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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.
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of
are the focus of Roth's critique. Despite 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
ence, and that indifference played a central role in both mod
cally radical art in the 1960s." Roth, "The
Aesthetic of Indifference," 53. Art historian
Benjamin Buchloh has furthered a narra
ernism and postmodernism by contrasting strong politics with
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 by focusing on the systematic, on typology,
or on
Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique distancing techniques, ambiguity, chance operations,
of Institutions," October 55 (Winter 1990):
105-43. 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.
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