Intermission a soundwork to accompany A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day by Alex Schweder Vinyl, Equipment + NTSC DVD
21' x 9' x 28'
3:00:00
Unique
2007


Exhibition History

Suyama Space, Seattle WA, January 15 - April 13, 2007


Description

A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day stuffs the four rooms of an 800 square foot house into a building envelope of a 500 square foot bungalow. Through this misfit, an architectural space results with deformations, writhings, and contortions as the rooms inflate and readjust to their volatile adjacencies. Although the timed "score" of fans turning on and off remains the same for every performance, the material and architectural result of the vinyl sacks is different each time that the rooms fall upon one another in different configurations during the deflations.

 Intermission is designed as a complement to the resting phases of A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day, the sound work is created from recordings gathered during the installation's active phases. The piece supports the glacier-like stillness of the deflated rooms by creating an icy landscape with references to the sac's past and future.


Reviews

A recent group exhibition at Momenta Art in Williamsburg, Brooklyn entitled Weak Foundations posited the premise that the twentieth-century “built environment” suffers from a “bankruptcy of its ethical rationale wherein all reason beyond that in the service of self-interest is eclipsed.” The exhibition viewed the built environment broadly as architecture, neighborhood, and most damningly, as real estate. The primary mediums were photographs and videos with a penchant for documenting neglect, disrepair, and change. Gentrification was detailed as a destructive force with the face of prosperity. These urban decay chroniclers of the past and the “revitalized” present had a singular message: the majority of what we build is teardown.

It has become popular of late for young artists to explore architecture and lived-in environments. Most of these artists seem especially interested in how we experience space and the politics of space. Emerging out of a legacy of minimalism—with its fascination with hard-edge industrial materials—many artists have deconstructed the places we live using the same materials and language of builders and demolition crews. This current resurgence of artistic interest in buildings seems to often preclude the bodies and people that inhabit them.

Alex Schweder received a Rome Prize fellow in 2006 and studied architecture at Princeton. His built environments are more like body art, with structures mimicking buildings and playing stand-ins for people. The language Schweder employs to discuss his work is as likely to be anatomical or sexual as architectural. His artworks are stunt bodies.

The permeable relationship between bodies and buildings is central to all of Schweder’s work. For A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day (2006), Schweder created a bungalow-sized, transparent vinyl envelope which measures 6.4 × 8.5 × 2.75 meters and contains four smaller forms alluding to rooms with windows, doors, and interior walls. This site-specific installation happens three times a day (9 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 4 p.m.) with each inflation/deflation lasting forty minutes. It’s an activation of space and material presence that re-energizes the historical feints between a hard- edged formalist minimalism and an aberrant organicist post-Surrealism. Schweder’s ductile building manages to hash the distinction in contemporary sculpture that can be traced back to a postwar duel of solid against sprawl; A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day manages to be both.

Schweder calls it an “architectural performance.” This is a bit like the old “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” quote, except the dance is the form in this case, and talking about music is also integral to the work. Schweder has collaborated twice with composer Yann Novak. Previously, Schweder presented Sick Building Sequence (2006) at Howard House in Seattle with Novak’s accompanying sound composition. The large, clear-vinyl room-within-a-room was filled with swirling, fan-propelled clouds of feathers with black-and-white animation projected onto them. The projection was a movement, taking the viewer down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, and back down again. Novak uses sound not just as a sonic bed—the piece for A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day plays while the house lies deflated—but as an enhancement. He uses samples of ambient sound (in this case the sound of the fans used to inflate the piece) as the soundtrack; captured, layered, enhanced, and edited, the white noise of fans play along.
– Nate Lippens (Body Doubles, Fillip)