Notes on Housewrecker, 2002 (revised 2014)
‘Housewrecker’ is a formal exploration of the architectural
uncanny. It seeks to question modernity's requirement of
transcendence as well as youth culture’s representation of a
perceived ‘sublime’. Within this context I will present the
idea of the sublime as a ‘cultural readymade’ one that implies
transcendence but where the ‘wild’ remains restrained or it’s
limits quantifiable as in Jeff Wall’s ‘Destroyed Room’. I am
interested in the societal need to ritualize destruction, in
this case, self-destruction as a symbolic attempt to subvert
hegemonic forms. This ritualized destructiveness is a
contesting of architecture as a hegemonic ordering of spatial
experience. Within this there is revealed a tendency towards
the gothic. The gothic allows for a relationship with
terror, but only in a playful sense. It imagines terror and ‘acts’
it out. With the self-conciousness of theatrical display, the subjects
of my work do the same. They are caught somewhere
between what they might consider the ‘authentic’ and the
representation of it. The supposed ‘radicality’ of their action is
the intersection of play and social conciense, romantic
escapism, and the cruelty arising from a sense of an inherent
lack in the core of ‘reality’ or the real.
‘Housewrecker’ documents a group of youths attempt to
destroy the house that they live in. The house has been neglected
by the owners for years, the lot appraised for development
and the building slated for destruction. A housewrecking
party is thrown. The work is part comedy, part performance, but
as well a critical investigation into the gentrification of
Commercial drive in Vancouver and one group’s reaction
towards it as well as implication within it. One loop depicts a
youth endlessly hitting his skateboard against the wall of a
room. He will never be successful in his attempt to smash
through the wall. The trauma of his impotence is constantly
returned to. It is the paradox latent in the ‘romantic’
desire to convey the ‘tempest’ by static or aesthetic method.
The house will never be truly destroyed. The architecture
becomes a stage for this ‘performance’. Another loop shows
the outside wall of a room shaking and buckling from the
pressure of revellers on the other side of it. A section of
music is looped along with it. It drones on in a monotonous,
continuous, crescendo, never reaching any resolve. This is
the ‘tempest’, an attempt to present the un-representable.
Elements of the ‘sublime’ are presented by way of it’s
effects on the architecture that contains it. Another loop shows
holes in the ceiling of a room constantly dripping and
showering plaster. This is the fissure through which the uncanny
escapes. There is an awareness here of the gap between an
aesthetic goal and the possibility of achieving it. A sense
of the uncanny erupts from within this gap because the
subjects are playing at radicality using avant-garde techniques
devoid of their original ideological impulse. What results
is a fulfilled aesthetic revolution, that of 'punk',
stripped of its promise of social redemption which in turn
creates the condition for ‘uncanny’sensations to arise.
Drawing on the history of video, photo-conceptualism, and
performance ‘Housewrecker’ addresses the notion of a man’s
world: hard and immutable. The formalist analysis of bodies
in space suggests the empty, hard-edged site as an analogue
of (straight) male sensibilities-emotion and camaraderie
expressed ritually through play in a group setting rather than
with individual, spontaneous, verbal communication. There
is a similar anxiety over space and objecthood that informed the
visual language familiar from the boy’s club of
Minimalist sculpture. This literal perception of objects reflects
the strategies of minimalism, whereby ‘kinesthetic’ demands
are placed upon the viewer, but here the object is but one
of the terms at play in a reading of the work.
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