July 2018 | Eyesore
Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.
Behold the new Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, by architect Steven Holl (multiple winner at EOTM!). Whatcha got here: ever a new way to present blank walls to the street. Along with new ways for designing large structured masses to feel like they are about to fall on your head. One can easily predict the “art” that will reside within: videos depicting the inhumanity of men, macrame celebrations of the vulva, pulsing neon intersectional claims for reparations, decoupaged animal corpses — the popular stock-in-trade of the curatorial class.
The Institute’s web page offers the following dazzling metaphysical theory behind the building:
The torsion of these intersecting bodies is joined by a “plane of the present” to the galleries in “forking time. The idea of “forking time” suggests that in the world of contemporary art there are many parallel times. The notion of one ongoing time and its “grand narrative” of history is questioned.
“History is questioned….” I love that, as if history was the “perp” in some plot to overthrow reality and museum curators are police summoned to interrogate it.
Note the shot below. There’s an old joke about Mussolini’s modernist train station in Florence: “That’s not the station, it’s the box that it came in!”
Shout out to John McConnell for nominating this humdinger
