Published in Wallpaper* November 2008
New Yorkers
love to practice the destruction of their city. The Will Smith-fights-vampires
movie I Am Legend showed, again and
again, a desolate Times Square, lions ripping up deer flesh while grasses
whispered in a space currently alive with five-abreast tourists gawking at Sex
& the City ads. J J Abrams’ Cloverfield imagined a monster ripping through the city with the
force of a thousand furies. And the War of the Worlds had Tom Cruise just across the river, watching
cracks in the streets open up for attacking aliens. It’s a post-9/11 condition,
this desire to rehearse, prepare for and control our destruction before it
happens. At the same time, we’ve become obsessed with the Greenmarket, with
eating locally, seasonally, with sustainable futures, with trying to be as
close to a Michael Pollan version – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” --
of an omnivore as we can. It seems like two completely separate channels, but
three art events this summer only showed that our love for nature and our
obsession with the apocalypse are, in fact, closely entwined.
After Nature is a brilliant show put on by the New Museum,
suddenly a big hitter since the opening of their SANAA-designed building last
December. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni and curatorial assistant Jarrett
Gregory, After Nature uses a
Werner Herzog film and a W.G. Sebald essay as starting-off points for a series
of pieces that explore how the world might be, once nature is something we
remember rather than look forward to. The works span aesthetics and media,
sharing only polemic drive. A tree sawed apart and put back together with
massive brackets and screws by the artist Zoe Leonard makes you realize the
inanity of the idea that nature needs our help to survive, while a piece by
Tino Sehgal in which a series of dancers writhe on the floor -- changing every
two hours with a few minutes of synced-up overlap – is, through its
face-to-face (or body-to-body) communication, about the translatability of oral
history. It implies that, one day not so far away, person-to-person contact
might be the only technology we’ve got.
Continue reading "Art Goes Apocalyptic (Wallpaper*)" »
Published in Wallpaper* November 2008
Alan Aldridge is so LA. It’s taken a while for him to become
so LA – answering the door to his La Brea Park apartment in bare feet, hair
dyed black and slicked back, stereo playing music that would fit just as well
in a raucous yoga class as in this spare art-decorated space – but he made it.
It’s taken a few career shifts, a few absurd stories, and one self-described
Machiavellian move, but Aldridge is settled in this fair city of angels. And,
after years as a Hollywood screenwriter, Aldridge is back to his art.
Aldridge designed this month’s magazine cover and, when we
speak a bright August afternoon, is about to start designing the word
“Wallpaper.” He doesn’t really have a plan for how it’ll go – “when it’s right
it just hits” – and he’s not really worried about having to get ready for a big
retrospective of his work slated to open this October at the Design Museum
London –“it’s not a problem.” Mostly, right now, he wants to tell the story of
how he got here.
Continue reading "Luck of the Draw (Wallpaper*)" »
Published September 2008 (link)
It is probably a
bad idea to drive a Hummer to a Scandic Hotel. It is probably a bad idea to
leave it idling while you run in looking for a single-packed toiletry item
(which you won’t find) and an equally bad idea to ask the staff to change your
sheets every night. It is definitely a bad idea to ask for your own
hermetically sealed packet of jam at breakfast (you won’t get it) or not to
separate your trash from your recycling (because it means the hotel has to do
it for you).
It might seem
like a lot to ask of guests, but taking a hard line on some choices, and a
gentler, encouraging touch with others, is all part of the Swedish chain’s
program to reduce its carbon emissions to zero. The company is giving itself a
little bit of time to get there—“By 2025, we shall not contribute to the carbon
emissions at all with our operations,” says Jan Peter Bergkvist, the vice
president for sustainable business—but Scandic is trying. And so far, its
efforts are working.
Click on Scandic’s
Sustainability Live Report on its Web site (www.scandichotels.com) to see a delightfully graphic tally of “the
environmental savings we have made since 1996.” For now, the company shows the
numbers for four target systems—measuring consumption levels for energy, water,
unsorted waste, and fossil carbon dioxide—a framework created by the Natural
Step, an international NGO dedicated to improving corporate sustainability. For
now, you can calculate the environmental gains from your Scandic sojourn
(achieved by drinking the tap water, sharing the jam, and staying in a place
heated and lit by alternative energy sources) by clicking on how many nights
you’d like to stay and seeing just how many lightbulbs pop up. That number is
compared to a benchmark released by the International Tourism Partnership, a
hotel-industry NGO set up by the Prince of Wales Trust. They’re not exact, but
they’re close enough that Scandic can tell that it’s making a difference.
Continue reading "Carbon Footprint (Metropolis)" »