Rem Koolhaas interviewed in Artforum

Via Artforum

Few individuals have so radically altered the vocabulary of architecture as REM KOOLHAAS, whose theoretical writings (Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan [1978]; S, M, L, XL [1995]) and groundbreaking structures (the IIT McCormick Tribune Campus Center in Chicago, 2003; CCTV headquarters in Beijing, 2010) largely gave form to our turn-of-the-millennium understanding of the metropolitan landscape and its cultures. As part of this nearly four-decade-long program, Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture have often engaged with questions of art, proposing buildings for institutions such as Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and, in fact, much of the analysis surrounding those projects was on display at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where the architect’s installation Expansion—Neglect presented vast amounts of information about the changing demands for contemporary art under the sign of globalization. Today, Koolhaas is immersed in his Hermitage 2014 Masterplan, a comprehensive reconsideration of the encyclopedic Saint Petersburg museum’s structure and function, slated for completion on the institution’s 250th anniversary. Artforum editor Tim Griffin sat down with Koolhaas this spring to discuss the architect’s plans for the site in light of his previous research.

Here A Part of the Interview:
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Winter Palace galleries being used as a hospital during World War I, Nicholas Hall, Hermitage, ca. 1914.

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TIM GRIFFIN: What’s been your relationship to the idea of the museum, and how do you see the status of the museum today?

REM KOOLHAAS: Well, I’m in the position of someone who, through competitions, has thought a lot about museums but has built relatively few. Through the late 1990s, museums started to expand in direct proportion to the rise of the stock market, and during this period we realized at a certain point that we had designed more than thirty-four soccer fields’ worth of museum space. The Hermitage, I should note, is an important counterpoint to both this trend and our participation in it, but collectively all this work enabled me to document the nature of the new, enlarged museum and its relationship to the art displayed in it.

Tate Modern—specifically, the Turbine Hall—is perhaps the ultimate example. I remember so well [Tate director] Nicholas Serota warning us architects at the beginning of the competition for it that, although he didn’t necessarily share this opinion (as he carefully pointed out), the “artists” did not care for strong forms and felt that former industrial space was more sympathetic to their work. Such space appealed to artists, one might suppose, for the reason that they could finally feel alone and triumphant in their own world, without interference.

But I think it has actually become a fantastically fascinating trap, this oversize incubator, in which nobody has ever said, “OK, I’m not going to be intimidated. I’ll just do a show there.” Rather, everyone has reached for the big statement. And if you look at these statements, they all seem to bear an apocalyptic message—Miroslaw Balka’s box of darkness, Doris Salcedo’s sinister crack, Carsten Höller’s existential leaps, Bruce Nauman’s alienated whispers, Anish Kapoor’s overstretched foreskin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s postdisaster camp, and so on. From the cumulative Unilever Series, you would think the end is nigh—and maybe in a certain way it is. You really begin to wonder why the space is so susceptible to these apocalyptic kinds of projects, and I have a feeling that, like radioactive matter, there might be a half-life for the relevance of certain types of space and the art they promote. So here, the equating of industrial space, with its inherent nostalgia, with the contemporary sublime of Minimalism may be nearing exhaustion. Maybe we’re witnessing a moment where these massive nonspaces, once backed by Wall Street’s steep ascent, are actually reaching their ultimate impotence, sustaining and containing only the announcement of the end—a moment, interestingly, where it perhaps becomes relevant again for space to push back, to be more confrontational, more oppositional, more heretical, and more editorial.

TG: I have found it impossible not to think along these lines when looking at shows such as Marina Abramović’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—where there’s a different public aspect to her work, because the terms are so radically changed by the space. In her ongoing performance there, to what extent is she actually in the same space as yours? Is it really a performance, or is it a representation? That setting for The Artist Is Present [2010] is so incredible, because it’s staged—I mean, it takes place on a set. There are cameras everywhere, and she doesn’t account for the effects of that.

RK: This is exactly my point: It’s not a stage but an atrium. The museum is so big that its spatial conditions don’t allow intimacy; they’ve become just too monumental.

I saw an early performance of her Imponderabilia at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1977, and, unlike now, where basically the experience is of having to choose between turning your back to a man or to a woman, what was gripping in that original performance, which of course she did with Ulay, was that not only did you feel you were invading private space—and were forced to be brutal about it—but you also felt you were interrupting a relationship, literally standing between two lovers. It was a perfect thing, in a perfect space. The Stedelijk Museum was this nineteenth-century classical building that had been completely whitewashed by [Willem] Sandberg [director of the Stedelijk Museum, 1945–63]. Its walls had a thickness that allowed the performance to exist entirely within the threshold, and they were covered in whitewashed burlap, whose roughness stood in total contrast to the artists’ naked skin. It was a combination you would never achieve today: the advantages of classicism, symmetry, monumentality, etc., with the advantages of “white space” and experiment.

In 2000, I was enlisted in Thomas Krens’s effort to create a fifth Guggenheim, in Las Vegas—the project that initiated our relationship with the Hermitage. He proposed inserting a large Guggenheim into the complex footprint of the Venetian resort, between the parking garage and the hotel, and, as part of the Venetian’s facade, a smaller entity dedicated to the Hermitage. I was aware I could not compete with Frank Gehry in terms of the spectacular, so I resurrected a model of the museum that had been imprinted on me by the experimental shows at the Stedelijk: the museum not as a holy place but as an accessible factory of the new. We produced a big, factory-like, almost theater-like space for the Guggenheim, and a more jewel-like condition for the Hermitage. We imagined a museum without form, but a museum that was able to perform…..

Read the rest of the Interview here
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