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AFTER THE DIAGRAM Diller + Scofidio Curated by Douglas Cooper and Lauri Firstenberg 26 April – 2 June 2001 The diagram collapses the dichotomy between representation and abstraction: it always has ties to the real, and it is always abstract. “After the Diagram” is an examination of various ways in which contemporary artists and architects involve disparate strategies to detonate the conventions of the diagram itself. Representing only a few critical assaults on traditional notions of the diagram, this exhibition questions new and tentative modes of artistic production in the wake of representational security. The subtitles are far from rigid categories, as much of the work featured in the show operates under many of the posited strategies. Building the Diagram. Artists have worked to build the diagram itself, rather than building from the diagram. Melissa Gould (Mego) produces installations and proposed monuments centering around both personal and historical memory and artifacts, often existing only in the form of diagrams, and by reinterpreting plans of structures into reinvented renderings. She will exhibit a floor plan of a razed synagogue built as traces on the earth with light. Alex Posen’s Untitled is a grid of highly abstract portraits created by dripped wax on paper and assigned names: Goya, Stein, Balthus, Bowles, Waller, Camus, and Fields. The portraits are abstracted from notions of delineation and representation, introducing aspects of the annotated diagram into an entirely gestural space. Mis-Annotation is a strategy to introduce nonsensical or distorted translation, in order to push the diagram into a more poetic and less practical space. Atom Egoyan’s 20-minute film, En Passant, addressing the signage wars in Montreal, will make its New York premier in “After the Diagram.” Egoyan moves the Anglo/French battle onto neutral terrain: the generic diagram of the human body found on traffic signs and bathroom doors. Mego’s lithographic map, entitled Neu-York, 2000, revises a Manhattan map of 1939, inserting contemporaneous sites of Berlin to create a nightmarish conflation, mapping “psychological transport, place, displacement, and memory”. The artist forces a retroactive system of annotation onto New York, via theThird Reich, in an obsessional, invented system of naming. The Diagram Divorced from Human Will. The diagram represents intent. Surrealists experimented with automatism and Coop Himmelblau adopted automatic drawing technique for the production of architectural form. This strategy has been extended here with David Rokeby’s Giver of Names—a computer installation in which objects are placed on a pedestal by the audience, then captured in video and interpreted by the computer via a “metaphorically linked associative database,” an artificial intelligence which describes and draws objects placed in front of it. The computer produces a sentence about the image, reflecting Rokeby’s interest in patterns, ruptures, and failures of simulation and virtual translation in his attempt to “reduce real objects presented to the level of diagram.” The Gestural Paradox. will be investigated vis-à-vis the expressionistic gesture, generally considered antithetical to the diagrammatic urge. Anthony Vidler has pointed out that this operation dates to Duchamp and the pre-animated graphic. Critical attempts, beginning with Duchamp, to sever the essential connection between the diagram and the real, through the introduction of nonsense (Twombly) or illegibility (Beuys) is built upon in Dysmedia’s Amendment (2000-2001), painted diagrammatic drawings on mylar, evidencing the problematics and contradictions of digital technology. Dysmedia manipulates utopian texts—Le Corbusier’s heroic prose, the First Amendment—distorting this verbage through iterative procedures of Internet translation and voice recognition software. Abstracted almost to the point of nonsense, these words are reproduced on the mylar to annotate utopian iconography – Le Corbusier’s Modulor and biomorphic hearing aids. Dysmedia’s highly gestural conclusions negotiate problems of abstraction, figuration, and digital decay, producing “diagrams of misinformation.” Softening the Hard Edge. The diagram is largely identified with the perfect line: the hard-edged perfection of the draftsman, a quixotic attempt to empty the real of substance while retaining its essence. Diller + Scofidio, experimental architects, are in the midst of designing a building which radically celebrates the soft edge: the Blur Building, which will be the signature pavilion for the next World Fair. This project will sit in the center of a Swiss lake and emanate fog: it is building as cloud, structure as anti-structure. The work will be represented in the exhibition by preparatory drawings and models which themselves contest the conventional hardness of the architectural line. Kim Lieberman’s sewn pages of postage stamps re-gender and quiet the grid. Known for her lush, jeweled tone compositions, Lieberman mimics her base grid with a weave of white thread. The work includes a list of the sites of sewing. Siemon Allen’s Untitled is a monumental field of woven magnetic tape which creates a hyper-opaque black surface whose handmade quality is camouflaged at a distance, yet perceived as a delineated grid upon closer inspection. Pushing the Diagram into the Real. Contemporary photographers have taken the emptiness of the diagram and, while retaining the lineaments, have transferred the full texture of reality into the schematic. Warren Neidich’s Beyond the Vanishing Point produces distorted reflections of both staged and in situ street scenes reflected in a glass curtain wall of a Los Angeles building façade in order to examine and refute Renaissance notions of perspective. Michael Rashkow will exhibit for the first time in New York City, a corpus of photographs titled 360 degrees, 1999-2000. The artist reconstructed his car, wrecked over the course of 10 years, into a vehicle for producing photographs. The car, now a semi-disfunctional yet biographical vessel, was transformed into a panoptical camera. The car is a surrogate for the artist’s body, history, and memory, and bears a physical record of his past, thus literalized and re-embodied by the new mechanism of the car cum camera. The resulting documents evince ambiguous depth, appearing as dense yet obscured views of both interior and exterior – from the mechanics of the car to the montaged cityscape. Wade Guyton’s neo-minimalistic architectonic sculptures are composed of multi-bezeled interfacing plexi-elements whose placement is, to a degree, arbitrary, based on chance operations. Large columnar rectangular elements are comprised of plywood or his signature mirrored surfaces, which take on the reflected appearance of the surrounding space. Guyton’s constructions speak to his photographic methods, particularly his intervention of black drawing in the surface of the photograph, obscuring and reconfiguring the image; what the artists terms as “diagrams for potential sculptures.” Guyton’s work in the context of this exhibition will reflect the negotiation of photographic and sculptural modes of production, particularly the intercession and conversion between those two spaces. Jonah Freeman’s highly formal photography visualizes found commercial spaces cropping and critiquing contemporary social and architectural structures. SEVERING THE ACTUAL. Siemon Allen’s edited audio piece of a statistician discussing the hypotheticals around the 2000 presidential elections extracts the expert’s responses leaving the questions absent. This sound is overlaid with a tape of Lyndon Johnson’s speeches, rendered white noise in order to abstract the historical/auditory experience. The work of Michael Queenland, in his New York debut, is represented by a photographic triptych of an obscure image—styrofoam packing material suspended in the air by a transparent radial grid, a spider’s web which holds the object in place: a diagram of nothing. Composition is achieved here by chance in a serial fashion or ode to Muybridge. Packing material is photographed, 2 pieces, 3, pieces, and then 4. The paradoxical state of tension is achieved between the lightness of the suspended object in its state of decontextualization, alleviated from its original function of protecting through compression. Alex Arcadia’s digital rendition of his fantastical figure Monique represents the mapping of a virtual and impossible structure. This digital work creates a dialogue with the Arcadian alphabet – a personal and unintelligible lexicon – the basis for the artist’s mythology and larger production. Special thanks to the Canadian Consulate General & TEKSERVE PRESS Show: After the Diagram “After the Diagram,” curated by Douglas
Cooper and Lauri Firstenberg, opens at White Box, NYC, April 26,
Featuring Diller + Scofidio, Kim Lieberman, Siemon Allen, Alex Posen,
Michael Raskhow, Michael Queenland, Atom Egoyan, Douglas cooper,
Warren Neidich, and Jonah Freeman.
After the Diagram is a group exhibition curated by Canadian author/artist Douglas Cooper and Lauri Firstenberg. Bringing together painting, sculpture, drawing, film and installation, After the Diagram features artists who have used the diagram or incorporate diagrammatic elements into their imagery. Look for Canadian new media artist David Rokeby (pictured) and filmmaker Atom Egoyan.
A dozen artists and architects, including Rem Koolhaas and Diller + Scofidio, leave the diagram behind. Look for Siemon Allen’s woven magnetic-tape monochrome, Atom Egoyan’s video projection, an d David Rokeby’s smart do-it-yourself still life.
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