print November 1996

Steven Brower

Of all the contemporary work that extends neo-Conceptual art into the realm of architecture (from Tom Burr’s peepbooths to Andrea Zittel’s “escape vehicles”), Steven Brower’s may well be the cutest, which is not to say it lacks substance. If anything, the artist gives you too many ideas to consider, too many forms abundant with associations, and too many clever titles. In “Downsize,” Brower’s first solo exhibition, viewers were greeted with a six-foot-tall yellow pencil, Overwhelming Implement, 1995, leaning against the wall. Any similarity, conceptually or morphologically, to Claes Oldenburg’s

print November 1996

West 8

The analogy might go something like this: Dutch landscape firm West 8 is to the Office for Metropolitan Architecture what Swedish bubblegum band Ace of Bass is to ABBA. Both West 8 and Ace of Bass are clearly derivative of iconic figures from their native lands who had made critical splashes (in architectural theory and ultra-white disco, respectively) in the United States in the mid ’70s. In both cases, the figures that the younger artists choose to emulate confirm their good taste, or at least their pop savvy, which is arguably more important.

“Fuck the park,” the catchiest single to date from

print October 1996

TRAVEL & LEISURE

Last fall Andrea Zittel arrived in Berlin on a grant with the idea that she would design her own living space. Inhabiting an apartment in Berlin for a year would be like starting from scratch. The house in Brooklyn she was temporarily leaving behind was populated by A-Z Prototypes—various modular “Living Units” and “Comfort Units” designed to minimize demands placed on the body—that form the core of her artistic production.

However clunky the term, “artistic production” accurately describes Zittel’s working method. Since 1992 she has manufactured domestic prototypes bearing the logo “A-Z

print September 1996

New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Venice, Turin, Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Stockholm, Liverpool, London, Brisbane

MAKING MISCHIEF: DADA INVADES NEW YORK

This fall, Dada finally gets its due as a stateside movement. Curated by Dada scholar Francis M. Naumann with staffer Beth Venn, the WHITNEY’s show will include Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare. . . , as well as more than 200 objects by American and European artists associated with the movement on this side of the Atlantic. Along with the usual suspects—Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and, lately, Florine Stettheimer—you’ll also get to see works like Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (feathers and a champagne glass) and a partial

print April 1996

“City Speculations”

Of the two great panoramic views of ’60s New York, only one survives intact: the opening credits to the television series That Girl. The other, which goes by the name of the Panorama of the City of New York, was updated for the reopening of the Queens Museum in November 1994. Originally, this 10,000-square-foot model, still the world’s largest, was commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964–65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park and became the fair’s central attraction, with its miniaturized five boroughs (one inch equals 100 feet) rendered within a contractually guaranteed one percent margin

print January 1996

“Light Construction”

As the millennium approaches, everyone in the architecture world is searching for a new high concept, but no one seems willing to hazard what it might be. In the wake of deconstructivism (which, we are now told by the very publicists who turned it into a movement, was never supposed to be one), the very idea of a period style raises suspicions. Such a climate leaves the Museum of Modern Art (the cultural institution responsible for transforming nearly every formal variation in the architecture of this century into a “style”) face-to-face with a fundamental dilemma: how to present a thematically

Ernest Pascucci