The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond (review)

As bookish 12-year-olds, another "faculty brat" and I redrew the map of Europe, arbitrarily grouping countries and simplifying boundaries with our Crayola crayons and colored pencils. In second-empire Paris, city planner Baron Hausmann called himself an "artist-demolitionist" as he leveled old neighborhoods to make room for new boulevards and blocks of elegant apartments lining them. In Germany's Third Reich, the creative young Fascist Albert Speer envisioned heroically wide thoroughfares leading to mammoth state buildings. All of these tendencies seem to be found in the work of Constant Nieuwenhuys (b. 1920), though his major political influence may be the Situationist theorists of the 1950s and 1960s, with whom he associated. Centered around a quintessential Parisian named Guy Debord, the Situationists made the city their subject matter and their canvas, and saw many of their slogans adopted for posters by radical students in Paris in 1968.

Constant's work began with drawings resembling those of the COBRA group, composed of artists in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam (hence the acronym), who sought a childlike expressionist purity after the devastation they had witnessed in the Second World War. He soon moved on to creating works incorporating a methodical, serial alignment of small cubes on the surface of a canvas. Less organic than Larry Poons, less colorfully decorative than Victor Vasarely, the works strike me as resembling computer punch cards, appropriate for the cover of an IBM annual report or MIT Technology Review, circa 1962.

These works led Constant to create architectural-looking works, where his forms' movement into space came in concert with Situationist ideas of "unitary urbanism." He produced a multitude of sketchy drawings, which look like the plans of an architect as she or he moves towards a grand vision. Constant also proposed—then created— models of huge, labyrinthine interiors with reconfigurable walls, floors, lighting and environmental experience (color, texture, smell), their internal configurations supposedly driven by public desire, almost by whim. His high-level views of Lego-like "sectors" zig-zag diagonally over vast terrains and straddle national boundaries on the map, as if to render such boundaries irrelevant in a globalized world and interconnected European Community—one wonders if maybe they are irrelevant.

Constant's work fits into the utopian tradition of Boullée, Le Corbusier and Britain's Archigram group, or the more recent genre that mixes conceptual plans and gallery objects, like Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work or Mike Kelley's recent architectural model of remembered school buildings. Kelley's contemporary, Spelman Evans Downer, created many textured and scribed map-like paintings in the 1980s and 1990s, but these more often focused on natural topography than urban phenomena. Constant must enjoy Minneapolis, Minnesota, where downtown buildings are connected by walkways to facilitate urban life and circulation during cruel winters. I could not help also seeing his "sectors" realized in ungainly and insecure Logan Airport in Boston—one imagines Constant spending a lot of time roaming airport terminals. His forms are echoed somewhat more successfully in 1960s buildings on campuses of public universities such as U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco State, San Jose State or Cal State Hayward (all in California). Their shadowy concrete plazas, beneath several floors of classrooms and offices, should be used more often in movies as settings for lovers' miscommunication and emotional strife.

The problematic "sectors" that Constant exhibited over the past three decades display urban life that is off the ground, away from the street-level existence that makes a city most vibrant. If built, they would keep the homeless and the unemployed at bay, serving as an easily policed bulwark against the rabble and the rabble-rousers. They would function much as a shopping mall does in daily life. Their changing characteristics sound like little more than the aesthetic shifts of the department store window, delightfully entertaining...