Against Erection
11 September - 12 October
While the works in this exhibit vary greatly in form and intention, they at least fragmentally share an implicit negative relation to architecture, whether through resentment, anxiety or disgust. Architecture in this context isn't meant to signify the designs of buildings but the authoritarian erection of structure. These negative relations have something to do with the lack of consent that is ever given to the formations of the environments we exist in that shape and imprint upon us psychically, physically, sexually, spiritually.
Much of George Bataille's writing was aimed at beheading the governing moral logic of his day at this point of a state imposed structural regulation of experience. Acephala, the headless symbolic figure that he and his associates chose to symbolize their political intentions with, indicated that he wasn't simply seeking to replace what he was against with a new state form. It's significant to consider that in his youth he was once a member of a Benedictine seminary and then studied to become a librarian with a focus on Medieval texts. Churches and academy libraries may seem like strange breeding grounds for anarchists, but it's less a coincidence and more of a resume of his displacement, just as many of the most prolific arsonists learned their craft while working as firefighters.
Traditions hoping to elude politically imposed determination, have often tended to find their inspiration in ruins. But over centuries, the drive to escape the bondage of historical logic has cumulatively forged its own kind of bizarre, nostalgic conservatism. Romantic architecture ought to be a contradiction, but an umbilical cord can only be cut once before it becomes a metaphor.
The bureaucratic management of a systems imprint on its subjects, can be gauged not only by a subject's conscious internalization of it, but also by what it has displaced from them. What the subjects externalize in response to their inevitable anatomical and psychological conformities. Not unlike the missing area of a half eaten apple can act as a forensic site. Such lacunae occasionally display what had been unconsciously internalized, as well., like an invisible graffiti.
Arguably, a psychotic break isn't necessarily a fracture from reality so much as a hyperliteral identification with architecture. If one is adverse to the illustrative bureaucracy of data, perhaps the performative mimicry of a psychotic break is the closest way that one can convincingly "draw from life".
It's a perverse, if familiar, scenario to feel driven to be adopted by a structure one would also wish to see demolished.
- James Krone