Superstudio: Pratt Manhattan Gallery/Artists Space/Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Felicity Scott

Storefront for Art and Architecture restaged The Twelve Ideal Cities, a 1972 dual-screen slide projection based on a series of illustrated parables that appeared a year before in Architectural Design. At Storefront, as in the original presentation, a voice-over narrative was transmitted through portable transistor radios. The series shows twelve dystopic accounts of the extreme rationalization of industrial city-machines and their coupling with postindustrial cybernetic servomechanisms. These macabre "ideal cities" point to architecture's willing participation in consumerism, planned obsolescence, social and spatial hierarchies, ideological conditioning, environmental exploitation, late-capitalist expansion, and so on. The citizens are wired into "electronic analysers," "tele-pantograph" suits, and other cybernetic systems that program their thoughts while serving their every need. Depleted of all agency, they remain resolutely trapped in endless cycles of meaningless existence, unable to question or rebel. When they initially appeared in Architectural Design (a copy of which was on display), Frassinelli's "premonitions for the mystical rebirth of urbanism" were legible as sinister allegories of actual cities, an ambition confirmed by the delightfully dark accompanying readers' questionnaire. Although the slides that appeared on the left side of the dual-screen projection at Storefront were familiar from their original publication and related lithographs, the images that appeared on the right-hand screen--only a few of which have been reproduced elsewhere--reveal the work's subtext. Images of military control rooms, television, businessmen, the White House, and the Vatican point to relations between the "ideal" cities' power and control networks and contemporary technological, political, and ideological structures.

Beyond the current widespread interest in this period of experimental practice among architects and artists, Superstudio's work is ripe for revisiting to other ends. It offers a compelling demonstration of collaborative relations between conceptual architectural work and alternative art spaces in which architecture does not retreat to other sites and media, or even to contiguous disciplines such as art or film, but rather forges modes of engagement with the political. A sort of double passage occurs whereby the domain of art is adopted, in the first move, as a space of critical reflection, a space in which the architects acted with "serene indifference" to develop "unbalancing" strategies with which to battle the system of superproduction and superconsumption. Returning to the domain of architecture, "criticism becomes action," while socioeconomic forces deform strategies derived from art. Although premised on an untenable idealization of both art's autonomy and architecture's proximity to life, a critical notion of utopia nevertheless emerges from this difficult encounter.

Superstudio's polemics resonate powerfully in a contemporary era characterized, on the one hand, by ever-expanding networks of cybernetic and information technologies and their increasing penetration of the bodily and architectural realms, and, on the other hand, by a perpetual state of warfare that remains seemingly inextricable from the economic and territorial logic of the United States military-industrial complex. Although the curators play down the work's political aspects, preferring its playful lyrical quality, its political side still speaks loudly. For instance, a 1968 poster presented at Artists Space serves less as a lingering premonition than as a call to historical memory. As the war in Vietnam was escalating, Superstudio depicted itself in characteristic rock-group lineup in front of a pyramid, above which was an apparently innocuous holiday greeting. The dark background suggests dusk, and over their heads flies an owl. For Hegel, famously, the owl of Minerva (goddess of wisdom who demonstrated skill in the arts of life) spread its wings at dusk. Able to understand reality only after the event, philosophy, according to Hegel, was not meant to prescribe how the world ought to be. Similarly, the poster reminds us that architecture has a slightly different, if equally troubled, relation to the present: It continues to be haunted by utopian convictions. Once again, "Superstudio Wishes you a Year of Wisdom and Peace."