O'Kane's meticulously studied hybrids are the fruits of a contemporary eclecticism rooted in the high-speed image trafficking of contemporary media, where architects themselves can easily forget that buildings are experienced in the context of a real site and dynamic situations. "A bit like going shopping in architectural history books," is how the artist half-jokingly describes his formal references, echoing the creative process of 19th-century architects. Yet beneath these seemingly obvious references lies a more radical proposition—that the modernist canon is in fact less authoritative, less transparent, and more shaded with ambiguities than we typically allow. Facts and fantasies begin to blur not because the artist manipulates history, but because he re-presents architectural artifacts suspended between perfection and ruin.
Why do artists turn to architecture for subject matter? Does architecture have something that art lacks? Or is architecture incapable of speaking for itself, so that only artists can interpret the subliminal currents emanating from frozen buildings and plans? What does architecture say, under its breath, to the world? Eamon O'Kane ventures into the heart of the architectural canon, sends off a shower of sparks, and returns with a changed view of a changed artifact.
Eamon O'Kane I grew up in a historic Georgian style house dating back to the 1600s in the northwest of Ireland. It was surrounded by trees, a formal garden, and an orchard. A number of the out-buildings were derelict, roofless, with trees growing out of them. So I became aware early on of a fragile relationship between architecture and nature. I intended to study architecture at the university, but fell in love with the arts while doing the general foundation year at the Art Academy in Dublin. My interest in architecture continued alongside, and has become part of my artwork.
Do you see iconic buildings as works of art in themselves, or rather as "found objects" to be made into art through acts of representation?
There is a quote by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, "In dreams begin responsibility." And that sums up a lot of my work, because I'm interested in exploring iconic modernist architecture and urban planning, and to bring them back to a starting point, where they can return to being an idea or dream. I see a role for art to probe architecture and design and planning, to reevaluate the past, and begin to construct and reimagine a possible future. Although nothing's permanent, architecture can have more of an impact than art works. The temporal nature of art is a useful foil for looking at the longer-lasting consequences of architecture and planning.
In your paintings of architecture, you have made radical modifications—for example, changing the Farnsworth House to black, hybridizing buildings by Eames and Le Corbusier, mixing night and day at Casa Bo Bardi, and multiplying and stacking the Eileen Gray side table into a tower. Where is the line between representation and reinterpretation?
Casa Bo Bardi Night and Day, as well as Fallingwater Seasons Remix and Philip Johnson Night and Day Remix are attempts at presenting scenes which on the surface can appear quite straightforward, with an iconic piece of architecture situated in an idyllic landscape. But on closer inspection, you realize something must be wrong. All the seasons are present simultaneously, or day and night have blurred. The erosion of natural rhythms begins to draw out the problem of sustainability. But these also echo literature, from Edgar Allan Poe's writing about architecture, to Stephen King's The Shining – this idea that a place can appear perfect from the outside, but as things develop, it eats you up from the inside. A utopia can turn very quickly into a dystopia.
The interpretations and modifications of buildings primarily arise out of research. To give an example, the hybridizing of the Eames house/studio and the Centre Le Corbusier are prompted by the fact that both Charles Eames and Le Corbusier were educated in childhood using the Froebel method (Friedrich Froebel, 1782-1852, inventor of the kindergarten), which included small blocks that children could use to explore shape and structure. Frank Lloyd Wright and Piet Mondrian, among others, were also educated in this way. I did an installation in 2010 entitled Froebel Studio: A History of Play at Le Quartier, Centre d'art contemporain de Quimper, France. I'm interested in how the attempts to structure creativity and play through education can have consequences later in life, and in history. Here again art is a probe to reexamine the legacy of design.
It started out many years ago for me in quite an intuitive way, but on a more theoretical level I would mention Nicolas Bourriaud's Postproduction (2001), in which he compared an artist to a DJ. It's this idea that maybe nothing we do is original, and it's a continuous remix of things from before. More recently, Jörg Heiser has explored the idea of super-hybridity in Frieze magazine (September 2010), which looks at how artists and musicians and practitioners are circulating and referencing things ever more rapidly through web media, before they can even be assimilated in society.
In 2006 I started remixing artworks in my Double Portraits series, fusing classical portraiture with more current photo-realist painting or photographs. I have also made hybrid architecture drawings, and remixed well-known buildings with other sites, throwing doubt on conventional notions of a place, a time, and a work. The Economist Studies, for example, impose a modernist building on a classically painted landscape, so there's a rupture of utopian idea as it becomes merely an object floating in space. Or on the other hand, it creates a way of reevaluating that utopian vision by seeing it in another context.
Is this fictive practice related to your simulated museum shows?
Yes, the Mobile Museum Retrospective began in 2005 as a series in which I insert my own works virtually into panoramic photos of museum interiors, such as the Guggenheim, turning them into a video walk-through, adding ambient sound from the actual spaces. I was questioning the artist's relationship to the museum and museum architecture. I also painted a series of museums, thereby reversing the wish of the artist to be collected by a museum– through painting I started collecting museums. In a weird twist of wish fulfillment, the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden Baden, Germany bought my painting of the same museum – a building designed by Richard Meier. The painting is entitled How Soon is Now, after the famous Smiths song. It's my attempt to use pop culture associations to counteract the high culture of the museum.
I'm interested in how a good idea or vision can turn into something quite the opposite. Take for example Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born architect who emigrated to America and invented the suburban shopping mall. It was a kind of utopian proposition. As the concept of the shopping centre quickly spread, Gruen became disillusioned, saying the concept was bastardized by subsequent developments. Today it's a symbol of environmental degradation. On this theme I made a public installation work entitled, Panorama: I Like Shopping Centres and Shopping Centres Like Me (2006-09). The panorama is 30m-long wrap-around painting, mounted on the inside of a solid wood cylinder. It was constructed to be exhibited initially in a conurbation called Blanchardstown just outside Dublin, which had been a green field site up until the late 1990s. The painting referenced the nearby landscape—or the memory of it – as well as the architecture of the new satellite town.
Wasn't this Panorama a piece of architecture in itself – a freestanding structure whose sole purpose is to enable a certain kind of viewing?
You look in from the outside through a series of viewing lenses mounted at different heights. These apertures reveal a distorted the view of the curving painting within, or show other mise-en-scène landscapes that defy expectations. The panorama proved to be a very relational work, with people going around its circumference, looking in at different heights, seeing unexpected things and sometimes bumping into each other. After Dublin it was shown in London at the Economist Plaza, and in Paris. It was very much a public work that people stumbled upon in the course of their working day. People would question, "Is it art, or are they building something here?" It kind of looked liked construction hoarding, until you got curious enough to look inside. The viewer has an opportunity to be transported, and then to reflect on that.
How did the idea of the panorama figure in your City Panorama series from the late 1990s, which layered maps and views of large urban fields?
The City Panorama Series was an attempt to study the representation of urban space in a singular rectangular plane. It referenced the 19th-century phenomenon of the panorama, but also emerging ideas around virtual space. Each of these paintings often can be read as a continuous sequence, like a Japanese scroll painting, left to right along the bottom of the canvas, and then continuing upside-down along the top. There is an overlay of urban planning diagrams or the city's rail networks, which end up sort of obscuring the view. I see the aerial mapping or planning schemes as being a kind of code behind the urban space, or the means to construct a space. The work is a deliberately futile attempt to put it all together, a noble failure. Similarly, the old three-dimensional panoramas also failed; they were inadequate to the task of surrounding the viewers to immerse and plunge them into the spectacular illusion that they craved. So these works are about the impossibility of representation.
Your works on paper mimic the dry precision of architectural drawing, but include surprise elements. They have the aura of a hand-made work, or a relic from another time. How do these strangely technical artifacts come about?
The modernist furniture that I'm depicting in the works is often quite old. But because of the iconic status of these objects, and the way they're reproduced by furniture companies and magazines, they're often disconnected from the time in which they were first conceived. For example, Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair from the late 1920s is still seen as ultra modern, even though it's now old. The deliberately aged drawings, stained with coffee, are meant to prime these design objects for reevaluation, so they are brought back to the drawing board in a new light.