PERFORMANCE:Bodybuilding

Architecture, in its emphasis on permanence and stability, at first resists an easy pairing with live performance, commonly associated with ideas of ephemerality and elusiveness. But, beyond the surface differences, architecture and performance share a core concern: the interplay of bodies and space. Traditional narratives around this relationship generally focus on the legacy of the early 20th century avant-garde, as well as 1960s and 1970s utopian projects coming out of “radical architecture”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Performa Archive

Performa presents “Bodybuilding” a free online exhibition that examines the use of live performance by architects and charts a multigenerational lineage of designers and studios who have made architecture out of actions.The central question of “Bodybuilding” is: What happens when performance enters the world of architecture? For architects, performance can be a method for designing, a tool to transform users’ experiences, or an instrument of critique. In every case, performance is a blade that cuts into the matter of architecture. It slashes architecture open, but it can also reshape it. “Bodybuilding” is a 24-hour online program accessible for free on Performa’s homepage (performa-arts.org). Most works in the exhibition will screen once daily, while one Performa Commission from the organization’s archives and two rarely seen feature-length films will screen at dedicated times. The exhibition is dedicated to Germano Celant, who coined the phrase “radical architecture” in 1972 for the catalogue of MoMA’s landmark exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”. His analysis, which solidified burgeoning conceptual strategies of a new generation of architects, remains a touchstone today for the questions of space, performance, and responsibilities of the architect that animate Bodybuilding. Featuring the work of more than three dozen architects, “Bodybuilding” examines the use of live performance by architects of the 20^th and 21^st  Centuries who propose radical new approaches to the theory and practice of architecture. Looking beyond the unbuilt, utopian projects of the early modernists or the postwar avant-garde, the exhibition delves into real works of architecture that draw on performance, from the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

The architect Bernard Tschumi, in a 2015 interview, offered a useful distinction between architecture and performance on the ontological level. For Tschumi, the former is a “field” while the latter is something else.  He categorically refuses to consider performance art as a discipline, considering it instead a “form of questioning disciplinary boundaries. “Bodybuilding”, treat performance not as a standalone discipline but as a tool to  help architects accomplish a task, collect information, or disrupt a situation, sometimes more effectively than a drawing, 3D rendering, or model. More significantly, the tool of performance can serve as a heuristic device, allowing architects and collectives to probe the limits of the discipline, to learn, to solve problems.

It’s May 2018. We’re in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice. It’s opening week of this year’s architecture biennial, and a line has formed outside the Dutch pavilion: a typical late De Stijl structure, built in 1953. Inside the pavilion, the Princeton University architecture professor Beatriz  Colomina is lounging on a large bed in her pajamas. She has converted this out-let for national cultural promotion into a remake of an Amsterdam hotel room, where almost fifty years earlier John Lennon and Yoko Ono had staged their “Bed-In for Peace”. In this readymade of flower-power celebrity activism, Colomina has  invited  guests as Madelon Vriesendorp (cofounder of Rotterdam’s Office for  Metropolitan Architecture) and Hans Ulrich Obrist to join her in bed and chat about the fate of architecture today. She is channeling the by-now iconic imagery of John and Yoko in the Amsterdam Hilton as the  starting point for her own thesis: the bed, which went from private to public in the late 1960s, has now become a prime site of work, the locus of our conflation of labor and leisure. In the 21st century, a performance of this kind is just another way  to address architecture, as valid as a model, a review, or a rendering.

The exhibition includes works by: Ant Farm, Basurama + Area Ciega, Ricardo Bofill, Cooking Sections, Coop Himmelblau, Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, Didier Fiúza Faustino, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, Haus-Rucker-Co, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki and Associates, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Francis Kéré and Christoph Schlingensief, Ugo La Pietra, Moore Grover Harper, New Affiliates, NLÉ, OMA, Gaetano Pesce, Julieanna Preston, raumlabor, Jimmy Robert, Bryony Roberts and Mabel O. Wilson with the Marching Cobras of New York, Aldo Rossi, Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, SO – IL with Anna Prvački, Bernard Tschumi, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, and Wolff Architects.

Info: Curators: Charles Aubin and Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Duration: 15/5-15/7/20, www.performa-arts.org