Follies and Falsities: Architectural Photography

SUPERMODEL, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA, January 15-June 5, 2000.

Next to Robert Rauschenberg's Two Furlong Piece and along side the largest gallery in the United States there is a small room with one glass wall containing a glass door. In the context of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA), it is a broom closet. One Saturday last May I tried to enter this room but the door was locked. After a few inquiries, a security guard appeared and opened it up for me--apparently an oversight since the building was open that morning. A local of a certain age, the security guard could have been one of the six thousand workers laid off by Sprague Electric when its 750,000 square foot factory closed in 1984, leaving a void now filled by MassMoCA; several former employees are currently working for the new tenant.

The tiny room is a gallery, the site of SUPERMODEL, an exhibition of architectural photography broadly construed. Eschewing the conventional documentary tradition of representing the built environment, the exhibition takes for its subject the photographic dissolution of perceived reality. The effect in most cases is the transformation of images of anything-but-building into seeming-building. Bernard Voïta contrives reality by perspectival sleight-of-hand, turning quotidian domestic objects like Scotch tape dispensers into monumental architecture, generic Modernist product design becoming generic Modernist architecture. Martin Dörbaum creates 3-D computer drawings (not, it should be noted, CAD-based architectural rendering) and by means of a device which transforms binary code into structured light intensities, prints them directly on Polaroids, that one-time epitome of the authentic snap-shot. Oliver Boberg (yes, more than half the artists in this show are German) photographs models which are composites of the vacant detritus of Wirtshaftswunder architecture on the working-class rim of Nürnberg.

Although several artists do photograph "authentic" buildings, even these buildings disclose only deceit. Alexander Timtschenko depicts the Las Vegas recreation of the monuments of Paris, with a highway in the foreground. Miles Coolidge makes images of Safetyville, a one-third scale town built in California in the 1970s, that contains a Denny's, strip malls, and office buildings, entirely bereft of human life. Yet these documents of actual locations seem more fraudulent than the virtual buildings represented in the work of those artists whose material is unbuilt. In Timtschenko's Paris II, the photograph of a real city looks like a collage--the Eiffel Tower and a Parisian palace superimposed on a picture of the outskirts of a generic American city. Coolidge's works resemble a computer rendering of the kind of three-story smoked-glass office buildings that line American cities' ring roads.

Thus the curatorial focus could be said to be the epistemology of photography; the extent to which "photographs remind us that photography is not a record of reality," according to the museum. The curator of the show was Elizabeth Mangini. Ever since Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" critics have argued the case against artistic originality and authenticity; first in response to the infinitely reproducible photograph and recently due to the ease with which any record of reality can be altered, falsified, or constructed from scratch by means of digital technology. In many cases during this time the artist was prosecuting the case against originality and claims of authorship--in particular, the constructed photographs of Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine in the 1970s and, later, the scaled-down miniatures of Laurie Simmons. Emblematic of this kind of work is Miriam Bäckström's Brechtian gestus: photographs of film sets, framed so as to reveal the false walls, lights, mike booms, and wooden step units for ascending to the elevated stage. (Another of Bäckström's series, not included in this exhibition, is of the fictionalized interiors of homes of that have become tourist attractions...