Parachute, 1 décembre 1980, Hiver

[" » f: ; .MWttsiÉÉ! ¥imm /.vV \\.yï'»(: ^*3 P8R £35 t-; PARACHUTE directrice de la publication: CHANTAL PONTBRIAND conseil de rédaction: BRUCE FERGUSON, PHILIP FRY, RAYMOND GERVAIS, JEAN PAPINEAU, RENÉ PAYANT.collaborateurs: BRUCE BARBER, ROBERT DEL TREDICI, RICHARD FOREMAN, FRANCE GASCON, RAYMOND GERVAIS, DONALD B.KUSPIT, JOHANNE LAMOUREUX, JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MAZZONI, JOHN MURCHIE, DIANA NEMIROFF, RENÉ PAYANT, PAUL-ALBERT PLOUFFE.adjoints à la rédaction: SERGE BÉRARD, ANNE RAMSDEN traduction et correction: NICOLE MORIN-McCALLUM graphisme: ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ diffusion et publicité: FRANCINE PÉRINET administration et secrétariat: COLETTE TOUGAS PARACHUTE, revue d\u2019art contemporain inc./ Les éditions PARACHUTE 4e trimestre 1980 (publication trimestrielle) PARACHUTE C.P.730, succursale N Montréal, Québec, Canada H2X3N4 Tél.: (514) 522-9167 PARACHUTE rédaction 4001, rue de Mentana Montréal, Québec, Canada H2L3R9 vente au numéro Allemagne:\t8.25 DM\t Belgique:\t150 FB\t Canada:\t$4.00\t France:\t21 FF\t Grande Bretagne: 2.40 L\t\t Hollande:\t10 FL\t Italie:\t4,000 L\t Suisse:\t8.75 FS\t U.S.A.:\t$5.00 US\t abonnement\t\tinstitution un an\t$14.00 (Canada)\t$20.00 \t$20.00 (Europe, U.S.A.)\t$30.00 \t$25.00 (par Avion)\t$35.00 deux ans\t$25.00 (Canada)\t$33.00 \t$35.00 (Europe, U.S.A.)\t$42.00 \t$43.00 (par Avion)\t$52.00 distribution: au Québec par Diffusion Parallèle 1667 Amherst, Montréal, H2L 3L4 521-0335 aux États-Unis par Bernard De Boer, Inc., 113 east Centre Street, Nutley, N.J., 07110 en France, en Belgique et en Suisse par Argon diffusion, 43 rue Hailé, 75014, Paris, France, tél.: 327.66.17.(Numéro de commission paritaire en instance) PARACHUTE n\u2019est pas responsable des documents qui lui sont adressés ou non réclamés.tous droits de reproduction et de traduction réservés.© Parachute, revue d\u2019art contemporain inc.les articles publiés n\u2019engagent que la responsabilité de leurs auteurs.PARACHUTE est indexé dans RADAR.PARACHUTE est membre de l\u2019Association des éditeurs de périodiques culturels québécois.PARACHUTE est publié avec l\u2019aide du Conseil des Arts du Canada et du Ministère des affaires culturelles du Québec.dépôts légaux Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec Bibliothèque Nationale du Canada ISSN: 0318-7020 courrier 2e classe no 4213 Imprimerie Boulanger inc., Montréal Rive-Sud Typo Service inc., St-Lambert imprimé au Canada/printed in Canada Couverture: Extrait de Madness and Tranquility de Richard Foreman, 1979, photo: Robert Del Tredici. mm.Wm by Bruce mm v : IMMENTAIRES/REVIEWS hel Goulet/Louise Robert, Irene ISillA CINQ ANS FIVE YEARS Il est toujours délicat de revenir en arrière.Mais comment faire pour oublier que PARACHUTE, avec ce numéro 21, a cinq ans.D\u2019ailleurs, faut-il seulement oublier.Ne vaut-il pas mieux se livrer à quelques constats qui font plaisir, et ce faisant se rappeler qu\u2019il s\u2019agit d\u2019une fête.D\u2019abord il y aurait tous les constats d\u2019ordre statistique, qui se traduisent en augmentation du tirage, des abonnements, des points de vente à travers le monde, puis les constats d\u2019ordre idéologique, révélés par un examen minutieux des objectifs du départ par rapport aux effets subséquents: une plus grande connaissance de l\u2019art étranger ici et vice-versa, une connaissance de l\u2019art contemporain sous toutes ses formes, une valorisation de ces formes inclassables comme l\u2019installation ou la performance, le développement et le renouveau de la critique d\u2019art, ce ne sont que quelques traits qui caractérisent PARACHUTE aujourd\u2019hui.Si, parmi ces multiples retours sur soi qui ponctuent la production d\u2019une revue, il est nécessaire, en fin de compte, de s\u2019attarder plus longuement sur celui-ci, c\u2019est pour bénéficier des avantages d\u2019une rétrospection, bien sûr, mais plus encore, pour se mettre sur le chemin des perspectives d\u2019avenir.Car notre défi actuel est de faire passer notre publication à une étape de stabilisation économique qui lui permette d\u2019avoir le rayonnement souhaité (à traduire non seulement par sa qualité et son appréciation par le milieu mais par un tirage plus important, l\u2019accès à un budget d\u2019opération réaliste et un personnel de base permanent, indépendant du bénévolat.PARACHUTE s\u2019intéresse d\u2019avantage à son avenir qu\u2019à ses gloires et misères passées.Ces cinq années nous fournissent l\u2019occasion de renouveler un engagement ferme envers l\u2019art contemporain sous toutes ses formes: arts plastiques, cinéma, vidéo, performance, musique et danse.Un engagement qui transgresse les frontières géographiques (qui fait que la revue fonctionne à une échelle internationale) ou les limites critiques (à l\u2019écart d\u2019un \"trop plein\u201d de critique comme d\u2019un carcan théorique, \u201cformaliste\u201d ou autre).PARACHUTE est une revue faite au Québec avec la stratégie bien particulière de lier le vieux continent au nouveau,avec cette volonté de ne pas oublier, malgré les pressions intérieures et extérieures, que nous, québécois, sommes un îlot francophone dans une mer anglophone.Situation dont PARACHUTE essaie de tirer l\u2019optimum en faisant circuler comme dans des vases communiquants diverses cultures et divers registres de culture aussi.PARACHUTE est un véhicule de la pratique artistique contemporaine, mais elle est aussi le lieu d\u2019éclosion de méthodes critiques qui sont autant d\u2019approches possibles pour un public chercheur.Ce que nous tentons, c\u2019est une vulgarisation intelligente de l\u2019art contemporain.Par vulgarisation, il faut entendre l\u2019utilisation de l\u2019information comme moyen de dissémination de la connaissance, non comme délayage, non comme démagogie, non comme mystification.Dans cette optique et dans l\u2019espoir de rendre compte de la pluralité des démarches, nous publions, avec de nombreuses photographies, des interviews et textes d\u2019artistes, en plus des textes d\u2019analyse.Il nous apparaît par ailleurs important de multiplier les positions théoriques au niveau de notre politique éditoriale afin d\u2019éviter tout dogmatisme et de donner lieu à une rétroaction indispensable.Ce que nous souhaitons, c\u2019est la multiplication d\u2019approches et la prolifération des lectures.Pouvoir dire, autant de lecteurs, autant de lectures.Plus concrètement, cet éditorial est un appel aux lecteurs de PARACHUTE, sollicitant leur soutien toujours renouvelé.La revue existe depuis cinq ans avec des moyens limités.Mais nous avons besoin de fonds accrus pour éviter l\u2019enlisement dans une marginalité dans laquelle on ne peut plus fonctionner, dû au fait que les exigences de tout ordre auxquelles nous devons aujourd\u2019hui faire face ont considérablement changé depuis cinq ans.Avec ce numéro, PARACHUTE passera le cap des cinq mille exemplaires.Mais c\u2019est encore trop peu pour rendre viable sa situation économique.Il nous faut passer à d\u2019autres étapes, et nous comptons beaucoup sur notre public pour y parvenir.There is always a certain awkwardness about reminiscence.But could it be forgotten that Parachute, with this 21st issue, is five years old.Moreover, must one really forget these things.Isn\u2019t it better to mark the occasion by a few felicitous statements and remind oneself that this is a sort of event in itself.Firstly, there are those statements of a statistical nature about the increase in press run, subscriptions, distribution around the world, etc.then statements of an ideological nature, informed by a minute scrutiny of the objectives from the very beginning compared with subsequent effects: a greater knowledge of foreign art here, and vice-versa, a knowledge of the many different forms of contemporary art, a validation of those unclassifiable forms such as installation or performance, the development and renewal of art criticism \u2014 these are but a few characteristics of PARACHUTE today.If, amongst all the various self-examinations that punctuate the production of a magazine it seems necessary to emphasize this one, surely it is to benefit from retrospection, but even more, to gain a perspective into the future.Because our real challenge now is to bring our publication to a point of economic stability, enabling it to have the desired attention (translatable not only in terms of quality and appreciation by the milieu,but also by a larger circulation),access to a realistic operational budget and a permenant staff independent from voluntary work.PARACHUTE looks to its future rather than back at past glories or miseries.These five years give us the occasion to renew our continuous concern with contemporary art in all its forms: visual arts, cinema, video, performance, music and dance.A concern which transgresses geographic boundaries (so that the magazine operates on an international level) or critical limits (at the cost of a \"too heavy\u201d criticism or a theoretical thrust, be it \u201cformalist\u201d or other).PARACHUTE is a magazine produced in Québec with the very particular strategy of linking the old continent to the new, with the intention not to forget, that despite internal and external pressures, we Quebecers are a francophone island in an anglophone sea.A situation which we attempt to make the most of in acting as a forum for diverse cultures and diverse cultural levels.PARACHUTE is a vehicle for contemporary artistic practice, but it is also a place for the blossoming of critical methods, each one offering a possible approach for an inquisitive public.What we are attempting is an intelligent vulgarization of contemporary art.By vulgarization, one is to understand the use of information as a means of dissemination of knowledge, not as a dulling or watering down of what is said, not as demagogy, not as mystification.In this view, and in the hope of taking into account the plurality of approaches, we publish, with numerous photographs, interviews and artists\u2019 texts, as well as analytical texts, in other respects we find it important as an editorial policy to multiply the number of theoretical positions in an attempt to avoid any dogmatism and to give place to an indispensable feedback.What we would like to see is an increase in approaches together with a proliferation of possible readings.So many texts, so many readers.More concretely, this editorial is an appeal to the readers of PARACHUTE soliciting their renewed support.The magazine has existed for five years with limited means.But we need to accumulate funds to avoid sinking into a marginality in which it is not possible to function any longer.The considerations we must face today are different from those of five years ago.With this issue PARACHUTE will reach a press run of five thousand copies.But that is still not enough to create a viable economic situation.We must go on to further stages, and are especially counting on our public to make this possible.CHANTAL PONTBRIAND 4 ARCHITECTURAL REFERENCES: POST-MODERNISM, PRIMITIVISM AND PARODY IN THE ARCHITECTURAL IMAGE A Review Essay by Bruce Barber Dans cet essai, Bruce Barber pose un regard critique sur les travaux de Alice Aycock, Melvin Charney, Gordon Matta-Clark, Glenn Lewis, Anne et Patrick Poirier, Charles Simonds, Alan Sonfist, General Idea et SITE présentés à l\u2019occasion de l\u2019exposition \u201cArchitectural References\u201d à la Vancouver Art Gallery du 30 avril au 1er juin qui fut organisée conjointement par l\u2019architecte Babs Schapiro et le conservateur Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker.Avant d\u2019apporter ses commentaires sur les pièces, le critique remet en question quelques-unes des hypothèses énoncées par Schapiro dans l\u2019essai intitulé (\u201cThe Consequences of the Post-Modern in Contemporary Art and Architecture\u201d), présenté dans le catalogue.Il s\u2019attarde particulièrement au fait que celui-ci situe le modernisme en opposition avec le postmodernisme et à sa définition du modernisme comme étant \u201cmasculin\u201d et préoccupé par l\u2019espace et du post-modernisme comme étant \u201cféminin\u201d et préoccupé par le lieu.Le critique élargit ces oppositions afin d\u2019inclure divers types de primitivisme qu\u2019il relie aux tendances millénaristes dans la culture en général et procède ensuite à l\u2019analyse de la présence du primitivisme dans les travaux et les postulats des artistes.Il traite finalement des problèmes liés à la parodie comme forme de critique culturelle et d\u2019intervention en puissance faisant référence au travail de General Idea et de SITE en particulier.Revolution can be avoided.Architecture or Revolution.(Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1927) Architecture is evolutionary as well as revolutionary.As an art it will acknowledge what is and what ought to be, the immediate and the speculative.(Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966) Architectural References was the title of an exhibition jointly organized by Vancouver architect Babs Shapiro and curator Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and held at the Vancouver Art Gallery during the weeks of April 30th through to June the 1st of this year.The mounting of the exhibition was an ambitious undertaking, though somewhat late if we consider the number of years it has been fashionable to present correspondences and dialogues of every manifest kind between recent art and architecture.Studio International started the ball rolling as far as art journals were concerned with their publication of a group of articles in a special issue for September/October 1975 under the lead title Architecture Art.And Germano Celant\u2019s exhibition Ambiente, held in Milan a few years ago, comes to mind as one of the more comprehensive exhibitions to deal with the relationships formed between art and architecture.However it was refreshing to have an attempt made by an architect to reveal certain consequences of the conjunction of attitudes within the recent theory and practice of these two disciplines.Architects are usually more adept at collecting art or debating the efficacy of work commissioned from artists to adorn the facades or courtyards of their buildings than in sustaining intelligent debates concerning the postmodern in art and architecture.In its final form the exhibition presented the work (drawings, plans, prints, photographic documentation, videotapes, films and one installation)1 of eight artists; Alice Aycock, Melvin Charney, the late Gordon Matta-Clark, Glenn Lewis, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Charles Simonds, Alan Sonfist and two groups; Toronto\u2019s General Idea and New York based SITE.2 References was an apt title, for with the exception of one installation by General Idea, all of the work was of a documentary or project nature.While not a major problem, in some ways this enriched and gave depth to the show; the predominance of drawings, plans and photographs mounted carefully behind plexiglass only served to heighten the \u2018white cube\u2019 modernist architecture of the VAG and to mystify the planning operations revealed in the works.And as much of the work shown attempts to challenge the priorities of the gallery or museum space, it was unfortunate that the residue had found its way back into the sanctified and hallowed barns that many of these artists have, at some time or another, attempted to reject, subordinate or change.The honesty and directness, the implicitly interventionist character of much of the work presented (Simonds, Charney, Matta-Clark, Sonfist, Aycock) was subverted by the gallery\u2019s expressed need to identify items categorically as art and perhaps by the artists\u2019 imperatives for making a living.The exhibition was accompanied by a fine catalogue printed on paper with a grid scale guide to approximate an architect\u2019s or designer\u2019s velum tracing pad and contained along with artists\u2019 statements, titles, media and dimensions of the works, a lengthy essay by Babs Shapiro outlining the themes and raison d\u2019être for the exhibition.Subtitled The Consequences of the Post-Modern in Contemporary Art and Architecture, the essay attempted to present some historical reasons for the production of the work and aimed at giving the reader a general understanding of the meanings associated with the term post-modernism in both visual art and architecture.However, the essay, to my mind, rarely arrived at consequences; where the reader is led to \u2018consequences\u2019 of a kind, these, upon inspection, invariably turn out to be value judgements, allusions or assumptions (sic) \u201cin their (the artists) references to the city historic and the development of its layered and natural forms, they lay bare the transient nature of the urban context.In their separate ways these artists attempt to inscribe a modern lexicon on the built environment.\u201d (Shapiro, p.5).5 One consequence which is hinted at in the essay and which could have withstood further analysis is the indication that the exhaustion of the theoretical premises upon which a modernist ideology was built has precipitated an impasse or lead to the demise of modernism, and, to quote the author: As a consequence a sense of displacement and longing for meaningful symbols and a true sense of place remains.It is in this present search for a potent metaphorical level that the dialogue between art and architecture coalesce (p.5).It is suggested that an overly liberal use of Ockham\u2019s razor in the production of modern architecture has led to the impoverishment and subsequent exhaustion of themes and forms in architecture and visual art.Modernism\u2019s emphasis on the practical function of buildings, and aesthetically on the aggrandized ideal of the technologically contemporary and indubitably \u2018modern project\u2019, has lead irrevocably to the death of architecture as art.Place is denied, complexity and meaningfulness all became subjected to the cutting edge of that Razor, Mies\u2019 dictum, which states \u2018less is more\u2019.While modernism promised and practiced an analytical cleansing of the salient and more objectionable feature of 19th century architecture \u2014 its eclecticism \u2014 it offered nothing but an engineered and functional sterility in its place.Modernism became in some senses ahistorical, anti-human and unnatural.Shapiro implies that a post-Bauhaus American purism has lead to the negation of artistic (architectural) freedom and to counter this an affirmation of place and an acknowledgement of history is required.Architects (and artists) must once again practise the \u2018and\u2019 instead of the reductionist \u2018either\u2019/\u2018or\u2019, or else total alienation will become the result.This sort of thinking is contained in Robert Venturi\u2019s theoretical and didactic critiques of Modernism in his publications Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (with D.Scott Brown and S.Izenour 1972).Acknowledging complexity and contradiction, one is giving priority to the interconnected event (history) over the evanescent moment (presentness); to affirm complexity and contradiction in art and architecture is to conter a high status on change, the natural and continuous, in short, life.Shapiro takes Venturi\u2019s ideas a little further than he would probably countenance.For her the antidote to modernist sterility and the incipient post-modernist \u2018angst\u2019 in architecture becomes the expression of the desire for the need for place as distinct from, and at the expense of, space.Gaston Bachelard\u2019s humantistic thesis The Poetics of Space3 is invoked several times in her essay: any proponent of the personal, the poetic, the primitive and the private space, which out of semantic necessity becomes place, looks particularly good in this context.Perhaps we can recognize these attitudes as two sides of a single coin, characterized in a little known, yet valuable essay published several years ago by Baruch Kirschenbaum under the title of Primitivism and Impossible Art.* Kirschenbaum\u2019s two sides of the coin are revealed in two attitudes adopted for dispelling the difficulties that civilization has wrought upon our individual and \u2018collective\u2019 psyches.These attitudes may be summed up in the term primitivism.For Kirschenbaum, interpreting many others on the subject, from Rousseau, Hobbes, to Boas and Robert Ardrey: Primitivism refers to an attitude of mind working from an imagined pre-cultural state uncontaminated by the ills of civilization.It arises out of the suspicion (even conviction depending on how bad things appear) that civilization has brought with it a progressive deterioration of the true state of being.(Kirschenbaum 1971 p.168).Accordingly we must strive forward in order to return.This is one aspect of millenialism.The past is perfect or at least from the vantage of the present, seems perfectible, while the future is viewed as being (potentially) imperfect.The past as seen thus, is idyllic; the kind of past where sheep and lions bed down together and happy families rule the day.The other side of this is that attitude which emphasizes the past as bestial, brutish; the childhood of history as hard, immoral and uncivilized; simply a Rousseauian as opposed to a Hobbesian world view.The first attitude Kirschenbaum characterizes as soft primitivism which is distinguished from its antithesis hard primitivism.Both attitudes can be allied to utopianism, with the hard attitude specifically expressing the desire to further \u2018civilize\u2019 through the encouragement of rapid scientific and technological advance.This is presumed to be the only way that we can transcend our bestial and immoral beginnings.The soft view insists that civilization itself is the problem and advancement, particularly in fields of scientific and technological expertise, can only hasten our demise.Inevitably the primitive and the post-modern are conjoined.But what is post-modernism?How often have we heard the \u2018post\u2019 in postmodernism used as if it were the \u2018post\u2019 in post-impressionism?What do we really mean when we assert that this work or that attitude is postmodernist?It is my contention that we cannot speak of post-modernism in the same manner as critics and historians have spoken of post-impressionism; while we may be dealing with certain morphological changes and gathering of attitudes and beliefs in the former (hence the much vaunted 70\u2019s pluralism), we are dealing with something altogether more specific in the latter.In post-impressionism we can discern changes in the production of work that are in part precipitated by a changed and expanded consciousness on the part of the producers of this work, a consciousness which reflects and reproduces synthetically changes in the artist\u2019s view and understanding of reality.These changes were predicated upon the belief that a more \u2018authentic\u2019, psychologically truthful, or scientifically more accurate approach to reality must be achieved, in contradistinction to the qualitatively less scientific and intuitionist approach with its residue of naturalist tendencies that characterizes the production of the impressionists.The \u2018post\u2019 of post-modernism, it seems to me, is the post of denial and is not the kind of post which is designated through a progressive and more \u2018enlightened\u2019 extension of the past.Shapiro\u2019s approach to the problems associated with the terminology is straightforward and unadorned, if somewhat naive; it is implicit in the chosen quote she uses to introduce her essay, a revealing statement from one of the residents of Le Corbusier\u2019s Pessac: \u201cWhat does my wife think?.well now.since my wife is a lecturer I\u2019ll answer your question under two separate headings: as an intellectual I suppose you\u2019d say, although the term is pedantic.she rates the house highly.not as highly as I do.but highly, though of course I\u2019m speaking at an intellectual level.\u201cAnd on the other level.?\u201d \u201cWell on the other level, I must admit that for the first two years she was not exactly enamoured of Le Corbusier.for reasons which were not directly connected with.well primarily on account of the heating and the badly fitting windows.the point of view of the mother.of the housewife.\u201d (p.4).Shapiro probably chose this quote to introduce her essay because it neatly encapsulates the ideal/material split; the antagonism between on the one hand the earthy pragmatist who experiences and feels beyond the theoretical purism of the structure and the \u2018ideal\u2019 spaces therein contained and confronts the real deficiencies and imperfections of the building as habitable place, and on the other, the intellectual who is concerned with the conceptual unity and aesthetic purity of the building and is prepared to overlook the problems the building has as habitable space.Utility, paradoxically the hallmark of Le Corbusier\u2019s machinist aesthetic, is pitted against the transcendent idealism (Kantian essentialism) implicit in the notions associated with pure form.The mother-housewife figure (the heart) is contesting the authority of the cool aestheticism of the architect (the mind), the seeker after the ideal solution to all problems, and in so seeking solutions to all, inevitably by-passes the small, the incidental but from the point of view of the post-modern humanist, the meaningful.Here is the old mind/ body duality and Shapiro capitalizes on this in her refutation (after Venturi) of modernism and its premises and in her quixotic championing of the artists exhibited.One can detect at the heart of this the rather simplistic and erroneous argument that post-modern is accorded \u2018feeling\u2019 and is subsequently more feminine while modernism is \u2018unfeeling\u2019 and more masculine.Feminine place becomes diametrically opposed to the masculine space; modernist formalism has given way to a post-modern humanism.How are the artists and their exhibited work referenced to all of this?On one level it is easy to uncover various forms of primitivism.It\u2019s there for instance in Charles Simond\u2019s work, his \u2018little people\u2019, their miniature handcrafted clay dwellings modelled in a fashion after the pueblo\u2019s \u2018primitive\u2019 yet highly specialized places of community.But the little people, the Lilliputians are nowhere to be found.When the little people get destroyed, people start to think.I\u2019ve often sensed the feeling of loss about the brutalization of that fragile fantasy which is emblematic of the lives they themselves lead, that sense of \u201cwell every time you try to do something around here, its always destroyed\u201d.(Artist\u2019s statement) 6 r -\"X Anne and Patrick Poirier, Project For a Text Witnout End, 1978, felt pen on paper, 79 x ÜUU cm, collection: the artists Melvin Charney, Streetwork 1, 1978, drawing, coloured pencil on velum, 60.96 x 91.44 cm.Collection Art Gallery of Ontario.Instead we dwell on what is left.the dwellings.Our interest is that of the detached observer/analyst, the archeologist rather than the (hypothetically) engaged anthropologist.There is little place for the political here, even when Simonds implies that acknowledging the \u2018destruction\u2019 of the past \u201cawakens and politicizes the consciousness\u201d (for the present)*.There are no little people to identify with \u2014 to get to know.We compromise and fantasize about the community: Gulliver is there, not in the aggrandized form of monopoly capitalism, nor as the colonial oppressor of the North American Indian, but in the presence of the artist, carefully building publicly his allegorical fantasy of what was, not what could be.As criticism it stops short of becoming active; that work, the real political work must for Simonds come after \u2014 the work done with the Lower East Side Coalition for Human Housing and other community groups the artist acknowledges having worked with.This is the real work of political engagement; the other, the work done in the streets, becomes a public act of retribution, an emblematic form of penance which of course all penance must become.Innocence is lost in all but the artist\u2019s evocation of lost innocence.His is the return of the innocent.Simonds is aware of the irony.He states clearly that his work is emblematic and implies that it is subject to some of the criticisms I have, in shorthand, employed.If it was the work of the naïf, we might regard it merely as a curiosity, but because the level of engagement is carried over into the real world of community meetings with the view to effect real change and not simply consciousness raising via the emblematic, Simonds work is vindicated.As he writes: The time I spend in meetings discussing the future possibilities for the community are anything but escapist and I don\u2019t differentiate this from my \u2018art\u2019 activitythere.It\u2019s all of one fabric.Anne and Patrick Poirier\u2019s work has been compared to Simonds\u2019 and the comparison is not unwarranted.Both types of work idealize and in some senses even mythologize the past.Both are utopian and counter-entropic gestures in the face of the negative influences of a technocratic futurism and corporate capitalism.But while Simonds mythologizes the past for the consciousness raising of the present, the Poiriers work more consciously within the French utopian socialist (Fourieriste) tradition, as this is expressed in the work of the postrevolutionary (1848) architects Ledoux and Le-queu.There are also reminders in their drawings of the fantastic architecture of Piranesi and Boul-lée, particularly the latter\u2019s unrealized yet still quintessential monument of the Enlightenment, the Project for a Cenotaph for Newton.The Poirier\u2019s Drawing for an Architecture (1978) is particularly interesting in this respect, for while it references its forms to the Boullée project, it becomes an exercise in the repudiation of Newtonian physics and intends instead to index its forms to a kind of \u2018post-Hegelian phenomenology of the spirit\u2019.The dialectics of inside/outside are explored through the basic (for them archetypal) forms of the circle, the sphere and the whirl.Inside and outside of which are managed different ways of circulation (stairs).These ways of circulation allow consciousness (body and mind) of the concepts used for the elaboration of this architecture.These concepts are the circle, the sphere and the whirl.The upper part of the construction is a circular tumulous outside and a cupola inside with a central oculous open to the sky.One can reach this oculous following the two exterior stairways going up to the top of the tumulous.When arrived one can see through the oculous the inside and underground part of the construction?Which is a circular little ampitheatre partly filled with water.Two spiralic and symmetrical stairs go down into the lower ground under the level of the water as a whirl.These in- 7 side spiralic stairs are connected to the outside stairs in a continuous endless curve.While entropy appears to be at work in the miniature work Assée (1979), cited as a model for an improbable Utopia, one doomed to fail, and their sketch plan for A Port in Ruin, (1978) their positive utopianism is revealed in an \u2018after the holocaust?\u2019 Plan for a Circular Utopia in the Desert, (1978) a city that turns in concentric rings around a central core or shaft.Spaces designed for theatrical spectacle are always lurking somewhere in the wings of their plans, but as they clearly state in their notes for A Complex of scenic spaces for the most part references (Piranesi, Ledoux and Boullée), the work often takes on the appearance of very \u2018literary\u2019 architectural pastiches.And while Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas cryptically divides all buildings into two main classes, \u2018Ducks\u2019 and \u2018Decorated Sheds\u2019, Aycock\u2019s Manichaean reductio ad absurdam for architecture becomes the attic and the cellar; two spaces that can provide stimuli for a wide variety of behavioural and psychological responses.In fact while these spaces in a work such as the Beginnings of a Complex (1976) seem habitable, the connecting spaces in between, ladders, pathways, windows and facade are Düfey .U8£8»« : kmvuswss> rwM *'33.Alan Sonfist, Time Landscape A Reconstruction of a Pre-Colonial Forest, 1965-78, New York City.'Ill LIT! ttlf till imi open (1978), these spaces are not designed for the professional actor but for the \u201caudience to invert, in which the public spectator becomes the actor in a spectacle which often escapes him.\u201d Alice Aycock\u2019s post-modern \u2018primitivism\u2019 is summed up in typical Venturian language as the \u201cvocabulary of disjunction\u201d.However, while Venturi\u2019s recognition of complexity and contradiction in architecture becomes both repudiation of modernism and humanistic (in Shapiro\u2019s terms) advocation, or better, evocation of place, Aycock\u2019s \u2018vocabulary\u2019 becomes a series of crude exercises in psychological conditioning.With its cabalistic engineering (the quoting of Borges) and fashionably eclectic indexing of forms (from Hollywood sets, industrial parks, military architecture (bunkers), to rural granaries and silos) and its art historical clearly uninhabitable unless one is in the habit of pole sitting.The cellar and the attic or platform (the beginning of an attic?) are \u2018home\u2019.Architecture takes on menacing and/or enveloping proportions; place becomes reduced to basic containers that have the capacity to \u2014 according to Aycock, and presumably depending on the character of the individual perceiver, \u2014 elicit certain behavioural responses, from claustrophobia, claustrophilia, to acrophobia and acrophilia.However, spaces do not, psychologically speaking, elicit these behaviours in people \u2014 they must be acrophobic or claustrophobic to begin with.They only recognize in these spaces their syndrome, caused presumably from some past (usually childhood) experience.In building her spaces then, Aycock may be dividing her perceivers into separate and identifiable classes of people, those who will go in \u2014 and those who will not.Alan Sonfist\u2019s major work exhibited was his Time Landscape (1965-78).His Landscape blueprints are accompanied by several crude drawings executed in the late sixties \u2014 projects, according to the artist, aimed at elevating the status of natural phenomena to \u2018Public Monument\u2019, as if this was not the case with \u2018Old Faithful\u2019, Niagara Falls or Mt St.Helens or any other well visited and documented natural phenomena in North America.This may indicate a \u2018ready-made\u2019 aesthetic operating, but Sonfist\u2019s method is somewhat different from this form of declaration, even though at times it may appear otherwise.His attempt is to elevate the changing states of natural phenomena (through time) as monument.It is an attempt to arrest the changing to stasis, and as such, becomes a curious form of environmental primitivism.His Time Landscape is perhaps the clearest example of his idea, an attempt to reproduce over the period of one hundred years the original fauna of a pre-colonial forest in Manhattan prior to the destructive power of urbanization.Sonfist was aided in the project by a commmunity planning board studded with professionals \u2014 an historian, a botanist, an architect, other artists and environmentalists and was assjsted financially with a grant from M.l.T.Sonfist\u2019s urge to monumentalize is a key element to understanding the work and estimating its worth.On one level the work represents a \u2018monumental gesture\u2019 against those who hold that putting value into land is attained by building on it, that valuable property (land) should not merely be used for growing plants or trees, especially if the plot is not large enough to be profitable from harvesting its crops.This is the work\u2019s value as intervention \u2014 \u201cwe can always do with some more green space around here.and.especially that which can be used for teaching purposes\u201d.On one other crucial level his is a nostalgic act of rememberance, a commemoration of the past by attempting to \u2018resurrect\u2019 that past.As he writes: As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs and natural outcroppings should be remembered.However, monuments of this kind \u2014 memorials \u2014 by their very nature record the passing and not necessarily the quality of life or activity prior to death.Monuments have the ability to endure, to remain, in a sense, alive.Sonfist\u2019s real concern is with mythologizing; myths continue to live and change.We must remember that Sonfist in an earlier project proposed to donate his body, upon death, to the Museum of Modern Art.Perhaps this is the real key to his urge to monumentalize, to ensure that his work will live on after him.His quest is that of the personal mythologist, providing his own memorial (monument) in his monuments.This is a concern that most artists share, and most less openly; yet what better way to enshrine oneself in history and exercise (without the resources of a Rockefeller) one\u2019s \u2018philanthropic\u2019 concerns?Glen Lewis\u2019s work seems to evince less of an interest in the machination of an entropie sub- 8 msssssarw !¦! -A ' * ^\u2022i Ï **®|©fcSc 'if* /,¦ ' ' \u2022\u2022> -v Glenn Lewis, Survival Paradise I Hadrian's Vilia 1976/79, Silkscreen, 75,5 x 56.6 cm *222*