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

Reformation theology emphasized the intangible quality of faith and its location within the hearts of believers rather than in the prescribed ritual of an ornate and hierarchical Catholicism. Embedded here, generally, was a rejection of the material. As waves of iconoclasm spread with Protestantism, so did the articulation of a new church architecture – one spare and plain, puritanical, rather than bejeweled or gilded.

This new religion founded itself in reaction, in protest, to the dominant practice thus, forming a network of Protestants in various guises, across Europe. Central to their belief was the philosophical distinction between the visible and invisible churches, between those who participate in religion in a material, empirical way—attending sermons, Sunday school classes—and those who, more significantly, are spiritually bound to Jesus.

The Westminster Standards, composed during the English Reformation, became the basis for, among other movements, Presbyterianism. The Standards articulated this difference between the invisible and visible, while denouncing the Pope of Rome as the head of the church. Instead, this vision of Protestantism imagined a community of individuals bound not by ecclesiastical authority but instead by a persistent and invisible faith. Protest then, unites a group diffuse in location or body under an immaterial priority.

In a staged protest however, it is exactly visibility that is valued. The accumulation of individuals, en masse, gives meaning and weight to an abstract belief or political priority. In the political sphere, to protest in one’s heart is as good as not protesting, and it is presence, attendance, and appearance, that substantiate the cause, no matter how independently noble. If you don’t show up, it doesn’t count.

For the average protest, attracting media attention is as critical as the grievance itself. Although current modes of digital communication can help to spread awareness of a cause, in order to maximize the scope of demands and generate public debate, demonstrators may collectively appropriate the city. Thus, protests typically maintain a spatial dimension.

As societies become increasingly sophisticated, so do their forms of demonstration. Instead of throwing stones at government buildings or staging hunger strikes, there is a new form of ethical violence: wasting food. Physical aggression can be superseded by a provocative attack to a ruler’s conscience. In 2009, dairy farmers in Belgium began spraying milk onto farmland in order to protest the extremely low prices that they were receiving for their product. The entire world was paying attention to the decisions of the policymakers who were responsible for a protest which wasted food (while developing nations lack the most basic necessities). As a result of the protesters actions, feelings of blame were directed at bureaucrats, while the inability of observers to watch such wastage spurred the end of the protest.

Resistance is often a response to acts of political aggression. If a ruling party is seen to be corrupt, protesting can instigate the foundation of a parallel establishment associated with the general public. In May of this year, Spanish citizens criticized what they perceived as the existing corrupt power through the formation of a grassroots democratic movement. What began as an informal protest camp, is developing into a hyper-organized micro-society that aims to show the parties involved in the political system how to reach collective decisions.

Public space can be a space for debate. And… more

Rachel Engler

Daniel Fernàndez Pascual

“It improves the look of the neighborhood like 1,000 percent…”

-Advocate for neighborhood revitalization, Albany N.Y.

The Russian minister Potemkin is apocryphally said to have erected a series of hollow facades and empty homes—the shells of real village life and real infrastructure—in order to impress Catherine the Great. She was the queen and his lover and all was to be in order for her 1787 review of the Crimean countryside.

While this vision—of false townships glowing in the Slavic wilderness, of a tremendous project presented to an adored, royal woman—holds a mythic appeal, the “Potemkin Village” has since become a useful and potent metaphor, assuming a weight and cultural meaning that obscures its origin story. The phrase is now used to describe any number of initiatives that present a theater of deception, a world somehow duplicitous. The Potemkin Village operates according to facades and is false specifically in its superficiality.

Today, the motive for falsehood is no longer the great monarch in need of consolation or confirmation of her subject’s well being. While the presentation of apparent success remains a priority, the individual or institution to which that presentation is directed is diffuse and far from obvious. Infrastructural accountability is directed at vast networks, and the standards, rather than those of royal service, are notions of urban success and municipal efficiency… more

Havana’s Tropicana is a place, out of time. While in many ways, much of Cuba is living in the past, with the island’s limited resources ensuring that little has changed since the 1959 revolution, this seventy-two year old cabaret-style nightclub has evaded the worn aura that sweeps over much of the rest of the nation, making it one of the few lasting testaments to Cuba’s pre-revolutionary decadence.

The experience of the Tropicana is steeped in fantasy, reminiscent of old Hollywood films studded with visions of gangsters, starlets and dancers clad in flamboyantly voluminous, yet strategically scant costumes. With an utterly cinematic entrance, that winds around a lush tropical roundabout lit with glorious neon signage, it is difficult not to get swept into its deeply displaced atmosphere from the moment of arrival. Doormen escort patrons from their 1950s American cars to the club’s entryway, a glamorous mirrored hall with crystal chandeliers, which cast a sparkling light all around the reflective space. Here guests are presented with gifts, long stem roses for women and cigars for men. Moving onwards into the main space, staff in vintage-style tuxedos seat guests, as others deliver complimentary champagne and rum. All the while, a dazzling show begins, in an intimate space surrounded by a dense canopy of tall trees, laid out across multiple stages at varying heights, amplifying the venue’s ability to intoxicate with, above all else, overwhelming visuals.

As cans of Coca-Cola begin making appearances on the streets of Havana and with the recent meeting of Cuba’s Communist Party (the first in fourteen years), changes are taking place that signal a shift in the values and priorities of this nation. Hopefully the Tropicana will endure, as an island within and island, continually moving to its own rhythm.

Rachel Engler

Erandi de Silva

Following her first marriage and first divorce, and in an attempt to show her acquaintances that she was “doing alright”, my grandmother would sew designer labels into her generic clothing. There is a beige trench coat that hangs in her closet. Opening it wide, you can see a silky square tag, stitched in with amateurish and uneven strokes. It says, “Bergdorf Goodman”.

We clambered out of dresses and skirts in rooms full of women all doing that same thing—rustling through racks of patterns and textures, grabbing things, calculating discounts. These sales are mostly held in warehouse spaces, in empty and cavernous halls in which mirrors have been placed and tables positioned. We were chaperoned by a few, by people who guarded the doors and the dressing rooms and attempted to impose order and manage the sloppiness that materialism and desperation seemed to inspire in otherwise tidy women.

The stock sale’s relatively reasonable prices begin to suggest an easy access to designer clothing otherwise inaccessible but for the few. The warehouses that hold the clothing are big and spare and without elegant lighting or paneled fitting rooms. They evoke the factory—the place of production—and imply a paired down version of a world usually rarefied and ornate. Rejecting the boutique’s preciousness and the department store’s attempts at the cosmopolitan, these warehouses represent a different vision of retail, one suffused with gritty cool and the thrill of disorder. Important here, though, is one distinction. The items that burden the racks that line the walls are, implicitly, unrelated to the mode of factory production responsible for lower-end garments… more

“One of the first changes I made, as soon as I arrived, was to the label on the clothes. I added the address…”

-Peter Copping, The New York Times, March 4, 2011

Associating a brand with a particular place is an established practice in the fashion industry. From cities, to neighborhoods, to streets: Chanel is tied to Paris, Yves St. Laurent to the Left Bank (Rive Guache) and Nina Ricci to Avenue Montaigne. These relationships with a specific locale are usually established through a company’s promotional material which may feature images of urban landmarks or citations of city names and addresses.

Some designers, such as Dries van Noten, take a more subtle approach to generating associations with particular environments. With no photographic or written references, the patterns of his textiles, with their nods to silks from Asia, printing processes from Africa, weaving methods from South America and so on, take their wearers all over the world.

An even more abstract tier of signifiers are evoked by designers like Comme des Garçons and Martin Margiela through a barrage of techniques, such as ripping and employing dubious amounts of black, to connote “the street”.

A label’s ubiquitous allusions to place may, in part, be associations formulated as tributes to a muse. But more significantly, they may be presented with the intention of providing a distinct lifestyle narrative, helping shoppers to connect with the atmosphere an item seeks to create, regardless of what new context it is placed in.

Rachel Engler

Erandi de Silva

While CNC milling is prized for its capacity to rapidly produce large-scale prototypes of complex geometries, the physical properties of the mill’s construction—it relies on circular drill bits to carve away material—results in residual noise, or grooves, otherwise known as ‘tooling paths’. Although these tooling paths can be smoothed out with coats of Bando or sanded out of existence, over time they have become accepted into the contemporary design language and even celebrated for their ability to map the fabrication process—a marriage between fabrication and ornament, not dissimilar to the work of Process artists from the 1960s.

If Process art was prized for documenting natural organic phenomena, such as movement and gravity, contemporary rapid-prototyping offers a parallel view into the world of digital machines. The width and head-type of a tool-bit or the resolution of a plastic printer reveal the limitations of the technologies that produced them. But while the artists of the 60s were producing sculpture at a one to one scale, architects typically utilize rapid prototyping to produce scale models of objects that are much larger. And while the grooves on Greg Lynn’s Tea & Coffee Towers… more

To ward off bad luck, the more traditional residents of Lancaster County—the heartland of those apocryphally known as the “Pennsylvania Dutch”—mount circles and shapes, colorful geometric compasses and mandalas, on their barn walls. The symbols have been termed “hex” signs for reasons that are now opaque. Whether this name derives from sinister spell-casting—“hexing,” a gerund rooted in the German word for witch, Hexe—or from the more benign formal term, hexagon, is unclear. This ambiguity, however, reveals—despite its inherent confusion—a structural relation and hidden affinity. The distance between these two notions, between geometry and mysticism is, in some cases, not a great one.

The magic circle, imagined in both archaic and popular visions of sorcery, enacts precisely this conjunction of form and witchcraft. Drawn as a ring around its maker and enlivened by an accompanying incantation, it generates a protective realm, a field-like safe haven originating in simple, two-dimensional form. The magic circle forms a semi-architectural plan, the designs for a realm not built but mystically tangible.

E. Sean Bailey

Rachel Engler

In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the author attaches special importance to I. M. Pei’s 1989 addition to the Louvre in Paris, which he concludes is the burial site of the Holy Grail. What is curious about Brown’s hypothesis is that it assumes a complicit architectural profession, and in so doing forces us to reconsider Pei’s reputation as a high modernist. While Pei’s work is often viewed as an exploration into the volumetric potential of basic geometries, Brown interprets it as an infatuation with symbology (not surprisingly, basic geometries translate quite well into symbols of other things). While Pei has argued that the pyramid was “most compatible with the architecture of the Louvre, especially with the faceted planes of its roofs” and that his pyramids were not meant to be read as copies of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, for Brown, Pei’s pyramids are foremost wayfinders for members of the Priory of Sion. The pyramids represent a V, feminine vessel (vagina), or Holy Grail (Brown believes that the Holy Grail is… more

In the 1944 film Gaslight, the home, potentially the site of Paula Alquist’s conjugal bliss, is perverted by a husband who is similarly depraved. He’s in it for the jewels, you see.

He, her husband, moves things within the house. Her bag, the table and his pocket watch change position unexpectedly, appearing in the wrong places—the seeming symptoms of her mental degeneration. He flickers the gaslights and the rooms become suddenly brighter and then dark again. This varied dimness convinces her that it is not the physical world that is somehow corrupt, but rather, her mind. For poor Paula, our victim-cum-heroine, the home becomes not only the stage but also an actor in her psychological oppression.

Following the release of this movie, “gaslight” has become an expression to describe intentional psychological manipulation—a quaint noun is transformed into a sinister verb by the eponymous film.

E. Sean Bailey

Rachel Engler

In Amsterdam it is possible to walk from one miniature house to another.

The Rijksmusem’s dollhouses are precious, cross-sectioned structures, enclosed in glass vitrines and lit appealingly. They represent a particularly lush period of Dutch history, one which is known as the Golden Age. The period was not so-called without reason; its title refers to a time when homes were well-furnished with elegant fabrics, lined with spectacularly patterned wallpapers and well-stocked with preserves and meats. There was also enough money for miniaturization—for tiny, expensive, scaled versions of full-sized structures.

These dollhouses were not toys, but rather, the possessions of wealthy women. Serving as elaborate parlor tricks, they allowed a woman the pride of a home in a state of permanent perfection. Rather than drag guests up notoriously steep stairs, past potentially unmade beds, the Dutch hostess might display the refinement of her decoration in miniaturized form. Condensation reinforced a sense of possession by connecting super-vision with ownership.

Besides the famous Golden Age of Holland, the period which perhaps places second in a tourist’s knowledge of the Dutch capital is that of the Second World War. This era’s local centerpiece is the Anne Frank House—her hiding place somehow conflated with her home, in the museum’s misleading title—which attracts crowds daily. Lines of people assemble, along the canal, to walk through a now mostly empty attic space.

While the annex’s… more

Skirt lengths, shapes and drapes often embody social messages, and since its invention, the mini-skirt has been seen as both a symbol of liberation and of control. Originally introduced as sportswear, because of the freedom of movement they allow, by the 1960s they were popularly adapted by women as tools of self-empowerment. Following this period however, minis tended to be seen as complicit in the objectification of women.

With these sorts of narratives in mind, Miuccia Prada carefully selects the cuts of her skirts. Skirts have consistently played a significant role in Prada’s repertoire since the inception of her women’s ready-to-wear collection in 1988. However, in lieu of the mini, she favors lengths that land around the knee. In the typical Prada collection box pleats, kick pleats, and gathers are variously configured on A-line and full skirts — these often appear alongside a smaller selection of pencil-skirts. Her skirts are built to perform as devices of subtle expression, employing vaguely matronly designs that heavily signify bourgeois ideals of feminine propriety—a combination which is generally interpreted by fashion’s pundits as some loose synthesis of subversion, politics and intellect.

In Prada’s Waist Down exhibition, one of the fashion house’s many collaborations with AMO, this sense of politesse is thoroughly eschewed. Numerous skirts are mounted on motorized hangers which send their hems high into the air. Their display is further aided by the placement of mirrors on the floor, giving the viewing public a glance of what lies beneath. Without relying on the revealing qualities of the mini, Prada and AMO have developed a way to engage the skirt in the act of display.

Rachel Engler

Erandi de Silva