MAK Center Artists and Architects in Residence Present: ReadyFasterBurnsLonger
Opening Reception: Wednesday, August 20, 6 - 9 pm
August 21 - 24, 2008
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, L.A.
Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
323-651-1510
office@makcenter.org
Following six months of living and working in Los Angeles, Group XXVI of the MAK Center Artists and Architects in Residence program will present their Final Projects in an exhibition at the Schindler House. Manuela Mark, Paul Dallas, Raimund Pleschberger and partners Eldine Heep, Oona Peyrer-Heimstätt and Paul Peyrer-Heimstätt have been living in the R.M. Schindler-designed Mackey Apartments and working on projects that all use Southern California as resource and inspiration.
Schindlertryangeles, the Final Project of Eldine Heep, Oona Peyrer-Heimstätt and Paul Peyrer-Heimstätt, is a geometric re-interpretation of Rudolph Schindler's Kings Road House. Elements of the building - walls and lawn - will be transformed into segments of triangles, forcing units originally based on a grid of squares into a triangulated grid. The procedure of "triangulation" derives from the science of geodesy, which uses rasters to analyse the surface of objects or landscapes. This analysis of an object requires its adjustment to a standardized norm; it is a method of imposing order. Schindlertryangeles is a metaphor for the power that geometry imposes over everyday life and the natural world.
Despite the mathematical similarity of the basic geometrical forms of both the original and the transformed Schindler House, the building unravels into a so far unknown habitat. Only through the confrontation of two incompatible systems can the viewer be conscious of the merciless presence of a schematized architecture. In the combination of architectural body and geometrical raster, of research object and scientific analysis, Schindlertryangeles raises questions not only about the possibility of scientific methods, but also about the obsession and the obligations of analysis. It reflects not solely the human urge to submit the entire world to a scientific examination, but also the primal instinct to control the environment.
During his residency, Austrian artist Raimund Pleschberger worked on a series of objects, still lives, and phrases under the rubric, The Extended Ornament. While these works do not look like conventional ornaments, they share some basic properties of "non-autonomous" artworks. They are either dependent on another object to carry them, are symmetrically ordered, have a strong rhetorical component, or serve an obviously decorative purpose.
For the Final Projects exhibition, Pleschberger will show photo documentation of "stucco-prototypes" that he attached to different spatial settings in Los Angeles. These works explore the effects a small sculptural intervention can have within an anonymous urban space. Another body of work Pleschberger will exhibit documents ornamental arrangements he composed using objects of daily life found at the Mackey Apartments. The third component of the Final Projects presentation will be a collection of "ornamental" phrases projected onto Schindler's architecture. These explore the idea of rhetoric as the linguistic counterpart to ornament and attempt to merge the two disciplines into a single form.
For The Twin Towers Project, Canadian artist Paul Dallas, inspired by the anxiety of "watchfulness" pervading the United States, examines perspective and point of view as physical and cultural phenomena in the context of the U.S.-Mexican border. In the past fifteen years, the U.S. has transformed the border region into a highly militarized zone and it has become a testing ground for the latest in surveillance and security technology. The physical wall between the nations has, in effect, become a virtual wall, with the border "fence" relegated to a symbolic function in the landscape.
The Twin Towers Project is an attempt to evoke the dissolution of the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico and to question the nature of a border between two countries so profoundly interconnected. Positioned on either side of the border to create a visual cross-border dialogue, the towers become interchangeable icons which can record panoramic sights on one side while simultaneously screening them on the other side for a public audience. This virtual transference democratizes surveillance, transforming the activity into shared event.
At a time when the U.S. is closing Border Field State Park to make way for a new "no man's land" and shutting its doors to one of the last places where divided friends and family can meet without crossing the border, this project attempts to call attention for the need for connective public space.
Austrian artist Manuela Mark will present a video and photographs. Interested in the relationship between video/film-recording and natural perception, her work in Los Angeles explores the process of creating identity through the involvement of architecture, design and film. While in Los Angeles, Mark became aware of how people interact with specific environments in the context of their appearance. Using their bodies and certain locations as tools for performing, people create a temporary identity through mimicry or by incorporating the behaviors of fictive roles. The video relates this identification process, employing the first-person narrator in a fiction.
Mark's video project is based on sound recordings extracted from the novel Quicksand by Nella Larsen. The text fragments contain sensual and concrete descriptions of people, rooms, furniture and fabrics, using powerful imagery and phrases. At certain times, the voice-over becomes the structure for the performances; the rhythms, hesitations and pauses of the reading are reflected in the movements and gestures of the figure in the video. Filmed at the Mackey Apartments, the visual performances are also very much inspired by their locale. The exhibition will also include photographs responding to the video. While the structure of the video is dominated by the process of reading, the photographs are concrete compositions of body, texture and the architectural structure.
The MAK Center is located at 835 N. Kings Road in West Hollywood. Public hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The MAK Bookstore is open seven days a week, 11:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Regular admission to the Schindler House is $7; $6 students and seniors. Admission and the "Schindler by MAK" guidebook is $17; $16 students and seniors. Admission is free for children under 12 and Friends of the Schindler House, and on Fridays from 4:00-6:00 p.m.
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MAK Center for Art and Architecture
at the Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
323 651 1510 phone
contact: office@makcenter.org
