rem koolhaas, content

8/13/2019 Rem Koolhaas, Content

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www.antithesis.unimelb.edu.au

The following text was originally published in

Dj Vu: antiTHESISVolume 17 (2007).

This digital version of the text is an

exact reproduction of the print version.

antiTHESISis an annual journal of criticism and creative writing

edited by graduate students in the School of Culture and Communication

at the University of Melbourne !ustralia.

"or further information on the journal please visit

www.antithesis.unimel.e!u.au


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190 antiTHESIS| VOL 17

Rem Koolhaas ont ntKln: TASCHEN, 2004

$39.95, ISBN 978 3 82283 070 3

Grace McQuilten

I see Architecture as an endangered brand, and Im trying to reposition it.1

Produced and edited by the notorious architect and designer Rem Koohlaas, Content

(2004) presents a theoretical exploration of art, architecture and social politics in theformat of a bright, advertising-littered magazine. The contentious format of Content,

along with the ambivalent nature of its content, provides a troubling example of

social critique that plays the market. In his infamous publication of 1978, Delirious

New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Koolhaas celebrated congestion as

the foundation of the village environment in New York, and therefore of community.

He proclaimed, The Culture of Congestion is the culture of the twentieth century.2

Tracing the history of New York, he explored the spectacle of the city and its

inherent conflict between order and disorder. The grid design of Manhattan, he

suggested, created a space that was both orderedand fluid, and that symbolised the

city itself: a space of contradiction. Recently Koolhaas has expanded this celebration

of congestion to encompass the congested state of consumer culture. Designing for

fashion companies and corporations, he has employed an eclectic mix of art,

architecture, design and commerce, claiming to use the mechanisms of consumerism

to expose its excess. Contentextends this exploration of the commercial market by

conflating fashion, design, art and architecture in the one publication. While the


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Dj Vu | MARCH 2007 191

approach of Content is fascinating a spectacle in itself it is also potentially

nihilistic, and signals several issues regarding the viability of critical practises

engaging so overtly with commerce.

Content plunges into the heart of consumer culture, documenting Koolhaas recent

architectural projects at the same time as advertising major fashion wares. Following

his earlier publications S, M, L, XL and The Harvard Design Schools Guide to

Shopping, it presents an equal mix of commercial advertising and architectural

discourse. Content is contradictory, presenting academic work disguised as a

magazine, and a magazine disguised as academic theory. Published by Taschen, anacademic publishing company, as architectural theory, Content nonetheless it

employs all the devices of contemporary commercial magazines. It includes

advertisements, the pages are printed on thin, glossy paper and its cover includes a

logo, a barcode, bright colors and catch-lines. The images on the cover make clear

use of what Naomi Klein describes as culture-jamming tactics; for example, George

Bush wears a packet of McDonalds fries on his head while brandishing a Christ

covered in guns. These apparently subversive tactics are undermined, however, by

the placement of Prada and Gucci advertisements on the following four pages. Yet

even this commercialism is contradictory. The Prada advertisement, for example,

features a photograph of a street vendor selling fake Prada bags on the street. What

should be an example of ad-busting is instead used ironically, or cynically, to sell

the real thing.

As a result of these conflations, the text becomes virtually indecipherable. An assault

on the senses, it presents a myriad of spectacular images, collaged text, computer

graphics and architectural plans. The ambivalence of the material is apparently

intentional, as early statements indicate:

no alarms

no surprises

Im not sure if this is a book or a magazine

Actually, I find the tension between the two super-interesting.


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192 antiTHESIS| VOL 17

The overt commercialism of the project points to Koolhaas claim that his work is

engaging with a contemporary context: I see Architecture as an endangered

brand, and Im trying to reposition it.3 While re-branding might be just what

architecture needs to compete in the contemporary economic public sphere, it is

important to consider what this type of collusion may bode for critical fields such as

visual art and social politics. The spectacular presentation of commerciality in

Contentruns the risk of subsuming its content. Antonio Negris theoretical writings,

for example, are reduced to two pages in Contentand buried at 350 351 within a

544-page document between an advertisement for TimeOut Magazineon the one

side and a promotional piece for OMA-AMO on the other. It seems that there is more

than a figurative loss of space for criticality at play.

Discussing the work of Koolhaas and the OMA, architectural theorist Anthony Vidler

asks the pointed question: should we conclude that irony, when wielded against

itself, turns to nihilism, or, worse, into postmodernism?4 Content mimics

postmodernisms eradication of subversive tactics. While this strategy might be self-

conscious, it does little to change the effect. Particularly at stake is the place and

space of visual artistic practice. Contentis full of artistic appropriations. An unmarked

double-page spread, for example, features a suspiciously Jenny Holzer-like neon sign

that bears the slogan: One mans hatred / Cannot alter another / Mans destiny,

with a vague logo in the upper right corner bearing the abbreviation NTA. Even

Walter Benjamins infamous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction, is appropriated in one of the fashion advertisements. The setting is a

fashion parade, where a darkened audience is enraptured by a central model on the

catwalk, whose figure emits a whitened light and whose digitally doubled image actsas a halo. The headline simply reads, Aura. Does such an appropriation re-brand

art, make it fashion-sexy, or transform critique into fashion? Art and theory are

present, apparently, but they just happen to be in the service of the commercial

interests of companies such as Gucci and Prada.

As history is raided for such pithy headlines, both context and content are emptied of

meaning. What might once have been considered parody, is now used as a

marketing tool for a cynical audience. While such a strategy might seem effective for


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Dj Vu | MARCH 2007 193

the critical and cultural spaces of architecture, which have always had to negotiate a

relationship with commercial culture, this kind of cynicism nevertheless faces critical

impotence. In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), philosopher Peter Sloterdijk

describes this kind of cynicism as the defining feature of the contemporary world.

Weve come to a point, he suggests, where we cynically celebrate our

powerlessness, effectively declaring: Hey, were alive; hey, were selling ourselves;

hey, were arming.5The effect is not an enlightened participation in the systems of a

new world as Contentmight claim but instead the repetition of the very political

and social conditions that elicited the cynical attitude in the first place.6Rather than

providing a productive reorganisation of systems of consumer culture, the cynical use

of the market in Contentrepresents only the reproduction of the market. This is a

danger for any projects that celebrate the fusion of consumer culture and critique.

|NOTES|

1 Cited in Hal Foster, Design and crime: and other diatribes (London: Verso,2002), 62.2Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York(London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 125.3Cited in Foster, Design and Crime, 62.4Vidlers question is posed directly in relation to the work of Koolhaas and hisOMA-OMA. See Anthony Vidler, Architectural uncanny: Essays in the ModernUnhomely(MIT Press, 1994), 195.5 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987), 546.6Sloterdijk writes, cynicism guarantees the expanded reproduction of the paston the newest level of what is currently the worst. Critique of Cynical Reason,546.

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