Vito Acconci and Steven Holl
When I first heard that artist Vito Acconci and architect Steven Holl were to collaborate on the redesign of Storefront for Art and Architecture, the rebel gallery located on the eastern edge of New York's SoHo, the idea sounded absurd. Holl's architecture is poetic, based on the experiential qualities of space, exquisitely, if obsessively, detailed; he is heroically uptight. Acconci's work is alternatively brash and sublime, always confrontational. Storefront, long known for its provocative exhibitions, political acuity and impatience with the status quo, astutely uses this incongruous pair to push its own envelope, physically and conceptually.
The collaboration, reportedly a head-butting ordeal, produced a new façade of pivoting vertical and horizontal planes cut into the gallery's street wall. Clad with Supraboard, a mixture of concrete and paper, the façade of beige, textured panels is bunker-like when closed; when the panes are rotated into or out of the gallery, the new façade inverts the idea of gallery as an enclosed volume displaying art to be viewed. Here, inside is outside, outside is inside. Storefront's old frontage (a wooden, windowless wall with peeling green paint emblazoned with the super-graphic STOREFRONT across its 100-foot length) was a whimsical show of disdain for the establishment. The new façade, the first installment in an ambitious programme that calls for a redesign every two years, signifies the gallery's desire to broaden its audience and to conjoin a discourse between two branches of visual culture.
The lineage of the pivoting panels is inherent in the work of both members of the design team. Adaptability of space and participatory spatial compositions can, for example, be found in Holl's housing project in Fukuoka, Japan. There, the Japanese tradition of fusama (multi-use spaces) is updated by Holl: hinged diurnal walls between living and sleeping areas in the apartments can be rotated to make one large room by day and to enclose the bedroom space by night. Acconci's fascination with preconceived notions of shelter often involve viewer-activated constructions. A commentary on mass-produced housing, his Mobile Linear City (1991), for example, explores the compromised position of the American Dream. Here, rooms of a house, pulled from the rear of a flatbed truck, open out from one another in diminishing size, from the most public spaces to the most private.
The inaugural exhibition in the reworked Storefront, 'Upstairs, Down: The Pit, The Tower, The Terrace Plateau', is as appropriate as it is fatally ironic. Appropriate because Peter Noever, the architect and Director of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, has engaged an international network of artists and architects (Acconci among them) to debunk the 'hands-off' elitism of cultural institutions. Ironic because Storefront, a gallery now designed to break down the barriers between public and private, the haves and have-nots, is hosting one man's personal vision of a Utopian landscape, where buildings and passages are burrowed into the Austrian countryside. Still, at a time when people are barricading themselves from each other, it is refreshing to see Storefront doing just the opposite.
