The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Projects and Tactics
THE MIRACULOUS TRANSFORMATION OF SPACE BY EVENT
The six to ten seconds on 22 November 1963, during which John Kennedy
was struck by gunfire, are the most intensely studied few seconds in history.
There are eighty-two still and movie photographers known to have been in
Dealey Plaza during the assassination. Attempts have been made to identify
every person appearing in each frame of film, and their histories have been
investigated by federal commissions, criminal and civil courts, the mass
media, and, most significantly, by an assortment of private citizens who are
not satisfied by the official accounts.
NEW CHOPPER
The crisis of late postmodernism: media, size, style, content. Rather than
being a limitation, the required business card–size of the Outpost artwork
and the artwork/signature separation encourage a conceptual response. Rejecting
the macho premise that big art is best art, the idea becomes (bigger
than) the artwork. The divorced signature encourages the audience to explore
the relationship between the image and signature cards; and rather
than a pure statement of authorship, the signature card becomes essential to
and the “other half” of a specific work. Artist response: image cards display
mounted medical dressings with seemingly random dates—the corresponding
signature cards reveal the childhood incident that required the
dressing: “New Chopper Christmas 1968.”
MULTIPLE NARRATIVES
Just as conspiracy theory explodes the myth of a single linear history, architecture
can be seen as not the fastidious refinement of an abstract language
but the site of collisions between competing ideologies. Architecture becomes
a trip across the wavebands, samples of disassociated, but recognizable,
story lines. A single narrative thread is lost, thereby making possible
multiple readings. Despite their questioning of the official or the proper,
when taken individually conspiracy theories represent a search for the authentic,
the true story. Collectively, though, they deny the possibility of
such a search.
MOD CONS
In the paranoid world of the conspiracy theorist, the elegantly positioned
mezzanine level becomes the perfect sniper’s nest. In Mod Cons familiar objects
from the domestic realm are displaced around the city: shower equip-