REVIEW: The Painted Label: A Review of CAB 5, “This Is A Rehearsal” at the Chicago Cultural Center

Asim Waqif, “Pretty Wrecked,” (installation view), discarded rubber tubing borrowed from the Resource Center in Chicago, wrapped around a custom built steel scaffolding, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo by David Sundry.

REVIEW
Chicago Architecture Biennial 5
Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington St.
Chicago, IL 60602
November 1—February 11, 2024 (now closed)

By David Sundry

Throughout much of history architectural building types accommodated a number of overlapping needs in society. Religious and government buildings served as marketplaces, workshops as homes, ancient temples as a central treasury or bank, etc. Material and labor were scarce, and cultures made do. It was not until after the industrial revolution in the late 19th into the early 20th centuries that building types and single-use structures proliferated (think: energy generation, factories, lighthouses, railway stations, prisons, laboratories, crematoriums, airplane terminals, observatories, bowling alleys, malls, exhibition halls, reactors and the like). Conversely, artistic disciplines developed ever tighter ground rules to rid themselves of literary influence and define their distinctive merits and proper domains after an onslaught of new cultural forms brought about by the same cultural forces of industrialization (think cinema, photography).

Architectural practices expanded in order to define and solve the increasingly complex problems brought about by the emerging modern economy. These practices developed a tight methodology and a focused sense on function. On the other hand, the other major artistic disciplines countered the expansion of cultural forms by defining down, or restricting, the possibilities of their medium to guarantee a form of cultural production that only that medium could provide. Better to assert less, but to assert with authority. The common element between the two reactions (architecture and the other artistic disciplines) was (and still is) specificity, to assert in a meaningful way. Then a late 20th century backlash advocated, necessarily, for a new complication of these disciplines – an opening up of the space of possibility between them — the interdisciplinary. But oddly, this no man’s land of interchange, redefinition, research and expansive cultural development is accompanied by curious limitations – a constricting of the horizons of what these practices uncover, reveal or state. This interdisciplinary expansion is eclipsed by a limited statement of purpose. Meaning narrows while practice claims mushroom. 

The curators of the current Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5) entitled This Is a Rehearsal, which recently closed on February 11th , challenge the typical biennial format of presenting proposed or already constructed projects (including thought-experiments) through a series of plans, elevations, sections, models, and photoshopped images in a gallery setting by moving laterally into a series of installations and programming that expand from the confines of the Cultural Center out into neighborhoods across the city. This curatorial side-stepping shifts the focus to site-responsive design projects and programming to “collectively set the stage for the cross-pollination of ideas that welcome alternative ways of making architecture.” It also works as a pivot to “rethink” architecture through the interdisciplinary model favored by the curators, Floating Museum. And, interestingly, it provides a small laboratory to review the expansive claims of the interdisciplinary approach. Given the space limitations within this article, I will focus on two installations within the Chicago Cultural Center itself.  

Upon entering the classical revival building, one is immediately enveloped within a towering assemblage of looping swirls of black industrial tubing that is artfully wound thru an over scaled galvanized scaffold. A demountable industrial truss is stuffed with tubing that spans and almost engulfs the grand entrance and central stair. Though turbulent and disheveled, the work is well conceived and executed with care. It suggests a kind of dystopian beaux-arts or classical arch that frames the central stair of this building. It is an industrial reworking of the classical grammar. The tubing is rhythmic and sculptural. It echoes the deeply carved reliefs and decorative details both in the lobby and throughout the building while also presenting a critique of the bravura finish of the refined materials typical of beaux-arts architecture and the Cultural Center itself. The piece seems to celebrate the play of counterintuitive materials of low origin. The scaffold structure suggests the infrastructure of a concert venue, but the combination of structure and tubing still capture the weight of the classical arch – its grandeur and monumentality. “Bravo!”, I think, and then I make my way over to a small wall label located to the side of the installation. Ah, yes, wall labels – didn’t Tom Wolfe write a book about them? This piece (Asim Waqif, Pretty Wrecked, 2023), it seems, is about discarded materials. Fair enough. The inventive use of recycled materials is a common theme in art and architecture for at least a generation. But there is no celebration here. This installation is a “grotesque intervention” that “alludes to the exploitative nature of industrial capital that has produced the ... excess of decoration at the Cultural Center.” 

Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word (1975), is a revelatory satire that tracks the social history of modern art as it rebels against literary content in the 19th century to pursue a revolutionary visual formalism throughout much of the 20th century. Wolfe posits that modern art, unfortunately, due to the insular nature of the art world, falls under the spell of a small group of critic/thinkers and devolves into a parody of its previous revolutionary possibilities. It is now nothing more than an illustration of the critic’s texts or theories. And, through more than a century of revolution, modern art, in the end, “become[s] nothing less than literature pure and simple.”

At CAB 5, we have the opposite problem. Potential beauty, and complexity, and invention, and play, and celebration of material is crudely condensed into one convenient au courant condemnation of capitalism. Nothing more. No nuance. No ambiguity. No multivalent sense. Nothing. Does the artist really believe this? Is this language a curatorial intervention? (A guard at the show that I spoke with believes that it is). Is this a forced theme inflicted upon works as the price of inclusion in the show? It almost seems as if the artist and/or curators are embarrassed by some of the actual underlying methods and intentions involved in the work: the celebration of (in this case) material play and formal invention.

The Buell Center and AD—WO, Columbia University, “100 Links: Architecture and Land, in an dout of the Americas,” (installation view), 2023. Image courtesy of the artists and the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo by David Sundry.

If the goal was simply to combat exploitation and accumulation of waste, why design an installation in this manner? Why gather, deliver, unload, and assemble the material in this manner? Why create a “grotesque” threshold into the biennial? Why expend the labor to wind the tubing in an interesting, possibly aesthetically pleasing manner? Why introduce the industrial demountable truss? Is every other allusion I mentioned above a mistake? A misreading? If perchance, some of my impressions were shared by the artist, even in passing, why not indicate or at least convey some small indication that the artist is aware of other readings? These are simple questions that may be asked of a DESIGN process. (Remember, this is a show purportedly about architectural practice and process.) If the information on the wall label is to be seriously considered, it would not survive a first-year studio design critique. But again, I believe the description to be somewhat disingenuous, downplaying the artists interest in form, texture, material, and invention, and that these associations played some part in the generative process. And that the artist’s language is a surrender to an institutional distortion for the piece to be considered for the show.

Another installation (The Buell Center and AD-WO, 100 Links: Architecture and Land, In and Out of the Americas, 2023) located on the upper levels of the Cultural Center followed the same lines of disjunct between impression and statement (and this a pattern for many works in the show). The installation uses a simple, linking tectonic element (steel double eye pin and steel ring) to logically develop a form in space. The installation is inventive in its development of a grammar of joining techniques that are rigorously applied and result in a clean, airy minimal enclosure. The space is a result of a uniform, incremental and accretive process. It is reminiscent of 1970s formal sculpture with echoes of Fred Sandback or Carl Andre. The audience, and particularly the children, freely interacted with the piece and seemed to find it engaging and playful. Per the wall label: It turns out that these steel double eye pins and rings are an historic device called “Gunter’s chain”. (Edmund Gunter was a 17th century English surveyor who invented this device to allow an easy and accurate means to survey and plot land for documentation and development.) I find this history and the repurposing of this device in the work fascinating. But then the claims begin: these tools (Gunter’s chains) “inextricably linked liberty to property” and foreclosed on “any alternative way of being with the world”. Further, this installation reverses the damage brought about by Gunter’s chains and “unsettles the historical and ongoing dynamics of enclosure and dispossession by redefining land not as an object but as a relationship.”

I am not sure where to begin. Since the practitioners invoke history, let’s discuss history. Gunter’s chains did not link liberty to property. That would imply agency. Gunter’s chains are merely refinements of the knotted ropes used to lay out fields in ancient Egypt and Greece. Objects have no agency. But humans do. So, maybe the piece should reflect upon the history of surveying which, by the 17th century had possibly been practiced for roughly ten centuries (since the Neolithic Era around 9000 BCE) or at least 6000 BCE. Or, if we trust Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, it is said that geometry arose from the need to measure or define shapes for the Egyptian assessors to tax farmers growing crops by the Nile River. The refinement of a thousands year old process does not link liberty to property. Perhaps mathematics, ancient governments, the need for protection and the establishment of the earliest economies link liberty to property. Or perhaps, all human cultural development led to this moment. And if this “linking” of liberty to property did exist, then it is all of mankind that has been successively linked (at different times and moments) and not merely the claim of  the moment that Gunter’s chains denied “indigenous communities who considered themselves as belonging to the land ... or by enslaved peoples who invented new modes of life despite being declared property” a “way of being with the world.” But, according to the practitioners, all of this is accomplished by this attractive, airy well-fabricated installation with its repurposed surveying tools?

Of course, there is some semblance of truth to these claims. Yes, there have been oppressed peoples throughout history and, yes, technological innovations are employed to advance this oppression. But in this cultural moment, it is so easy and expected to say. Just drag in the colonial narrative to buttress the piece. That will instantly give it relevance and provide safety from any critical response. We don’t actually have to successfully embody the claims within the work but just point to, or associate with, some current institutionally favored stance and we will be fine. And then, after the “airy structure” somehow highlights centuries of oppression it, magically, reverses the process and the airy structure “unsettles ... historical ... dynamics” of “enclosure and dispossession.” This installation does not encourage the viewer to meditate upon the histories of liberty, possession, and enclosure, its mere existence has the power to somehow “redefine land not as object but as relationship.” How does causation work in this instance? I spent some time in the gallery over two days observing viewers’ interactions. 100 Links: Architecture and Land, In and Out of the Americas is a great piece but not for the reasons cited on the wall label. One thing that this piece is NOT is anything resembling the institutional blather on the wall label. I had another long conversation with a security guard stationed in the room. He was shocked and dismayed at the audacity and the sheer disconnect and overreach of the claims that his work put forth. 

The Buell Center and AD—WO, Columbia University, “100 Links: Architecture and Land, in an dout of the Americas,” (detail view), 2023. Image courtesy of the artists and the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo by David Sundry.

This lengthy dissection concerning the disconnect between work and wall label or work and language claim highlights, or mirrors, the exaggerated tendencies within curatorial statements in general (throughout this museum and museum and exhibition culture in general) and interdisciplinary practices themselves. The late modern critical (or postmodern or postcritical) discourse obviates the connection between work and meaning. The meaning of a work is no longer initiated by or within the formal structures or relations of the work or the work’s ability to firmly point the viewer in a particular direction or to prompt a reflective response wherein questions or issues arise. Now, the work merely points to a critical position and the weakest association is all that is required. The work is an advertisement for the label. It seems we have arrived, yet again, at the moment of the “painted word.” Maybe we never left.

If these works and practices do engage with a more complex generative process involving a synthesis of traditional and contemporary approaches, then, it appears that the practitioners lack confidence to pursue work on other terms or, more importantly, to pursue ideas without resorting to a trendy resistant vocabulary of faux-Foucault and gender, race, and now a colonial or anti-capitalist stance. Without framing the work along these terms there is the fear that their work or approach will not gain access to a space of display, or they will not be allowed to circulate inside the institutional system. So, you look at the wall label and lo and behold there is the limitation of interpretation, of speech and of conception. The claim is the limitation – it means only in this manner – i.e. it supports, upholds and reinforces a pre-ordained institutional position – i.e. stakes in the culture game.

This is a Rehearsal “collectively set(s) the stage for the cross-pollination of ideas that welcome alternate ways of making architecture” and to “rethink, rework and reimagine the present and future of cities.” CAB 5 leans heavily into the interdisciplinary approach to engage these issues. The strength and the weakness, the crux, of the interdisciplinary model resides in its lack of definition. It is a fuzzy landscape that refuses to focus. Great for “thought-experiments” and open to abuse. Though the curators have selected non-traditional practices, the biennial still points to “making architecture” which is a centuries old discipline with a history and a complex domain of overlapping schools of thought and professional requirements. Its obligation to uphold the health, safety and welfare of society is a complex regulated backbone of our public good. And yet, the interdisciplinary practices seem to only engage with the symbolic expression of the profession. Much of the history and in some sense the integrity of the discipline is conveniently discarded. 

The problem is many interdisciplinary practices lack conceptual ideas that interlock. Successful interdisciplinary practices introduce, at a minimum, cross associations that build into layered patterns of capture. They bring with them an enlarged field of questions and a clarity that allows for a standard of assessment and the terms by which the object or practice may be viewed, understood, critiqued. The elements do not separate out, as in a days-old emulsion, but remain in tension forming a new complex whole – in short, a discipline. 

There is a tendency for interdisciplinary practices to engage in a kind of intellectual appropriation. The shallow absorption of a historical discipline, one with guiding concepts and methodologies, and pursue a merely symbolic affiliation that is more metaphor than substance –a literary ingestion or the equivalent of hitching a ride. And the abuse works in both directions: art or interdisciplinary practices that do not understand or misuse architecture, and traditional architecture practices that do not understand or misuse installation, sculpture, and/or performance. Often, these practices involve nothing more than a claim rather than a commitment. A claim in the sense that the hyphenated interdisciplinary practice is enough. Just append another discipline to your practice.

Finally, this is a problem as many of these newer practices claim to be activist, to have real direct agency in the world. They have leapfrogged Kant and elevated interdisciplinary practice to a “kind” of science. There is no sense that art or aesthetic statements are not arguable or provable as statements are in other disciplines and that these statements are not purposive and lead to decidable or predictable outcomes. There is no sense that art-type statements possess their own particular kind of knowledge (and in some sense agency) but this knowledge comes with severe limitations and that these practices, freed from requirements of proof and demonstration, generate certain kinds of assessments and meditations that have a shaping power that could influence reason and ethics – although indirectly. But that is it. The journey ends there and the other disciplines must pick up the load, the vision, and carry it forward. If you want real predictable agency then these interdisciplinary practices must deliver processes and methods that are transparent, that produce outcomes. And, as we know, when interdisciplinary practices are more metaphor than substance they must stand patiently along the main artery of engagement. Yes, you may impact the world – one day – but you are at the very very beginning of the process. And, if you hope to ever be of help to anyone or anything, it is suggested that at the very least one must work to more directly align that deep divide between art work and language claim. Or all of this is merely hyperbole and careerism.

David Sundry is an architect and artist, co-founder of SITE/less Chicago, and editor of the Bridge Architecture section.

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