Late to the After Party: Neo-Geo Architecture Hans Tursack In the exhibition 44 Low-resolution houses at the Princeton through the lens of structuralist and post-structuralist theory University School of Architecture this past fall, Michael and commodity capitalism. I identify in neo-geo art a novel Meredith offered “low-resolution” as a term to describe method for dealing with “dyschronia,”2 the term used by certain contemporary practices that privilege orthographic Mark Fisher to describe a pervasive feeling that the past projection, primitives, flatness, and simple geometric games perpetually leaks into the present—an aesthetic theme that in their design processes.1 The display in the main gallery haunts cultural production today especially architecture of the exhibition showed forty-four models of houses in and visual art. What follows is a brief and impressionistic white paper at a uniform architectural scale, rendering the account of the emergence of neo-geo art, and a loose designs as geometric cicada-shells of real and imagined diagram for a possible neo-geometric architecture that projects. Stripped of all but the most essential detail, and extrapolates generative spatial concepts from the formal without any significant indications of site, these “low-reso- innovations of neo-geo artists Ashley Bickerton, Peter lution” architectures were presented as an argument for a Halley, Jonathan Lasker and Haim Steinbach. Examining design language of subtle combinations and manipulations the work of neo-geo artists, and using their particular of cubes, cylinders, cones, and prisms. If the work demon- application of artificial color fields, graphic figures, industrial strated a keen awareness of the past overall, the cross- design sensibility, primitive geometries, as well as their section of low-resolution houses presented in the exhibition references to science fiction, infrastructure or ecological also expressed a wide range of theoretical stances and peril, it is possible to identify methods for dealing the cards adopted different attitudes towards modernist and post- of modernism again. In this brief sketch, I want to offer the modern precedents. While some projects spoke to smooth neo-geometric both as a set of operations, but also as historical continuities, i.e. neo-modernism and neo-pop, a finer-grained category within the larger umbrella of low- others appeared more like critical ruptures, i.e. low-resolu- resolution work. For those operating within a geometric tion as a reaction to first wave digital excess. In my own tradition that favors the manipulation of base elements— design practice, as well as in my contribution to the exhibi- primitives, grids, color fields, two-dimensional figures— tion, I suggest “neo-geometric” as another sub-genre of the neo-geometric provides a model for communing with contemporary, low-resolution architecture. disciplinary history that is capable of avoiding naive rehearsals, apathetic distance, and melancholic memorials The neo-geometric in architecture pirates the visual and to the past. FIG 1 conceptual strategies, defined by a group of artists working in the 1980s in New York often described under the heading Frozen Monuments of “neo-geometric” or “neo-geo,” that reactivate elements from minimalism, pop-art, and hard-edge abstraction Although it had been hailed as the kernel of the visual arts 60 Late to the After Party: Neo-Geo Architecture 61 Hans Tursack In the final decades of the twentieth century some felt that the grave of modernism was not nearly deep enough, and there was still work to be done on dismantling its geometric hubris. This accounts for the various strands of deconstruction in architecture, the pursuit of base materi- alism or anti-form, and the formless in sculpture. Others went into a kind of religious mourning and made solemn, reverent homages to dying language, i.e. Raimund Abraham’s archaic, concrete poetics, Massimo Scolari and his drawings of dream-visions and floating primitives, Robert Mangold’s shaped color field canvases with lyrical ellipsoid figures, Donald Judd and the late works he produced in Marfa, Texas. In the 1980s and the approaching millennium, the conten- tion that modernist master narratives would shortly arrive at a full stop provided those looking for running room Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 295, October 1976. October 295, Drawing Wall LeWitt, Sol FIG 2 FIG with an ostensibly limited domain: that is, for those visual practices based in modernist experimentation, predicated on the use of simple geometric forms, colors, and the pri- mary elements of composition, the strategies and operations looked limited. By the end of the 1970s conceptual positions of mourning, obscurantism, nostalgia, belated attack or, more likely, wholesale indifference, were apparently all that was left to occupy. Enter mixed-media sculptors Ashley Bickerton, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine and painter Peter Halley; these are some of the artists who begin making another kind of geometric work in the 1980s in New York under headings such as neo-conceptualism, simulationism, and neo-geo. Neo-geo art presented a cool, surgically precise redeployment of the earlier geometric abstraction, FIG 1 Hans Tursack, Desert House, 2017. Desert House, 2017. Hans Tursack, but one that was playfully corrupted by references to popu- lar culture, commerce, and developing information tech- nologies. FIG 3 Peter Halley developed super-sized images of offset squares using Day-Glo fluorescent paint colors overlaying Josef Albers with technical reference to archi- in the early twentieth century, and considered key to an tectural plans. Haim Steinbach built shelves for Nike shoes ontological equivalence between painting and architecture, and lava-lamps that appeared like a mix of Donald Judd geometric abstraction suffered several distinct deaths and Anne Truitt laced with IKEA. Ashley Bickerton freely during the post-war period. The semantic sterilization of combined the visual languages of Larry Bell and Donald abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s was nearly as dramatic Judd with earlier, prewar, abstraction, and integrated darker as earlier claims, by pre-war utopic revolutionaries and overtones of science fiction futures and environmental mystics, that geometry held the promise of a universal apocalypse. Abstraction as redefined by the neo-geos— language and was the representational code for a new social and others within the East Village scene like Jonathan order. The catastrophic failure of the collective project of Lasker—became an artificial, synthetic, visual language, abstraction occurred across several crisis movements. consciously self-sited within a new matrix of art historical In minimalist sculpture, this was epitomized by the gray, citations. Some contemporary critics decried neo-geo art featureless columns of Robert Morris and the Beckettian as empty sign-play that subjected previous art to cryogenic cages of Sol LeWitt, FIG 2 work which in both cases imagined preservation. Hal Foster, for example, declared the work as mute volumes and irrational composition-machines sus- “static signs that then stood as if out of time.”6 Viewed as pended in a macabre limbo.3 In post-minimal sculpture, the an immersive acceleration of previous art, however, neo- architecturally scaled figures used by Richard Serra and geo work seemed to suggest that living in the end of time— Alice Aycock developed a phenomenologically grounded or working after the end of history—had its advantages, geometric order marked by precarity, and violent images of so neo-geo developed with a sense of over-caffeinated heavy industry and danger. Geometric expression suffered enthusiasm for a cohort of references. Under a surface of parallel deaths in architectural avant-gardes in the 60s and commercial finishes, neon color, decals, and pop-minimalism, 70s, for example in Peter Eisenman’s experiments with the an intensive rhetorical strategy was determined to come nihilistic automatization of the formal codes established by to terms with the art of the past—recent criticism has de- Giuseppe Terragni,4 in John Hejduk’s arcane syntheses (or scribed the work as “intertextual.”7 The collective production cleaning-up) of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and of Bickerton, Steinbach and Halley, as well as Koons, Levine Le Corbusier, and in Hiromi Fujii’s existential rhetoric of and others, carved out a theoretical and visual territory emptiness and loss of meaning realized through manic, for the further development of abstraction, or perhaps its destabilized grid-games.5 prolonged spectral afterlife. As an architect looking for extra-disciplinary conceptual neo-rationalists to the speed of a digital remaster. In this models, I view the particular cultural abstraction developed sense, MOS suggests a movement towards the generative by neo-geo artists as an unfinished project. Neo-geo art potential in over-realizing, doubling down, and dramatically implies the possibility for a new subset within a contempo- amplifying a historical project in low-resolution formal rary architectural design field dominated by a struggle to experimentation. The MOS model photography imagines reconcile itself with the death of formalism as a master House No. 13 as a Takefumi Aida-like exercise seen through narrative. Just as the neo-geo artists recast the minimalist the lens of a Nintendo game—that is, House No. 13 is some- “specific object,”8 and cross-pollinated representational and thing like a special ‘level’ of a video game environment, a non-referential codes, so too might contemporary architects game that exceeds the limits of recitation.9 The massing of selectively reanimate modern and postmodern formalism. the MOS images takes Aida’s playful geometric sensibility In this sense, a project like MOS Architects’ House No. 13 a step further by adding artificial color, CAD hatches, domes- House Parts Collected (2018) can be interpreted as a neo- tic bric-a-brac, and notes of surrealism to the equation so geometric exercise that produces a hyperreality from a that House No. 13 can be seen as a MOS reinterpretation carefully calibrated historical pastiche.