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The post-critical u-turn: a return to criticality

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 2013 Conference Proceedings
26 – 28 November 2013
Adelaide, South Australia

Christopher BRISBIN

How do we critique contemporary creative works or speculations that claim of them-

Wednesday | Session 1A | Other

selves no inherent critical function—that claim to transcend any conscious act of crit-
icality—works that are apparently nothing more than outcomes of programmatic and
commercial pressures placed upon them? The critic often excludes these seemingly unin-
teresting and uninspiring projects as not worthy of their critical gaze, and yet perhaps it

age. In considering the effects of artworks that are categorized as post-critical, or disin-
terested in the function of art as vehicles through which to mount cultural critiques, Hal
Foster has poignantly observed that what we are in fact witnessing in visual culture is
a radical rethinking as to what it is to be critical. In the 1990s, architects Robert Somol,
Sarah Whiting, Michael Hays, and Rem Koolhaas presented the idea of a creative practice
free from the dogmatic preconceptions of the preceding anti-humanist theories of the 60s,
70s and 80s. Liberated from the esoteric self-indulgencies of trans-disciplinary high theory,
post-critical architecture sought to reassert its explicit disciplinary knowledge and exper- 1 Diana Mihai, “Post-Critical
Architecture: Going Rouge
tise and absolve itself of any critical functioning. for Maverick Regimes,” in
Politics of Fear; Fear of Politics
- Conference (University of
Brighton, 2010).
2 Nigel Thrift, “Understanding
a shibboleth of our age. This paper argues that such content is at the heart of post-crit- the Material Practices of
Glamour,” in
ical artwork and architecture that seeks to engender the operative modes of the market Theory Reader, ed. Melissa
system through the branding of glamorous artist and architects as consumptive objects of Gregg and Gregory J.
Seigworth (London: Duke
- University Press, 2013), 293.
3 This is a paraphrased
cality as uniformly uncritical, suggesting that, whilst pretending to be neutral, post-critical quotation of student
works are in fact, by the very condition of their active claim of opposition to avant-garde
year critique sessions across
critical practices, ‘inherently political and partisan.’1 The paper concludes that the acquies- a number of architectural
cence from criticality itself therefore becomes a form of critical action and ‘conformist non- schools in Australia between
2009-13.
conformity’2 that demonstrates the inherent potential to re-purpose the operative mecha-
nisms of the neo-liberal political economy to an artist’s or architect’s own post-critical
and creative ends.

Post-Critical; Art; Architecture; Criticality

31
 Introduction
4 Karin Costelloe, “What
Bergson Means by As an external guest critic of a number of architectural schools across Australia, I
“Interpenetration”,”
Proceedings of the Aristotlean
Society New Series 13 (1912- whom, faced with a blistering panel critique as to the absence of any tangible or mean-
3): 149. Whilst Costelloe ingful critical voice in the their work, defended the lack of its instrumental agency as
is directly referring to the
process where by movement evidence of their perceived lack of Architecture’s relevancy in expressing any ideolog-
conceptual inference is that
ical position. ‘Architecture, like a child,’ expressed the student, ‘should be seen, and not
meaning is frames by the heard! … our interest is in form, not politics!’ I was dumbfounded by the broad agree-
inter-penetration of past and
future as I am also inferring
ment this indifference to architecture’s potential power held within the student cohort,
is the case in re-framing post-
critical work as critical.
5 Thomas Crow, “Modernism student’s work. Whilst I acknowledge that this was not necessarily a new scenario, it
and Mass Culture in the Visual dawned on me that this lack of critical aptitude appeared to be a growing trend (if not
Arts,” in Modernism and
Modernity, ed. Benjamin H. D. fully entrenched); with an ever-increasing percentage of students unwilling or unable
Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut, and to mount any considered critical position through their design work. This was in direct
David Sorkin (Halifax, Nova
Scotia: Press of Nova Scotia opposition to my own sense of architecture’s critical functioning: Faced with the radi-
College of Art and Design,
2004).
6 Jürgen Habermas,
“Modernity—an Incomplete
Project,” in Postmodern What this debate revealed to me was the inherent assumptions that were being made
Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Pluto
Press, 1985), 5-6. about the value of criticality in the design process and the active role it proffered in
7 Peter Eisenman, “The End framing meaning within the work (or as a response to it), and its role in commenting
of the Classical: The End of
the Beginning, the End of upon social and cultural values through built and speculative architectural project/s.
the End,” in Theorizing a New The student work was indifferently immune to any overt position, defended simply as
Agenda for Architecture: An
Anthology of Architectural an outcome of the programmatic forces affected upon it by the design brief. It was as if
Theory 1965-1995, ed. Kate
Nesbitt (New York: Princeton
the work existed in complete isolation from any architectural and/or cultural history;
Architectural Press, 1996). -
8 For a discussion as to the
ant-human or post-human
qualities of Eisenman’s celebration of the ‘here and now’ and was in complete denial of the discipline’s role
deconstruction, see John
Macarthur, “Experiencing in responding/shaping/critiquing the very economic and cultural forces that act to
Absence: Eisenman and frame it. Whilst the work could be categorised conceptually and stylistically (whether
Derrida, Benjamin and
Schwitters,” in Knowledge in explicit commitment or acquiescent ambivalence) as ‘post-critical’, it still lacked any
and /or/of Experience: The deliberate engagement with the broader cultural and economic processes that informed
Theory of Space in Art and
Architecture, ed. John its design. Whilst the literature in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy has inferred that
Macarthur (Brisbane:
Institute of Modern Art,
the post-critical is explicitly un-critical in its ideation, it is the aim of the essay to argue
1993), 101-2. See also John that post-critical work is inherently critical and to demonstrate, through the artwork of
Macarthur and Naomi
Stead, “The Judge Is Not
Michael Zavros and architect Rem Koolhaas, ways in which such a post-critical position
an Operator: Criticality, can be re-framed as fundamentally critical of the agents and systemic forces that inform
Historiography and
Architectural Criticism,”
OASE Journal for Architecture practices of Capitalism as a means through which to cast a mirror to the world of narcis-
69 no. Positions: shared
territories in histiography & sistic consumptive practices of glamour and allure.
practice (2006): 142.
9 Diane Ghirardo, Architecture
after Modernism (New York:
Thames & Hudson, 1996),
came before.4
32-5.
10 Macarthur, “Experiencing The post-critical has emerged as a cultural paradigm that accepts and embraces
Absence: Eisenman and
Derrida, Benjamin and
Schwitters,” 121. explicit reaction to the isolating self-indulgences of the architectural theory of the late

32
twentieth century. The avant-garde acted as a ‘kind of research and development arm of
the culture industry,’5 whom assertively emblazoned their imaginings with the promise 11 Anthony Vidler, “Diagrams
of ‘conquering an as yet unoccupied future.’6 However, the future they imagined was of Diagrams: Architectural
Abstraction and Modern
interested more in the dogmatic adherence to the perceived anti-Humanist ideals of Representation,”
Representations 72, no.
Modernism then the social and theoretical needs of society. This period of postmodern Autumn (2000): 5. Here
Vidler is paraphrasing Robert
Somol’s observations about
underpinned the subsequent theoretical structures of decomposition, deconstruc- the transformation of the
diagram’s role in architecture.
See Robert Somol,
language aimed to undermine the structuralist idealisation of binary relationships in “Introduction: Dummy Text,
Semiotic theory. This binary relationship bound meaning to a universalising system or the Diagrammatic Basis of
Contemporary Architecture,”
that supported the belief in a singular ‘ultimate truth’ that underpinned how meaning in Diagram Diaries, ed. Peter
- Eisenman (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2001), 7.
crasies. Literary theory and Architecture happily co-existed with the shared goal of 12 Andrew Benjamin,
“Eisenman and the Housing
transcending the repetitive traditions of language, culture and Architecture (as Peter of Tradition,” in Rethinking
Eisenman indicted them) and to conceive a new autonomous architecture through the Architecture: A Reader in
Cultural Theory, ed. Neil
‘immaculate conception’ of authorless anti-human or post-human environments;8 Leach (New York: Routledge,
through anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, then philosopher Michel Foucault and 1997), 300.
13 Peter Eisenman, ed. House
of Cards
University Press, 1987), 182-3.
In Eisenman’s deconstruction, meaning was not projected by the edicts of the architec- 14 Robert Somol and Sarah
Whiting, “Notes around the

that was discovered subjectively by each beholder anew, or so the story goes. Moods of Modernism,”
Perspecta 33, no. Mining
‘Eisenman’s fractured buildings [are] completed by thought about them.’ In decon- Autonomy (2002): 73.
struction, we were neither the authors, nor the ultimate subject of the work, but had 15 Leonard draws an interesting
correlation between the
to, none the less, trudge through its obscure use of convoluted and esoteric literary terms ‘critical’ and ‘neurotic’,
and graphic symbolism. What we experienced through the work was the presence of and between ‘uncritical’
and ‘pervert’. His argument
its absent generative diagram and the sensation of experiencing not the static outcome is that, unlike a neurotic
of a design process, rather a living, breathing, and evolving process in and of itself: ‘the
and represses their desires,
diagram has become ‘the matter of architecture’ itself, as opposed to its representa- the pervert knows exactly
what they want and have
tion.’ Whilst the formal outcomes of Eisenman’s deconstruction were often alien in no ambivalence in seeking
their resulting affect, the work none-the-less offered a rich critical language through it out. Leonard believes
that criticality in the
which to challenge the orthodoxies of architectural language, and the ‘traditions’ contemporary art context is
through which architecture was read, understood, and its meaning produced. ‘[A]rchi- inherently concerned with
neurosis. “By contrast, as a
tecture cannot be except as it continuously distances itself from its own boundaries; it proud pervert, Zavros [the
is always in the process of becoming, of changing, while it is also establishing, institu- subject of Leonard’s essay]
is shamelessly complicit. He
tionalising.’ Eisenman’s goal therefore was no less than the complete reinvention of knows exactly what he’s
the discipline of Architecture. into: his type of sports car,
this kind of horse and his
- therefore is an act of
tion to something else; between culture and form, kitsch and the avant-garde, literal narcissistic pleasure that
is actively engaged with
and phenomenal, objecthood and art, to name but a few. The unending pluralism of by Zavros that becomes
the postmodern era leaving a resonant trace upon the cyclical tendencies of fashion, the subject of his own art

taste and consumption. Architecture, Art, and visual culture more generally, were of what provides immediate
pleasure becomes thus the
content of the work. See
fetishist desires of the ‘perverted’. Architecture, in particular, drifted further and Robert Leonard, “Michael
further from the banal realities of everyday architectural practice, or from the concerns Art
& Australia 49, no. 1 Spring
of the public to which its architecture undeniably serves. The one consistent idea that (2011): 109.

33
 was the shared belief in criticality as foundational in the solidifying of meaning in their
respective creative practices.
Through the ideological and pedagogical structures of the academy, Robert Leonard
recounts, ‘we have inherited the idea that artists should be critical.’ So too in architec-
ture, the role of the critic is perceived as sacrosanct: ‘the essence of architectural educa-
tion is architectural criticism.’ This focus on criticality was introduced through the way
in which students were taught to be artists and architects; to present, defend and demon-
strate a critical awareness of the explicit and implicit voices of their work in saying some-
-
thing went awry: critical of who, what and why? The kitsch and the perverted somehow
transcended these critical ideals and became the content of art and architecture. Art and
architecture were themselves consumed by the consumptive practices of Capitalism. Not
only were they unable to inoculate themselves from infection, they unwittingly became
the primary instigators of its celebration. Criticality no longer held its sway in binding
theory and practice, becoming, instead, a relatively closed academic exercise in Theory’s
self-referential gymnastics without any tangible application in practice itself. The story of
Theory’s apparent demise is well charted:
so what has changed?

not theory that binds the apparent randomness of postmodern plurality, it is Money.
The cultural value associated with the artistic practices of Art and Architecture is
-

Hal Foster notes, ‘Critical theory took a serious beating during the culture wars of the
-
gences isolated its audience and diluted its cultural relevancy to the point which society

the systemic mechanisms that led to its benign cultural relativism; or its subsequent
16 Ibid., 104. celebration of increasingly narcissistic notions of beauty and taste and the predicable
17 Peter Collins, “The
Philosophy of Architectural
affects these notions had on the composition of the built environment.
Criticism,” AIA Journal 49, no.
January (1968): 49. Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to
18 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for
Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge
(London: Manchester
University Press, 1984), 76.
19 Hal Foster, “Post-Critical,” kitsch, art panders to the confusions which reigns in the ‘taste’ of patrons. Artists,
October 139, no. Winter
(2012): 3. gallery owners, critics and the public wallow together in the ‘anything goes,’ and
20 Lyotard, The Postmodern the epoch is one of slackening.
Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, 76.
21 Leonard, “Michael Zavros:

34
They elevated themselves, through the direct engagement and manipulation of the
fundamental economic practices of supply and demand, to the status of a brand. In
order to explain this shift, Leonard cites art historian Rex Butler’s indictment of the
‘artist as brand’ as a ‘post-critical’ turn that can be understood as an irreconcilable

for familiarity in the milieu of semiotic and informational saturation that is emblematic
of the age.
It is this cultural branding that Nigel Thrift argues has manifested in contemporary
culture as a ‘glamorous celebrity sign system’ in which the legible aesthetic signature
of branded architects and artists become paramount in achieving the transformation
of inanimate objects into sites of lust and desire, which is fundamental to the effective
functioning of the market system. For Thrift, the ‘means of captivation’ inherent in
the ‘glamorous celebrity’ is transferred into the inanimate objects they generate;
ontologically transformed into corporeal commodities of consumption that have

their celebrity host.

22 Thrift, “Understanding
the Material Practices of
Glamour,” 307.
23 Ibid., 305-7. Thrift presents
the anecdotal example of
work in the post-critical. Michael Zavros’ artwork can be understood as a shibboleth of
our time; as a demonstration of a particular ritualistic obsession of our narcissistic age hair. The hair becomes a site
that manifests technological
in which the authenticity of the original is corroded through its systematic re-presenta- and cultural innovation into
tions and translations. Zavros’ work sets in motion a return of ‘symbols of status’ an aesthetically expressive
“synthesis of aesthetic
and an ‘aspirational cannon of beauty’. object and a means of
stroking public intimacy.”
See also Grant McCracken,
Big Hair: A Journey into
the Transformation of Self
without resorting to the default-setting language of criticality, wherein a work (Woodstock, New York:
Overlook Press, 1996).
can’t simply express something, it has to elaborate, scrutinise or deconstruct it. 24 Leonard, “Michael Zavros:

Whilst Zavros himself is bemused by Leonard’s indictment of his work as post-critical, Leonard cites Rex Butler
in Somol and Whiting,
- “Notes around the Doppler
tion, it calls for a different kind of reading.’ The obsessive character of Zavros’ atten-
of Modernism.” See also
tion to verisimilitude is mirrored by the very subjects of the work’s representational Walter Benjamin, “The
gaze. That is to say, the choice of representational technique is mirrored in the content Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,”
of Zavros’ art as a commentary on questions of taste, beauty and aesthetic perfection. in Illuminations (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968).
V12 Narcissus 25 Leonard, “Michael Zavros:

26 Ibid.
27 Louise Martin-Chew, “Slow
Art: Recent Fictions by
of Narcissus who, after shunning the advances of the smitten nymph Echo, is enchanted Michael Zavros,” Art Monthly
by Artemis (as punishment) to fall in love with his own self-image. When coming Australia 233, no. September
(2010): 30.
across a spring as ‘clear as silver’, Narcissus gazed into the untouched waters and fell 28 Leonard, “Michael Zavros:

29 Victoria Hamilton, Narcissus

and Oedipus: The Children
of Psychoanalysis (London:
stained the snowy whiteness of his completion, admiring all the features for which he Karnac Books, 1994), 21-5.
was himself admired.’ His own self-love leading to the ultimate consumption of his 30 Ibid., 23.

35
Fig. 1. V12 Narcissus (2009)
Michael Zavros

Fig. 2. Echo (2010) Michael Zavros

36
own mortality as he plunged a dagger into his own chest declaring; ‘Ah youth, beloved
in vain, farewell!’ For Leonard the moral lessons underpinning the myth of Narcissus
are transcended within contemporary visual culture—if not entirely ignored—as the
but I would argue, absorbed into
the painting as a narcissistic act of auto-consumptive self-destruction. The ‘mirror–
The
31 Ibid., 24-5.
potential of the post-critical therefore is to consciously use this mirror-stage to criti- 32 Leonard, “Michael Zavros:

33 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror

- Stage as Formative of the
I Function as Revealed in
tivity’. It is concerned with a hyper-realism that oscillates between the copy and the Psychoanalytic Experience,”
in Écrits: A Selection (London:
Travistock, 1977 (1949)). Here
to the sorts of photographs you might see advertising perfume or aftershave in the I am applying Lacan’s use of
the mirror-stage to explain
pages of magazines such as Vogue Uomo or GQ Zavros’ Echo the conceptual functioning
The new Round Room
through which to determine
Echo juxtaposes identity in young children
the opulence and glamour of the hall-of-mirrors in Versailles against the gleaming (6-18 months old). Here I am
proposing that the mirror-
chrome surfaces of bodybuilding gymnasium equipment. Similarly, The new Round stage allows for a forensic
Room examination of post-critical
works that reveal not the
grounds of the Palace of Versailles—yet again—against the gleaming chrome surfaces author’s degrees of criticality,
of yet more bodybuilding gymnasium paraphernalia. In Echo and The new Round Room but the embedded ego of
capitalist culture as a whole.
34 Leonard, “Michael Zavros:
and contemporary) and, I would argue, the metaphoric associations of individualised 35 Sebastian Smee, “Brittle
viewpoint that such dogmatic applications of Renaissance linear perspective entails. Beauty,” Weekend Australian,
March 24 2007, 18.
The image is constructed in order to be ontologically consumed from a singular view- 36 Christopher Brisbin, “Spatial
point in space as a ‘symbolic form’ that ‘transformed psychological space’ into the
Mixed-Reality in the Virtual
‘mathematical space’ of Cartesian perspectivalism. Reality Panorama,” in
Panorama to Paradise: Scopic
Focusing exclusively on male vanity and men’s fashion, Sebastian Smee argues, is Regimes in Architectural and
Urban History and Theory
endemic of a ‘standardised’ and familiar world that consists of a restricted fetishist XXIVth Annual Conference of
vocabulary of ‘suits, shoes, ties, the same square jawline, the same straight nose’ which the Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and
elicits a ‘kind of vacuum packed vanity, as airless as it is seductive.’ Zavros’ artwork New Zealand, ed. Stephen
challenges the literalism of recent contemporary art that makes a fetish of the real: ‘not Loo and Katharine Bartsch
(Adelaide2007).
a sculpture of a shark, but the shark itself; not a painting of a pregnant women, but a 37 In referring to ‘symbolic
Madame Tassaud’s-style copy, replete with individually inserted hairs.’ It challenges form’, I am directly
referencing Panofsky’s
the literal manifestation evident in the work of architects, such as Rem Koolhaas, in seminal work on the
which the operative diagram radiating from the market forces of Capitalism, is legible construction of subjective
truth that is facilitated
in the formal expression of the architecture itself. Much can be learnt from Zavros’ by Renaissance linear
perspective. See: Erwin
attuned manipulation of the very market system that celebrates and lauds his work for Panofsky, Perspective
as Symbolic Form, trans.
Christopher S. Wood. (New
York: Zone Books, 1991), 41.
See also Anne Friedberg,
“The Window,” in The Virtual
Window: From Alberti to
Microsoft (Cambridge, Mass.:
round-table discussion with Wolf Prix presents a radically different conception of the MIT Press, 2006).
38 Smee, “Brittle Beauty,” 18.
39 Ibid.
and aesthetic puritan to trendsetter and media star’ and outlines the conception of 40 Mary McLeod, “Architecture

37
Fig. 3. Prada New York (2000-1)
Rem Koolhaas, OMA

Fig. 4.
(2010) Michael Zavros

38
the emerging category of the ‘starchitect’. Thrift’s ‘glamorous celebrity sign system’,
applied earlier in the essay to contextualise post-criticality, is evident in Architecture
and the recent ‘spatialisation of brands’ into experiential environments through which
the ideals of glamour are manifest as visceral and experiential affects.
In Architecture the architect is transformed into a brand through the aestheticization and Politics in the Reagan
Era: From Postmodernism
of the architectural product, and the glamorous allure associated with its celebrity to Deconstructivism,”
designer. However, I argue that this is more complex in that it requires a fusion of the Assemblage 8, no. February
(1989): 38. Stacy Anderson et
‘object of desire’ with the iconography of its designer as ‘subject’. What we see therefore, al., “Collaborative Space: An
Exploration of the Form and
Function of Fashion Designer
the aesthetic of the architectural project, and its inherent cultural baggage, becomes and Architect Partnerships,”
indistinguishable from its architect; as evidenced by journalist, architect and founder of SCAN Journal of Media Arts
Culture 7, no. 2 (2010).
For the initial conception
of the ‘starchitect’, see
Michael J. Lewis, “The
Rise of the``Starchitect’’:
On the Ungainly Fusion of
to the priority of self-promotion of aesthetic familiarity over the substance of its actual Architecture and Celebrity,”
experiential affect. The internal marketing and promotional arms of such architectural- NEW CRITERION-NEW YORK
26, no. 4 (2007): 4.
brand practices, as OMA’s marketing palindrome AMO, publish and disseminate OMA’s 41 Thrift, “Understanding
work in addition to their own independent research through brochures, catalogues, the Material Practices of
Glamour,” 301.
magazines, journals and books, working ‘in parallel with OMA’s clients to fertilize On Criticality
architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines … including media, poli- (Delft: DSD Publications,
2009), 4-6.
tics, sociology, renewable energy, technology, fashion, curating, publishing, and graphic 43 OMA, “Oma/Amo,” OMA
design.’ OMA/AMO’s research into shopping, occurred simultaneously to OMA’s design
Architecture), http://www.
of Prada New York.44 oma.eu/oma.
On Criticality, 6.
that brought into being the aesthetic ‘excesses of exclusivity’ that such exclusive luxury See also Rem Koolhaas et al.,
brands embody.45 The Harvard Design School
Guide to Shopping / Harvard

the City 2, Taschen Specials

contemporary content of Architecture, including his most important work (at least, (Taschen, 2002).
in the context of this argument) S, M, L, Xl: Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large On Criticality, 6.
See also Rem Koolhaas et al.,
Koolhaas introduces the concept of ‘Bigness’ in order to speculate upon a funda- eds.,
1 (Milan: Foundazione Prada,
mental re-thinking of the role of the architect and the content of the architecture that 2001).
is produced. According to Koolhaas, ‘[b]eyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the 46 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce
Mau, “Bigness, or Problem
properties of Bigness.’46 For Koolhaas, this question of ‘scale’ is initially a simple archi- of the Large,” in S, M, L, Xl:
tectural concern of the relative size of buildings to their context or each other. Here Small, Medium, Large, Extra
Large, ed. Jennifer Sigler
Koolhaas is attempting to pre-conceive the programmatic complexity of architecture (New York: Monacelli Press,
as a form of sophisticated conceptual system in which the formal and aesthetic compo- 1995), 495.
47 Ibid., 513.
sition of a building is given over to other generative forces; ‘Bigness means surrender to 48 Interestingly, Koolhaas’
technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others.’ Koolhaas Bigness urbanism has been
realized recently in the form
is imagining a world in which mega-metropolis projects, such as his own thesis project of cities that emerge in near
instantaneous timeframes,
Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture in relation to traditional
Constant Nieuwenhuis’ New Babylon European concepts of
the gradual growth and
of urbanism and undermine the traditional assumptions of an architecture that bares aggregation of layers of a city
the legible signature of a singular author.48 growing over time. In Dubai
and cities in China, whole
[Bigness] can be achieved only at the price of giving up control, of cities are being designed and
constructed at extraordinary
rates.

39
 performance is as critical as the architect’s … It promises architecture a kind of
post-heroic status- a realignment with neutrality.
The question of the changing nature of the author is key here as Koolhaas’ Bigness
concept denotes a shift in the widely held cultural understanding as to how creative
works are conceived. Koolhaas’ suggestion that the complexity of large architectural
works demands the ‘surrender’ to multiple authors ultimately diminishes the legi-
bility of any singular or familiar logic. An inherent irony results: by incorporating the
consumptive practices of luxury products such as Prada into the functional and concep-
tual content of the architecture, Koolhaas unwittingly (or, perhaps wittingly) gives the
work over to a market system that transforms the authorless post-critical architec-

the global brands that it serves. They are trans-continental corporations that require

status and anxiety of the global customer. Sylvia Lavin’s call for a ‘’cool’ architecture
that is unashamedly fashionable, desirable, and ephemeral’ demands a direct engage-
ment with, and celebration of, the very market mechanisms that the tenets of criticality
so vehemently opposed. Consumptive practices became thus the primary content of
Architecture, and Capitalism, its ultimate author.
There is an inherent irony in the claims of post-critical art in that the very ideal of

economic forces of the free market, directly contradicts the fundamental roots of
Capitalism. Capitalism is based on the attribution of authorship as intellectual property.
In so doing, this intellectual property forms the basic ethical structures of copyright
-
-
right or ownership, and subsequently leverage this ownership against other forms of
49 Koolhaas and Mau, “Bigness,
or Problem of the Large,” -
513-4. tional qualities of form and aesthetic familiarity of ‘brand’ reign supreme. Artworks
50 Michael Speaks, “After
Theory,” Architectural Record
193, no. 6 (2005): 74. form of quasi-entertainment to be consumed, regurgitated, than re-consumed anew.
51 Here I am re-deploying
Rem Koolhaas or Michael Zavros as ‘stars’ are not just images, but are representations.
a similar transformation of They represent a culture of desire and lust that is deferred through the symbolic allure
pop-star Madonna from
image to representation. See and promise of lifestyle and taste that is presented by the star’s representations.
On Criticality, 5.
52 Firat and Venkatesh outline
Baudrillard’s critique of
Marxism. A. Fuat Firat form that becomes the essence of the consumer society.’ The irony, according to A.
and Alladi Venkatesh, Fuat Firat and Alladi Venkatesh, is that as artworks critically react to market forces
“Liberatory Postmodernism
and the Reenchantment of placed upon them within the dominant Western economic system of Capitalism, they
Consumption,” Journal of
Consumer Research 22, no. 3
are subsequently consumed by the very system that they seek to disrupt. For Firat and
(1995): 248; Jean Baudrillard, Venkatesh, there are only two possibilities for cultural critique in this capitalist frame-
The Mirror of Production,
trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis:
work: re-appropriation or marginalization. It is either subsumed into the market, or
Telos, 1975). it is marginalized by it, to the point that it is no longer relevant.
53 Firat and Venkatesh,
“Liberatory Postmodernism The Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century bares remarkable similarity to the
and the Reenchantment of
Consumption,” 249.

40
and Koolhaas. This correlation to the Enlightenment offers an alternative transforma-
tion of post-critical architecture’s critical position. As Bruno Latour has observed;

descriptive tool, that of matters of fact, which were excellent for debunking quite a 54 Bruno Latour, “Why Has
lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions, it found itself totally disarmed once matters of Critique Run out of Steam?
From Matters of Fact to
fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus. After that, the lights of Matters of Concern,” Critical
the Enlightenment were slowly turned off. 54 30, no. Winter (2004):
232.
55 Wes Hill, “On Post-Critical
So too, faced with the undeniable agency of post-critical architecture’s causal effects, Art,” Contemporary Visual
post-critical architecture can be argued to be far more critical than the traditional Art+Culture Broadsheet
41, no. 1 (2012): 67. Hill is
criteria for asserting criticality would infer: ‘the post-critical turn is not the rise paraphrasing Hal Foster’s
of uncritical approaches to art, but a reconsideration of what it means to be crit- argument. See Hal Foster,
“An Interview with Hal
ical.’55 As Diana Mihai has observed, ‘[p]ost-critical architecture pretends to be politi- Foster: Is the Funeral for the
cally neutral/post-critical and rejects social critique, but the fact that it is modeled on Wrong Corpse?,” Platypus
Review 22 (2010): 12.
contemporary business practices and market systems renders it inherently political 56 Mihai, “Post-Critical
and partisan.’56 Architecture: Going Rouge
for Maverick Regimes.” See
principles, cannot be easily differentiated from its economic and political symbolism. also: Kim Dovey, “’I Mean
Their acquiescence from criticality itself therefore becomes a form of critical action. to Be Critical, But ...’,” in
Critical Architecture, ed. Jane
Rendell, et al.,
Critical Studies in Architectural
the explicit critical capacity of the work in/of the Australian context. As discussed Humanities (London ; New
York: Routledge, 2007), 256-
earlier in the essay, Zavros’ representational technique revealed an inherent undercur- 7.
rent of criticality in commenting upon questions of beauty and obsessions with male 57 McLeod, “Architecture and
Politics in the Reagan Era:
self-image. The focus on Vermeer-esque degrees of verisimilitude and photo-realism From Postmodernism to
Deconstructivism,” 25.
Phoebe is dead/Mcqueen 58 Martin-Chew, “Slow Art:
demonstrates a technical production of art that embeds within the work an inherent Recent Fictions by Michael
Zavros,” 30. Martin-Chew
contradiction of the market mechanisms of consumption that are believed to be the is quoting Alex Chomitz.
post-critical generators of Zavros’ artistic oeuvre. Phoebe is dead/Mcqueen presents See Alex Chomitz, “The
the life-sized image of Zavros’ own daughter, ‘playing dead’ whilst laying still and inan- Icon Collection with Michael
imate over a mirrored surface draped with a Alexander McQueen skull-covered scarf. Zavros,” (2010). For a
commentary and critique
As Louise Martin-Chew observes, Zavros’ use of such a painstaking painting technique
posted on social media)
phenomena, see Olympia
that commodify the bodies of young-women in acts of highly competitive narcissism, Nelson, “Dark Undercurrents
celebrate the conception of a diametrically opposed condition of ‘slow-art’. 58 Martin- The
Age, July 11, 2013.
Chew’s analysis of Phoebe is dead/Mcqueen 59 For a discussion on the Bill
Henson’s work, see Melinda
attuned with the embedded critical narratives at work through the fear of the illegiti- Hinkson, “Australia’s Bill
mate sexualisation and use of images of children for illicit purposes; as evidenced in the Henson Scandal: Notes on
the New Cultural Attitude to
moral panic and controversy in Australia surrounding the use of children in the work of Images,” Visual Studies 24,
no. 3 (2009). For a discussion
on Polixeni Papapetrou’s
Art Monthly Australia entitled Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s work, see “Turning the
Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs Gaze,” in Australian Story, ed.
Trudy McRobert (Brisbane:
ABC1, 2013). For a broad
overview of the history of
sexualisation in art imagery,
see Danielle Egan and Gail
We are perhaps still too close historically in order to objectively identify just how Hawkes, Theorizing the Sexual
Child in Modernity (Palgrave
critical or un-critical post-critical artists and architects actually are. Indeed, in the Macmillan, 2010).

41

60 George Baird, “Criticality and
Its Discontents,” Harvard
Design Magazine 21, no. Fall
2004/Winter 2005 (2005).;
Rem Koolhaas and Bruce
Mau, “What Ever Happened
to Urbanism?,” in S, M, L, Xl:
Small, Medium, Large, Extra
Large (New York: Monacelli
Press, 1995).; Dovey, “’I Mean
to Be Critical, But ...’,” 256.
61 McLeod, “Architecture and
Politics in the Reagan Era:
From Postmodernism to
Deconstructivism,” 51.
62 Thrift, “Understanding
the Material Practices of
Glamour,” 293.
63 Ibid. Thrift is paraphrasing
Postrel. See Virginia Postrel,
The Substance of Style: How
the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is
Remaking Commerce, Culture,
and Consciousness (New York:
Harper Collins, 2003), 9.
64 Murray Fraser, “Introduction:
The Cultural Context of
Critical Architecture,” in
Critical Architecture, ed. Jane
Rendell, et al.,
Critical Studies in Architectural
Humanities (London ; New
York: Routledge, 2007), 249.
65 Jianfei Zhu, “China as a
Global Site,” ibid.
66 Rem Koolhaas, Content (New
York: Taschen, 2004), 480-1.
42
context of this essay, it really doesn’t even matter. The paper has argued that there
is an inherent criticality in all post-critical works, whether their artists or architects
acknowledge them or not. Whilst Koolhaas himself aims to be overtly uncritical,
Kim Dovey believes that Koolhaas’ embracing of market forces results in a forensic
resonance in his architecture: ‘Instead of encoding critical comment or opposing the
effects of power, his work at times accentuates such effects, rendering architecture
more socially transparent.’ The challenge for architects is to transcend the poststruc-
turalist paradox, ‘whereby the architect is absolved of obligations of authorship but
the object is granted considerable subversive power.’ Architects must learn to better
acknowledge both the work’s authorship and its potential subversive power if they are
to reverse the current trend of critical indifference. Koolhaas’s work thus reframed,
presents a post-critical structure that is simultaneously a powerful form of criticality.
-
ture of criticality or post-criticality as movements or styles within postmodern culture,
rather it has attempted to better elucidate and understand what cultural values are
being expressed through such works; what is the cultural tableaux upon which Zavros
and Koolhaas operate and what cultural forces are at play within their work. The paper
has not been an attempt to necessarily eschew one from the other in terms of their rela-
tive critical or post-critical positions, rather it has aimed to demonstrate the false-
hood in claims that the post-critical is dogmatically and unashamedly un-critical: Quite
the opposite has been demonstrated to be true. What we can yield from both Zavros’
and Koolhaas’ recent work is that it engenders a kind of complicit-ness in/to consumer
culture that in turn engenders the work with a ‘conformist non-conformity.’ In Zavros’
oeuvre -
mative act. As Virginia Postrel astutely observes ‘form follows function’ has been effec-
tively usurped by ‘form follows emotion.’
A post-post-critical architecture, or a post-critical ‘u-turn’, is required to ensure the
critical engagement with the ‘present imbalances in power and opportunity’ of our
time that Architecture so often ignorantly reinforces.64 As the world’s economies and
socio-political power structures transform and shift from West to East, it is paramount
that we ensure that we are not left behind.65 -
ment to the Australian context, it is not surprising that even Koolhaas has derogato-
rily satired the Australian architectural context as celebrating a conservative brand
of mediocrity.66 We operate in a context of increasing political indifference and liberal
naivety in which critique and engagement with the profound problems or our age are
swept aside in order to reinforce social stereotypes, pander to the fear of an uninformed
affords. The formal and social costs are too high when the focus is so exclusively on a
post-critical architecture that abstracts human relationships to it to the point that they
become post-human and culturally irrelevant.
As Koolhaas and other post-critical architects like him collectively lead their practices
into the uncharted territories of China, they unwittingly have monumentalised the
ruins of Capitalism. As Walter Benjamin observed, ‘[e]ach epoch not only dreams the
next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking ... In the convulsions
of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie
as ruins even before they have crumbled.’ As China attempts to reconcile its own polit-
ical ideologies of hierarchical Communism with the economic structures of free-market
Capitalism, it facilitates the ultimate transgressive act; consuming the post-critical
ruins of the West and regurgitating them anew as a new form of global criticality. In
the East, there is no author, just content.
In following Michael Hays, the paper has argued for an architecture that is conscious of
its expressive and disciplinary position in the world, not ambivalent or indifferent to it.
Hays, and other post-critical architects, claimed that the discipline’s emancipation from
the domineering tendencies of architectural theory of the late twentieth-century could
only be achieved through a return to architectural practice as the locus of disciplinary
knowledge and expertise. However, the paper has argued that this return to a creative
practice, freed from the dictatorial constraints of theory, does not absolve architec-

cannot ‘inoculate’ itself from its privileged position as a mirror-stage to society. It

society, and acts as a vehicle through which to better understand the discipline’s role
as a situated force in the ongoing formation of historical and social narratives.68
What it is to be critical has clearly irreconcilably changed. Hal Foster’s observations
that the post-critical in Art was actually a new kind of criticality—that it demanded a
rethinking of our fundamental conception as to what it means to be critical—must be
similarly adopted in Architecture so that its architects can become better attuned to
listening to what these architectural artifacts say about our world, regardless of whether
their architects intended them to be overtly critical or not! However, we may not be

promoted stardom.’ But, as Oscar Wilde so eloquently reminds us, ‘every portrait that
is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the
accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter
who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.’ Cultural artifacts are therefore interpre-
tations and translations of what the artist and architect see in the world. Their creations
have a voice; the question is whether we have the fortitude and resilience to objectively
listen to what they critically have to say about us.
67 Walter Benjamin, “Paris,
Capital of the Nineteenth
Century,” in
Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writing,
ed. Peter Demetz(New York:
Schocken Books, 1979), 162.
68 Michael Hays, “Critical
Architecture: Between
Culture and Form,” Perspecta
21 (1984): 27.
69 Tracey Cooper-Lavery and
Diane Warnes, “The Prince:
Michael Zavros,” artlink 33,
no. 3 (2013).
70 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of
Dorian Gray (Ward, Lock, and
Company, 1891), 9.

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