With Elka Krajewska DA: Ruth Benjamin

Damage Control

In its current usage Damage Control is understood first in the sense of spin, media manipulation and through orchestrated public opinion. But the phrase also suggests recovery and survival, hinting at the term’s military origins. Initially describing strategies for response to naval attack, Damage Control was broadly divided into procedures for damage PREVENTION, MINIMIZATION, and RESTORATION. In relation to this temporal phasing – before, during, after damage – the studio will bias the last phase, scrutinizing most closely the effects of damage, and what comes after.

Damage, broadly conceived, will be explored as the conceptual terrain for the studio. The studio will consider conceptions of damage in a global context, and in its various articulations, including Damage Control, collateral damage, and a wide range of damage definitions and damage vectors. We will examine the complex financial damage of the moment and all that it entails – subprime damages, Euro damage – as well as accidents, urban and architectural configurations of damage, legal damages, fire damage and ecological damage, even as we skirt around the obvious technological damage of massive ruptures, oils spills and junk shots.

SAI

Within this general field of damage the studio will have a specific focus, The Salvage Art Institute (SAI). In collaboration with artist Elka Krajewska the studio will develop spatial, temporal, physical and organizational strategies for the SAI, the first space devoted to, indexed and organized in relation to art removed from public circulation and the art market due to accidental damage.

Beyond creating a context for displaying damaged, critical but unseen works of art, the institute will provide a platform for discussion of the fundamental nature and value of art and architecture. SAI will position recent art and architecture production in relation to concepts of ageing, deterioration and damage, considered as a set of contemporary international concerns.

The studio will work with AXA – the primary New York art insurance agency – to develop a taxonomy of damaged work. Most important in AXA’s and the studio’s actuarial logic are a series of fascinating reversals. Foremost among these is the reversal of the value of the objects. Once the decision to forego repair and damage insurance has been paid the objects are officially devoid of value. These objects then belong to an odd nether world; they are the zombies of the art market, no longer alive in terms of the market, gallery or museum system, but more or less still intact. The question of where and how this evacuation of value occurs will circulate through the studio.

The studio prompts reflection on questions of expiration and obsolescence. The studio will consider the moment and terms of expiry and the reversal of the 20th century subjectivist declaration that art is such through the assertion of the artist, “It is art because I say so,” to “this is no longer art because I say so.” The issue of the authority and agency of those voices will be raised by the studio, as will be questions of architecture’s involvement in issues of expiry, obsolescence and temporality.

Damage Aesthetics and Devaluation

An unavoidable reference for the studio will be a category of artwork that attempts to formulate an aesthetic project of accident and damage. Consider Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test in which a Royal typewriter was launched from a speeding Buick Le Sabre, to test, among other qualities, the road-­‐worthiness of the typewriter. In Ruscha’s project the moment of damage was identical to the production of the value of the work.

If not exactly antithetical to that category and history of work SAI departs from it by considering the institutional, legal, actuarial conditions of damage, as well as the conditions of devaluation and the pressures toward the recovery of value, which the SAI seeks to resist. The studio, then, will be regulated by the process of devaluation, and will amplify the questions that the accident, damage and value provoke for these objects, for art, for architecture and for a broader context of aesthetic and cultural production.

The studio will question the context of survival, and will think through the institute as a problem, as a type, and as related to finance, value, pay out, and to public identity. In part, the question will be one of how architecture participates in or erases value. What is an architecture project aimed against the accrual of value, outside of the market? What are the possibilities, conditions, and strategies for remaining outside?

Finally, while the Salvage Art Institute is at the core of the studio, the final work of studio will not necessarily be constrained to its site or to its program. Students may offer counter proposals, for their own counter institutions, by thinking through the issues of damage in other contexts, and through other architectural systems, and urban conditions.

All notes on site, process and schedule to be posted on courseworks.