Page 187 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

House installation in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1972, a boy from the suburb where the house was located cycled by and asked: “Are you building something or destroying something?”9 It was precisely Pettena who, years later, conceptualized his own work through the rubric of the “anarchitetto” whose speculative labor is not so much expressed in buildings but rather through interventions that probe the alleged essence of the architectural.10 Sculpture might be rethought in analogous terms – especially as practiced by Colomer and other artists for whom the category, genre, technique, or artistic medium is basically a viewpoint or perhaps a language game in Wittgenstein’s sense, within which everything else, all that can be “encompassed,” may circulate as new signs thereby acquiring unforeseen qualities.
Following the thread of Pettena’s anarchitectural trajectory, other instances can be found. At the time he was working on the Clay House, Pettena met Robert Smithson at Salt Lake City. Years before, Smithson had found the Palenque Hotel at some obscure location on the Yucatán peninsula, and had delivered a famous lecture about it at the University of Utah. Extant today as a slide show with a tape recording of the artist’s voice, the document/work known to us as Hotel Palenque is without doubt the only vestige of the singular hotel. “A hotel which is also a motel”, Smithson explained, whose partly unfinished, partly ripped up floors are “reminiscent of Piranesi,” and whose design exhibits formal originality (the emptied pool with a suspension bridge spanning over it) and sophistication (the garden of broken bricks, the wall-less window) worthy of true amazement.11 The Palenque Hotel, a prophetic monument for a proto-punk architecture that never was, is a frozen metaphora, its form stuck at the point where construction development turns around upon itself and is accepted as ruin, to the visitors’ hilarity and bewilderment. In a similar vein, Smithson’s own Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) is a brutalist prefiguration of Pettena’s Clay House presented as construction without end: stuck in time but also lacking purpose, atelic. This work by Smithson also partially inspires Juan Muñoz’s reflection in a text work titled Segment, a mock-research piece on the (fictional) legend of La Posa, an empty house burnt and rebuilt each year in the village of Zurite, in Peru: “Rather than a house,” Muñoz argues, “[La Posa] resembles the image of a house [...] Is this gathering place and crossroads point also a lodging, a dwelling? It can’t just be a monument, a symbolic structure posing as a house”.12 The
9 Gianni Pettena interviewed on his installation Architecture Ondoyante at 49 Nord 6 Est - FRAC Lorraine, Francia, 2014, https://vimeo.com/98547364. Accessed February 2017.
10 G. Pettena,
L’anarchitetto. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Architect. Prato: Guaraldi, 2010.
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11 The original text of the lecture is not included in Smithson’s Collected Writings.
I used the Spanish edition of
the text: Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque (1969), trans. by. Magali Arriola, Mexico City: Alias, 2011.
12 Juan Muñoz, “Segment”, in Escritos/Writings. Barcelona: La Central / MNCARS, 2009, pp. 121-143.