On the Road 3

The third edition of the ongoing “On the Road” series is an unconventional exhibition type that uses public roads to allow people seeing full-scale architecture that would not be seen in a gallery.

There is much debate today about the role of the contemporary institution, specifically the museum. The relevance, agenda, and responsibility of this traditional model is being challenged through experimental methods of funding, display, outreach, commissioning, publishing and public engagement.
Discourse abounds about what experimentation means, what audience is to be curated for, and what the role of the curator is when processing information for display. Luckily, much of this meta-curation is arranged within the institutions themselves, offering an intense amount of expertise and multiplicity of voices on the nuances of curatorial practice.
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013

One such project that operates outside of these existing structures and showcases a high degree of originality is the ongoing “On the Road” series, a collaboration of Los Angeles-and-Syracuse-based protagonists Danielle Rago, Courtney Coffman, Jonathan Louie, and James Michael Tate. The team has recently finished their third iteration, which takes the form of a decentralised exhibition where the public is encouraged to download a map and drive to seven existing, architecturally significant homes west of downtown Los Angeles. This unconventional exhibition type goes around the institution, and uses public roads, allowing people to move around with relative ease. They can also see full-scale architecture that would not be seen in a gallery. It mobilizes the audience directly to otherwise uncuratable artifacts.

On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
Upon arriving at each house, exhibition-goers are invited to take a post card from the mailbox of the home, available for one day only from 10am-4pm. These standard 4" x 6" postcards were drawn by young architects who each re-cast one project in their own way. Here, the representation of the house is presented directly in front of the real dwelling, offering a didactic, critical take on the home. It also allows users to compare and contrast the representational and the real. The selected cribs are an assortment of both the iconic, such as Frank Gehry’s 1984 Norton House in Venice, CA, and more quotidian, vernacular morsels.
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
Historian Kazys Varnelis notes that infrastructure actually makes architecture possible, not the other way around. Architects cannot build beautiful buildings without roads and other infrastructure laid down first [1]. In the case of “On the Road 3”, people experience architecture delivered through infrastructure. This is an experience wholly of Los Angeles: a pastoral, quotidian cruise through the picturesque, sublime landscape of Southern California, looking at buildings from a time far gone on roads from a past era. These buildings are meant to be experienced from and through the urbanism of the car, if we are to believe Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the American architects responsible for the suburban, infrastructural modernism so perfectly played out in LA.
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013

Roads are one of the few truly collective experiences; the “On the Road” project harnesses this and merges it with the individual via the mailbox, a site where the very public merges with the very intimate. While the internet has changed the importance of this dynamic to an extent, the mailbox represents our connection to the outer world, desire collected in a small box that is a receptor for a large, public network of distribution.

The “On the Road” project works in many ways as a completely public project, as it detourns, or perhaps "hacks" roads to deliver the exhibition. It is not completely new in this regard, as other decentralised exhibitions have taken place across cities or regions. However, by delivering the content also through the mailbox, the project also subverts and exploits another public system, the postal service. “On the Road 3” goes around the traditional institutional model for curation by utilising public amenities. By inverting the mailbox and making it an object of delivery, rather than an object of reception, the relationship of the house to the city is inverted. The home is no longer a place of private, domestic isolation, but one of public, civic engagement.

On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013

The program lasted one day. It would have been interesting to see what would happen if somehow the curators had negotiated for the postcards to be available everyday for a month. Because the exhibition only lasted one day, a smaller sample of people were aware that it was happening. The single day also capped off with "a discussion about contemporary modes of communication within architectural production moderated by Hammer Curatorial Fellow Ellen Donnelly." This event caused many users to end their day the same way. It would have been provocative to see what happened if the discussion had been a week later, so that after the exhibition, people could have continued their derive, and ended up at In-and-Out or on the beach. Either way, the exhibition proved successful, and its record lives on in the form of postcards and a model for public occupation via infrastructure deployed as curatorial space.

On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
Participants of “On the Road” include Andrew Akins; Clark Thenhaus; Heather Flood; Heather Peterson; James Leng; Mark Ericson; Jessica Colangelo; and Wendy Gilmartin. Artists Bryne Rasmussen-Smith, Jaime Kowal, Leon Henderson Jr., and Maya Santos of FORM follows FUNCTION will capture and ultimately tell the story of the evening’s activities through photographs and video projects.
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013

Notes:
1. Kazys Varnelis, Systems Gone Wild: Infrastructure After Modernity, http://www.c-lab.columbia.edu/0162.html (accessed Dec 9, 2013).
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013
On the Road 3, West of La Brea, 2013

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