Investigations of the Suburban.

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes

Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art Pittsburgh

October 4, 2008-January 18, 2009

Yale Architecture Gallery

New Haven, Connecticut

March 2-May 10, 2009

In an exhibition entitled "Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes," curators Andrew Blauvelt, Design Director and Curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Tracy Myers, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, set out to explore the notion of the suburban. Thus, the works of the more than thirty artists and architects included in the exhibition share a common conceptual anchor: the contemporary American suburb as fundamentally constitutive of our subjectivity. The relationship between the suburb and the city has over time become less distinct; as a result, the suburbs have evolved from stereotypical mundane sites of architectural sameness and demographic conformity to sites of class, racial, and cultural heterogeneity and architectural experimentation. In the preface to the exhibition catalog, Blauvelt writes:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The works, which range from two-dimensional media to three-dimensional sculpture and video installation, attempt to critically examine precisely what Blauvelt calls the "paradoxes" of the suburban landscape--the notions of site and identity being crucial coordinates of this investigation. In various ways, the artists and architects document, map, and represent the landscape, questioning its supposed transparency and readability while simultaneously calling attention to its interpretive present and future potentials. The exhibition was a collection of viewpoints, producing the suburban landscape as a site of evolving, open-ended difference.

The photographs of Larry Sultan often require a second glance to fully read their content. In Tasha's Third Film (1998), Sultan questions the presumed innocence of suburbia, revealing it as a site of scopophilic desire. In the foreground of what appears to be an ordinary living room, Tasha is seated on a couch between two sleeping men. She seems passive and tired, scantily dressed with curlers in her hair. In the brightly lit background separated from the interior by a French-style window, we see a glimpse of a terrace filled with people. In the right-hand corner, a film production crew is recording two people having sex. In the left-hand corner, another group of people, presumably the owners of the house, dressed casually in shorts and T-shirts, are watching the production crew filming the sex scene. What appears to be an ordinary domestic snapshot is suddenly read differently: the innocence of the suburban idyll is transformed into a documentary expose of the pornography industry. By closely studying a specific social phenomenon the porn industry--Sultan demystifies the photographic apparatus and exposes its artificiality. The suburb, inherently implicated in this process, becomes a space that propagates voyeuristic sexual desire.

While Sultan researches a specific phenomenon, such as the provisional, suburban porn sets, Gregory Crewdson stages the suburban milieu. His work references the photographic tradition of the horror film as both seductive yet frightening, beautiful yet terrifying. Crewdson creates an image of suburbia as a site of Freud's uncanny, where "[the] uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old--established in the mind and has become alienated from it through the process of repression." (2) The familiar landscape of suburbia in Crewdson's work becomes a site of anxiety, its inhabitants transformed into haunted specters of our unconscious. In his Untitled, from the series "Dream House" (2002), Crewdson captures what appears to be an ordinary evening in a middle-class, white suburban household: mother is dozing off on the couch, mindlessly watching TV, a bottle of painkillers on the coffee table in front of her. The daughter is lying on the floor, sleeping, with crayons and sheets of paper scattered around her. Behind the French-style window is a beautiful rose garden with mountain peaks appearing on the horizon. What disturbs the tranquil composition is an ominous figure of a man looking in on the mother and daughter, with freshly cut roses and a lamp in his hands. Is he perhaps the father or husband returning late from work, or the gardener working odd hours? Or could it be that he is a psychopathic stranger about to commit murder? The photograph offers no clear answer; the man's character oscillates on the verge of being any or all of those identities. For Crewdson, the question of what is hidden in the world of suburbia remains open-ended--his photographs are set up to resist any sense of interpretative closure.

The work of Interboro, a young architecture collective, uses a different set of strategies to engage its viewers. They arc not interested in demystifying the photographic apparatus, nor are they engaged in representing the contemporary suburban uncanny. Rather, their research practice involves "inventive pragmatism" and incorporates "sensitive and rigorous analyses of local dynamics." (3) Their piece In the Meantime, Life with Landbanking (2002/2007) examines a quintessential suburban site (an abandoned mall in Fishkill, New York) and maps the constitutive historical forces that lead to its current, supposedly "forsaken" state. Interboro's research demonstrates the mall is anything but empty. It has been reclaimed by a variety of occupants who adapt the space to their individual and communal needs. In their project, Interboro effectively catalyzes the activities of the illicit occupants and re-imagines the mall as an emergent and evolving community in place of an empty signifier.

Recognizing suburbia as an established rather than a novel form of American architecture, the artists included in the exhibition examine the diverse experiences of this expanding phenomenon. As Blauvelt notes, "the concept of suburbia remains potent--less a matter of propinquity and more a state of mind." (4) For Sultan, Crewdson, and the Interboro collective, the suburban does not function as a mere inferior backdrop; on the contrary, it profoundly shapes the viewer's response to the piece. These works are intriguing precisely because they ask us to examine our own assumptions and prompt us to think of the lived environment in unique, different ways.

JULIA FRIDAY is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University in New York State. She currently resides in Athens, Ohio.

NOTES (1.) Andrew Blauvelt, Walker Art Center, and Heinz Architectural Center, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2008), 11. (2.) Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,"' trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, James Strachey and Anna Freud, eds., (London: The Hogarth Press, 1919), 241. (3.) Blawelt, 310. (4.) Ibid., 11.

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