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Canada's entry in the
8th International Architecture Exhibition
of the Venice Biennale, 2002
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Program notes
by Rodolphe el-khoury:
NEXT: IT'S ABOUT TIME.
The curators of the Canadian exhibition in the 2002 Venice Architecture
Biennale have taken a risk. The work they selected by Michael Awad,
Eve Egoyan, and David Rokeby would make a lavish, winning contribution
to any art show but their frugality with literal architectural content is
bound to raise more than a few eyebrows.
The architects are the most conspicuous omission. With the notable
exception of Awad, the show features artists who have had but a
marginal investment in architecture. The fact that they are interested
in the city as subject matter doesn't bring them any closer to the
discipline than a Manet or a Canaletto.
The unconventional choices may be taken to reflect an ambition for
interdisciplinary breadth. But this is not the kind of show where
architects hope to expand their scope with timid excursions beyond
disciplinary boundaries. This one brings artwork, done by artists, to an
architectural arena. It confronts architecture directly with something
external, alien.
The virtual spaces of video and sound installation are familiar and of
course welcome in a show on architecture. They are by now regular
extensions of the "built environment". In a media-saturated world, the
assumption that architecture primarily deals with physical objects is no
longer tenable. It is increasingly hard to think of buildings independently
of magazines, television shows, video games, and surveillance cameras
that alter and process them for consumption. The urbanity delivered in
sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends often precedes and inevitably inflect
the experience of the "real" city. These shows have in fact been credited
for the urban renaissance in North American cities; like a TV commercial,
and far more effectively than buildings, they have sold the city to
suburban consumers.
The pieces by Awad, Egoyan, and Rokeby invent new forms of mediation
to construct a different experience of the city. They demonstrate a
capacity to design and control the reception as much as the production
of the urban environment. The show suggests a series of potential
shifts in architectural discourse - from fabrication to inhabitation,
things to phenomena, promising a refreshing relief from the tyranny of
the object and of formal innovation.
This is not to underestimate the formal ambitions of the show. The
curators/artists have capitalized on the curving perspective of the
Canadian Pavilion to orchestrate an animated sequence of visual and
aural effects. The rhetoric of the Pavilion and the installation combined
deliver a riveting mise-en-scene of urbanity. An architectural tour-deforce
in its own right that speaks of the dynamic and complex nature
of cities, if not of Toronto and Venice specifically.
But if there is a critical edge to this show, beyond a skillful deployment
of unconventional media in the staging of urban atmospherics, it would
have to be sought in the temporal rather then spatial features - features
that are not readily recognized as architectural.
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There are no buildings to speak of in Michael Awad's Chinatown. They
have vanished behind the iconic red-and-white streetcars of Spadina
Avenue and some pedestrians in the foreground. The monumental
figure of Plaza San Marco is outstaged in David Rokeby's video
projection where only moving objects are highlighted by means of digital
processing. The installation by Eve Egoyan and Rokeby is strictly aural.
Any building here would have to be inferred from the acoustical qualities
of the soundscape.
Where static building masses are muted, evanescent characteristics of
the living city are emphasized. This is most evident in Awad's work. His
innovative technique reverses expectations inherent to photography -
whose camera obscura origins are partial to immobility: anything moving
is in sharp focus while the static is blurred beyond recognition. This is a
consistent device in the show that defamiliarizes the ephemeral and
fluid features of the city by imparting to them the kind of presence and
solidity that is expected of architecture. The device is particularly
effective in enhancing the perception of change in Rokeby's Seen. All
change, even as minute as in a pigeonís flight across the square, is picked
up and registered in pyrotechnic trajectories. Seen is a documentation
of time rather than space.
This show must then be recognized as a provocation: an assault on the
hegemony of space, and the concomitant occularcentrism. It challenges
the domination of space as both, the self-evident medium and all-inclusive
subject of architecture.
Time has made sporadic and not so challenging appearances in
architectural theory and practice, such as in radical instances of the
picturesque and the Cubism-inspired experiments of modernism. But
only recently have new media and technology begun to provide the tools
that would allow designers to engage it dynamically. With Awad, Egoyan,
and Rokeby it is now possible to expand on recent investments in
program, event, and scenario, to think of time as a workable medium
where one could manipulate the vital but elusive fluidity of the city.
In an age where space offers no resistance to communication and when
efficiency is measured in lag-time and processor speed, architecture is
poised for the conquest of time, the next frontier.
Next Memory City home
To John Knetchel's Program Notes
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