Content provided in partnership with

Diller + Scofidio: critical structures: a recent Whitney Museum show featured installations, models and projections by this New York architecture team at a significant moment, as they move from art-based cultural critique into their first major commissions for museum buildings - Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio - Critical Essay

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Tom McDonough

Since their collaboration began in 1979, the New York wife-and-husband team of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio has blended architecture, stage design and the visual arts into an array of visionary frameworks that escape the traditional divisions between these disciplines. Most often taking the form of temporary installations intended for museums, public sites or theaters, their projects address a wide variety of issues. They frequently make use of multimedia technologies that, linked to various physical structures, combine real time and virtual time and confront the way that media culture privileges the transmission and the telecast, with the mediated coming to eclipse the directly experienced.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

Presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, "Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio"--organized by adjunct curator of architecture K. Michael Hays along with Aaron Betsky, the American director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute--was the first major U.S. museum retrospective of the team's production. It took place at a crucial moment of transformation in their careers, as they move from a practice primarily sited within the art world to one that increasingly produces traditional (relatively speaking) architectural objects. The exhibition thereby offered an opportunity to review one of the most provocative architectural practices of the moment as well as to analyze the shifting terrain of critical thought shared by art and design.

"Scanning" accordingly consisted of a mixture, of installations, objects and architectural models distributed throughout the Whitney's fourth-floor galleries. Although billed as a retrospective, this overview was by no means comprehensive--it was heavily weighted in favor of what we might call Diller + Scofidio's conceptual production over their architectural projects, and it rejected a chronological organization (which might have permitted a better understanding of the evolution of the team's practice) in favor of a loosely thematic one. Visitors wandered among works that examined cultural homogenization, the sites of tourism, built spaces and visuality, and, finally, a range of forms of surveillance--although these categories should be taken as structuring the exhibition in only the broadest terms.

Physically joining many of the discrete spaces was the only work designed specially for the exhibition, a kinetic piece whose title, Mural, referred both to its being literally "of the wall" and to the resulting "art work" that was, itself, a kind of anti-mural. It consisted of a robotic drill mounted on a track and programmed to randomly pierce the gallery walls as it moved from room to room. The frequent whining of the drill was a backdrop to any visit to the show. The piece served as concrete metaphor for Diller + Scofidio's larger project: a demonstration that architecture need not be concerned only with the Vitruvian principles of commodity, firmness and delight, but that it might serve, as Betsky writes, as a critical tool of reflection on those various rituals which "make up a world that may be our daily reality, but that goes unnoticed." (1)

Conceptual Architectures

Master/Slave (1999), a captivating installation created for an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier's headquarters in Paris, (2) is in a sense paradigmatic of much of Diller + Scofidio's output over the past two decades and was perhaps the most effective work in the Whitney show. Installed in a large gallery all to itself, it consists of a massive, 36-by-36-foot glass-and-steel vitrine whose 2-foot-high display case is raised to about eye level and lit uniformly from within by a ceiling of fluorescent tubes set behind translucent plastic panels. Inside this stark modernist environment, dozens of toy robots circulate on a conveyor belt making an endlessly repeated loop. All the while, tiny surveillance cameras film this movement, which is shown on nearby video monitors. At regular intervals, a robot drops below eye level and passes through an X-ray scanner that allows us to glimpse its inner workings. On one hand, the appeal of Master/Slave is straightforward, even simple: as a serf-contained environment whose operation remains somewhat mysterious, it sustains the same childlike fascination as, say, a model railroad. And the toy robots themselves are absorbing, all of them vintage artifacts of Cold War childhood and many recognizable, from Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet fame to R2D2 and C3PO.

On the other hand, as the work's title suggests, rapt fascination and delight are not the only modes through which Master/Slave is experienced. Diller + Scofidio seem instead to call attention to certain implicit relations of power embedded in contemporary society and its architectural settings. The installation's isomorphic architecture recalls several types of real-world spaces, whether factory floor, corporate and government office or airport, where a relationship of those who command and those who labor may be said to pertain. In other words, Master/Slave becomes an allegory of certain structures of what the curators call "surveillance and bureaucratic monotony." (3) The slave, the laborer-as-thing, has been replaced by the robot, a mechanical worker that can never hope to become self-conscious through the process of its labor and thus can never rebel. This is, of course, a particular bourgeois fantasy, guaranteeing as it does the eternal rule of the "masters" of society.

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Tom McDonough

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts