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Francisco Javier San Martín Models
Our planet is built, the earth is replete with buildings, with cities. There are places such as Los Angeles, Mexico D.F. or Jakarta, in which the metropolis converted into megapolis has taken over significant portions of land. On the other hand, from the beginnings of photography, architecture has constituted one of the privileged motifs. The history of photography and that of the representations of architecture and cities seem to run parallel: this is logical, since before painting, which lived the XIX and XX centuries in tension between avant-garde innovation and the weight of secular tradition, photography quickly adapted its technological modernity -objective, instant, true- to the new reality of the industrial society. Under these premises, which would be generic for the entire relation between architecture and cities, most noteworthy is the abundance of models used instead of real buildings in current photographic speculation. Among the artists appearing in this edition of EXIT alone, we could cite James Casebere, Oliver Boberg, Loris Cecchini, Javier Vallhonrat and Jordi Colomer. Along with other considerations, this proliferation implies an inversion of the Merzbau procedure. Schwitters built an ideal space, actually a large scale model, and the photographs he commissioned to a photographer from Hannover -who still remains anonymous- were something secondary in his project, pure documentation of the work carried out. But the postmodern yearning to build models, for the programmed purpose of being photographed, again expresses a weakness of real architecture as much as it does a mistrust on the part of artists toward built architecture. In other words, this would be a reaction to the documentation on architecture that had dominated a substantial part of the conceptual panorama: the titles alone of the art books with documentation on buildings that Ed Ruscha published between 1964 and 1970 indicate well the scope and intentions of his work: Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on Sunset Strip, Nine Swimming Pools, Real Estate Opportunities, …although he was not alone in this dry way of understanding photography and architecture. In 1966, Dan Graham published his famous articles in the magazine Arts, Homes for America, illustrated with photographs of his of neighborhoods of single family homes, in which he analyzed their structural elements from a pseudo-professorial stance, and, in 1971, Hans Haacke, having recently abandoned his post-minimalist pieces that reacted to the environment, began his stint as artist-politician with Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, in which he demonstrated 146 photos and many other documents related to the real estate business of the Shapolsky family in Harlem and the Lower East Side. All this indicates, among other things, that American artists were particularly interested in dealing with architecture as a suitable crystallization of reality, and that the straying toward unreality in the photographed models is a reaction to this. We must remember that also in Europe, Bernd & Hilla Becher were dealing with architecture, in this case industrial structures, in their impassive black and white photographs in which they applied a rigorous formal purging. However, it is also possible that the photographed models constitute one last way of defending a certain form of photography, a certain constructed materiality, although fictitious, a remnant of handwork, in the face of the empire of digitization.
The American artist James Casesbere offers in his work the most characteristic example of this strategy of fictionalization of architecture. The models Casebere employs to make his photographs do not represent real places, despite their truthful aspect, but rather typological approaches to spaces of reclusion: prisons, schools, hospitals, monasteries… spaces "for control, for punishment, for categorization. But at the same time, it is a mental construction as well as a physical one". Despite their being fictitious architectures, the models are made with plaster of paris, a real material used in architecture. In some of the pieces, such as Flooded Hallway, 1998, the inclusion of water, and the exactness of the reflections, increases the effect of reality. They are small scale models, but unlike the work of model-makers, who substitute construction materials for others that represent them, Casebere employs real materials. Definitively, Casebere fabricates architectures of real spaces built from fiction, while the Merzbau was a space of fiction actually built and inhabited for life and work. The evolution between these two works, which could function as a difference between modernity and postmodernity, would be along the lines of disappearance, immateriality and fiction. Architecture and logotype
The Pompidou center in Paris, a symbol of a new museum strategy in the Western World, embodying one of the most fitting examples of high-tech architecture, appears wrapped in an Arabian style architectural structure, with rugs hanging from the steel structure and surrounded by a motley crowd of men wearing turbans. This building, the latest prompting of techno-scientific optimism, makes evident the sustaining structure and the utility conduits, as if the edifice were a machine. Herein, the building has been confronted with the motley Islamic décor. The Berlin Reichstag and the tower of the parliament in London likewise appear improbably crowned with Arabian cupolas. Architecture is one of the great condensers of cultural meaning. Often, buildings not only speak, but are also capable of summing up an entire culture. If this were not so, whence would originate the psychological impact, the spark of surprise provoked by the Islamic Project, this series of photomontages that the AES Group created in 1998? Precisely from the emblematic nature of the buildings employed. In some instances, a sculpture can work as an emblem of a city, such as the Mermaid in Copenhagen, but foremost in this capacity to summarize -like an authentic synecdoche, the part for the whole- corresponds to architecture. Big Ben is as good as London, just as the Eiffel Tower is Paris. This rhetorical transference is not anchored in the past, but continues to develop over time: the Sydney Opera building or, to an even greater extent, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is not actually the city symbol, but rather its creator, the mechanism that has enabled its existence in the mass media, or, according to the catch phrase employed by politicians, "has put it on the map". The building creates the city, no longer aiming to integrate itself into the urban fabric, but to recreate it in its shadow.
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