or next year:

Click through to Kreps’ for the full size version.
Ruth Root, Feb 7 – Mar. 16 at Andrew Kreps Gallery [andrewkreps.com]

On Tomason, Or The Flipside Of Dame Architecture

純粋階段, originally uploaded by nor1.

Atelier Bow Wow is my favorite Japanese architecture firm. Rather than by building or proposing some kind of Roarkian vision, they first made a name for themselves [besides the catchy name they made for themselves, I mean] by observing and reporting architecture as it was inadvertently happening in Tokyo.

They put out exhaustively researched but in no way comprehensive books: Pet Architecture documented the ways structure took shape in the impossibly narrow spaces of a city where no scrap of land goes unused. Made in Toyko was about ridiculous hybrids: a department store with a driving school on the roof; a cement factory integrated with the workers’ dorms. They called these ridiculous, pragmatic spatial phenomena dame [dah-may] architecture, using the Japanese term for “no good.”

Such ad hoc, aggressively undesigned accidents stick in my mind as I read about Tomason [also spelled Thomason and Thomasson in English]. If dame architecture is the awkward result of relentless functionality, Tomason are the useless, abandoned leftovers. Stairs to nowhere are a favorite. Bricked up windows are a close second. Tomason are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of building, destruction, and redevelopment that characterizes the Japanese city. No clean slates here, no way.

The term comes from the art & architecture collective formed in 1986 known as Rojo Kansatsu [Roadside Observation], which counted the author/artist Akasegawa Genpei as a founding member. Rojo’s inspiration was Gary Thomasson, who was given the biggest contract ever in Japanese baseball in 1981-2, only it turned out he couldn’t hit; then he blew out his knee. He was a giant, useless lump on the bench.

Rojo exhibited at the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2006 [i.e., the architecture biennale, not the real one. heh], but I found out about Tomason from an essay on neojaponisme. Like everything there, it’s too long by design. The image below from neojaponisme, of a store shutter without a storefront, is from one of Akasegawa’s original books. It reminds me of some of the Powerless Structures sculptures by Elmgreen & Dragset.

There’s also a rather nice photopool on flickr. here’s the japanese tomason tag and here’s the thomason group.

Roadside Observation [neojaponisme.com]