Post-critical China: there is no author, just content!
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Date
2014
Authors
Brisbin, C.A.
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Conference paper
Citation
Critic/all international conference on architectural design & criticism, 2014, pp.225-237
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Critic/all international conference on architectural design & criticism (12 Jun 2014 - 14 Jun 2014 : Madrid, Spain)
Abstract
How do we critique contemporary creative works or speculations that claim of themselves no inherent critical function—that claim to transcend any conscious act of criticality—works that are apparently nothing more than outcomes of programmatic and commercial pressures placed upon them? In the 1990s, architects Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, Michael Hays, and Rem Koolhaas identified the emergence of a new kind of critical practice in Western Architecture that transcended the dogmatic and labored theoretical pursuits of the preceding antihumanist 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 expertise and absolve itself of any overt critical functioning, however its critical functioning is not so easily erased, especially in the contemporary architecture of China. The paper complexifies the commonly accepted definition of post-criticality as uniformly uncritical, suggesting that, whilst pretending to be neutral, post-critical works, such as those of exemplary post-critical artist Michael Zavros, are in fact—by the very condition of their active claim of opposition to avant-garde critical practices—"inherently political and partisan.”1 The paper concludes that the acquiescence from criticality itself therefore becomes a form of critical action and “conformist non-conformity” 2 that demonstrates the inherent potential to re-purpose the operative mechanisms of the neo-liberal political economy to an artist’s or architect’s own post-critical and creative ends. Whilst written from a Western perspective, the paper reflects on the cultural intersection of East and West that is manifest in recent counterfeit architectural projects in China.
As China attempts to reconcile its own political ideologies of hierarchical Communism with the economic structures of free-market Capitalism, it facilitates the ultimate transgressive act; consuming the postcritical ruins of the West and regurgitating them anew as a new form of global criticality. Perhaps we have more to learn from China then they do from the West. In the East, there is no author, just content.
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Copyright 2014 The Author. Licensed under a creative Commons License 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/)