Indifference, Again
Author(s): Michael Meredith
Source: Log, No. 39 (Winter 2017), pp. 75-79
Published by: Anyone Corporation
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26324005
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Michael Meredith
Indifference, Again
No one would dispute that over the past decade the sociopo
litical context of architectural production has been governed
by partisan politics and civil unrest on a global scale. And as
previous models of neoliberal globalization have fallen into
turmoil, our discipline has focused on two competing models
for architecture.
Number one: An architecture that expresses innova
tion, difficulties, and problems - from sustainability to social
justice and from diagrammatic clarity to technological pre
cision - through dynamic buildings that twist toward sun an
gles, recycle water, and are covered with greenery. Or through
designs that address the refugee crisis. Or through parametri
cism, which expresses technological progress by way of cus
tomization, formal malleability, and so on. Architecture as
technical expertise and urgency, informed through realism,
with an emphasis on engaged problem-solving and producing
an architecture that expresses problem-solving.
Number two: An architecture that performs and is de
fined by an increasing number of refusals, denials, and post
designations through an acceptance of nondesign: the banal,
generic, and unoriginal; the weak; the antidramatic; obscure
referents, citations, and mashups; entropy, chance, and inde
terminacy; ambiguity between fact and fiction; the cheap and
1. My interest in indifference began ac
cidentally, through a series of events: first,
commonplace; play with mediums; and a focus on architec
stumbling upon an old Artforum article;
ture's representation of itself, as opposed to realism.
second, a reaction against numerous
curatorial agendas around "urgency,"
engaged problem-solving, etc.; and third,
is found among a group of young, mostly American archi
a rereading of Robert Venturi's Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture, which
presents "calculated indifference" as a
positive value. Since then, Hilary Sample
and I have taught several workshops
around this theme.
I characterize the second disciplinary position — which
tects today — under the general term indifference,! with the
understanding that a similar sensibility arose among young
American artists negotiating the comparably partisan and
volatile McCarthy period (1950-54).2
2. The correspondences between today and
the McCarthy era are not always a matter
Writing in the November 1977 issue of Artforum, art his
of analogy. Roy Cohn, prosecutor in the
torian Moira Roth asserts that two extreme attitudes mapped
Rosenberg trial and advisor to Senator
the poles of national consciousness during the McCarthy pe
Joseph McCarthy, also served as lawyer,
advisor, and confidante to now President
Donald J. Trump. See Jonathan Mahler
riod: a bigoted and overzealous conviction, best embodied by
and Matt Flegenheimer, "McCarthy Aide
crime novelist Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled patriot-detec
Helped Shape Young Trump," New York
tive Mike Hammer, and an embittered passivity, best exem
Timer, June 21, 2016.
plified by the antihero protagonist Holden Caulfield of J.D.
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Moira Roth, "The Aesthetic of Indif
ference," Artforum 16, no. ] (1977): 46-$}.
Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye} In response to the
Reprinted in Roth, Difference/Indifference:
tough-guy extremism of Hammer and alongside the apolitical
Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp
neutrality of Caulfield, Roth writes, a cool "aesthetic of indif
andJohn Cage (Amsterdam: G+B Arts
International, 1998).
4. Grand, heroic, and masculine.
5. See Clement Greenberg, "'American-Type'
Painting," Partisan Review 22, no. 2 (Spring
1955): 179-95- Reprinted in Greenberg, Art
and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon,
ference" developed across a group of self-critical American
artists including Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Merce
Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. After
the grand heroic narratives of abstract expressionism,4 aes
1961), 208-29.
thetic production became playful, ironic, removed, cerebral,
6. Roth, "The Aesthetic of Indifference," 4-9.
and ambiguous through calculated indifference. Formalism
7. Even art critic Harold Rosenberg's
so-called American action painters, while
not as overtly political as the works of their
interwar or immediate postwar predeces
sors, nonetheless recorded the "gesture on
the canvas" as "a gesture of liberation from
Value - political, aesthetic, moral." Harold
Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters,"
ART News 51, no. 8 (December 1952): 22.
Reprinted in Rosenberg, The Tradition of the
New (New York: Horizon, I960).
8. "Again and again in the 1950s, Johns took
emotion-laden material and ran it through
a filter of indifference.... At the heart
of these early works ... is a pull between
the search for meaning and a denial of
meaning. Johns chose subjects to paint that
revolved around the basic tools of meaning;
cooled down. Mediums and techniques were mixed. Artists
mumbled matter-of-factly in monotone rather than yelling
triumphantly. And this attitude would persist in the face of
the increasingly radical politics of the following decade, when
engagements with American commerce and corporate indus
try would combine with formalist theories to inform pop and
minimal artists, from Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol to
Ed Ruscha, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd.
The everyday imagery in paintings by Johns, the empty
and by-chance compositions of Cage, the deadpan photo
graphs of Ruscha and John Baldessari, the collection and ap
tools of light, measurement and language
propriation of Rauschenberg's Combine and Cardboard works,
by which the world is conventionally
the entropic material structures of Robert Smithson, and
apprehended and described. We need light
literally to see the world we live in, but
both the ready-mades and ironic absurdity of Duchamp:
the flashlights and light bulbs (themselves
artificial light sources) in Johns are often
these models of artistic practice were all described, praised,
inoperative: they are embedded in metal
criticized, and defined through indifference. All claimed to
or broken (Light Bulb I and Light Bulb //,
1958). Numbers are tools of measurement
for establishing one's spatial position and
the size of objects in the world, but Johns'
numbers are useless. His monotonous
repetition of numbers and alphabets (such
as Gray Alphabets, 1956, or Gray Numbers,
1958) recalls the mutterings of a senile
person who once learned in early childhood
lessons of counting and memorizing the
alphabet and who vaguely remembers that
further lessons made sense of such exer
cises, but cannot recall anything more."
Roth, "The Aesthetic of Indifference," 52.
express nothing in particular. Previous progressive, institu
tionalized models of art like abstract expressionism were re
jected, halting art's movement toward a "pure" Greenbergian
medium-specific condition5 - that is, a purely technical,
technique-based project - that was understood to express
the artist's freedom and individuality as something uniquely
American. Instead, the model of indifference opened up other
possibilities. It was ambivalent about any specific meaning.
It collected. It mixed things and mediums. It used pictorial
fragments, found material, texts, and performance. It pointed
at the wrong things; it flattened; it deflected attention. It did
things wrong. And, taking a "generally neutral" and "deliber
ately apolitical"6 stance unconcerned with defending mod
ernism or engaging present-day extremisms, it did all this
to challenge not models of life but the critical institutions of
art.7 In "The Aesthetic of Indifference," Roth clearly admires
the exacting ambiguity in Johns's work - the gamesmanship
with conventions, techniques, and history - and describes it
as oscillating between meaning and meaninglessness, use and
uselessness, to produce indifference.8
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Log 59
Senator Joseph McCarthy with Roy
Cohn during a televised Senate
Permanent Subcommittee meet
ing, April 23, 1954. Photo: Bettmann
Archive. Courtesy Getty Images.
Ultimately, however, Roth's text is a sort of critical la
ment that certain "indifferent" work might have been more
political, more socially engaged, and more of a direct chal
lenge to McCarthy while also being less antiexpressionist, less
9. It is not Johns et al. but subsequent ambiguous,
pop
and minimal artists, indifferent in the midst
of '60s countercultural movements,
less paralyzed, and less "cool."9 Given our cur
rent political and disciplinary climate, the previous models
who
are the focus of Roth's critique. Despite
of
indifference offer us something to think about. Should we
being produced alongside civil rights,
feminist, environmentalist, and other challenge
Trump, as Roth would have had artists challenge
radical movements, these later artworks
McCarthy? And if so, what would such a challenge look like?
were in no way their aesthetic analogue.
Radicalism, Roth writes, "was a threat to
I would argue that architects and architecture, both now
Middle America, but 'radical' avant-garde
and in the past, have productively instrumentalized indiffer
was not, for there was virtually no politi
cally radical art in the 1960s." Roth, "The
ence, and that indifference played a central role in both mod
Aesthetic of Indifference," 53. Art historian
ernism and postmodernism by contrasting strong politics with
Benjamin Buchloh has furthered a narra
tive of indifference into administration art
weak or empty forms; by cooling things down; by developing
and conceptual art. See Benjamin Buchloh,
noncomposition;
"Conceptual Art, 1962-1969: From the
Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique
or on
of Institutions," October 55 (Winter 1990):
105-43.
by focusing on the systematic, on typology,
distancing techniques, ambiguity, chance operations,
nonauthorship, and positivist logic(s); and by employing the
antiaesthetic aesthetics of appropriation, ready-mades, and
lists. Yet even if indifference (antiexpressionism) indeed lay
at the core of modernism - in Albert Camus, Edouard Manet,
Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and Fernand Leger - it is clearly
also of the here and now.
As we confront our own McCarthyesque political en
vironment, we do so alongside architecture's exhaustion of
progressive models obsessed with technique, technological
innovation, measurement, and the expansion of technical
skills through the computer. Many contemporary practices
have left behind heroic expression and, with it, those models
of architecture embedded in a neoliberal, globalized realism
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Log J9
Donald Trump with his attorney
Roy Cohn, October 18, 1984. Photo:
Bettmann Archive. Courtesy Getty
Images.
that try to optimize performance toward more efficient build
ings, to (co)design socially engaged structures, or otherwise
to make society function better directly through building.
Architecture since the turn of the millennium has been ob
sessed with mass-customization, parametricism, and BIM;
with twisted geometries determined by sun angles and didac
tic sustainability; with data and computation; with diagram
matic logics; and with countless other technological models,
all of which promise to make things better, more efficient, and
more flexible. And these models promised to embody all of
this within expressive, radical, and hyperbolic gestural forms.
These disciplinary and technological extremes have
produced an architecture world of the sort delineated by
Mike Hammer, armed with an expertise in the latest tech
nology, and Holden Caulfield, blankly searching, collecting,
and scrolling through images on the Internet. So here we
10. To preclude any misunderstanding,
the presence of the term aesthetic here is
significant; "indifferent," impersonal art
does not demand or reflect true absence of
feeling, only its performance.
11. When asked for her thoughts on the 201$
Chicago Architecture Biennial, to which
many young architects sensitive to models
of indifference contributed, Zaha Hadid
offered the following reply: "I think it's
a cute show." Quoted in Olivia Martin,
are again. And so is an aesthetic of indifference,10 which can
describe the assorted work being produced at the moment work that both feels post- (postparametric, postsustainability,
postpragmatic, or postmodern) and is generally character
ized as "cute" or "silly."11 Personally, I have never thought the
recent generation of architects to be postmodern, but rather
something else. If anything, they seem indifferent to mod
"Zaha Hadid," Architect's Newspaper,
els (or narratives) of progress through technology and data.
December 15, 2015, https://archpaper.com/
2015/12/zaha-hadid.
They play, collect, scroll, reappropriate, and reuse, taking lit
12. Not coincidentally, a value commer
tle interest in tabula rasa innovation or authorial originality.12
cially tied to technology through patents.
They misuse both technology and history toward work that
drifts between dada, pop, and minimalism and describes itself
in terms of qualities traditionally rejected in architecture like
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Log 39
playfulness, failure, heaps, piles, ad hoc assemblages, collec
tions, the ugly, the ironic, the awkward, the absurd, the cute,
the humorous, the ambiguous, the banal, the nondesigned,
the generic, the ready-made, the referential, crude material
processes, the entropic, bad sketches, the cheap, the hand
made, and so on.
An entirely incomplete and provisionally representa
tive list of architects demonstrating these tendencies might
include Archive of Affinities (Andrew Kovacs), Erin Besler,
Bureau Spectacular (Jimenez Lai, Joanna Grant), D.ESK
(David Eskenazi), First Office (Andrew Atwood, Anna
Neimark), Formlessfinder (Garrett Ricciardi, Julian Rose),
is-office (Kyle Reynolds, Jeff Mikolajewski), Aniajaworska,
the LADG (Andrew Holder, Claus Benjamin Freyinger),
MALL (Jennifer Bonner), Medium (Alfie Koetter, Emmett
Zeifman), MILLI0NS (John May, Zeina Koreitem),
Norman Kelley (Carrie Norman, Thomas Kelley), Curtis
Roth, T+E+A+M (Thom Moran, Ellie Abrons, Adam
Fure, Meredith Miller), WELCOMEPROJECTS (Laurel
Broughton), and a parade of recent thesis projects. And I
would include MOS in the above list as well, though arguably
we're still too pragmatic, too obsessed with technology, and
too concerned with solving problems. While I have focused
on a younger group to parallel Roth's article, I don't think
indifference is necessarily generational nor is it necessarily
American. Plenty of young architects would not match its de
scription, and numerous older architects would.
As Roth makes clear, this model of indifference is neither
unsympathetic nor callous, but rather a "psychological and
1$. Roth, "The Aesthetic of Indifference," 52.
intellectual way out."1! That said, my main critique of Roth's
essay is her conclusion that art missed an opportunity to be
more engaged. Because, at its best, architecture, like art, op
erates politically through aesthetics, not direct engagement.
(Confronted with a choice between the politics of aesthet
ics or the aesthetics of politics, indifference focuses squarely
on the former and the institutions of aesthetics, which are
everywhere.) The artistic expression of no expression, of
calculated indifference, is not necessarily the avoidance of
or giving in to extremist politics. Instead, when done well,
architecture's calculated ambiguity - its indifference - is a
social engine to produce discussion, reflection, thought, and
Michael Meredith is a principal of MOS
(along with Hilary Sample) and an
even action, while allowing for the coexistence of an irresolv
able diversity of ideas and identities.
assistant professor at the Princeton
University School of Architecture.
79
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