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AntiThesis - Content - Rem Koolhaas
AntiThesis - Content - Rem Koolhaas
au
www.antithesis.unimelb.edu.au
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antiTHESIS | VOL 17
Grace McQuilten
Produced and edited by the notorious architect and designer Rem Koohlaas, Content
(2004) presents a theoretical exploration of art, architecture and social politics in the
format of a bright, advertising-littered magazine. The contentious format of Content,
along with the ambivalent nature of its content, provides a troubling example of
social critique that plays the market. In his infamous publication of 1978, Delirious
Dj Vu | MARCH 2007
Content plunges into the heart of consumer culture, documenting Koolhaas recent
architectural projects at the same time as advertising major fashion wares. Following
his earlier publications S, M, L, XL and The Harvard Design Schools Guide to
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antiTHESIS | VOL 17
The overt commercialism of the project points to Koolhaas claim that his work is
engaging with a contemporary context: I see Architecture as an endangered
brand, and Im trying to reposition it.3 While re-branding might be just what
architecture needs to compete in the contemporary economic public sphere, it is
important to consider what this type of collusion may bode for critical fields such as
visual art and social politics. The spectacular presentation of commerciality in
Content runs the risk of subsuming its content. Antonio Negris theoretical writings,
for example, are reduced to two pages in Content and buried at 350 351 within a
544-page document between an advertisement for TimeOut Magazine on the one
side and a promotional piece for OMA-AMO on the other. It seems that there is more
than a figurative loss of space for criticality at play.
Discussing the work of Koolhaas and the OMA, architectural theorist Anthony Vidler
asks the pointed question: should we conclude that irony, when wielded against
itself, turns to nihilism, or, worse, into postmodernism?4 Content mimics
postmodernisms eradication of subversive tactics. While this strategy might be selfconscious, it does little to change the effect. Particularly at stake is the place and
space of visual artistic practice. Content is full of artistic appropriations. An unmarked
double-page spread, for example, features a suspiciously Jenny Holzer-like neon sign
that bears the slogan: One mans hatred / Cannot alter another / Mans destiny,
with a vague logo in the upper right corner bearing the abbreviation NTA. Even
Walter Benjamins infamous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, is appropriated in one of the fashion advertisements. The setting is a
fashion parade, where a darkened audience is enraptured by a central model on the
catwalk, whose figure emits a whitened light and whose digitally doubled image acts
as a halo. The headline simply reads, Aura. Does such an appropriation re-brand
art, make it fashion-sexy, or transform critique into fashion? Art and theory are
present, apparently, but they just happen to be in the service of the commercial
interests of companies such as Gucci and Prada.
As history is raided for such pithy headlines, both context and content are emptied of
meaning. What might once have been considered parody, is now used as a
marketing tool for a cynical audience. While such a strategy might seem effective for
Dj Vu | MARCH 2007
the critical and cultural spaces of architecture, which have always had to negotiate a
relationship with commercial culture, this kind of cynicism nevertheless faces critical
impotence. In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), philosopher Peter Sloterdijk
describes this kind of cynicism as the defining feature of the contemporary world.
Weve come to a point, he suggests, where we cynically celebrate our
powerlessness, effectively declaring: Hey, were alive; hey, were selling ourselves;
hey, were arming.5 The effect is not an enlightened participation in the systems of a
new world as Content might claim but instead the repetition of the very political
and social conditions that elicited the cynical attitude in the first place.6 Rather than
providing a productive reorganisation of systems of consumer culture, the cynical use
of the market in Content represents only the reproduction of the market. This is a
danger for any projects that celebrate the fusion of consumer culture and critique.
|NOTES|
1 Cited in Hal Foster, Design and crime: and other diatribes (London: Verso,
2002), 62.
2 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 125.
3 Cited in Foster, Design and Crime, 62.
4 Vidlers question is posed directly in relation to the work of Koolhaas and his
OMA-OMA. See Anthony Vidler, Architectural uncanny: Essays in the Modern
Unhomely (MIT Press, 1994), 195.
5 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 546.
6 Sloterdijk writes, cynicism guarantees the expanded reproduction of the past
on the newest level of what is currently the worst. Critique of Cynical Reason,
546.
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