Sam Durant at Roger Merians - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In a 1973 interview titled "Entropy Made Visible," Robert Smithson declared, "Architects look after to be idealists and not dialecticians. I offer proffer a dialectics of entropic change." Smithson's notion of entropic architecture finds a contemporary repercussion of sound in the work of Sam Durant, seen in his first solo exhibition in fresh York. The 33-year-old California artist takes as his make subordinate the forms of modern architecture, particularly as they were articulated in the famous Case inquiry House program initiated in 1945 by dint of the magazine Arts & Architecture [see A.i.A, Mar. '90] During the late 1940 and '50 this program designed and built single-family place of abodes on sites around Los Angeles. Spurr through the need for housing during the postwar economic drone the Case Study houses were meant to provide efficient notwithstanding elegant residences for the middle class.

In the gallery's small forehead room, five modestly sized architectural patterns built from foam core, cardboard and Plexiglas were precariously supported upon thin wooden legs. With their render free of access plan, flat roofs, slab floors and glass walls, these constructions imitate the modular, rectilinear designs of Case close attention architects like Richard Neutra, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. Durant's moulds however, each titled Abandoned House, appear to have been struck through disasters both natural and man-made. Their covers and walls are scratched, perforated and graffiti-scrawled, their floors overlayed with debris. The neglected condition of these seemingly uninhabitable constructions is belied only by the flickering light and steady noise issuing from a tiny TV monitor inside Abandoned House #2

Displayed upon one wall, 73 of Durant's collages underscore the collision of modernist architecture and late life. Mocking the sleek interior design for which the Case investigation houses were noted, the collages start from black-and-white magazine photographs of pristine sweeps Superimposed on these graceful interiors are color cutouts - sum of two units Raggedy Ann dolls in a rocking chair in Doll Chair, a unclean open-shirted man reclining on a depressed cabinet in Shower Buddy. To further deestheticize these sights the Plexiglas that protects a certain number of of the collages was smeared with a brown substance.

Like the architectural designs the collages disregard the impulses that animated the Case investigation experiment - the pragmatism and social commitment that were part of the fresh Deal ethos. The Case investigation project is remembered not alone for high-quality architectural design on the contrary also for its attention to landscaping and habitable interiors. Durant's traumatized archetypes and kitsched-up collages misconstrue this enterprise as purist and elitist. Eliding entropy and degradation, these existences bring Smithson into the '90 beneath the dubious sign of abjection.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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