It’s A Little Abstract

Another of the things that Richard Serra said at LACMA last week has stuck with me was the artist’s call to arms for abstraction: basically, for artists in the 20th century, you’re either with us [i.e., Serra and Malevich] or you’re with the terrorists [i.e., Duchamp].
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I was reminded by it, ironically, by the Times’ review of the new Tomma Abts show at the New Museum. By now, the spatial effect of seeing Abts’ arduously determined, small-scale, abstract paintings installed in large, white cubes is part of her experience. Abts’ room at the Carnegie International–which was also curated by Laura Hoptman–was an engrossing highlight; the paintings commanded the industrial space at greengrassi in London, too.] Ken Johnson writes, “Ms. Abts’s 14 small works look as though they died and went to heaven.”
But he also said, “Stylistically the paintings seem oddly out of sync with the present; they could be recently rediscovered works from the 1950s or ’60s.” That sense of anachronism seems inextricably tied to both the style–abstraction–and to the size. Though I can think of powerful exceptions, it seems like abstraction and smallness have been out of sync since WWII.
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Abstractionist Thomas Nozkowski, who gets namechecked by Johnson–and whose resurgence is happening right now withfirst show after switching from Max Protetch to PaceWildenstein–talked in 2004 of deliberately choosing in the 70’s to paint on small board instead of giant canvas…

You can’t really understand artists of my generation until you factor the political atmosphere into any analysis of their work. I felt that I could no longer do big paintings that were for an audience of the very institutions that I then despised. The last thing I wanted to do was to paint for a museum, to paint for a bank lobby. I wanted to paint paintings that could fit in my friends’ rooms. So I started making 16 by 20 inch paintings that you would recognize today as my work, in 1975. These pictures, initially for political reasons, had roots in subject, in things that connected to the real world.

…and of the extremely skeptical response he received at the time, from curators, dealers, and his fellow artists:

I remember Steingrim Larssen who was then the director of the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen coming by, and, to my surprise, he got excited about the paintings. This was 1975 or ’76, and he pulled a whole group out, said that he thought they were really interesting and then said, “Your psychiatrist told you to do these right?” He just thought it was some kind of therapy, he couldn’t imagine that this was serious work. I got a lot of that. Even Betty Parsons who was very supportive and loved young artists, she would flinch whenever I showed her a painting. So, I joined a co-op gallery to have a way to get them out of the studio and into the world.
…
There was an organization called The Organization of Independent Artists and they were attempting to subvert the gallery and museum system and all the established hierarchies. They had decided that each artist shown in their group shows would pick the next artists and so on. I was one of the artists chosen for the second show. I remember going to the organizational meeting and being told that the other artists had decided I couldn’t be in the show because the paintings weren’t serious.

Karl Lagerfeld Has A Posse, Duh

P1050990.JPG, originally uploaded by mordechai der yid.

which includes a Diet Coke butler [via andy]

[2023 update: Mr Mort posted these c. 2008 photos on instagram on the occasion of the Met’s Costume Institute show. I remembered blogging about the Diet Coke butler (because ofc), and noticed that the flickr embed code was not working anymore, though the direct link is still active. So I updated the pics, and left the link.]

Lego City Of The Future, By Norman Mailer & Friends

If you had to name one American, for instance, who clubbed together with a couple of friends in 1965 and spent more than three weeks building a futuristic seven-foot vertical city out of Lego, you might not immediately think of Norman Mailer. Thirty-three years later, however, the city still stands in Mailer’s living room in Brooklyn Heights, and its creator remains enthusiastic about his project. “It was very much opposed to Le Corbusier. I kept thinking of Mont-Saint-Michel,” he explains. “Each Lego brick represents an apartment. There’d be something like twelve thousand apartments. The philosophers would live at the top. The call girls would live in the white bricks, and the corporate executives would live in the black.” The cloud-level towers, apparently, would be linked by looping wires. “Once it was cabled up, those who were adventurous could slide down. It would be great fun to start the day off. Put Starbucks out of business.”

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Last fall after he died, the fate of Norman Mailer’s Lego “City of The Future,” which stood in his living room for more than 40 years, was not publicly disclosed.
I wondered what it looked like. Turns out, it probably looks a lot like the photograph of it by Simeon C. Marshall, which accompanied The New Yorker article on Lego from which the above quote was taken.
update: Basically, awesome.
This photo was used on the cover of Mailer’s 1966 essay collection, “Cannibals and Christians.” The city itself was Mailer’s own proposal for dealing with the looming crisis of sub/urban sprawl: “If we are to avoid a megalopolis five hundred miles long, a city without shape or exit, a nightmare of ranch houses, highways, suburbs and industrial sludge,” he wrote in a 1964 essay in Architectural Forum, “then there is only one solution: the cities must climb, they must not spread, they must build up, not by increments, but by leaps, up and up, up to the heavens.” Thus, the Lego city. [quote via arcchicago]
In Mary Dearborn’s Mailer: A Biography, the construction of the Lego City is portrayed as nothing less than a bold attempt by the author “to make a revolution in the consciousness of our time”–if only they could’ve gotten it out of the writer’s living room:

In many ways this was a typically Mailerian project. He announced it in advance in the pages of the New York Times Magazine and, to underline his seriousness, in Architectural Forum. The prose city he outlined would change the face not only of public architecture but of society itself. He had long blamed architecture for many of the woes of contemporary society, and now he applied himself to setting forth his plans in pronouncements and, beginning in the fall of 1965, the creation of an actual model city, immense in scale and meticulously planned.
…
He decided to build a model of a city that could be populated by 4 million people, and to build it in his own living room. He conceived it as a monument to his sweeping utopian vision.
At the quotidian level, Norman acted as the brains behind the project, soon discovering that he didn’t like the sound of the plastic Lego pieces snapping together; it struck him as vaguely obscene. He delegated the task to [fourth wife] Beverly’s stepbrother, Charlie Brown, who worked as a kind of handyman for him, and to Eldred Mowery, a friend from Provincetown now in the city. The two men drove Norman’s 1961 blue convertible Falcon out to the Lego plant in New Jersey and returned with cases of the colored blocks. Then Norman directed them, instructing them to create hanging bridges, buildings with trapdoors, and four-foot-high towers, all constructed on an aluminum-covered piece of plywood on a four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood supported by five-foot legs.
Construction proceeded apace, and Norman never really did call a halt to it. But someone from the Museum of Modern Art came out to Brooklyn to take photographs of the model, hoping to display it at the museum. At that point, Mailer and his helpers found that the “city” could not be taken out of the apartment. though they consulted movers with cranes and took measurements of the glass in the front windows, they soon saw that it couldn’t be removed without being disassembled first. Here Norman drew the line. He told Mowery to build a fence around it and leave it where it was. There it still sits, occupying a third of the living room’s floor space. Beverly, who contributed a scale model of the United Nations to indicate the overall scale of the city, professes that she loved it, but concedes, “It was a bitch to dust.”

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That must be the UN in the lower left corner there. As so often happens to builders of utopian Cities of The Future, Eldred Mowery was arrested several months later in an art insurance scam. Seems that in December 1966, he and an artist/carpenter friend broke into the Provincetown cottage of painter Hans Hoffman and made off with 41 paintings, which they tried to return to the insurance company for a reward. Only instead of insurance company executives, they handed the works over to undercover FBI agents.
Any photos or documentation in MoMA’s archives remains to be explored.
The Joy of Bricks by Anthony Lane, Apr 2, 1998 [newyorker.com]
Apparently some brickers sussed out the photo last December, too[brothers-brick.com]
Mailer: A Biography, by Mary V. Dearborn [google books]
Buy Cannibals and Christians on AbeBooks [abebooks]

Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul. Herbert Muschamp Is What The World Trade Center Is All About!

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Choire’s interview with Elizabeth Berkley reminded me of some unfinished Showgirls business here on greg.org.
Back in 2002, right after Beyer Blinder Belle released the first, banal master plans for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, a parody critique circulated in the style of Herbert Muschamp, then the architecture critic for the NY Times. Finally, here it is:

A Critical Appraisal
Special to The New York Times
Striding down the row of design proposals for the World Trade Center site, balefully eyeing each inert mien and artificially enhanced plan, I was reminded of the scene in Showgirls where the choreographer grimly surveys his topless charges. Flicking a feather across their assembled nipples, he scolds, “Girls, if you are not erect, I’m not erect.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve seen the master plan proposals from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and, to put it mildly, I’m not erect.
My heart sank as I watched John Beyer of the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle attempt to describe these hapless proposals. I was painfully reminded of another much more casual presentation one glorious autumn on Capri. The visionary Rem Koolhaas was holding forth on urban planning, shopping, life, and the smell of fresh basil. Wearing beautifully tailored trousers and a tight, cropped black top (need I add it was by Prada?) he gestured energetically as he spoke. With each gesture, his shirt rode up ever so slightly, revealing a tantalizing sliver of tan, taut tummy.
It is this kind of energetic gesture that those of us who care about contemporary architecture hunger for so desperately. Beyer Blinder Belle’s work is occasionally competent: certainly their by-the-numbers renovation of Grand Central Terminal pleases the hordes of moronic commuters who stream through it each day, but it will come as no surprise that this recidivist pile of marble is of little interest to the infinitely more important audience of attractive young European architectural students who make pilgrimages to our city each year and can barely choke back their tears of disappointment. John Beyer, whose exposed torso would be unpleasant for even the more adventuresome New Yorker to contemplate, must shoulder the blame for this catastrophic failure.
It is now time to list these names: Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Steven Holl, and, of course, Rem Koolhaas. There.
Is a little daring, a little excitement, a little sexiness too much to ask for on this sacred site? Lower Manhattan Development Corporation chairman John Whitehead and New York governor George Pataki would do well to rent a videotape of “All About Eve” and examine Bette Davis’s behavior before the big party scene. Her character Margo Channing reaches into a candy dish and hesitates again and again before finally popping a candy into her mouth. This tantalizing motif “impulse, surrender, gratification” is the central one of the twenty-first century. It alone must provide the ideological blueprint for all architectural work being done anywhere in the world, including lower Manhattan. If this fails to make sense to the theme-park obsessed corporate apologists for big business, so be it.
In the interest of full disclosure, my proposal for the site will be revealed at a time and place of my choosing. Fasten your seatbelts, New York.

Ignore, if you can, the glaring error that Muschamp would never have made: the choreographer used ice cubes, not a feather. The irony is that not only did Muschamp’s writing the last few years before his too-early death seem to cut loose, as if to meet his parodists in the sky, the fake WTC critique turned out too true by half: thanks to a sycophantic 1776 minstrel show from Daniel Libeskind and a chorus line of starchitects flashing their tits, the Port Authority’s original proposal is right on track.
[via mouthfulsfood]
Previously: Surely, Hordes of Showgirls-Googling Architects Can’t Be Wrong?

Charlton Heston’s Rifle Now Presumably Free For The Taking


Shotgun! Does anyone know who wrote about visiting a gun show and the NRA convention for Spy? The caption under the photo of Charlton Heston was “Guns ‘n Moses.” The title of the magazine got everyone they talked to to open right up. To a guy whose idea of humorous magazine writing had been limited to Mad, it was a life-changing article.
[update: I guess it really is a joke that writes itself. ]

Hope And A Dollar Won’t Get Me On The Bus

Much less get me one of thesehere sweet Obama banners.

After almost a week of daily trips past this sign/awning company with giant vinyl Obama – HOPE banners by Shepherd Fairey on either side, I resolved to scale the building and steal them. One, at least one.

Alas, my diabolical plan was thwarted by the friendly guy laughing and waving at me as I snapped a photo–and the two hungry kids in the backseat. Oh well. And anyway, it looks like there’s a HopeCam perched above it.

Coop, Rafael. Rafael, Coop

What looked like a cement plant or oil refinery–but what obviously was neither–on a jet-lag-early walk through downtown Los Angeles turned out to be Coop Himmelblau’s High School for the Performing Arts, an aggressively industrial design that will serve as the eastern gateway to a massive cultural redevelopment plan in the works for Grand Avenue.

The original workaday design for a much-needed high school was given the boot, replaced by the PA school, with a huge event space, at the behest of Eli Broad, noted philanthropist.

Recently, Broad has been noted for not giving away quite enough of his billions of dollars or contemporary artworks as others think he should. The Coop school is significantly over budget and behind schedule, and critics complain that the LA School District is stuck footing the bill. [The project has already blown through the figures in Nicolai Ouroussoff’s 2003 article on the project, supposedly reaching over $200 million.]

That prow-like tower will be sweet, though, no doubt an inspiration to thousands of future kings of the world. My favorite part about the building is the perforated, skeletal tower’s dramatic contrast/challenge to the cliff-like solidity of Rafael Moneo’s LA Cathedral and its bell tower. I’m not sure if freeway appeal is the most important priority for LA’s high schools, but this one sure has it.

If You Wake Up To Find The Found Object Murdered, I Know Who Did It.

Richard Serra. In the Broad. With a 600-ton steel plate.
Serra’s always good for a zippy quote, and even though I’ve heard his and Lynne Cooke’s routine before, I figured it’d be worth the trip to hear them speak at LACMA tonight. [Worth the trip from our hotel in downtown LA, that is, not necessarily from NYC.]
Serra’s in town to install a wall drawing in the Broad Museum, and the “post-pop post-surrealist” collection he finds himself surrounded by has apparently been weighing on his mind. And this, a guy who knows from weight.
In 1991 or so, I got a bit too obsessed about an offhand grand unifying theory Serra tossed off at a Cy Twombly panel discussion at MoMA. [It went something like, “the 20th century is based on a misreading of Cezanne.”] When I met Serra a few years later, I mentioned that I’d been wondering what he was talking about; I think I’d hoped to be let in on some kind of secret Art History, but he didn’t remember ever saying it, and had to improvise an explanation anew.
After hearing him speak enough times, I see it’s just a habit of his to constantly try to suggest contexts for him and his work, both for us as viewers and analysts, but also for him as a viewer and student of the work that’s come before–and that’s now hanging or standing around his own.
[Tonight at LACMA, for example, he talked about how “Nauman, Hesse, Smithson, Long, and me” did this or that in response to minimalism, a conveniently historic grouping that elides Serra’s less famous colleagues in the Sixties. You know, what’s his name. Married to, uh. He actually made a reference to “your friend, who married, uh,” and Cooke correctly identified the guy.]
Anyway, as he was a guest of the institution, Serra tried, or at least pretended to try not making pitiless fun at the Duchampian “hand-me-downs” that filled the BCAM–and by implication, the current art market/scene. In the 20th century, you were either Team Malevich or Team Duchamp, and most people went with Duchamp. He said. The last words out of his mouth before the Q&A were a stage-muttered charge, calling for “the death of the found object.”
Just sayin’.

Stuck In “The Office”

I don’t know, is it a good thing to be rustled awake in the middle of the night by a compulsion to write about an exhibition you saw in December? It’s like having a flashback, only to the Elk Grove Village Marriott instead of the Hanoi Hilton.
“The Office” was curated by Ethan Sklar, director at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, where the show ran from November 30, 2007. Given its focus on the object, material and spatial aspects of the corporate workplace, it’s worth noting that it was “downsized” in January, and was closed [let go?] on February 9th.
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Like hitmen traveling to Europe, it’s the little differences that caught artists’ attention as they explored the cubicle farms and conference rooms, and some of the work has the feeling of self-consciously aestheticized, if not exoticized, souvenirs of the trip: Tim Davis’ Manet/Viacom, a 2002 photo of an emptied out office. Martin Soto Climent’s As yet untitled, a plastic venetian blind draped lyrically off the wall, and Nicole Wermers’ French Junkies #2 a lacquer and steel cube smoking station whose improbably Juddian features are immediately recognizable in the recontextualizing gallery setting.
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Other artists were attuned to the invisible and overlooked elements of corporate space: Jay Heikes’ The Hill Upstairs was an artfully [sic] stained fragment of a drop ceiling. While downstairs, Peter Coffin installed a generic, grey carpet with the grain set at an angle. The first round of perceptual disequilibrium was definitely physical, as if the walls weren’t plumb, but once I realized what was going on, a reflexive economic disorientation kicked in: if only he’d laid it straight, he could’ve saved 25% on that carpet, easy.
Which got to the crux of Sklar’s curatorial focus on artists exploring “products whose original form and structure [and he adds later, value] are inextricably linked to their functionality, production and utility.” By celebrating objects created or redesignated as art, whose exponentially enhanced value derives from its new-found uselessness, the gallery is the diametric opposite of the office. Or at least it’s supposed to be.
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There’s an element of Surrealist perversity to “The Office”: only a very confident collector, with a very conscientious cleaning crew, could take Kris Martin’s la lettre perdue–a 5×7 envelope freshly liberated from its mundane supply room existence and thoughtfully propped against the wall–and return it to his office as his latest art world trophy.
But the irony of the show cuts both ways; after all, its second incarnation was “downsized” to make space for the gallery’s next show. Artists may be highly attuned to the aesthetic and social implications of the corporate environments other people inhabit, but in this week especially, where gallerists are busy adding their personal touches to a warren of identical cubicles at a giant trade show, the differences between “The Office” and “The Gallery” can be very little, indeed.
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I’m reminded of the indignant reaction when Andy Freeberg showed his “Sentry” series at Danziger Projects last September. His photographs, shot on the sly, capture the uniformly daunting entrance desks of Chelsea galleries. Often, just the top of a nameless attendant’s head peeks out above the stark, minimalist cube. On his own site Freeberg wondered, “in this digital world of email and instant messaging that supposedly makes us more connected, are we also setting up barriers to the simple eye to eye contact that affirms our humanity?” Well, yeah. How else are you supposed to get any work done?
The Office, 30 Nov 2007 – 9 Feb 2008 [images via tanyabonakdargallery.com]
“Sentry,” Andy Freeberg, Sept. 6 – Oct. 13, 2007 [image via danzigerprojects.com]
Andy Freeberg – Statement [andyfreebergphotoart.com]

On Re-Creating Dan Flavin’s 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition

RC Baker gets all caught up in the spirit in reviewing Zwirner & Wirth’s re-creation of Dan Flavin’s historic 1964 exhibition at Green Gallery, the first time he exhibited only-flourescent works. The show sounds fascinating, and when combined with Flavin’s original installation sketches and documentation and a dedicated catalogue, it surpasses the one-room approximation of the show that was included in the 2005 NGA/Dia/MFAFW retrospective.
Instead of grounding the show and its reception at the time, or exploring how its details related to the artist’s later, lifelong practice, Webster just emotes about being in the space. If that’s an attempt to channel 1964 viewers’ experience, it’s unfortunately not labeled as such. And I think Webster is wrong in his description of how Flavin’s estate deals with the artist’s chosen materials, which were once off-the-shelf, but are now obsolete:

(the Flavin estate periodically commissions large batches of discontinued hues from G.E.)

When I spoke at length with Flavin’s last studio assistant, Steve Morse, who is now the conservator of the estate, for my NY Times story on Flavin’s work, he told me that in the 1980’s, there was a period when GE’s formulation changed, and they started buying up every green light bulb they could. They still have some left, or they did in 2004, anyway. But since then, the estate has documented the chemical formulation of the coating of each color of light bulb, and when it needs more, it has them fabricated in small batches. The off-the-shelf, mass-produced product had become a custom, handmade object. Almost like art.
Dan Flavin: Light White, Light Heat [vv via man]
“Dan Flavin: The 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition” runs through May 3rd [zwirnerandwirth.com]
Previously: Lights Out: The Dark Side of Success [nyt]
My interview with Stephen Flavin

Breuer’s Whitney: NFSFN

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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]

Wow. “The Selling Of The War” on VPRO

A couple of months ago, I was contacted by producers from Backlight, an investigative documentary TV series on the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. They were trying to locate and interview Scott Sforza for a program set for the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. [I’d tried and failed to contact Sforza for my Cabinet Magazine article about his work last summer.]
The episode aired the other night, and it’s online now, and well worth the watch, even if you don’t speak Dutch; most of the talking heads–including me–speak English.
It’s amazing on many levels, not the least of which is the sheer impossibility of an in-depth, retrospective investigation called “The Selling Of The War” ever airing on an American news network. VPRO focused in on a couple of very specific elements of stagecraft, manipulation, and deceit from 2003: Colin Powell’s UN speech; the White House-built stage at the CENTCOM media center in Doha, Qatar; and the Coalition press conference where Gen. Tommy Franks announced the invasion, which had a controversial–and damning–Dutch hook.
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I did my Sforza fanboi spiel about human wallpaper, and it turns out that among the human wallpapers Franks pulled on stage and introduced as a Coalition partner was a Dutch colonel, Jan Blom [on the far right above]. But the Netherlands were not part of the Coalition. The guy was a NATO public affairs officer, who was grabbed at the last minute to provide balance and camo variety to the backdrop. Naturally, word of the scandal that erupted in Holland after Blom’s appearance has not yet penetrated the American heartland.
The two guys in the middle were Franks’ equals from the US’ actual Coalition partners, Great Britain and Australia, who were only told at the last minute by a White House operative that they would not be participating in the press conference. The guy on the far left was another prop, a Public Affairs guy from Denmark. So the stagecraft managed to simultaneously insult and dissemble. That’s Rumsfeld’s new lean&mean Army!
Perhaps it’s really a minor point, but it’s just one of many that show how deceptive and manipulative the administration was in the crucial period of the run-up and the invasion. Again, try to imagine a US network news show of any kind devoting 30 minutes to pull apart such a lie. [Actually, it’s probably half that time; there was a great deal of time devoted to former Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson’s explanation of how the UN WMD speech came together, something that has been covered in the US.]
So anyway, happy anniversary!
Program page: Tegenlicht: De Verkoop van een Oorlog [vpro.nl]
Watch the episode online via real player [vpro]

Save The Neutra! Sell The Neutra!

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Holy smokes. On Archinect, Orhan has launched into a free-ranging, fantastical, and ill-informed lamentation over the impending doom that the callous, uncaring, neglectful architectural aficionado community is somehow foisting on the Neutra VDL Research House in Silverlake:

I wouldn’t elaborate on it at this finger pointing tone, but this is a city where you hear the words “inspired by Neutra” in various forms and places such as architects’ web sites, in countless design blogs, in real estate ads and of course in the circles of armchair design writers.
What abandonment.
Pages of coverage, with wall to wall color pictures, for so called Neutra specialists, when they re-build or renovate million billion dollar properties, which the architect and his pupil did years ago with clear aluminum sash and placed the glass in the right place. But, they don’t mention the VDL House, where it were all dreamed up and put to experiment.
…
After Mrs. Neutra’s death, the decay gradually became visible and impossible to hide.
Rudolf Schindler became the new hero of the Austrian invasion and people start to forget about Neutra for fashionable correctness. The same community who raised hell over a building next to MAK protected Schindler house, knew nothing of VDL house’ neighbors or didn’t care. Absurd and campy cliches like “Neutra was not as good as Schindler’ became part of groupie conversations in hipster parties.

It may very well be important for Neutra’s legacy; for the moment, let’s assume that it is. But the VDL Research House’s history is so deeply troubled, that the only conceivable way to save it is to sell it.
The current owners and stewards of the house, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona’s Dept. of Environmental Design [ENV], have proved utterly incapable of either using, maintaining, preserving, or promoting the Research House from the moment they were promised it in 1979 and from the moment they took possession of it in 1990.
According to the house’s own website, the “Urgent Campaign for Neutra VDL” has two purposes: to raise $30,000 immediately [by Oct. 2008, oops] for such basic operating expenses as insurance and utilities, and to raise $2 million, half for major repairs required after years of neglect [also resulting from original design drawbacks like putting a reflecting pool on the freaking roof]; and half for an endowment to provide ongoing operating expenses, and funds for programming and events for Pomona’s students and the broader public.
If this money can’t be raised, what will happen? According to the website, “the building complex is threatened with closure, possible sale to a private party, and quite possibly permanent loss of public and educational access.” Ooh, what abandonment.
The University that has neglected and underfunded the house for the 18 years since it received it, that apparently can’t fundraise successfully to support the house, and that lets major structural damage occur on their watch is now making an urgent plea for emergency funds. Meanwhile, they’re essentially holding the wounded building hostage, letting its conditions deteriorate until the inevitable finally happens, and the building is sold–and saved, finally–to some other entity who has a real commitment and the means to preserve it. And the only possible downside is “possible” loss of access.
The University generally and the Department of Environmental Design [ENV] specifically have demonstrated their total lack of commitment and interest in keeping the VDL Research House. In 2005, the University’s president launched a Priority & Response project to focus the school’s strategic and budgetary goals and needs. Here is a portion of a recommendation from the ENV Dean’s Office:

Over the past four years [i.e., since at least 2001. -ed.] ENV has attempted to raise funds for repairs to VDL, without much success. One impediment to fundraising is that the house is already named. Further, the VDL property serves a small portion of the ENV population of students and faculty. Since the house is 35 miles from campus, it is not a convenient location for seminars, weekly classes, or even receptions. While the College of Environmental Design recognizes this home as an icon of modern architecture, it is a much lower priority for fundraising than other projects, including a new building for the college, endowed professorships, scholarships, and a faculty development fund.

At the time of that recommendation, the estimated cost of needed repairs was $350-500,000, or half what is estimated today. The irony in several faculty statements in the P&R is not sweet:

[O]ur College is recognized nationally for its program in Historic Preservation, which has an emphasis on works of the twentieth century. The VDL house is a central feature of this program.

If that’s at all true, then the College should have its accreditation reviewed, because despite presiding over a modernist landmark built largely of manufacturer-donated materials, a pool of cheap-to-free labor and expertise, and [until very recently] a real estate/renovation/preservation boom, they have managed to push the Research House to the brink of disaster.
Proving themselves so unworthy, if the school and the Neutra fans in it honestly give a damn about the house, they’ll work to find it more capable owners, pronto.

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1932: VDL I, by Richard Neutra

But is the house really so special it needs saving? It is certainly a Neutra design, but which design? And for that matter, which Neutra? It seems to be a question no one in the architecture community wants to bring up, lest it hurt the house’s chances for survival.

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1963: VDL II, by Dion Neutra, I mean, “Richard and Dion Neutra”

But the basic timeline and the facts of the house are not in dispute: Richard Neutra built the front, studio/residence section of the house in 1932, and he added a courtyard house in back in 1940. The front house burned down in 1963, and a new house, with a new design, using new materials, was built on the foundation in 1965-6. The architect of record was Dion Neutra, Richard’s son, who had joined his father’s architecture practice.
According to Dion’s explanations of his working method with his aging father, and looking at at least some of the drawings for the Research House II, Neutra pere watched the fils design, and then gave him feedback. A glance at photos of the 1932 and 1965-6 incarnations of the house show dramatic differences. I’ll leave definitive historical judgments to the experts, but to my mind, the Neutra design needing saving right now is an Early Dion approximation of a Late Richard.
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From self-serving online chats with students, to his delusional price comparison of his father’s office building to the paintings of “Klimpt & Pollack,” to the outsized bronze plaque/tombstone declaring his intention to have his ashes scattered in the VDL courtyard, Dion Neutra’s dogged insistence on inserting himself repeatedly and aggressively into his father’s legacy might be making it difficult for more clear-eyed, thoughtful preservation and scholarship to take root. It’s worth noting that Dion is not publicly involved with the VDL campaign in any way; his younger brother Raymond, a retired physician, is the family representative.
And while the Neutra family is to be commended for their dedication and efforts, you kind of wish–and by “you,” I mean “I”–that someone in the field would sit them down and talk to them frankly about the choices they need to make between actually preserving their father’s built legacy and perpetuating a well-meaning but disastrously flawed idea without a plan that puts that legacy at risk.
Frankly, the committees, boards and friends of Neutra VDL don’t look like they have the capacity to raise $2.03 million, and until they realize that themselves, the house will just deteriorate further. The only solution they seem able to provide is an introduction to an architecture collector who will take the property off their hands. They should hop to it.
Neutra VDL Research House v. Hard Times [archinect]
Neutra VDL Studio & Residences site [neutra-vdl.org]
Previously: Neutra For Sale: Calling Michael Govin [sic]

Tibet Is Next To China

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My daughter got Tibetan necklaces for Christmas when she was two. I asked her if she knew where Tibet was. And then I told her, “It’s next to China.”
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image of Buddhist monks in Xiahe, Gansu province [in China] showing solidarity with protesters in Lhasa on the occasion of the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan rebellion against the Chinese invasion, which ended in the Dalai Lama’s fleeing the country: AFP/Getty via NYT.
Tibetan Government in Exile [tibet.com]