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

Similarly Bad Press from the "Dissident Housework" series (1993-98), the first work visitors to "Scanning" confronted as they stepped off the Whitney's elevators, suffered somewhat from its elaborately refined esthetic in service of a simple point. An array of men's white dress shirts, custom-ironed into complex shapes (variously reminiscent of flowers, labia, origami animals ...), was displayed in a glass case as a huge video projection showed one of these shirts being worn by a model. While intending to critique programs of domestic efficiency through an almost hysterical exaggeration of the rationalized disciplines of housework, Bad Press could also seem closer to a fashion display than to the sort of analysis its creators had in mind.

A continuing theme in Diller Scofidio's production has been the role of "spectacle" in contemporary culture. This includes a significant body of works dealing with tourism, that most commodified form of travel tellingly known as "sightseeing." Tourisms: suitcase Studies (1991) was a physically imposing mixed-medium installation that had a large gallery to itself: 50 suitcases, one for each state in the union, were suspended from a plywood ceiling by elaborate steel armatures. Each suitcase was displayed open and contained a postcard from a tourist site in the given state (Kentucky, for example, was represented by the Perryville Battlefield), a small object that echoed the theme of the postcard (in this case, lead models of Civil War cavalry and artillery pieces), and an etched mirror that featured a map of the site in question and also allowed one to see both sides of the postcard.

In a neat hand, each postcard was inscribed with a ten satirizing the banality of the genre: "The travel itinerary. The remark to elicit envy. Meal comments," reads a typical example. No texts referred specifically to a site, only to the well-established conventions associated with this form of travel. The interchangeability of the texts seems to imply the interchangeability of places--in fact, all the sites chosen for the work are either famous bedrooms or battlefields, places where someone well-known slept or where someone anonymous died--in the construction of a particular national mythology of "great" men and events. The installation seems to suggest that the tourist industry has constructed a paradoxical veneer of sameness over the most diverse of heritages, reducing history to a repetitive spectacle of barren fields and empty rooms. That this work, like Master/Slave, manages to convey its critique through humor rather than pedantry (particularly in the absurdity of the standardized postcard notes, which ring all too true) is only to Diller Scofidio's credit.

On a global level, a similar point regarding repetition is made by Interclone Hotel (1997), a slide projection that satirizes the standardized spaces of international travel Each hotel, located in a different city of the "developing" world, is represented by a room that is indistinguishable from the others except for a gloss of local color. In contrast to Tourisms, with its careful--even obsessive--documentation of prosaic attractions, Interclone Hotel seems glib hi its curt dismissal of the spaces of what has come to be known as globalization; here the humor effectively wielded in other works falls flat. The cities, such as Ho Chi Minh City or Bangalore, in which the "clone" hotels are situated are significantly more heterogeneous than Diller Scofidio want to let on, even if we are willing to reduce them to their international hotel chains. Of course, near-identical modernist hotels have proliferated in cities across the spectrum of "emerging nations," and each might strain to be a simulacrum of the successful Western formula, but the social relations embedded in those structures are not nearly as simple as their interior architectures might suggest. Here a peek behind the curtain of "spectacle" might have been a more effective and convincing mode of analysis. (4)