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Abstract
In 1970, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City hosted the exhibition Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE!, a mid-career retrospective of the Viennese architectural collective. Most historians have studied the range of design works created by the trio—and featured in the exhibition—alongside contemporaneous architects’ concerns with sci-fi fantasy; temporary, inflatable structures; and countercultural liberation. While not ignoring the emancipatory potential of these works, this essay focuses primarily on the set of performative actions Haus-Rucker-Co staged within the museum during the run of the exhibition, including: their decision to live within the museum galleries, the hosting of weekly meals in the exhibition space, and the ritual devouring of a scale model of the museum made out of cake. Taken together, these acts foreground a sense of sociality and community that counters the museum’s standard emphasis on individualized aesthetic absorption.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
Notes
1 The three-person group was founded in 1967 in Vienna. In 1970, the group moved to Düsseldorf and also opened a separate office in New York City. In 1971, they added Manfred Ortner to their ranks, and in 1972, Caroll Michels joined them.
2 See especially the catalog to the exhibition at Berlin’s Haus am Waldsee: Katja Blomberg, ed., Haus-Rucker-Co (Berlin: Haus am Waldsee, 2015).
3 Statement from Paul J. Smith included in the Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE! exhibition files at the Archives of The Americans Crafts Council, n.d.
4 See The American Crafts Council, Contemplation Environments (New York: Museum of Contemporary Crafts, 1970). In all, sixteen artists or artist groups participated in the exhibition. Among them were USCO, Wendell Castle, Ugo La Pietra, Neke Carson, and Alexandra Kasuba.
5 The American Crafts Council, Contemplation Environments.
6 Günter Zamp Kelp, “Wind, Foam, Sense of Space,” in Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE Again, ed. Andrea Bina (Linz: Lentos Kunstmuseum, 2007), 33.
7 Undated exhibition statement, written by Alfred Schmeller and translated by Haus-Rucker-Co, in the exhibition files of Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE! in the archives of The American Crafts Council.
8 Schmeller, undated exhibition statement.
9 Schmeller, undated exhibition statement.
10 Esther Choi, “Atmospheres of Institutional Critique,” in Hippie Modernism, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2015): 31–43.
11 Laurids Ortner, “On New Space,” in Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE Again, ed. Bina, 26.
12 Günter Zamp Kelp detailed the group’s goals for the Environment Transformer series at a public lecture at the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture on November 26, 2015. This coincided with the opening of the Walker Art Center’s exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia.
13 Kelp, “Wind, Foam, Sense of Space,” 33.
14 For an insightful look into the ways in which the design of museum spaces has morphed over time to enhance detached absorption, see Carol Duncan’s crucial “The Art Museum as Ritual,” in Civilizing Rituals (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7–20.
15 Schmeller, undated exhibition statement.
16 Schmeller, undated exhibition statement.
17 Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” in Architecture Culture 1943–1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, 1993), 375. Originally published in Art in America 53, no. 2 (April 1965): 109–18.
18 This stipulation is foregrounded in all contracts between Haus-Rucker-Co and the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in the exhibition records for Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE!
19 Klaus Pinter, “Out of Balance,” in Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE Again, ed. Bina, 40.
20 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 16–30.
21 Smith, statement, Archives of The Americans Crafts Council.
22 See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Art in Theory, 1900–2000, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 132–36.
23 It bears mentioning that the sort of “public” or “commons” that was created through the exhibition was still quite narrow in terms of its socio-economic and racial diversity. The audience for such (neo-)avant-garde exhibitions was, and remains, circumscribed by class distinctions.
24 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).
25 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79; Christopher Tradowsky, “The Office of Blame Accountability and Art against Ressentiment,” Art Journal 24, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 24–43.
26 For more on the global proliferation of the supposedly neutral “white cube” and its ideology, see Elena Filipovic, “The Global White Cube,” in The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthalle, 2010), 322–45.
27 See Okwui Enwezor, ed., Documenta 11_Platform 5 (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002).
28 David Joselit, “Conceptual Art 2.0,” in Contemporary Art, eds. Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 159–68.
29 See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 15–16. Here, Bourriaud refers specifically to Marx’s notion of a social “interstice” that might operate outside capitalist forms of exchange.
30 The most eloquent evocation of this argument remains Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The International Style Twenty Years After,” in Architecture Culture 1943–1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, 1993): 137–48.
31 For more on Hyde’s conception of the commons and the “right of action,” see his Common as Air (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), especially 23–44.
32 Joselit, “Conceptual Art 2.0,” 165.
33 By invoking antagonism and agonism, it is important to note my debt both to Claire Bishop’s theorizing of antagonism in the essay cited previously as well as Chantal Mouffe’s important Agonistics (London: Verso, 2013).
34 Stavros Stavrides, in An Architektur, “On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides,” e-flux journal 17 (June–August 2010), 7.
35 For select documentation of the event, see Haus-Rucker-Co, “Haus-Rucker-Co’s Vanilla Future,” Design Quarterly 78–79 (1970): 29–33.
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Ross Elfline
Ross Elfline teaches at Carleton College and his research focuses on the histories and theories of art and architecture since 1945, with a special emphasis on conceptual practices in the 1960s and 1970s. He has published widely on Radical Architecture in Italy, Austria, Britain, and America in the 1960s and 1970s, including a series of essays on the Italian architecture collective, Superstudio. He is currently at work on a book that considers the intersection of architecture and performance ca. 1970. His additional research interests include the history and theory of the neo-avant-garde; sound art; and post-structuralist, feminist, and queer theories.