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Worlds
Away: New Suburban Landscapes, edited by Andrew
Blauvelt
Walker Arts Center, 2008
The exhibition Worlds
Away: New Suburban Landscapes, currently at the
Walker
Arts Center, aims to "demonstrate how the American
suburb has played a catalytic role in the creation of new
art." It further aims to challenge "preconceived
ideas and expectations about suburbia (pro or con),"
featuring "artwork by Gregory Crewdson, Dan Graham,
Catherine Opie, and Edward Ruscha, among others, and architectural
projects by firms such as Fashion.Architecture.Taste,
The Center
for Land Use Interpretation, MVRDV,
and Estudio
Teddy Cruz." The companion book collects the exhibited
artwork and architectural projects alongside relevant texts,
be they previously written or done especially for the exhibition
and book.
The book is a well-designed object, with the writings printed
on colored pages and the artwork and projects highlighted
on glossy white pages. The design and ordering rewards jumping
around within the pages (I followed references in editor
Andrew Blauvelt's introduction to the various essays, a
parallel of sorts between his take on the exhibition and
the ideas presented within the book). Many of the essays
(some excerpted from books) will be familiar to those with
interests in suburbia, from John Archer's aesthetic exploration
of self and Robert Bruegmann's controversial critique
of sprawl's detractors to Ellen Dunham-Jones's embrace of
New Urbanism and the all-too-common Robert Venturi and Denise
Scott-Brown interview. Essays that directly tackle the subjects
of suburbia and art -- including Robert Bueka's look at
the portrayal of suburbia in film and Holly Wlodarczyk's
look at photography in the postwar American suburbs -- are
the most interesting, as is Rachel Hooper and Jayme Yen's
"Lexicon of Suburban Neologisms," an extension
of sorts of Dolores Hayden's Field
Guide to Sprawl.
Like the exhibition, the book does not try to make an exhaustive
presentation of the subject. Instead it presents a variety
of voices on the suburban realm, particularly embracing
the contradictions and hidden dimensions that betray our
expectations. The questioning of our preconceptions comes
across strongest not in an essay like Bruegmann's (whose
conservative approach questions cities as suitable environments
for sustainable living, among other questionable tactics)
but in the artwork that does not try to push a position.
The fact that the artists presented here decide to use suburbia
as inspiration for further inspection of the phenomenon
(an open loop of sorts that influences both artist and viewer)
is perhaps the strongest idea that the book and exhibition
can convey: culture, in the snooty sense, is not limited
to cities and their populations and institutions; it is
found just where many people don't expect to find it. What
this says about the future of the suburbs, the city, and
the United States is, as can be expected from this survey,
up for interpretation. The varied contributions and selections
are a refreshing antidote to the more focused and polemical
books devoted to the subject, giving the reader some perspective
that many of these other books lack.
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