A parallax practice: a conversation with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio

Patricia C. Phillips: I think it would be interesting to begin by discussing your recent exhibition, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio at the Whitney Museum of American Art in spring 2003. I imagine that it was a fascinating challenge for you and an important opportunity for viewers to encounter for the first time or reexamine and reconsider the many dimensions of your practice. In its aftermath, perhaps having had some time for reflection, what did you learn from this process and experience of planning a retrospective? You undoubtedly considered afresh your extensive body of work. Do you feel that you made new discoveries or gleaned unexpected insights on your own practice, its development and future?

Elizabeth Diller: The notion of looking back and assembling a body of work was antithetical to the work itself. The work doesn't cohere into a body. We decided right away that the project was to embody this problem.

Phillips: So the problematic genre of the retrospective exhibition became a subject of inquiry right from the beginning.

Diller: Exactly. We had to put together a bodiless body. It was inevitable that once we brought together many discrete, site-specific works, a supernarrative would form. We had the choice to help write that narrative or to try to make legibility impossible. The first strategy would question the need for spatial separation between works. The second would reinforce the need. As architects, the natural place to start was rethinking the role of the white wall and its alleged neutrality. We ultimately subdivided the fourth floor of the Whitney into galleries, one discrete space per work and systematically, over the duration of the exhibition, destroyed that separation with the roaming and errant robotic drill (Mural, 2003.)

Phillips: You had to find a way to articulate, exploit, and represent the ambivalence you felt, as well as the inherent tensions or contradictions in this kind of exhibition project.

Ricardo Scofidio: It was a difficult process, in part, because we were working with two strong curators who had their own stories to tell about our work.

Phillips: K. Michael Hayes, adjunct curator of architecture at the Whitney, and Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, organized the exhibition. Had they ever worked together?

Scofidio: No, I don't think so. Aaron Betsky had hoped to inaugurate the exhibition at the MoMA San Francisco, but left to accept the position in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Michael Hayes was relatively new to the Whitney and was launching its architectural program. It was fortuitous they came together around our work.

Phillips: I know this request to critique the retrospective may be premature. You undoubtedly feel that you are still in recovery!

Diller: We continue to reflect on the show and our behavior. Even though we knew the retrospective was to be curated by Hayes and Betsky, our impulse was to make it into a self-reflexive project and thus to curate the show ourselves.

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Phillips: Given your process, this is very natural. It was a project in which you had fully engaged the subject matter--or the problem, as you suggest.

Diller: It became very clear that the curators had a different motive. I guess it is not surprising. They were thinking about how to present us: as architects, artists-architects, or architects who are artists. The question had to be decided: was this an exhibition of the creative productions of architects aimed at introducing an art audience to a less familiar shade of architectural production, or an installation in and of itself? Ultimately, it was both.

Scofidio: During the past few years we have expanded our interests to built architecture. Was it better to focus on this newer work or should the show reflect a range that included our earlier practice? The only certainty I felt was that the old work felt mummified and the new work needed exposure.

Phillips: The retrospective is often a process of reification. It crystallizes--materializes--a history of a practice. I think it is often a contradictory or conflicting experience for living artists and architects.

Scofidio: Yes. Some critical reviews failed to acknowledge the age or chronology of the work. It was not just current work.

Phillips: Clearly not. I think I first saw Tourisms: suitCase Studies in 1991. In many ways, it remains very fresh for me, but it is one of your older projects. It is important to contextualize this and other work.

Diller: It is interesting that architecture critics generally wrote favorably on the show, yet several art reviews were highly critical. It seemed to demonstrate the continued endurance of disciplinary boundaries.

I wish we could go back and revisit how the exhibition was packaged. The curators strongly identified us as border crossers between art and architecture. For us, however, the work is always processed through an architectural filter. Of course, many of our earlier works were without regulatory, budgetary, and programmatic constraints typically associated with architecture. And we used an array of media and dwelled on seemingly extra-architectural themes such as tourism, globalization, conventions of domesticity, and visuality, but the work has always been about space.