Review - Book - Art and Architecture: A Place Between

BOOK
By Richard Williams

Art and Architecture: A Place Between.
By Jane Rendell.
I B Tauris, 2006.
£18.99

This is a survey of a wide range of contemporary events, installations and interventions, assembled under the rubric of ‘critical spatial practice’. Its theoretical reference points include Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, familiar to a generation of architecture students, but also the urban geographers David Harvey and Doreen Massey, and the art critic Rosalind Krauss. The cover recommendation comes from Rosalyn Deutsche, whose excellent book Evictions (AJ 02.10.97) was perhaps the first large-scale account of the topic.

Compared to Deutsche’s book, Jane Rendell’s is broader in scope and less episodic. It’s admirably clear throughout. The account of Benjamin is exemplary, while her discussions of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin, Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, and Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette, Paris, are detailed and persuasive. The book covers many less-well-known cases too – for example, a 1999 group show, ‘In the Midst of Things’, which took place in the model village of Bournville, replete with purple fountains and cabbages grown in chocolate.

But the book’s breadth can be a weakness: a lot of the work Rendell describes is dull, or worse. I thought Sophie Calle’s intervention at London’s Freud Museum in 1999 – her wedding dress laid on his couch, her wig on a table in the hall – was trite and pretentious. The account of Lacaton and Vassal stripping out the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to create an ‘architecture of omission’ is worthy of Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye. If these were ‘critical spatial practices’, to use Rendell’s terminology, then the critique was apparent only to their authors.

I blame Robert Smithson. Probably the most overrated artist of his generation, he has been the subject of a most effective posthumous marketing campaign, which holds large parts of the art world in its thrall. In 1968 he came up with his ‘site/nonsite dialectic’, a blurb exhibited alongside some recent sculpture. Few critics thought much of it at the time, but for Rendell it underpins her notion of ‘criticality’.

Unfortunately, Smithson’s key work, the Spiral Jetty (1970), is about as ‘critical’ as a Mercedes-Benz. Rendell’s picture of it isn’t any of the official views, but an aerial shot by the artists Cornford and Cross from 2002. This is presumably because Smithson’s estate treats the jetty as a cash cow, charging exorbitantly for photo-reproduction rights. There’s no criticality here, just an example of the art world making a killing.

Some openness about that and other material questions would have been welcome. I’d like to have known more too of the consumption of these works – the views of those who live with them, willingly or otherwise. The book reads very well overall, and is one of the few useful route maps to this burgeoning area of practice, but there’s a little too much that’s like art-world PR.

Richard Williams teaches at the University of Edinburgh