Figure Ground Game at the AA

Jeffrey Kipnis discusses the Figure Ground Game show at the Architectural Association:

In Praise of Sloth, Indolence and all Other Forms of Torpor

Figure Ground Game Gallery Talk

View a series of clips from the opening panel discussion!

A Conversation between Jeffrey Kipnis and Eric Owen Moss

Let the Game Begin!

Stephen Turk, Lisa Tilder and I plan to begin work with our many colleagues on a publication that treat in some depth the histories, current rationales, motives and methods behind the two shows we have mounted over the last two years, The Field of Dreams – our chapter in Peter Eisenman’s Piranesi Variations for the Chipperfield Venice Biennale displayed now outside the SCI-Arc Gallery – and its offspring in the gallery itself, Figure Ground Game.  So in lieu of a catalogue we decided that I the writer-producer of the show (formerly entitled the curator but revised on second thought) – and any of the principle performers at their liberty – would Blog the show in real time during its two month run in Los Angeles.  As close to daily as I can get, in my case.

I intend over these next two months to strive to produce a well-tempered record of the ruckus of thoughts on the show at any moment (like, for example – what the hell am I doing!?) and to engage questions and comments that may appear from visitors to the website.   In our conversation at the opening, Eric Moss asked some probing questions that I am wrestling with at the moment – an interrogation of the issue that I raised in the show’s introduction of how tragedy and comedy might apply to architecture, for example, or is there such a thing as truth in architecture, or what supplementary information does a visitor need to best appreciate the show, and my answers to many of these are certain to appear.   But if all goes well, I also would like to discuss in passing why it is so important to me to use work from other disciplines in my shows, in this case the dolls and the paintings; the difference between a figure and body that might bear on contemporary architectural discourse and perhaps ameliorate the inevitable and correct suspicion of a return to anthropomorphism the show suggests; the importance and irrelevance of Hejduk the show attempts to convey; the possibility and value of a non-local contextualism and a non-indexical, analytic parametricism – I’m so tired of forces  indexed onto vector primitives – ; why I adore science technology and measurable building performance but still think the existential project trumps any social or human science project in architecture; what happened to the sky in architecture; my affection for sloth, lassitude, indolence and all other forms of torpor and a bunch of other stuff I think the show addresses but that I’ll probably never get to.  Oh, yeah, and I want to discuss each piece in the gallery and the Field as well, of course.

But for my first entry, I have but two minor ambitions – to express the terms of my own hysterical (in the Freudian, not G. Marxist sense) overstatement of the importance of a visual art show as a medium of cultural production, to record a few of my favorite captured moments at the opening and thereby to invite others to submit theirs.

I distinguish an exhibition from a show along the lines of the difference between a documentary and a movie, as between fact and fiction of course, but more importantly how in terms of how each demands attention – the former close and didactic, the latter loose and elusive. For the most part, SCI-Arc mounts exhibitions in its gallery, for good reason.

In fact, I believe that among all forms of cultural production, the gallery show is the most fleeting, the most ephemeral. We visit them once, our stay is brief, our attention distracted by the dance of other people and the lure of the other things, and though they may travel for a while, once they close, they never, ever return. And if that list were not enough, we cloak them in openings, our euphemism for the cocktail of diversions we offer up to relieve us from having to suffer without relief the mysteries of a show. Though concerts and theater often have their opening galas, at least in them there comes a point finally when the audience is expected to sit down, shut up and listen.

It seems to me that quite a few of today’s curatorial customs, the obtuse abuse of didactics, the regretable evolution of the catalogue into a book,  the urge to comprehensiveness, the assumption that the show must make a point, all can be understood as efforts to counter-act what is tacitly acknowledged as an essential defect, its transience.

But I believe, on the other hand, that the irreducible and irreproducible effects, the pleasures, the powers, the possibilities of an exhibition, actually obtain from its evanescence. I take a cue from Hamlet.  Had the Prince wanted to catch the king, to prove his guilt and prosecute him, evidence would have been the thing; but Hamlet wanted something else, he wanted to catch the conscious of the king, and for that he needed theater, a play. I want something that requires even a lighter touch than live theater, because I want to put king, company, servants, and trappings all on stage as characters in an unscripted play, without them even knowing it; and to score it with the silent soundtrack that only a visual arts show produces. The art show is the only kind of theater in which actor, audience, prop, set, lighting, orchestra, even the stage itself is on stage all at the same time, and none quite know which role it is in.  Frankly, when I worked as an architecture and design curator, that’s really what I thought my responsibility was, because the only other places you find social similar staging are in bars and schools and libraries and courthouses, you know, just life as staged in architecture.

And to conclude: a few favorite moments:

1. Just moments after hearing to my great pleasure Jeffrey Brown, Elise Jaffe, Nicolai Ourosoff and Sherri Geldin extol the virtues of Stephen Turk’s synthesis of Brutalism and Boccioni in the Megaman tower  as the crowning achievement in the show, Finnian Payne, Jason’s son, walks in, looks at the tower and says, “look dad, Minecraft” [the name of his favorite video game (technically a sandbox indie game) that Stephen derived the tower from – part of the Game theme.] He was totally indifferent to its ten foot height.
2.  Two people run back and forth between Marcaccio’s painting Mirror and one of the Stephens’ dolls, swearing that the face in the painting is a representation of the face in the doll or vice versa.
3. Hernan Diaz Alonso and Florencia Pita’s two daughters, Maite and Charo see the Stephens’ Evolutionary dolls on the floor platform, and promptly place the two Barbie dolls they are carrying in the ensemble.  The Evolutionaries seem ever so slightly discomforted by the 2 prom queens, but were polite.
4. In the pre-talk, Eric Moss really worked me over on my claim about architecture’s fixation on tragedy and my desire to see it find its comic dimension.  Anticipating his position and his possible interrogation of our anthropomorphic turn, John Yurchyk found a beautifully comic drawing by Eric of an obscure project that showed a building drawn with legs in courtesy – perfect for the show. We tried to catch him with a candid camera as he previewed the show when he came upon the drawing, but missed it dammit, but the smile and the clear knowledge that he had been lovingly played was as visible on his face as the grin on a five year old with chocolate ice cream.  Today, 4 days later, I had a chance to ask Eric what the project or building was, since we never could find it, to which he responded: “Project was world savings and loan. Burned down in ’92 LA riot.” Not quite the theory of tragedy and comedy I have in mind, of course, but still gave me pause. 

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Jeffrey Kipnis