The Final Experience is Beyond Our Control

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a time An-My Lê remembers vividly. As she recalled during her Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) this month, Lê and her family were among the hundreds evacuated from Vietnam by US soldiers. When she left, she was just fifteen years old, and, because of the war, had never had access to the Mekong Delta. Her only memories of the place were images she’d seen of GI’s being airlifted out. Nearly twenty years later, working under a grant after graduate school, she went back to photograph it.

“Exploring the landscape was a complete adventure,” said Lê, describing her return in 1994, when the United States re-established relations with Vietnam. “Living in exile,” she explained, “means not having access to your culture. For many years, we did not think we could return to Vietnam, and once I got there, I realized that all these memories were not very reliable.”

Speaking at the GSD on April 1,  Lê described how she made repeated visits to make landscape photographs with a view camera. The cumbersome but essential tool allows her to capture vast landscapes and poignant portraits, with long exposures that often create “happy accidents.” Back in Vietnam, she quickly found resonances of not only her childhood and the war, but also centuries past emerging in her images. The blurry palm trees above a flock of ducks, depicted in “Untitled, Mekong Delta, 1994,” could have been preserved from another lifetime, long before the war made travel in the Mekong Delta unsafe and damaged the landscape.

Lê pointed out the similarity between her work as a photographer and that of landscape architects in terms of time and history. Landscape architects design spaces we experience in the moment that also make reference to history and suggest potential change. According to Lê,  photographers layer their images with “notions of the past” and future. She said she looks at the landscape like a designer when she thinks about the separation between earth and sky, or questions of scale.

“I love the freedom,” she said of her medium. “You can start anywhere. And yet, we do our best to provide specific elements—whether a landscape architect designs a particular hill or curve, or how I choose to frame an image—but, the final experience is something we can’t control.”

In 1999, at the invitation of a group of Vietnam War reenactors who stage battles in Virginia and North Carolina, she began to photograph images of war—or at least, a mimicry of it. She often participated in the events herself so that she could remain close to the action, posing as a spy or soldier. The resulting images—a cluster of soldiers converging in a small opening in the woods blurred by a stand of bamboo they’d planted, the sparks of a bomb splashing into the air like a fountain—reveal the moments she found most interesting, which, she reminded the audience, is not the same as the photojournalistic impulse to record what’s “most pressing.”

Since then, she has observed military trainings in the Southern California desert that prepared soldiers for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, traveled on US navy ships across the Pacific, visited army training sessions in Ghana, and observed earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Images from these travels became part of her series “29 Palms” (2003) and “Events Ashore” (2005–2012). She has also continued to attend war reenactments and was invited to shoot at the Louisiana filming of Free State of Jones, about the Civil War. While she often pursues “hot button topics,” she approaches those issues not from a documentary perspective but with poetic language, explaining that the building blocks of language and the photographic worlds she creates are very similar in terms of establishing tension, perspective, and the marriage of form and content.

In 2022, Lê began to experiment with the cyclorama, a form popular before the moving image that surrounded viewers with monumental paintings on the walls of a circular room. She reimagined the genre by hanging a series of large-scale photographs side by side around a circular room, allowing people to read them in linear and nonlinear fashions.

She used the cyclorama to present narrative photographs in the 2024 series “Dark Star” and “Grey Wolf.” Shot at a national park in Colorado near a nuclear missile test site, the images in “Dark Star”  depict the vast night sky, capturing with a long exposure the thousands of stars invisible to the naked eye, and urging the viewer to consider “civilization and the infinite world beyond us”—perhaps even offering comfort, Lê explained. “Grey Wolf,” a series of photographs shot from a helicopter over the missile installations set amid farmland in Montana and Nebraska, was inspired in part by the history of Land Art. The sites and their context evoke the monumental earthworks and concrete structures that comprise artist Michael Heizer’s Nevada project City, which stretches across over a mile of the desert. “The size of the stones on the path, the color of the stones, the height of the sidewalk, the borders, the plants—it’s very specific.” Lê cites Heizer as a contemporary influence.

She also engages deeply with the history of her primary medium and acknowledges nineteenth-century war photographers Timothy O’Sullivan and Roger Fenton as influences as well. Because war and its aftermath has been her subject for much of her career, Lê has had to wrestle with the question of whether she’s rendering violence “beautiful.” Her landscape photographs have been compared to the work of Robert Adams, and challenge our perception of the narrative a war image can tell. She argued that she’s in search of something beyond beauty—the sublime, or ineffable.

Her use of the view camera helps advance that goal. While she tried a smaller camera that allowed her to move with more agility, she was dissatisfied with the images; cumbersome though the view camera was, it allowed her to capture the landscape as she perceived it, with its many layers of space, time, and the valances of memory. And as she experimented with portrait photography—for example in her portraits of women on the carrier ships in “Events Ashore”—she also found that the view camera created different experiences with her subjects. When she went under the dark curtain to snap the shot, people posed for the camera, looking into its lens but unable to see her looking back.

Lê concluded her talk at the GSD with discussion of recent work in a new medium, embroidery, in which she considers the “ecstatic sublimity and quasi-religiosity of the frenzied performance.” She creates embroideries based on stills from a pornographic movie ostensibly set during the Vietnam War, in which performers stage an encounter between American soldiers and Vietnamese sex workers. She explained that she’s drawn to needlework because it completely absorbs her attention. “I find comfort when I lose myself in the work.”

She previously made weavings for her “đô-mi-nô” series, and was drawn to embroidery after finding a cross-stitched landscape in the basement of her apartment building. In Lê’s printing process, she edits her photographs at the level of the pixel, and began to think, “maybe that’s the way for me to control the image.” She was also influenced by medieval tapestries that “hang as decorative pieces while also suggesting a narrative. They’re about storytelling.”

Inspired by the long tradition of embroidery in Vietnam, Lê and her studio assistants create painterly palettes for the images that Lê expanded and cropped, abstracting them beyond the pornographic realm. “It’s not easily decipherable at first,” she explained. “I chose moments when the action is more obscure, which was important to get people to stop and think about the origin of the piece.” For her, the series is about how women “hustled during the war,” as well as the “spoils of war,” sex workers, and how the makers of the Vietnam War–themed porn film took a historic and painful time and turned it into entertainment.

Like all of her work, however, she leaves the embroidered images up to the audience to interpret. “Ultimately, you provide an experience that only the audience or the viewer or participant can experience themselves, and you just have to let go.”

Contemporaries, Now and Then

Los Angeles’ Alameda Street cuts a north-south line through the city. Potholed by time, traffic, and freight trucks, the roadway stretches from Chinatown to the Port of Long Beach. At the northernmost end, the broad, commercial street marks a boundary between Little Tokyo, a pedestrian-scaled historic district of Japanese-American culture dating to the late nineteenth century, and the Arts District, a steadily gentrifying neighborhood where with each passing decade light industry gives way to artist studios, which are then replaced by galleries, restaurants, and new condo developments.

The two sides exist in a quiet equilibrium, connected by the Little Tokyo/Arts District metro station. In a metropolis often derided as traffic congested sprawl, this recently reopened underground hub for public transit links this corner of Los Angeles to the farther flung edges of the basin. For GSD associate professor of architecture John May, Alameda Street is a seam between two urban fabrics, each in states of considerable transformation.

This past spring, May led the option studio “The Temporary Contemporary: Assembling a Public in Downtown Los Angeles.” His course brief frames the stark, shadeless plaza around Little Tokyo/Arts District metro station as a “missed opportunity” for creating a space where folks might assemble—and that with such a gathering of bodies comes a vibrant connection of political and aesthetic life. “This does not imply that the content of aesthetic work must become explicitly political, but rather that ‘art’ (very broadly conceived) and the institutions where it is housed, can form spaces, arenas, and backgrounds for publics,” writes May in his introduction to the studio.

The Geffen Contemporary, a satellite of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is located along Alameda Street and exemplifies the kind of institution May describes. On one side of the converted warehouse a message from Barbara Kruger— Untitled (Questions) (1990/2018)—queries passing drivers in all caps. “WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD?” her mural asks, demonstrating a necessary conflation of art, politics, and urban space.

Conditions of publicness are embedded in the museum’s history, as is its ambiguous relationship to Little Tokyo. Although The Geffen Contemporary shares the block with the Japanese American National Museum, it is located at the end of a long pedestrian plaza, which serves both institutions, and is set back from the street. One of the challenges posed to students was to address the urban connection between the museum and the metro station, where they were to develop a mixed-use building designed to support a residency for performance artists. The program grew out of a very real necessity: Wonmi’s Warehouse is a 14,500-square-foot facility that is part of the Geffen Contemporary but only occasionally used for exhibitions.

Connected to MOCA, but originally a separate industrial structure, it was never outfitted for any specific program. Inflexible in its raw flexibility, the space lacks facilities, such as dressing rooms, showers, and rehearsal space. “[Associate curator Alex Sloane] described the warehouse as a space for bodies and the MOCA Geffen as a space for objects—in her view the warehouse is woefully inadequate for bodies,” notes May. As such, the bipartite brief reimagines two sites—the warehouse interior and the Metro station—to better accommodate invited artists, dancers, musicians and forge new understandings of audience.

May also suggests that performance art defies the financialization of the art market. As such, the art form itself is aligned with contestations in public space, be them aesthetic or political, both suggest a kind of urban choreography that manifests, draws people together, and then fleetingly dissipates. Artist Suzanne Lacy, writing in the 1995 collection Mapping the Terrain , outlines a trajectory of what was then termed “new genre public art”—artist and collectives like Judy Baca, Martha Rosler, and Ant Farm (Lacy’s examples) to Postcommodity, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, and the The Los Angeles Urban Rangers (mine) that engage urban space as a call to action. “This construction of a history of new genre public art is not built on a typology of materials, spaces, or artist media, but rather on concepts audience, relationship, communication, and political intention.”[1]

MOCA Geffen was initially conceived as an exercise in temporality. In late 1983 when it first opened as a provisional outpost, some 1,500 architects and designers showed up for a preview party. Los Angeles Times urban design critic Sam Hall Kaplan reported the movement of attendees as a “parade.” It’s easy to imagine this creative murmuration flocking to what was then called the “Temporary Contemporary,” to mingle, network, and ogle the pair of old warehouses renovated by Frank O. Gehry, then, as now, LA’s homegrown star architect.

The architect’s rising fame, coupled with his penchant for bricolage made him a perfect choice to tackle the 55,000-square-foot retrofit. His scrappy, light touch approach to the industrial building (originally designed by AC Martin in 1947) contrasted the studied postmodern geometries of Arata Isozaki’s plans for MOCA , which was then under construction on Bunker Hill and wouldn’t open until 1986.

The convening was orchestrated by a short-lived nonprofit, the Architecture and Design Support Group, whose mission was to raise design consciousness in the city. Kaplan was skeptical, writing in the LA Times, “The question raised by the group’s stated intent is how relevant the architecture and design exhibits and programs will be under the aegis of the museum, whether they will be just another forum for the new cadre of avant-garde architects and designers who are self-consciously pretending to be artists, or whether they will indeed help redirect the profession toward fulfilling its obligation as a social art to enhance the quality of life.”[2]

His critique, however narrowly cast, points to a larger concern, one echoed by the themes of The Temporary Contemporary studio: What is the agency of museums, of architecture to serve a community? The necessity of an architecture of assembly was made urgent during the racial reckonings following Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In the years since, performance has emerged as a tool of rapid response—a means to bring underrepresented bodies into the institution and unsettle staid relationships between viewer and art. The venues where these performances happen are potentially transformative places.

May recasts the role of the museum from passive to active. His sentiments echo ones made decades earlier by Bernard Tschumi.  “There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program,”[3] wrote Tschumi in 1981, prefiguring Gehry’s Temporary Contemporary. Revisiting these ideas again, the architect was part of the jury for the studio’s final review in late April.

By imagining that MOCA might cultivate a spectrum of places along the public-to-private spectrum as site of free expression and refuges for queer, transgender, and BIPOC people—people often excluded or policed in public, The Temporary Contemporary studio envisions an architecture of resistance. Says May, “If we’re losing the right to protest and enact certain kinds of behavior in our ‘public space’, which isn’t really public, then maybe museums are going to have to take on this role more emphatically going forward.”

 

[1] Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, p. 28.

[2] Sam Hall Kaplan, “’Temporary Contemporary’ Agenda: Architects Tie Design Goals to L.A.” Los Angeles Times (1923-1995); Nov 25, 1983; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times, pg. OC_C23.

[3] Bernard Tschumi, “Violence of Architecture,” Artforum, 1981. Accessed June 6, 2024. https://www.artforum.com/features/violence-of-architecture-2-215475/

A System of Gaps and Linkages

For almost two decades, Sarah Oppenheimer has investigated the conditions that enable us to act upon and recondition the built environment. The artist is best known for her dynamic architectural interventions, or more precisely, insertions, as her work tends toward partial modifications rather than total disruptions in the structural fabric of a given space.

In spring 2024, Oppenheimer was a design critic in architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she led O(perating) S(ystem)1.1, an advanced research seminar in the Mediums domain of the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program. Though Oppenheimer’s work is insistently analogue, the students in OS1.1 modified the interior lighting of the GSD’s Gund Hall with digital and wireless means to relay haptic, kinetic, and visual information across a site-specific, networked system. Nonetheless, the course was directly informed by many tendencies that have long been consistent throughout Oppenheimer’s practice, even as they have evolved over distinct periods.

In an early work titled 610-3365 (2008), permanently installed at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, a vista of an area immediately outside the museum appears embedded into the gallery floor on the fourth level of the building. An elongated, narrow aperture opens into a plywood tunnel, the smaller end of which is placed inside a window frame on the third floor. Downstairs, one can experience the work as a sculptural volume: an oblique, truncated pyramid with smoothed edges descending from a “wormhole” in the ceiling , as Oppenheimer refers to it. The “existing architecture,” listed on the work’s label as a medium, is indivisible from the work itself. However, back on the upper level, the acute perspective resulting from the cone-like design is offset and virtually flattened by the optical effect of two pairs of diverging grooves carved along the structure’s interior, flanking the openings at both ends, while the ultra-Eamesian curvatures of the form also help to minimize sharp shadows. This sleek viewing device offers a crisp but disorienting image that equally adheres to the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy, rearticulating the perception of proximity between interior and exterior spaces.

Currently on long-term view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) , S-334473 (2019) is exemplary of another well-known series of Oppenheimer’s works. An iteration of an earlier project titled S-337473 (2017), exhibited at the Ohio University’s Wexner Center for the Arts, the MASS MoCA work consists of a pair of interactive, kinetic sculptures grafted onto the existing architecture. Visitors can rotate and reorient the sculptures along a predetermined arc. Each device features a beam made of glass and black steel that can pivot around the 45-degree axis of a slanted pole. When turned vertical, the beam stands parallel to the columns in the space; it aligns with the wooden ceiling joists when turned horizontal. The instrument’s structural support and rotary actuator are revealed on the gallery floor above, at the other end of the rotational axis that extends through the ceiling. Such instruments are like “conduits for energy transmission,” Oppenheimer says. Activating the devices with their movements, audience members experience the environment through the lens of transient images framed by the machine’s choreography and reflected in its surfaces.

While Oppenheimer’s work might readily recall the aesthetics of Lygia Clark, Nancy Holt, or Daniel Libeskind, she also points out resonances between her practice and that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The duo’s monumental wrapping of iconic buildings with temporary structures made of fabric was always accompanied by an archive documenting a bureaucratic trail, the process of negotiations with implicit yet all-too-present policies and protocols. For Oppenheimer, Christo and Jean-Claude’s temporary overlays can, in fact, foreground a sense of touch by other means, a kind of sociality that exceeds or extends the limits of haptic grip or optical grasp.

Particularly important for Oppenheimer is “grasping what systems already exist before we start thinking about the overlay of another system,” that is, before the so-called design process begins. In fall 2023, Oppenheimer was an artist-in-residence at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), an experienced that expanded the scope of her thinking about how exactly change takes place within an environment. Through studies that include edible robotics and autonomous ornithopters, researchers at EPFL aim to develop task-based technologies that can be integrated with the dynamics of an existing organic system. “Once the organism is reframed as a locus of emergent and adaptive patterns rather than a closed-off thing, a robot would no longer need to mimic an object per se,” Oppenheimer explains, “but learn the living entity’s way of existing in its larger social network.” Developing this interest in larger social and biological systems, she has sought deeper and more dynamic insertions into the existing architecture or, more precisely, orchestrations of evolving architectonic ensembles.

Exhibited at von Bartha gallery in Basel , N-02 (2022) is a more recent piece that incorporates several interlinked elements in motion. Visitors could activate an expansive pulley system by sliding horizontal black bars attached to custom-made freestanding walls, adjusting the vertical position of several rows of linear lighting fixtures hanging from the ceiling. A change in one corner of the room could trigger effects of different degrees elsewhere, allowing for several trajectories of causation to be possibly traced between what seem like inputs and outputs. The shifting reflections of the luminescent strips in the glass facade of the gallery—which sits in a converted garage with an active gas station still outside—marks yet another layer of change in one’s environmental perception when looking out from the inside.

Given the largely infrastructural and therefore hidden underpinnings of a lighting system, N-02 and related projects highlight the relationship between what meets the eye, what can be touched, and what can be sensed and identified as a mechanism of change in the environment. Light is here both a medium and a metaphor for the “perceptibility of cause and effect,” as Oppenheimer puts it, “because if something cannot be sensed, visually or otherwise, then it can hardly figure in our understanding of causation at all.”

Many of these ideas set the scope for OS1.1. The seminar aimed to experiment with lighting hardware to redirect sensory registers. “Illumination blurs a building’s boundaries,” reads the course description. The Gund Hall lobby served as the main site of exploration, where students conducted light systems analysis, surveys of wiring diagrams, studies of reflectivity on different surfaces, research into the legal limits of occupation, as well as interviews and walkthroughs with the facilities staff and regular occupants of the space. With backgrounds ranging from media arts to computational and industrial design, the students brought their expertise in programming, modeling, and fabricating, among others, to bear on the principle of adaptation. Seminary participants designed several prototypes with each iteration exploring reciprocities between bodily gestures, environmental perception, and the rhythms of machinic modulation.

The final exhibition of student works includes a collectively designed kinesthetic ensemble. Three wooden rings affixed around one of the columns in the Druker Design Gallery control three bespoke spotlight fixtures lodged into the ceiling, each with a rotating reflector. Each ring, which Kai Zhang (MDes Mediums ’24) refers to as an “architectural knob,” is equipped with optical sensors, an RGB color strip, and ball bearings. By turning a ring in one or the other direction, one could adjust the x-coordinates of one mirror and the y-coordinates of another, moving and modulating the three spots of red, green, and blue across the space.

Technically, the system resembles the inner workings of projectors and 3D printers that use movable micromirrors to control the direction of light beams. As one of the group’s guiding observations, this was suggested by Quincy Kuang (MDes Mediums ’24), who brought professional experience in the Digital Light Processing (DLP) industry. Conceptually, the comparison also indicates the project’s attempt to reframe images and objects as gestures with reprogrammable contours and coordiantes. OS1.1 developed as Oppenheimer’s own focus in recent years has shifted away from what she calls an “object-oriented” approach. She has become increasingly interested in questioning “how we could set in motion something whose gestalt cannot be seen as an enclosed totality; how we could sense linkages or effects of linkage across spatial gaps.”

On the note of filling in the gaps, Kuang’s personal residence, only a stone’s throw from the Gund, also remained accessible to everyone in the class to use as an invaluable, shared studio and fabrication lab. After all, experimentation with the variable materialities and mechanics of common spaces can itself serve as a context for cultivating an alternative, even if amorphous, sense of collectivity adjacent to institutional settings. While visitors to Gund Hall could manipulate the system produced in the course of OS1.1, the complex interaction of input and output devices made it difficult to anticipate the effects produced by the set of spinning rings. As in Oppenheimer’s own practice, the project staged a feedback loop between human interaction and environmental affordances. Her methods, as an artist and instructor, eventually foreground a sprawling network of variably perceived inputs and outputs, where causation is neither linear nor zero-sum.

Theaster Gates and Karel Miler’s “Actions”: An Excerpt from “Pairs 4”

Pairs is a student-led journal of conversations that matches subjects with objects, interview with archive. The journal is organized around a diversity of threads and concerns relevant to our moment in the design disciplines, bringing forth candid exchanges and provisional ideas.

For this conversation, featured in Pairs 4 , Isabel Lewis spoke with Theaster Gates, an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on social practice and installation art. Trained as a potter and an urban planner, Gates is the founder of the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit cultural organization that aims to uplift under-resourced neighborhoods. He is based in Chicago.

At the center of the conversation is Karel Miler’s Actions, a series of photographs of the artist in semantic translation. Made in Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s, these images were intended to be a form of visual poetry exploring corporality and spatial constriction. A Zen practitioner, Miler is concerned with representations of universal and individual forms.

Theaster Gates Let’s begin.

Isabel Lewis The first time I saw your work, I was nineteen and living in Portland, Oregon. I was taking a sculpture class, and the professor showed us a documentary about your practice. At the time, I was thinking about the way space is affected, how there’s always a social aspect to spatial construction. Your work helped me open the door to the field I’m in now, design and landscape architecture.

Recently, this came full circle, because I went to see the film Showing Up, which is about a young woman, a sculptor, who works at an art school in Portland, which I think is based on the Oregon College of Art and Craft.¹ It brought me back to this very specific time and place, this memory of living in that city and trying to figure out what sculpture meant to me. So it had a great impact on me when I saw in the end credits that you contributed art to the film. I was thinking we could start by talking about how memory informs your work.

TG This happens for me, too. Art and artists, they follow us through our lives. The more we learn about ourselves and the more experiences we have, sometimes a work of art shows up and carries a different meaning. It might mean more, it might mean less, but it continues to haunt us and be a part of us. For me, buildings, spaces, and materials also have that haunting effect. No matter what an object is, even the paint that you buy at a store, everything has history. It has an origin story. It has an eternity that precedes you. When you think about acrylic paint or oil paint, even if it’s new, it has a history: the tube that it’s in wasn’t made today. Those processes are in fact part of a found or reclaimed identity, even though it’s a new paint. You buy new wood at Home Depot, and it is not new wood. It’s sometimes preexisting wood that’s been planed again, it’s a tree that has a history, an origin story. For me, saying that a thing is new or has history, it’s everything. You can connect the fact that everything has a history and a narrative to, let’s say, a Buddhist or an Africanist religious belief around animism, or the idea that things have life inside of them. I think what I’m interested in is participating in the truth of the life that is within things.

The more I spend time with materials, the more I think, “Oh, yes, my dad was a roofer. Yes, roofing paper and the materials of roofing are important to me because of that history.” But I also think that those materials have a life of their own, and that if I spend time deeply thinking about that life, then great things could happen with those materials. The South Side of Chicago wasn’t born impoverished. The buildings that are currently abandoned, they weren’t always abandoned. Those buildings have life in them, and it feels like my job is to recognize, exhume, and celebrate the great lives of these spaces. The more I believe the life these buildings have lived was important, the more I want to preserve this, the more I feel like, “This thing deserves to live, deserves to continue to live.”

IL I love that idea of reembodying a place or an image. The striking thing about this set of photos is how physical they feel. I have this bodily response where I imagine myself in these positions and how these things feel. There’s a natural tendency to want to bring life into inanimate objects.

TG Absolutely.

IL It also reminds me of paint, oil paint in particular. We have these names like Siena or Umbrian brown, and those come from the land. That’s the color of dirt in Siena. These materials are defined by their most fundamental origins.

TG Yeah. For every color that’s a natural color, there’s a plant or a mineral or an insect or a bark or a root that’s being crushed and ground to produce the thing that then allows us to produce beauty. I think that those processes and those roots, they have their own beauty. Let’s pull up an image, Isabel.

IL I’m drawn to Limits, as with many of these images, because there’s so much movement that’s implied but not ever shown. You see the beginning and the end of an action, but everything in between is just inferred. I think it goes back to what we were saying about time and timelessness, too. We think of performance as a time-based art, but in its documentation, it becomes a moment completely out of time. When I look at this, I feel it in my body, and it becomes much more spatial than anything else, much more corporeal.

TG I also think that we’re not necessarily analyzing the photograph itself, but the choices behind it. In 1973, Ektachrome was already available.² We were already in good and saturated color, but to have this image in black and white adds to the austerity, meditation, simplicity, it makes those contrasts pop even more.

IL The artist, Karel Miler, was a Zen Buddhist. That stayed with him throughout his life, even after he stopped working as an artist. A lot of these images are meant to be a translation of poetry or meditation into a representative image. I wonder what you would end up with if you were to translate these images back into language.

TG Measurement is language in that you’re taking a somewhat arbitrary sense of space, and you’re codifying space with lines, and then you’re giving those lines a shared understanding, so that we all agree to what a foot is or what a meter is, what a yard is, we agree to what a millimeter is, and as a result of our shared vocabulary, we’re able to then translate information across time.

IL Does translation feel like an adequate way to describe how you move through different scales, from pottery to neighborhoods to larger urban structures?

TG I think about translation all the time, Isabel. I do. Sometimes when I’m making a work of art and I sit down with a journalist and they look at a tar painting, the first thing they say is, “So your dad was a roofer?” It’s like, “Well, yes,” but the thing that I’m trying to convey is not necessarily about my relationship with my father. There are other, more sophisticated codes embedded in these materials, not just one prescription.

Translation also has to do with our ability to deeply interpret the meaning of a word or moment. I think about translation in the sense that art is a stand-in for my words. It’s a set of codes that goes without the need for my body, and it’s able to say things, sometimes simple things, sometimes more complicated things. That’s cool.

I recently wrote an essay about a dear friend of mine named Tony Lewis, an artist who uses language in his drawings, and it led me to look up the history of shorthand.³ It seems like an abstraction, but people who understand it can translate shorthand into language. If people across languages learn the same shorthands, then you can sometimes know universal shorthand without having to know the language. All of these modes are modes of translation and interpretation. It requires that you have a base knowledge of something, and then you add to that base knowledge a symbol that is universalized. In that sense, Tony’s work reminds me of this international code. It reads as abstraction, but only because most people don’t read shorthand. I’m saying so much right now, Isabel, I’m so sorry.

IL No, no, it’s really wonderful.

TG If we go back for a second to measuring in this image, what I love about it is he’s trying not only to set up the limits of his body, like the length of his hand, but also to show the deep correlations between his body and a crevice, or a crevice and the rise of a stair. I think these things are so relevant for landscape architecture in that sense, because the rise seems incredibly human. When you think about stately stairs, the rise is often short, sometimes the run is super deep. You actually have to take two or three steps for each tread, and it’s interesting to think about how when it gets past the foot, when it gets to three feet or five feet, it reads as grand because it’s bigger than our body.

IL Form and the body have such an interesting relationship to scale. All those books of the architectural standards say that a countertop is going to be this high and a cabinet is going to be this high because a typical body looks like this, but then my mother can’t reach any glasses from the top shelf because she’s not a five-foot-nine male. It’s worth subverting those expectations to measure space by atypical metrics. I made a Klein diagram a little while ago about tables and chairs.⁴ A baby sitting in a highchair, that’s a chair and a table in one element, with a very prescribed use. But if you’re perched over the kitchen counter, eating takeout from a container, you’re not in a chair nor at a table, and you’re not using the counter as intended. It’s that individual expression, I think, that really makes a place belong to someone.

TG Well, last summer just before going to Japan, I went to a yoga class and the yoga instructor asked, “What do you want to get out of the class?” I said, “I need to be able to sit cross-legged for two to three hours.” What I needed most from yoga was to help me respect the social customs of the dinner table. I knew that moving from my cultural predisposition to a Japanese cultural predisposition would require work, exercise, stretching. I think that sometimes architecture and landscape architecture can inform our new cultural norms. It could allow us ways of getting out of ourselves and maybe new ways of thinking about what dinner could be.

IL The reason why I ended up including this one was because it made me reevaluate the simple idea of holding something in your hand, a perfect weight, a textural variation. By taking a record out of its sleeve or by thinking about how you’re going to shape a pot or play an instrument or cook a meal, all of these things are fundamentally about how we touch the world. It’s not something that’s exportable or translatable.

TG Touch is important because it is one of our first phenomena. Whether it’s the first touch when a baby is born, or consistent touch as a baby ages, or the ability to process information like hot and cold, it’s the way we learn to be in the world and encounter our limits. These images speak to my own interests in the ways they demonstrate how having a sense of how texture affects a viewer of art. People don’t want to just see things; they also want to touch them and know them. To see is to know, but to touch is to also know.

IL Yes, and with the Archive House and the Johnson Publishing Company artifacts, you could make the argument that these objects should be preserved in a museum. But there’s something about flipping through an object that’s very different.

TG Yes, and back to this conversation about the different ways that architectural archetypes show up, who’s to say that the Listening House isn’t a more perfect museum?⁵⁵ Because we have the ability to touch things—turning the pages of a book, looking closely at a glass lantern slide—we can be more than just witnesses to them by being witnesses through them.

The truth is, when you advance in your research at universities like Yale and Harvard and the University of Chicago, you can gain access to special collections and touch things that other people can’t. I think that sometimes touch is also about who has access and who doesn’t.

IL Even with this magazine, it’s partly because we’re all at the Harvard Graduate School of Design that we are able to have access to these people and to these objects. It’s a privilege. I think the hope is that by doing and sharing this work, we’re making the process at least somewhat more accessible. But it is true that touch is something that you’re very lucky to access. I think there’s probably a lot of lack of touch in the world right now.

TG For me at least, as I was building the Listening House, Archive House, and Black Cinema House, and ultimately the Stony Island Arts Bank, I was definitely thinking about a person’s experience of these different spaces. The experience of that has everything to do with trying to create more access to the place, more access to people. I feel like we’ve at least been successful in helping people gain access. I’m quite proud of that.

IL I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that clay in particular holds memory. It holds fingerprints, and the act of throwing a pot is so intensely physical, really, really hard work. When you hold something in your hands like that and it’s shaped by your hands, it has your imprint on it. But it’s interesting to think about the way that that is scalable through other materials as well.

TG Absolutely. It’s reasonable that when we’re doing renovation projects, if we take out a stone, like a terra-cotta cornerstone, from a building, we can see the marks of the maker. But they might also put in some funny anecdote, or write their name or the date, because these are not actually anonymous objects. They’re anonymous to us because the histories of those materials haven’t always been carried forward. But in fact, from a pot to a large structure, objects often carry the remnants of people’s touch. If you look close enough at most buildings, you’ll see the traces of the people who made them.

IL This is relevant to something I was working on last semester about Julie Bargmann’s work in rehabilitating toxic landscapes. In a landscape project, there’s this dual action of not erasing history but honoring it while also acknowledging that land often has a complicated past. How do we preserve memory in built environments or urban landscapes in a way that feels authentic?

TG I think sometimes art and conceptual practices can help us on that journey. Sometimes, and I think this is what we’ll get to with these photographs, performance and conceptual ideas help us tackle these bigger questions by putting the body present in ways that implicate a site, make you feel more compassion toward the site because of the complexities of the things that happened there.

I remember when Cabrini-Green in Chicago was being torn down.⁶ There was concern that poor people were being displaced, largely poor Black people, because that land had become some of the most important land in the city for its adjacency to downtown. It’s like, “Well, Black people still deserve the right to live in a place that they’ve been living in for the last fifty years, sixty years, for which nobody gave a damn.” The site has changed over time, but the people haven’t. What do you do when time has shifted people’s stigma of a place?

People who lived in Cabrini Green deserve the right to continue to live there, even if the land is now worth a lot of money. When they were excavating, there was a lot of clay underground. I remember just trying to get access to that site and that clay, to use it as a stand-in for the people who once lived there.

IL I think there’s this notion that a landscape intervention won’t do harm. It’s complicated because there’s one lens that focuses more on the rights of the biome and another on the rights of people. Of course, they go hand in hand.

TG We look to landscape architecture as the solution to neutralizing space and time. It starts with large projects that are government or municipality projects, but then you have private developers and privately owned public spaces.⁷ In these moments, we need landscape to give us something that is not an office building, not a residential thing. But that safe passage route or that new bike lane or that grove of trees is sometimes still a disruptive act of transferring a community space from one of people in need to one of people that have a tremendous amount. I think protecting green and public spaces is important, and also not using green space or landscape as the thing that disintegrates a certain community continuity is important.

IL What I’m trying to get across is that people can think of landscape as very politically neutering. It’s like, of course, who wouldn’t want landscape beauty in their neighborhood? But I do think that there’s a tendency when any project is approached with this developer-down, top-down approach that erases the individual user. Maybe the only way to really approach this idea is from the inside out, moving from what you can shape with your hands to eventually what can shape you.

TG I think we’re saying the same thing, Isabel, that every urban tool can be a divisive, derisive device that separates and disconnects as much as it can be a tool that aggregates and reconnects. There is no neutral tool, including landscape architecture, and I think it’s really powerful that you’re able to see that. There will be moments where you’ll be on big projects, and it’ll be like, “Fuck!” When we build these new cities, we haven’t given any thought yet to where people are going to commune.They’re building apartment buildings and they’re building bus depots and transit things, but they haven’t thought about places of worship. They haven’t thought about the park where people might do yoga.

IL Yeah, at least in the US, I feel like it can be a very capitalistic way of thinking. We consider how people can get to work but not about where they can get together. How do you think the work you’ve done in creating cultural archives supports community?

TG Well, right now, I’m in the center of downtown Chicago. You get used to seeing the same shit in every city, you know what I mean? We could be in New York right now, we could be in LA, we could be in Paris, we could be in London. One thing that’s interesting about the Arts Bank is that it shows up as an unexpected and autonomous form.⁸ Its use is so different from the typical use that’s evident on our urban streets. What makes the city special to me is the fact that there are things autonomous to that city. It’s not enough just to have the archive, it needs to populate the block in the same way that any other storefront could.

I think the Dorchester Projects gave me an opportunity to install my own interpretation of the architectural image of a block.⁹ Inside that architectural image are a set of things that are totally specific to what I care about. I love looking at images. I love looking at images with others. I love making music with images behind me. I love learning about other people’s histories through objects. In that sense, the bank became a place of congregation and shared values. Then it leads you to realize, “Oh, I don’t even have to go to the bank to look at these kinds of images. My grandmama has images on her wall that I never pay attention to—who are those old people on my grandma’s wall?” Before you know it, you start to have a new appreciation, not only for other people but for your own freaking family.

IL I think one of the things that’s particularly beautiful about photography is the dissonance between the original event and the reception of its documentation. Sometimes the documentation can spark a reimagining of its own in which you start building a narrative around the things that came together.

TG Absolutely. Images test the limits of a person, but they’re also about the deep recording of a specific moment. When you’re making the image, you don’t necessarily know that it is going to be important, but we’re looking at curbs and streets that may not exist anymore, buildings for performances that don’t exist anymore. But an artist punctuated this site, and we have proof of its existence. With the artist, we have a way to remember a thing that occurred.

IL We take these things as ready-made. The photograph is there, the paint is there, the canvas is stretched, et cetera. But then, when you remove an action from its documentation, it’s something completely independent. I’m thinking back to something you said in a TED Talk, that when you started the Archive House in the Dorchester Projects, even just sweeping it became a performance.

TG There’s a tension and a relationship between the gesture that one performs and the document that captures that gesture, and then eventually, what that documentation means for the future. I sometimes want to be able to go back and show people a moment when all I could afford was eggs and mushrooms and potatoes from the local market. It was food you had to eat that day, it was almost on its way out. As a result, the cost per pound was so cheap that I could buy five pounds of mushrooms for $2.50 and I could make a big frittata. I wish I had evidenced those days more. I wish somebody had taken a picture of me making my frittata and slowly letting that pan get hot, because people assume I’ve always had a chef, or I’ve always had handlers or some shit. I’m like, “No, that’s actually the last five years that I’ve had help.” But those gestures, those moments really matter. Me, when I could drop it like it’s hot, I could dance. It’s difficult for my nephews to imagine me partying, because the gestures that I make today as an older adult, they’re so different from the gestures that I made when I was 25. All I can say to them is, your uncle was the life of the party, trust me.

 

1. Showing Up, directed by Kelly Reichardt, with performances by Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, and Andre Benjamin (2023; New York, A24). ↩︎
2. Ektachrome was a high-quality color film first produced by Kodak in the 1940s. ↩︎
3. Tony Lewis is a Chicago-based artist whose practice concerns semiotics, abstraction, and site specificity. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. ↩︎
4. The Klein Diagram is a four-group graph describing how elements are related to each other and their opposing forms. It was famously used by Rosalind Krauss in her seminal 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” to describe the relation of sculpture and architecture. ↩︎
5. The Listening House is one of several abandoned properties on the South Side of Chicago whose use Gates reimagined. Today, it houses a record collection of over 8000 LPs with cultural significance to the Black community in Chicago. ↩︎
6. Cabrini-Green was a public housing development built by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) following the Second World War. Due to neglect and a lack of financial support from the CHA, the development fell into disrepair and became a symbol of urban blight. Its demolition was completed in 2011. ↩︎
7. Privately owned public spaces (POPS) are plazas, atria, or similar areas, typically in urban centers, that are open to the public while being owned and maintained by private corporations, often as a way to circumvent zoning restrictions or floor–area ratio regulations. ↩︎
8. The Stony Island Bank was vacant from the 1980s until 2015, when it was reopened by the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit founded and led by Gates to rehabilitate abandoned spaces on the South Side of Chicago. Today, the Bank serves as a local hub for artistic innovation and archival research, housing collections of music, film, magazines, and other significant cultural artifacts. ↩︎
9. The Dorchester Projects is a foundational expression of Gates’s interdisciplinary practice, in which urban design, archival preservation, and neighborhood engagement come together. In 2009, Gates purchased and then rehabilitated a set of neglected houses on Chicago’s South Side into vibrant cultural spaces, including the Archive House, the Listening House, and the Black Cinema House. In addition to serving the local community, these spaces are a model of positive urban restoration and collective action. ↩︎