Destabilizers

Destabilizers

In 1966 the architects Claude Parent and Paul Virilio published nine issues of their magazine “Architecture Principe” in Paris. Their manifestoes on “The Function of the Oblique” reconsidered the idea of human orientation in relation to the inclined plane and the oblique axis, and were meant to destabilize both contemporary modern and postmodern perceptions of space. Starting from the spatial experiences of a human body moving on an inclined plane, Parent and Virilio conceived various experimental installations, among them the French Pavilion in the 1970 Venice Architecture Biennial and Parents own house in Neuilly-sur-Seine. One of their last common projects was a self-experiment in inhabiting the oblique, called the “Instabilisateur Pendulaire“(Pendular Destabilizer). Both Parent and Virilio were planning to inhabit a capsular space hung up in an angle on the campus of the University of Nanterre, monitored by sociologists and medical scientists. Due to the beginning of the student uprisings in Nanterre in 1968, this experiment was never realized.

Why do you think I'm standing closer to you than you are to me?

Interview :T-shirts available to purchase

Limited edition t-shirts are now available to order from us throughout the duration of the exhibition at the Bonnefantenmuseum. Each of the 4 texts is taken from the interview with us conducted by Agata  Jastrzabek that has since been published in the exhbition catalogue. 

T-shirts are €15 each +postage/packaging and are available in white with black text in a variety of sizes. 

Orders can be made up to and including the 25th January 2009 via rachel.koolen@janvaneyck.nl, please allow 20 days for delivery.

Open displays for particular viewership

http://picasaweb.google.de/ndrsmllr/Fotos?authkey=mdecyT0oCgA#

"In the Desert of Modernity", Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
curated by Marion von Osten, Serhat Karakayali, Tom Avermaete, exhbition design by Jesko Fezer, Andreas Müller and Anna Voswinkel

Each 'item' to be included in the exhibition was approached as a surface of display, in that each work had its display formated to its physical presence, This to me seemed a very good way to make a kind of physical confrontation with items which may have had much less resonance if presented in a 'standard' format- in that much of it was source material, posters/models etc. So then they took the standard format of the display (especially if we think of the kind of informative display of the idea of 'visitor centre'  which become part of the langugage of visiting architectural sites -the Schröder Huis will, for example, get a new visitors centre this winter and when I visited Buckminster Fullers dome near Montreal this was sort of all there was, the dome itself was dying ) and specified it. If Andreas said that Rossi was using normative typologies in a kind of unspecific way then this would be opposite, staging an openenss by using a recognizable form and then specifying it by adjusting it to the materiality of the posing item.

And other concrete objects

Sound console

Tripod with over sized light bulb on timer/ 'If I ever filmed this text'

Hoffmann tables/ vitrines

Flexible multifunctional display

Depot

Rietveld, reallocating values and relations.

We went through this topic quite a lot now, still not bored with it.
At the housing development site near Tilburg modernism seems only to have been adopted as a style for the purpose to comminicate values like good quality, back to the basics, etc. and maybe even socio-democratic values. Yet the first impression of the image with subtitle 'no music' remains modernism/empty space = no music
What if we would highlight this aspect of (hollow?) idealism; the video might create an interesting tension with the bureau when projected on it. But maybe this is still to literal and we just need to project the video we already have of the construction of the terras. The construction video and the presentation of the Rietveld bureau in the museum is a clear cut, but sometimes clear is good right? Like all other objects presented in a museum especially this type of museum (this architecture and layout), Rietveld's furniture will be stripped of it's original meaning/value, instead an empty symbol is created. The signs of wear in the context of the museum become traces (evidence) to track down it's life, as if practicing modernist archeology. The utopic-functionalism of Rietveld is reduced (the everyday function between people and things are taken away) to an abstract idea/notion (In my opinion the definition of design)-just posing-, but (sorry I repeat myself) it's made into a functional (open) support by means of projecting on it. This is also where the whole technocratic/admimistrative design starts to interact with Rietveld. The idea of a table (the Hoffmann table) AND the idea (utopia) of a table (Rietveld),(=some 'design', ooh it's design or ooh it's art!).
What do you think will be the effect of listing things stacked on Paula's Rietveld chair as such and on the whole choreography? Do you think it will be an artificial attempt to retain the everyday function of the chair in the museum. (which can be good, don't misunderstand me) The actual question would be what do we highlight by highlighting the personal motif. Perhaps better to speak about the private versus the public.

Question: St. Francis, you've mentioned him once before but I couldn't find it back (ostensibility-text?). What does he have to do with the provider/user- and privat/public relation in our work? Oh man, I am boring technocrat!

Responding on a remark in your latest text called 'Tecnocratic openness-free aggression', furniture from Hoffmann and other office-interior suppliers are BOTH 'transparant/open' AND 'empty surface of mass made/ pre-fab'. Both aspects are interesting in connection with Rietveld. This aspect of time wasn't so visible in the presentation of the Rietveld imitation shelves at the jobsquare, but when exhibited in a art space, creating an overview of the whole (mass) production they will be an expression of time. There are about 7 try out shelves and the other 44 are more or less similar, yet clearly hand made. Utopian time, administrative time etc. are combined, contrasted.

I 'm happy that you offer a handhold for structuring the materials, using forms and devises from the technocratic world. Although I don't understand what you mean with 'to focus on the way in which the works are timed' (maybe that's a matter of showing) And I agree that if we would decide to stage ourselves in the worker's cottage, time is an important element to work with.

Conclusion: pure pose only exists in endless, continuous, indifferentiated time. Any kind of time that does differentiate will articulate what can be called attitude, which heavily depends on how one time/space is structured in relation to another. But this is pretty abstract too.

signed,
OPENNESS AS AN ACT OF DEFIANCE

I haven't been to your studio yet, because...

I wanted to organize my thoughts first in order to be more open; create special interior shelving to be more receptive for whatever is there. This is kind of a continuation of the batik figure; there are some elements, as you wrote, that are being pushed back a bit, at least in my imagination/mind, I hope to see them back again: the human touching, the stage which is not a fight, getting physical with relationships. What connects them is an aspect of physicality or embodiment (embodied passion), like the fan blowing the batik fabric is expressing. I'm still attempting to find the right tone to address this theme. In what way should I think about the worker's cottage: a stage, where we play out this relationship between embodied passion and behavior management? Very hard to make that concrete, are you thinking of something? By the way, I agree that 'no music' as subtitle goes better with the cottage than the retro-modern housing development. The other combination is too dramatic.
In one of the texts 'getting physical in relationships' is mentioned in the same breath as 'reallocating values'. In this context you wrote about using the form of invitation sincerely but in a way that is not necessarily recognized by the participants. Even though I wouldn't know how to imagine to get physical with relationships, which might be at stake in this whole loose construction, I do know we are reallocating values, or relations for that matter, especially with Rietveld. Even though this paragraph is quite messy I hope you can respond somehow.

Rossi's Bonnefanten and the Pose

In one of the previous texts you describe the analogy between office design and the Bonnefanten; that Bonnefanten has a corporate look. The day I was given this tour in the depot I took a picture of one drawing that's put up on the first floor, department for classical art.
It is analogue to the style in which the real museum is built. (and many other pictures like this).



Ledoux
Oikema, vue persoective, 1804






Happy colony












Pjotr Mueller
Koningin Beatrixpark, Almere, 1989






Short train of associations: Revolutionsarchitektur (Boullee, Gilly), precursors/ contemporaries of this architecture is the folly, both of which heavily rely and borrow from classical, gothic, oriental (Egyptian) archetypes. Of these three archetypes the classical is most dominantly present. The architecture reminds of ancient platform for philosophical discussion (forgot the Greek word for it) depicted in Raphael's fresco. Or indeed 'corporate': a 19th century industrial magnet's estate.


'Philosophy of Athens' by Raphael is dominated by pose (pure pose) similar to how you perceived the way works in the Bonnefanten museum are staged/presented.
Jo Frenken had a large transparent film (for silkscreen printing) with a reproduction of this fresco lying around in his office. I was playing with the thought of making a film (1:1) of your photograph with the figure+ batik. Note that only a few of these classic paintings can be downloaded for free in high resolution from the internet.