The Brooklyn Rail

A window that keeps repeating what it is, does, and was.

Observation: Someone told me—or maybe it’s from a meme—Gilles Deleuze said something like: “Talking is messy, writing is clean,” and I feel that. Going binary without really noticing, and a layer of good/bad sense, is one of my brain’s worst habits, and messy/clean are part of each other even though it can be hard for them to hang in the same stream. Still, can we agree to try? (The best thing Herbert Muschamp wrote? The intro for a Sturtevant exhibition booklet in 1988.)

One night in the early seventies as David Bohm, the eminent theoretical physicist blacklisted by J. Robert Oppenheimer—his theories called “obscurantism” by peers while they were simultaneously celebrated by Albert Einstein—was walking across campus with a Ph.D. student who, looking up, said something about the beauty of the sky and “all that empty space.” Bohm scrunched up his face and incredulously said: “Space is not empty, it’s full.” Man, I love that. Full of potential futures and their coded mist.

It was perfect hearing that Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis was working with Berlin-based collaborative design project b+ and Snow Kreilich Architects to “renovate” a building for the gallery’s new home. b+’s practice is informed by reimagining(s) of what the word “renovate” can mean. I see it as using renovation itself as a material, and I keep trying to use joining as a conceptual frame.

Midway is one of the great galleries of the world. Truly. Especially over time. Almost a bit Harald Szeemann–like in their ability to recognize and show artists just as their practice and work is in a really particular, full space. But I know them mostly through their library. It’s astonishing to me that I have access to all those books. I often end up needing to acquire them after being with them too, so their library is causing my library to grow in a nice rhizomatic fashion. I’m grateful. I tried to count these books I needed to buy and it’s like twenty-seven or twenty-eight—and I often leave them shrink-wrapped if they’re new too. I'm still not sure why—Tom Burr, Haegue Yang, Sturtevant, Mono-ha. I tell my wife part of why I love the library is “it’s cheap” but the data doesn’t support that. Is buying books an act of love, in this case, more than an acquiring?

Data from b+ talk:
38% CO2 emissions of building sector vs 8% of transportation sector
70% new building vs 30% renovation
9% increase of interest rates for new construction
1,500% increase of land prices in Berlin (2010–20)
23% increase in costs of resources and materials
36,000% increase in land prices in Munich (since 1963)

Observation: Data tends to create feelings for both the “sayer” and the “hearer” via evocative tones of certainty. It’s especially helpful for “making a case.” And at the same time, we also know that data can say almost anything. I want to remember that the point of a practice and its resulting work is to change and be changed through living renovation.

It was 2015 when I saw an article about the b+ project Antivilla in 032c magazine. I was stunned. And 032c was a perfect field to encounter it in—brash conceptual, philosophical glamour woven into some form of post-everythingness. Over a few issues years ago they were making a manifesto or something and kept riffing on “Fantasy is often posited as the antithesis of reality, but this is a fallacy. Fantasy is a part of reality.”

At the time, I read the accompanying text and understood Antivilla was a “renovation” of an old underwear factory, near a tranquil lake, which transformed it into a residence. The photos were so intense though, they limited my interest in information and, to be honest, I barely noticed the story. Maybe when time shrinks, possibility grows. Back in 2015, Antivilla was a fantasy, and for me, it still is. Like seeing Sigurd Lewerentz’s Flower Kiosk for the first time, and again.

Of course, I understand it differently now. And the energy around b+ just keeps getting more vast in ways that make it pretty challenging to describe. I trust that.

I wasn’t thinking about renovation when Antivilla came to get me through those photos and their alivenesses and ghosts. And seeing the photos of the new Midway before visiting, they did something similar and overwhelming. Now, after being with the building in different contexts over some time, it lives as a sort of repeating set of questions. I keep trying to remember this is what we can find when things open up. It’s a shift for me. This sort of opening makes constraints function and feel different. A window is no longer a window, even though it’s still a window.

When I went back to that 032c article recently, it felt different, but the photos are still so fiercely empty and full.

Observations: 1) I heard someone talk about translating the word meditation from the Pali. It basically means “to cultivate.” But there’s a modern slang phrase that’s used informally too that sorta means “getting used to it.” 2) I do this thing when reading: if a word is particularly powerful, I lick my finger and smear it a bit: messy/clean is more accurate. Is that a renovation? 3) Dan Graham often literally placed viewers and their perception in the object. Maybe b+ is doing something similar with buildings, and sorta inside out.

I’ve always liked the last section in my studio’s work contract that says: “IT’S ALL HERE.” It comes to mind when I think of b+ and Midway and the richness of their atmospheres. It’s all here. But I’ll admit that I don’t care about data or markets or developers or politics when I’m thinking. Maybe their work will teach me to care as I follow it? (I love being changed.) I find it’s oddly impossible to summarize even though, in my body, it makes perfect sense.

It’d be foolish of me to try to land all this somewhere now, with words and my addiction to trying to sound critical, clever and acrobatic (the reason I’ll ever finish You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk is because I read its beginning.)

This amazing renovated building that houses art and books and ideas and people and light and sound is, like everywhere, filled with non-empty space—the aesthetic alivenesses and the various physical and conceptually historical mists.

Maybe as translators of the famous Zen haiku by Kobayashi Issa debate accuracy, they’re also proving it?

The world of dew—
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet…

I guess the last time I said something I still believe when trying to write about design, architecture, ideas, and practice was about five years ago. I wrote a short text called “Dear diary, I’m so fucking sick of trying to get what I want to happen, to happen” and it closed with this: “I’m attempting to remember that, in the end, it’s not art; it’s not this nor that; not speech, not silence; there’s no me, no you; it’s always the same, however you approach it, whatever you call it, whatever you think you want… you are mistaken.”

Observation: bell hooks does great renovations.