The Seventh iDisplacement
Heavy on classical notions of ‘balance,’ ‘order,’ and geometrical proportion, William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich designed the United States of America Pavilion in 1930 as a tribute to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Enclosing the visitor in a ‘forecourt’ before directing them beneath the firmament of a lofted rotunda, the US Pavilion is built to be enveloping and arresting, with a wide wingspan. An outpost of the US, merging nationalism and art; a monument intended to last.
In 2017, US biennale artist Mark Bradford went back to the source quarry for the Biennale grounds and collected excess gravel with which to [partially] bury the site. The pile of gravel, paused in an angle of repose from its peak in the structure’s corner, spilled over and into the path, blurring into the surrounding no man’s land of the Giardini.
He let it accumulate trash over time. Confronted with the aesthetic celebration of a slaveowner ’s command of architecture, Bradford stopped short of loading the the structure with enough earth to crack (as Smithson did with his “Partially Buried Woodshed” at Kent State), instead simply tempering its right angles. Yet in doing so — and directing visitors asymmetrically through a lowly side entrance — he challenges and subverts the structure’s value system.
The covetable gloss of the tablets and iPhones reflected the brickwork back in distorted, darkened pools, optically rippling and sinking within the dead leaves and detritus. While the architectural Palladian precision was bent and split and fractured within these demoted frames, the shared, derivative, classical principles of symmetry and the grid so foregrounded in the iPhone and tablet were also subverted.
Apple patented the round-cornered rectangle nearly fifteen years ago. “We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described,” they wrote in patent USD504889 S1.
The illustrative diagrams show a rounded, flat screen rectangle with parallel diagonal strokes suggesting a glossy, reflective material. Dotted lines indicate a subtle, possible frame within the thin rectangle; they’re guidelines, for context. As Apple clarifies, the broken lines are “shown for illustrative purposes only” and “form no part of the claimed design.” The sleek rectangle, sharp-edged and shiny, is the contemporary ornament, a singular geometry — nearly reduced to a depthless plane —and as such, apparently patentable.
There exists a certain associative reverence around monument–portal – temple – device, around the notion of a temporal threshold one can sense, an communing with an alternate, mediated dimension (be that a subjectively accounted past, an ‘augmented’ present, or a speculative future). If (in Smithson’s eyes/texts) minimalism’s entropic monuments were philo-sci-fi inflected works of metal, glass, and LED on a macho scale, today’s is pocket-sized yet, arguably, more potent.
Framed by the shadow of central columns—their proportions hampered and their status thus demoted by the influx of trash and gravel — these monuments to the pinging ‘moment’ rest on latently unstable ground.
This post is part of a series that narrates nine iDisplacements implemented at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Follow the iDisplacements publication on Medium and/or the iDisplacements hashtag on Instagram to read and see the next instalments.
