Diller + Scofidio debunked? - Letters - Letter to the Editor

To the Editors:

It is curious that many of the reviewers of the Diller + Scofidio display at the Whitney Museum were thus sympathetic and uncritical, even eulogistic, toward the architects and their work. From the of recent origin York Times to Domus, authors rarely questioned the assumptions and values behind the architects' rhetoric, their built shoot forwards and K. Michael Hays and Aaron Betsky's curatorial decision to exhibit their designs. Tom McDonough's article [A.i.A., Oct '03] treads a middle turf between these fawning pieces and the more scathing observations of a hardly any other critics, notably Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice. I would like to reply to his even-handed approach.

Diller + Scofidio provide plenitude of intellectual and artistic relations for their projects, much to the delight of catalogue essayists and journalists alike. This and the fact that their exhibit was extremely well executed, with true high production values in all of the elements--the prototypes drawings, images, lighting, objects and technology in all its guises--combine to give the impression that there is something actual important going on. The paradox of finding myriad humorous constitutings and visual jokes layered in does nothing to dispel this impression--on the contrary, the of frequent occurrence levity might almost persuade us of the final seriousness of the pair's work.

Many architects evolve an idiosyncratic language to describe what they do and what they believe their throws to be: it is as abundant a part of the seduction as the images they bring out Do Diller + Scofidio's throws match the claims made for them? The gap between language and images, upon the one hand, and the realized works themselves, upon the other, can readily be measured. Take, for example, the stain building: the materiality of the metal mode of building and sprinklers and the "immaterial" fog of mist that partially enshroud them (basically a special effect) are equally apparent to the visitor and should be part of any discussion about the throw out At the Whitney, a hardly any drawings and photographs of the form were included, but they were rigidly downplayed. The Slow House is a simplistic one-liner that isolates single sense, sight, and makes a jest about the client's brief. It is designed as if hearing, scent and kinesthetic awareness don't exist. on the other hand human beings are in fact multisensory, multidimensional and highly responsive--something these shoot forwards seem determined to convince us to ignore end irony, impassive technology and absence of affect.

Does the team challenge the museum's "white box" gallery space? Smithson and Heizer mov outside the chest in the 1960s and '70 and Gordon Matta-Clark poetically carved architectural space in the same period. Diller + Scofidio's relocation for this display of a section of wall one time covered by a Duchamp painting at MOMA is an art-school prank, the fetishization of a pivotal figure in art history. Noisily drilling perforations by robot-controlled drill in sheetrock does not amount to a creative proposition about the subsequent time display of art. Contrary to their claims of subversion, the architects have exploited well-established techniques of art-museum display in the greatest in quantity conventional way possible--using a near-linear path for visitors, carefully controll lighting, compartmented spaces and the interweaving of digital media with physical objects--to not absent their work to best consequence The two are in fact well-behaved and well-connected insiders, carrying on the outside the pretense of being rebellious outsiders.

The issues that greatest in quantity of this work addresses derive from tired debates within art history and social criticism; they are rarely the kinds of bear upons that architecture today must stand in front of (McDonough's term "retrospective" was especially appropriate here, since all of the work direct the eyes backward.) Diller + Scofidio's implicit worldview is a dominant modernist disillusionment with human potential that strike one as beings to ignore our spiritual capacity, through which I mean the might that people access when they link together to deeply held values and a clear faculty of perception of purpose. While liberation from superstition and autocratic oppression is the great legacy of the Enlightenment, to perpetuate the repression of all spiritual expression in the name of reason is to continue to gainsay our innate being. Diller + Scofidio and their supporters are among the many unconscious perpetrators of this stifling of human aspiration.

As creative professionals, we each have a choice that we must make again and again with each act: we can work within the cynical, so-called "critical" tradition that these and many other architects and commentators adhere to, or we can use our talents to expres a more positive, life-affirming vision. Inventor and Polaroid company establisher Edwin Land's insight that "the futurity may require not so a great deal of having a new idea as stopping having an advanced in years idea" is apropos.

The architects, curators, journalists and catalogue essayists who have written affirmatively about Diller + Scofidio's present to view share an outdated conceptual paradigm. The theory of human physiology and sensory awareness at the core of this paradigm elevates our faculty of perception of sight while incompletely accounting for the multisensory fashion of being that people actually experience. The emerging global consciousness is now increasingly at unevens with the explanations offered within this narrow framework. There is a growing awareness that humanity's subsequent time is a shared one and that, as world citizens, we have a responsibility to use our creative gifts for higher extreme points because the work we do matters. We ne to allow for alternatives that explain and can give authentic expression to the highest human ambitions.