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http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/vanyro 1/17

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Coupe

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VAN.YR.Ø

COUPE

2013

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Money’s architecture decays. When it smells, it smells some-thing like deck-rot. The fungal scent of former inhabitation:dust, alcohol, the slow leaching of plastic, the sour mix of jetsamand dried salt. Distressed evergreens. A at, metallic taste ndsits way into your mouth, sent there by cardboard boxes tinged

with rust.

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98

The secrets of the house tumble out of each entrance and win-dow. Mildew. On the stairs there are dress shirts, pants and jeans spilling out of suitcases. Wool, cotton, silk: a litany ofmen’s names. All of them men.

From the dock, a rambling path splits toward a guest lodge anda boat shed. The shed is full of rotting wood, compressed bya collapsed ceiling. Ivy creeps in through the back window ofthe guest room, sharing the space with a rancid hot-tub full ofleaves.

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1110

And all around, mansions. Other houses, yards, people, yachts,maintaining appearances. But across a threshold of representa-tion, the surface has broken. Windshields attacked, doors kickedopen, the smooth glass face of the house now shattered andscattered across the kitchen oor. Broken bottles on the living

room carpet. A half-eaten turkey in the fridge. All of it rotting.

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1312

In front of the house is an expansive concrete landing where afew picnic tables linger awkwardly, teetering in the wind. The beach-front patio mimics a modernist town square. A jettyextends from the shore, acting as a marine barricade. It shel-ters the shore from the harsh waves of the sound, occasionally

breaking the wake kicked up by the passing ferries.

He clambered to the edge of the jetty and launched a paintedboard out onto the water.

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1514

The site lists an interminable constellation of elements, eachone staking a claim on the whole. The structure is a totality thatcategorizes its own decline through a vocabulary of abandon-ment. With gures sauntering through its natural passages andunfrequented aisle-ways (a work the size o f a sprawling glass

fortress), the place is not such much restored as unearthed.

Amnesia sti es the active experience of the present. Whirlinglike atoms, they drink the nepenthe of Homer’s Odyssey. Shecast into the wine of which they were drinking a drug to quietall pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. Joyand terror, enthusiasm and anxiety, are intermixed, togetherquaffed and forgotten. There is no recollection of that so-calledmoment of primitive accumulation. The absence of memorysuppresses all errant intensity.

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1716

Beyond the concrete, the house is approached formally withoutrecourse to lived experience. The site gures only as a boarded-up shell of capital. Its emptiness now can only stand in for theemptiness that preceded it, awash in scales of pro t and wreck -age. The object signals that past and present each share a face of

the other, ushered into existence by an economy of abstraction.

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1918

Fragments are withdrawn from the wreck age: wax, a metalsphere, bits of eroded styrofoam. What subsequently takes placeis a quiet revolt against the customary reign of objects. The wasted baubles of the rich are converted into objects of thought.The thoughts are converted to emancipatory blasphemes left to

the spray.

Digging through big grey green boxes once dormant, draggeddeep out of storage. A discovery: huge stacks of magazines,boxes of books. A hardcover tome with passages underlined, page numbers circled, clumsy notes in the margins.

Interior paint, primer, rollers, trays, all shed out of the backseat of the truck. Boards and nails broken out of the shed,down by the dock.

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2120

When time unwinds, it unravels entropically. A function ofthermodynamic variables. A state of disorder. Or a hypotheticaltendency toward such a state.

Within its own dynamic, the abstract, technical time of develop-

ment grinds against the quotidian t ime of collective experience.

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Here goes this plywood board, a thin coat of eggshell white,out onto the surface of the water. From this angle it is not probing the limits of ‘the frame’ or ‘art’ or ‘life’ or ‘c olour,’rather it mines the depths of excess and silence of the horizon. It disappears.

A monochrome is sent to the bay. Upon the concrete embank-ment, a imsy guillotine is erected for the already-headless. Onthe jetty and above on a cliff, painted signs announce them-selves out into the distance. Each is a minor exhibition of aformer singularity. This time, however, the foundation is builtfrom the ruins of luxury rather than the wreckage of life. For a brief moment, the old world dissolves like salt crystals returnedto the sea.

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2524

She set midsummer owers in a plastic bucket atop a woodenchair. Something eeting.

They envision a form of distanciation. On the horizon thereoats an Idea. It is there – out there – as a type of foam whose

water is History. The foam leaves an expanding trace, the ship- wreck of the idea is writ on water.

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But these words pose some questions for the oating idea ofhistory. The idea that knows of linearity while eliding its grasp.The idea that permeates the architecture of wreckage and whichpromises the re-appropriation of the commons in an era ofthievery. This question is for that idea.

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2928

When a red tide approaches the shore, it carpets the embank-ment (and all that it touches). Its movement expands in a broad billow, cleaving a widening arc across an enigmatic sea. To- wards this abstraction, friends submerge and re-emerge like im-perfect buoys. They are now within a temporary world, covered

in the grime of a red tide.

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3130

This site of demolished real-estate announces the fact thatday to day, week to week, overnight, at any price, constructionadvances forward. This world of capital, this erce and ever-ex -panding enclosure, is also a world that endeavors to present nogenealogy. It issues forth an architecture of time as though the

maneuvers of colonization were eternal. To think through a dif-ferent time therefore implies a counter-materiality correspond-ing to the origins of both old and new. It is a counter-rhythm,a counter-tendency, a counter-history that seethes and leaksinto the present, implicating the future of a different develop-ment that is here, there – the red tide of history. An experiencethat knows only one word – pro t – is thus counted by another word – expropriation.

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