OCT 12 14 CROSSINGS BETWEEN THE PROXIMATE AND REMOTE MARFA 2017 ACSA FALL CONFERENCE Between Worlds: Art and Architecture I Date: Friday, October 13, 2017 Time: 8:30:00 AM - 10:00:00 AM Location : Binder Gallery I Bad Acting Architecture Eric Olsen, Woodbury University This paper, entitled Bad Acting Architecture, explicates a relationship between art practice and architecture –an implicit argument of “Crossings Between the Proximate and Remote.” From the artistic economies of gentrified enclaves to transformative processes that critique and embellish the built environment, the late artist Mike Kelley’s concept of bad acting—not behaving according to proper disciplinary roles—provides an heretofore untapped avenue of architectural inquiry. Bad Acting implies both mischief and melodrama. Neither offering claims to universal values nor directly engaging processes of social action, it allows for contingent collisions between high and low art to produce ludic zones of informal design and collateral criticality. The posture of bad acting produces space, at multiple scales and sites, through unorthodox methodologies that explore architecture through the artist’s irreverent lens. Between a creative economy’s ability to reterritorialize space and urban designers thinking about ways to transform moribund landscapes, the missing catalyst in this discussion is the artist herself. If artists define new territories through their very inhabitation of a place, might not the work they produce also describe alternative design practices for the transforming the built environment? A large quantity of Kelley’s work, such as Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. (1980), Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry (1991), Educational Complex (1995), Sublevel (1998), Kandors (1999-2011), Petting Zoo (2007), and Mobile Homestead (2005-2013), indicates that architecture is a significant focus within his prolific and highly diverse artistic production. While Kelley’s work resists assimilation, a conversation between it and architecture proffers potent avenues of research for designers in a post- digital era during which architecture has emerged in need of significant renewal. What are the possibilities for architecture pedagogy –and the discipline in general –to engage art practices not only as a means to influence the way we think about our built environment, but also to suggest new vectors for designing it? In short, this paper explores the more conventional relationship between art and architecture through the less conventional lens of bad acting. It interprets the idea of bad acting through architectural and urban tropes and leitmotifs Kelley inspires, such as theatricality, nostalgia, monstrosity, DIY, props, sets, the uncanny, false memories, and the general territory of sentimentality and seeks to identify architecture excluded as its artistic “other” as well as the riot of work that contemporary artistic production incites for critical thinking about design. Common Ground: The Rothko Chapel and Architectural Activism Caitlin Watson The Rothko Chapel is described as “a stillness that moves, a quiet disruption, a sanctuary for the seeker” where “any and all are welcome.” In 1964, Dominique and John de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to design a series of site-specific murals for a chapel to be built adjacent to the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Following disagreements with the project’s original architect, Philip Johnson, Rothko assumed full control over all aspects of the construction, with technical assistance from Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry. The chapel was to be a non-denominational space for both spiritual contemplation and humanitarian action. At the dedication ceremony, Dominique de Menil described two of the experiences that ultimately led her to the chapel-- hearing Father Yves Congar’s eight lectures on ecumenism in 1936 and visiting the chapels by Léger, Matisse, and Le Corbusier commissioned by Father Marie-Alain Couturier in 1952. Congar and Couturier were integral figures in the renouveau catholique, a response to the crisis of truth in the 20th century. Both men were heavily influenced by Jacques Maritain and sought to turn his concept of integral humanism into action. Congar’s work was centered on social renewal through the ecumenical movement, while Couturier’s efforts aimed to preserve the physical and spiritual senses through commissioning works of sacred modern art and architecture. At the Rothko Chapel, the interdependence of the two approaches becomes clear. The de Menils’ social platform is wholly contingent on Rothko’s architectural ground. As Christopher Rothko observes in Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out, Rothko’s work was, from the very beginnings of his career, spatial, if not already architectural, in its conception. Of painting, Rothko insisted, “Space, therefore, is the chief plastic manifestation of the artist’s conception of reality.” Couturier emphasized this point in his writings for the review L’Art Sacré. He argues that truth becomes perceptible through the plastic revelation of pure form. Here we see the intersection of Rothko and the de Menils’ aspirations for the chapel, centered on the primacy of shared human experience in apprehending the true. In his essay “Perceptual Faith and Its Obscurity,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses the difficulty of perceiving truth outside of shared experience with other perceiving bodies. He argues that as one private world meets another an intersubjective ground is opened in which the sole true world, while still obscure, becomes visible. Merleau-Ponty’s notion that a world outside of us-- an experiential ground-- is required for such a meeting of private worlds to exist points toward the role of the chapel itself in fostering the spirit of inclusion and open communication the de Menils hoped to attain. This paper aims to establish the physical necessity of the chapel as a piece of architecture through an analysis of Rothko’s use of form as a vehicle for the union of matter and spirit, ultimately opening the horizon between the self and the other. In-Between the Physical and the Psychological: Locating Gordon Matta-Clark and Architecture Marcelo López-Dinardi, New Jersey Institute of Technology “What the father gives to the son is at once a writing and its substrate.” -Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever" This paper considers the proximity and remoteness in the dual relation in Gordon Matta- Clark's work between art-and-architecture but also between the physical and the psychological. By examining the locus of his work, it investigates themes of physicality and reachability as well as the inaccessibility of the psychological in the multi-media work of the artist. To achieve this, this paper analyzes the collection of the artist’s archived work and the operation of what was to archive, to consigned it within an architectural institution like the Canadian Centre for Architecture. It dialogues with Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever as a way to introduce the connection between the physical and the psychological., between was is located close to us and what is located far from us. This paper also discuss the rather conflictive relation of Gordon Matta-Clark with his father the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta (see Fig. 1) and will argue that Matta-Clark’s relation to architecture was impressed, archived in him by his father as architecture, architecture as paternal figure not limited to its formal training at Cornel University. Dwelling on the fact that Roberto Matta was also trained as an architect in his native Chile and later rejected architecture after working at the atelier of Le Corbusier in Paris, this paper will establish parallels between the two. Revealing interesting clues about a practice, that of Marta-Clark, always crossing between art and architecture but always in between the physical and the psychological, I would argue that architecture existed for him only as a psychological space from where to search but also from where to liberate. Only months after the birth of the twins (Gordon has a twin brother named Sebastian), Roberto Matta left the family, and with this event, commenced what became a conflictive relation between father and son(s). Departing from this personal history later combined with the career-life questions and motivated by the father whispering to his son–through written letters, “let architecture be it,” Matta-Clark develops a multi-media practice highly informed and sparked by this tensions. Tensions about location, about objects and media but also about matter and thought. With this framework this paper asks what is contained as the “matter” of the collection that had been transferred to an archive? The collection of Gordon Matta-Clark at the CCA is composed by “letters, notebooks, drawings, negatives, photographs, and clippings,” but also by films in multiple formats, reels, DVDs, old video-cassettes, posters, books, address books and one artifact. Where the work of the artist is located is a continuous crossing in-between the physical and the psychological, between what can be archived and what exists in the space located in between his father and him. Sensual Reality - The Affect Of Representation And The Effect Of Experience Spike Wolff, Carnegie Mellon University In response to a question raised in an interview, asking Donald Judd to describe the site at Marfa, Judd replied, ‘Well, Rudi here thinks it is utopia but for me it is just real’ 1 One can discuss, in great detail, the intellectual merit, academic theories, and art historical relevance of Donald Judd’s works at Marfa. It is in some ways quite simple to access a logical reading of the work, but the only true understanding of the work is through ones perceptual experience, over time. This is the ‘real’ – the reality of experience, the physicality of immediate sensation, the synthesis of thought and feeling. ‘Art is not the reflection of reality, but the reality of that reflection’ 2 The objective, as with all of Judd’s works, is to create perceptual experience.