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Jacques Herzog describes his and Pierre de Meuron's experience of collaboration between disciplines. (Courtesy The Chianti Foundation) |
| Architects and Artists come to the high Texas plains to sound
the gap between their disciplines. by Daphne Beal "The difference between art and architecture," explained Claes Oldenburg, the artist known for gigantic works that blur the line between the two, "is that architecture has windows and toilets." Oldenburg was speaking at the Chinati Foundation's Art and Architecture symposium, held in Marfa, Texas, last April. A dusty border town in West Texas, Marfa is by most definitions in the middle of nowhere. But despite its remoteness--or maybe because of it--more than 600 people converged there recently to hear luminaries of art and architecture discuss the relationship between their two disciplines. Artists Roni Horn, Robert Irwin, Coosje van Bruggen, and Oldenburg, architects Frank Gehry and Jacques Herzog, scholars James Ackerman and Michael Benedikt, and moderator William Stern joined in the discussion. Interrupted occasionally by the whistles of passing freight trains, the speakers gathered in the town's former ice plant to describe their own experiences of collaboration between the two fields. Some instances were amicable and successful (the glass and concrete surfaces of a German library that Herzog & de Meuron eloquently "tattooed" with photographs); or arguably successful, but not so amicable (Irwin's fierce battle with architect Richard Meier over the Getty's garden); or not so amicable and not so successful (Horn's "permanent" installation of 22 tons of cast-lead cobbles for an outdoor plaza in Munich, which was removed for "political reasons"). Van Bruggen, Oldenburg's wife and longtime collaborator, declared that "a turd on the sidewalk" is what many architects think a sculpture should be to a building. Not long ago, though, Gehry, who has felt a kinship with artists since his early days in L.A.--when they, not architects, embraced his work--incorporated a giant pair of binoculars by Oldenburg and van Bruggen into the facade of the Chiat/Day building in Venice, California, "to give it curves." "I got confidence from those curves, to use them in other buildings," Gehry said, as he clicked through slides that gave proof: the "Fred and Ginger" building in Prague; the voluptuous, voluminous Guggenheim in Bilbao; a new rock-and-roll museum in Seattle that evokes piled-up guitars, broken strings, and the red metal of an old Ford. Robert Irwin, jaunty in a baseball cap and sneakers, talked about his work at the Getty. "You'd never define [that commission as] a collaboration," he said. The Getty's board, Irwin explained, thought that Meier's museum was "becoming too much of a piece." By asking him to design a garden that would, in essence, act as a foil to the architecture, "the board asked me to go to war with Richard Meier." To Irwin, what the place lacked was intimacy; in the midst of Meier's grand complex he wanted to give the viewer the experience of "descending into a private place, a contemplative place." Using flowers, rocks, trees, and water as if they were paint and sculptural materials, he worked toward a "floating geometry" in the garden, with colors "getting more and more hysterical as you go down--exuberant by the end." The result, Irwin said, is "a sculpture in the form of a garden that aspires to be art." Jacques Herzog described the library he and Pierre de Meuron are working on in Germany--a rectangular building with an exterior of glass and concrete bands imprinted with archival photos belonging to the photographer Thomas Ruff. The effect, Herzog said, "masks the box of the building." The distinction between art and architecture seemed blurred in many of the works presented in Marfa, as each approached the other in form and function. While the binoculars designed for Gehry's building are the only piece Oldenburg has made with an interior, he and van Bruggen showed other works, both proposed and built, that stepped into the realm of architecture, such as the upside-down, melting Good Humor bar that was meant to replace New York's Pan Am Building, and a building-size clothespin that stands in Centre Square, Philadelphia. This crossover may reflect the disciplines' shared roots. James Ackerman, a professor emeritus of art history at Harvard University, explained: "In fifteenth-century Italian atelier training, there was no distinction made between art, architecture, and sculpture--the thing was to learn to draw." Only later, when artists began to work on spec while architects continued to work on commission, did a real divide, forged largely by economics, take hold. Even now, Michael Benedikt pointed out, architecture schools are split between those allied with art schools and those that ally themselves with engineering schools. But the large number of people who made the trek to Marfa--bunking down in cheap motels and campgrounds, surviving on burritos and Lone Star--may indicate a lessening in that rift. The joining of these forces would have pleased Donald Judd, the first person to come to Marfa to consider so explicitly art and architecture's relationship. Here, in the many buildings he bought and altered for himself and for the Chinati Foundation (the museum for contemporary art he founded in 1970s), and in the rigorous aesthetic that informed his own art and life, Judd constantly produced evidence of the possibilities inherent to the relationship between art and building. "Art and architecture--all the arts--do not have to exist in isolation, as they do now," he wrote in 1987. "This fault is very much a key to the present society. Architecture is nearly gone, but it, art, all the arts, in fact all parts of the society, have to be rejoined, and joined more than they have ever been. This would be democratic in a good sense, unlike the present increasing fragmentation into separate but equal categories." DAPHNE BEAL wrote about Donald Judd and his work in Marfa in the March 1997 issue. |
Keywords:
Marfa, Texas, art and architecture, Chinati
