“Insiders”

For ideological, economic, and ecological reasons, architects are increasingly interested in traditional crafts and alternative, homespun techniques. Artists, for their part, are appropriating local customs, ancestral lore, minor narratives, and events. Comprising both artworks and architectural projects, this exhibition focuses on the impact of the indigenous and the everyday on these two disciplines. Downplaying standardization and sophistication, it celebrates instead heterogeneity, DIY, and the mundane.

Celebration is one of the curatorial keywords that resurfaces throughout “Insiders,” alongside such notions as collecting, recycling, imitating, and the dichotomy between high and low culture. Cory Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstücke op.11, 2009, is an example of the latter. It consists of YouTube sequences of cats playing the piano edited into a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s eponymous dodecaphonic composition. The images lose their chocolate-box quality when associated with the music, taking on its highbrow connotations while blurring the boundaries between high art and popular imagery.

Applying advanced technology to basic materials, the Los Angeles–based architects Ball & Nogues Studio use sophisticated digital tools to “print” a network of cables in such a way that a virtual three-dimensional volume appears in their midst when viewed from afar. Meanwhile, other works commemorate traditional practices or architectural styles. Take Janet Lee Scott’s collection of traditional Chinese paper offerings of exquisite replicas of telephones, shirts, or shoes designed to be burned at funerals, or architect Terunobu Fujimori’s bewitching insectlike teahouses on stilts that rework local traditions into novel styles and forms. In architecture, the vernacular is generally looked down on, while in art it can be a rich source of inspiration. In this exhibition, however, the architects vie with the artists when it comes to exploiting the liberating, devil-may-care energy of popular culture.