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    LARB Digital Edition: Art + Architecture
    LARB Digital Edition: Art + Architecture
    LARB Digital Edition: Art + Architecture
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    LARB Digital Edition: Art + Architecture

    By Esther Yi, Victoria Dailey, Evan Selinger and Victoria Bugge Oye

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    As any historian or casual observer of urban transformation might tell you, walls are not everlasting. The following collection examines different ways monuments and notions of monumentality in art and architecture exist in relation to this reality. From Esther Yi's chronicle of the uncertain fate of a section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery, to Michael Z. Wise's essay on the Casa Malaparte in Capri, the articles collected in this month's LARB Digital Edition examine the powerful sway of the monumental on our common sense. Also in this issue, Victoria Dailey covers land artist Michael Heizer's LACMA installation, Levitated Mass; Evan Selinger reviews Bianca Bosker's in-depth look at the phenomena of duplitecture,” Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China; Victoria Bugge Oye reviews the first ever monograph on the acclaimed Postmodern architects Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro; and we look back on architect Joe Day's own monumental undertaking with the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLos Angeles Review of Books
    Release dateMar 20, 2014
    ISBN9781940660097
    LARB Digital Edition: Art + Architecture

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      Book preview

      LARB Digital Edition - Esther Yi

      Table of Contents

      Introduction by Kate Wolf

      Walls Are Not Everlasting: Preserving the East Side Gallery in Berlin by Esther Yi

      Part Palace, Part Temple, Part Prison: On the Casa Malaparte by Michael Z. Wise

      Levitated Mass Hysteria: Michael Heizer’s LACMA Installation by Victoria Dailey

      Replicated Communities: Bianca Bosker’s Original Copies by Evan Selinger

      Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Masters of Space, Viewed Through the Rear View Mirror by Victoria Bugge Øye

      Reflections on The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. by Joe Day

      Introduction

      As any historian or casual observer of urban transformation might tell you — and as the title of Esther Yi’s contribution to this selection of recent reviews and essays from the Los Angeles Review Books Art and Architecture section states — walls are not everlasting. In her piece, Yi chronicles the uncertain fate of a section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery. The Gallery, a group of 105 murals painted by people from all over the world amid the fall of a divided Germany in 1990, was once seen as a subversive, artistic expression of liberation; now its integrity is threatened by urban and economic development, not to mention graffiti and even one of the original artists who painted it. The East Side Gallery served to further undermine the monumental structure that was the Berlin Wall, and yet, perhaps inevitably, now it is being undermined.

      Indeed, it seems no wall, no matter the purpose, is everlasting, and the following collection examines different ways monuments and notions of monumentality in art and architecture exist in relation to this reality. In his essay on the Casa Malaparte in Capri, Michael Z. Wise explores how the controversial author Curzio Malaparte designed a house in his own image, an ego-driven edifice that embodied Malaparte’s visions of grandeur and internal conflicts. In her essay on land artist Michael Heizer’s 2012 installation at LACMA, Levitated Mass, Victoria Dailey notes the powerful sway of the monumental on our common sense, tracing lithic obsession back to the celebrated obelisks of post-revolutionary France and beyond, and illustrating how this tricky reverence evinces humanity’s preference for myth and fantasy over fact.

      Evan Selinger’s review of Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China by Bianca Bosker takes a look at the phenomena dubbed duplitecture, the uncanny practice of building replicas of famous Western landmarks in present-day China; what Bosker sees as creating ‘the most enduring monuments’ [for] a new, post-Tiananmen Square country. Back in the US, Victoria Bugge Øye reviews the first ever monograph on the acclaimed Postmodern architects Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro, noting the way their iconic revamp of Manhattan’s High Line stands as a testament to some of the team’s most fundamental design concerns.

      In closing, we look back at architect and writer Joe Day’s own monumental undertaking — reviewing eight of nine exhibitions staged last year during the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. Here, with an insider’s perspective, Day illuminates the recent architectural history of a city often accused of a willful neglect of its past. Certainly L.A. doesn’t have the best preservation record, but what about all the projects that didn’t even find their way to completion — a master planned park system, a utopian Wilshire Boulevard? (These never-plans were explored in the fascinating exhibition and accompanying catalogue Neverbuilt Los Angeles.) In light of the impermanence of even the grandest construction, this seems a fitting place to end, looking not to the everlasting, but as Day puts it, to a more fluid measure of Los Angeles’ changing promise and constant potential.

      Kate Wolf

      Senior Arts Editor

      Walls Are Not Everlasting: Preserving the East Side Gallery in Berlin

      By Esther Yi

      EARLY ONE MORNING this past October, the German pop artist Jim Avignon began to whiten a mural he had painted on the Berlin Wall more than 20 years ago. The police arrived within minutes. Unlike the herds of tourists who walk by the East Side Gallery and discreetly scribble on its surface, Avignon’s top-to-bottom undertaking, backed by 20 assistants, was hard to miss. Prepared, he pulled out a letter inviting him to repaint his work, Doin It Cool For The East Side, as part of a major restoration at the open-air gallery. It’s unclear if the authorities noticed that the letter was several years old. They thumbed Avignon’s passport and let him proceed, deciding he looked official enough.

      The police might have been less understanding, had they known that Avignon was not only working without permission, but also painting something entirely new. After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, a motley international group that included Avignon painted over a hundred murals on a border section facing East Germany. The murals — deemed a unique snapshot of post-Mauerfall jubilation — and the concrete wall sections at the East Side Gallery were placed under monument protection, or Denkmalschutz, in 1991. Any alterations — removal, relocation, renovation — must be approved by Denkmalschutz authorities. The East Side Gallery is now the longest section of the Wall preserved in its original location, running for 1.3 kilometers parallel between the road Mühlenstrasse (painted side) and the Spree River (reverse side) in a central area of Berlin called Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Hundreds of thousands visit every year. Restorations notwithstanding, every work from 1990 has retained its original content — except Avignon’s, after nine hours on that cold October day.

      His timing could not have been worse. Despite the site’s protected status, its overseeing association, the Artists Initiative East Side Gallery, feels that the wall has been treated like a second-class citizen in a city of memorials — long put off, lied to, and abused for other interests, as the group writes on its blog. Indignant grumbling escalated into high-pitched furor earlier this year, when a building project behind the Gallery threatened its partial destruction. The developer, Living Bauhaus, is erecting a 200-feet-tall luxury tower in the area between the wall and the river — formerly a death strip where East German border guards kept watch. (Despite popular imagination, the Berlin Wall was not a single barrier, but a multi-layered security system.) As stipulated by the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, Living Bauhaus intended to remove about 70 feet of the wall to create street access not only to its high-rise, but also to a pedestrian bridge over the Spree planned by the district.

      When construction workers removed a concrete slab in early March, hundreds — and by the weekend, thousands — of demonstrators gathered at the Gallery to prevent further destruction. Maik Uwe Hinkel, head of Living Bauhaus, postponed work on the site. Taking a stance of confused irritation, he pointed at the higher-ups who had signed off on his project. Franz Schulz, then mayor of the district, did in fact approve the building permit — and bystanders have been puzzled by his seemingly casual disregard for Denkmalschutz. (Günther Schaefer, one of the Gallery’s painters and now an active member of the Artists Initiative, puts it simply: The mayor broke the law. He is a criminal.) But the district’s Denkmalschutz authorities approved the wall opening. Hinkel complained that he and Living Bauhaus had been the vicarious agents of the district’s

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