Dorit Margreiter

The widespread destruction of post-war architecture conceived as social project is fuelled, according to Rem Koolhaas and OMA, by global rage. In an era when preservation is not only ubiquitous but deemed a noble cause, that genre of social architecture generated fifty years ago by a strong public sector is unjustifiably reviled. "There is now a global consensus", they assert, "that post-war architecture—and the optimism it embodied about architecture's ability to organize the social world—was an aesthetic and ideological debacle". In its stead, with public sector initiatives severely handicapped and the market subject to caprice, the more exceptional instances of flamboyant modernism are cherished. However, as preservation becomes a political issue, and heritage a right, the lack of both criteria and a theoretical basis on which its effects should be managed—"how the 'preserved' could stay alive, and yet evolve"—threatens its credibility and viability as public policy. Historical amnesia increasingly distorts our understanding of the past and, at the same time, impoverishes our vision of the future.

For Dorit Margreiter questions pertaining to the preservation or, conversely, the destruction of late Modernist architecture provide the occasion for probing larger issues shaping our contemporary socio-cultural context. Comprised of a carefully calibrated selection of works made over the past seven years, "Description", her first major survey show, highlights an abiding preoccupation. Four installations involving projected film are accompanied by ancillary related works. A nexus of interrelated pieces titled "zentrum", (2004 and ongoing), is located like a hinge at the juncture of the exhibition's two principal axes. Tellingly, "zentrum" has also provided the point of departure for the quartet of new works dispersed throughout the galleries. Monumental metal mobiles, these sculptures reference text-based works installed in adjacent spaces in that they, too, are comprised of letters from an alphabet created by the artist; when they are considered as moving images, however, their closest affinities are with her film projections.

Not polemic but description was the rhetorical mode Margreiter chose when conceiving this exhibition. Her disarmingly restrained timbre is nonetheless inflected with an incisive gender politics that has variously informed her practice over the past decade. Here it is perhaps most evident in the conjunction of subjects that fall loosely under the rubric of architecture: housing (both public and private), space (domestic and social), interiors (psychic and physical), display and exhibition. The theoretical and practical conundrums intrinsic to the preservation/destruction dialectic as outlined by Koolhaas are restated in "Description". Clearly at issue in this ensemble of works, they are not, however, articulated as binary alternatives: rather, they are presented as fundamentally incongruent. Margreiter thereby opens up alternative ways of conceptualizing such questions. Key, for her, are the forms in which they are represented and, consequently, the terms in which their discursive field is mapped. Seeking neither to theorize nor historicize the problematic of preservation/destruction, she offers instead models that can serve as heuristic devices—as ways of unpacking—socio-cultural representations which shape and govern the built environment.

Until 25 April 2011
Dorit Margreiter. Description
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Sabatini building 3ºfloor
Organized by: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Curated by: Lynne Cooke
Coordinated by: Lucía Ybarra