The Piccadilly Community Center does not represent an instance of documentation. Its uncanny juxtaposition of both impoverishment and overabundance is both anachronistic and revealing of the center’s studied construction. The inverse of the canon of social documentary photography, those images that record and sometimes romanticize the poverty, the community center creates a dense and specific world, rather than record one already existing. It is a kind of social realism built, not captured.

And though it takes as its subject interaction between people, and studies those spaces that facilitate and house these interactions, neither does the Piccadilly Community Center, as constructed in Hauser and Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery space, represent an instance of relational aesthetics. Rather than represent a continuation of that phenomenon defined by Bourriaud as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space,” the center perpetuates, instead, a more traditional dream of mimesis and its power.

When Pygmalion created Galatea in the likeness of a woman, he hoped the divine gift of a human soul might enliven her sculpted flesh. The Piccadilly Community Center, an artificially constructed vision of a local community center built in a gallery space in posh central London, is, in its mimetic foundation, an expression of renewed faith in recreating reality and the power of these recreations. The Piccadilly project suggests that by building something that looks like a community center, the spirit of such a place, of community, might somehow descend into its shell, rendering it less a mockery of the lower classes than a functioning supplement to their social lives.

As a type of reproduced space, the artist Christoph Büchel’s interpretation of a community center in Piccadilly has a dialectical agenda which is self-consciously positioned between reality and artifice. For this exhibition, Hauser and Wirth’s upscale gallery fittings are removed and replaced with scavenged furnishings and accessories that simulate a detailed but thrifty recreation facility, indicating a place that has been there for some time and is permanent rather than temporary.

This project relies on misrepresentation to define itself. While the space’s identity may originate in “Art”, it shies away from this label. An obvious gesture indicating an attempted divorce from the discipline’s conventions is the omission of Büchel’s name from any promotional material, implying that the community space has come into being as any other: a product of anonymous authors, possibly bureaucrats.

The uncanniness of the space results from its proclivity for mimicry but also from its programmatic tension: art fans intently gaze at carefully placed Post-it notes and disheveled file folders, as if they were trying to understand a Dutch still-life, while elderly locals bake Algerian bread. Some users of the space are there to observe, while those under surveillance may not know that they are being watched. Thus, there is a gradient of awareness amongst users as to what is really taking place in the space.

Büchel has essentially constructed a stage for ordinary people to go about their daily activities and upon which an audience can wander. Here the roles of audience and actor are fluid and can be exchanged at any given moment. This juxtaposition of program produces… more

Rachel Engler

Erandi de Silva

“Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby.”

-Laurie Anderson, “From the Air”

The Space Shuttle is gone. The program ended after thirty years when the orbiter Atlantis landed this past July 21st.

The Space Shuttle was designed to act as, and resemble, something between a pickup truck and a commercial airliner. Humanist and anthropomorphic, the shuttles climbed to orbit on two leg-like rocket boosters to advance NASA’s stated mission: “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

Before the shuttle, the first few generations of human built spacecraft were highly legible artifacts. Antenna, solar panels, docking ports, attitude thrusters and portholes clearly indicated that they were only components in larger contextual systems, processing nodes dependent on complex streams of input and output.

The ship pictured above is the X37-B, first launched by the Air Force in 2010, mission unknown. Blunt and blind, with no windows or doors, no visible human or network affordances at all, this object has nothing to indicate that its autonomy would be threatened or influenced by any other controller inside or outside its smooth heat shielded skin. Who could suspect that this baby robot spaceplane, cute and sinister like a vinyl Dunny toy, designed by the Department of Defense, would be capable of deploying orbital weapons?

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe describes the anger and frustration of the early American astronauts, all originally fighter test pilots, when they discovered that the vehicle they were expected to fly were really only subject to little more than the faceless math of… more

There is a framed picture on my dresser from when I was eighteen. In it, I am sitting on the floor of the Frankfurt airport. M., my first love, a lanky German boy, sits next to me and quietly studies my face. The other friend in the picture holds my hand, his eyes closed, crying. In slow motion, M. and I are being torn from each other: an hour after the click of the shutter, I will pass through the gate and go back to Minnesota after spending a year in Germany.

Twenty years later in a different city, I took a set of pictures the last time I stayed at J.’s apartment: the knives on the magnetic strip in the kitchen, my reflection in the mirrored closet doors, the vertical blinds and the West Coast light casting diagonal beams on the bed, the view of the bookshelf from the orange couch, each of us on an end, watching old movies and West Wing episodes under a thin turquoise throw. Here was Christmas, here was the most important letter anyone gave me. Here were the meanest things anyone ever said to me.

Neither love nor depression have the words “finish” or “end” or “done” in their vocabulary. Love is belief in expansiveness, of more and again and adventure, of a year that keeps unfolding, of Death Valley in summer and northern Sweden in winter and even just Venice Beach on a gloomy day in June. Depression, too, is expansive, but in a different way, a swirling vortex of shit, a downward funnel that just spins deeper.

Grief, however, is bounded. It twists and gnarls and it stifles the breath. It forgoes the linear in favor of spikes and spots and synchronicity. When you think you’ve managed to escape grief, it hoods you again, capturing you in another convolute. A knot under my sternum that sticks on every inhale, a peach pit, the bitter walnut falling out of a cracked shell. And then: the knot tires itself, giving way to all the muscles that gripped it; the walnut spit out, the peach pit tucked into a napkin, then folded in quarters.

Fred Scharmen

M. W. Steenson

Architectural educators often rely on the precedent to make distinctions between good and bad architecture. Works by esteemed practitioners such as Herzog and de Meuron, or Sejima and Nishizawa are dissected and documented in an effort to determine what makes them successful as buildings and as works of art. While important lessons may be learned, the danger of such idolatry for the nascent designer is in its capacity to influence. Architecture schools, which should be places of free exploration and experimentation instead become factories for the production of architectural pastiches, or collages, inspired by a few great men. Once naive and unpredictable thinkers, admirable qualities in youth… more

Cy Twombly drew deep inspiration from classical mythology and allegory. Recalling an artist with similar antique interests, he said “I would’ve liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time”.

Twombly produced gestural works which bore scrawls resembling names such as “Virgil”. Roland Barthes claimed that though Twombly produced images that resembled words, they were stripped of their meaning – mere traces.

His home, a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome, like his paintings evocatively reproduces a world past, in a present context.

E. Sean Bailey

Erandi de Silva