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Thomas Schutte at Marian Goodman

Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Eleanor Heartney

What are the minimum requirements of a home equipped for bare-bones living? This seems to be the question raised by Thomas Schutte's exhibition of "One Man Houses." With Schutte, however, one suspects that there are other, larger issues waiting in the wings. The title raises the question, only for men? And will there also be a series of "One Woman Houses"? Is this a vision of a society composed of atomized and solitary males?

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The front room presented a series of five house models (2004-05), created from birch, colored Plexiglas and other materials, which offered variations of rectangular and cylindrical forms. Cutaway sides reveal the interior arrangements of staircases, loft areas and furniture. Realized at a scale of 1:5 and perched on packing crates, they suggested a group of old-fashioned box cameras. A smaller viewing room contained a single, larger model, the progenitor of the five permutations, while the back gallery held colorful lamps of clear Plexi and colored paper, and full-scale examples of the furniture that appears in the birch models, made from dark wood hollow-core doors and ornamented with regular perforations. The furnishings are available in editions of 12; the houses can be commissioned for full-scale realization.

Schutte's model dwellings--which embody a longstanding interest in functional design that was first expressed in his work in the early 1980s--are compact and practical, but not constricting: they open out and up. In one instance, the cylindrical element becomes a basement or foundation; in another, it's a skylight; in yet another, it creates a portal-like window on the side. These homes bear a certain kinship to the "machines for living" created by Andrea Zittel, but without that artist's ingenuity and whimsy, perhaps because they have fewer self-imposed restrictions. This may be attributable to Schutte lacking Zittel's experience of trying to make a viable living space out of one of New York's tiny studio apartments.

Nor are the models utopian, in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright's "Usonian" houses, another close kin. Wright's 1930s designs feature prefab elements and inexpensive materials (the furnishings, also designed by Wright, were to be created out of plywood) so that the residences would be affordable at the then-reasonable price of $5,000. According to the gallery, Schutte's houses are priced to be "accessible," though they are clearly not directed at the conventional buyer.

The "One Man Houses" pay homage of a sort to modernism, and to other tastes as well. The furniture recalls the simplified, geometric designs of Wright, Josef Hoffmann and Gerrit Rietveld. However, the dark wood out of which they are made, as well as the gallery's flower-stenciled walls, look back to Victorian precursors. The lamps, by contrast, have a more postmodern flavor, with their curved planes held in place by metal rods. And the ceramic vases, in clunky shapes and covered with a metallic surface, violate modernist strictures about truth to materials. None of this, it must be said, looks particularly inviting or comfortable.

With these "One Man Houses," Schutte continues his peculiar dance between the affirmation and critique of modernist ideals. It is possible to envision living in these units, but it is not clear if one would really want to.

Thomas Schutte at Marian Goodman

Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Eleanor Heartney

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