AND A MICROPHONE

Architect Sekou Cooke spoke last month in support of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, a survey exhibit he curated at the New York Center of Architecture in 2019. He authored a manifesto on the subject, The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip Hop Architecture, in 2014, and is completing a book about it. I didn’t visit the show, which sounded gimmicky, but in photographs, and in Cooke’s presentation, the work collected has power and presence.

So it’s strange that in both speech and in writing Cooke is reluctant to define what hip-hop architecture (HHA) actually is. In the article, after failing to find an adequate definition for “architecture,” he moves on to describe hip-hop as a “subculture” that is at its core countercultural and multi-disciplinary. At the lecture, when someone asked what the formal ideas behind HHA were, its Five Points, he paused, sighed tiredly, and said only that hip-hop architecture was many things, that it really had no rules.

This echoes the words of Deconstructivists. And, formally, HHA might be the inverse of what that movement was. If Deconstructivism, in architecture, suggested forms coming apart centripetally, broken into smaller shards and sucked away into a vast neutral field, then the works Cooke showed might be understood as forms coming together centrifugally, of different parts from different places fitted together within a sliver of space in a city to make a vital new thing. That new thing is characterized by sculptural movement, calligraphic ornament, and percussive rhythm.

The most beautiful works Cooke showed were from his own studio, a series of models made by 3D printing the mass of an existing single-family house while spinning the printer. The resulting forms are bright and bold, human scaled, and accepting and recharging an existing vernacular. Architecture is made, ultimately, of forms and materials, not of ideas. There’s an architecture here; let’s look at it.

August 30, 2020 by Nalina Moses

FREE SPEECH

At an open reading I was part of long ago, after about a dozen amateurs (including myself) shared bits of self-conscious prose, a woman with dishevelled hair and a very big handbag shuffled to the mike, unfolded a piece of paper, and read a poem dedicated to her dead stepmother, which began:

She combed my hair every morning

She took me to school on time

She packed me sandwiches with jam

After she was done she looked up, smiled, and said, “She was the only person who really cared about me.”

The Pencil is a Key, the recent exhibit at the Drawing Center in SoHo, reminded me of that moment. There’s an immense rage of drawings here, by artists from different cultures and ages, with different degrees of talent and training, who all completed these works while they were incarcerated. But each artist drew with the same urgency – the same fundamental need to communicate. And in the end the skill with which they’ve drawn (linework, perspective, composition) matters less than the fact that they’ve drawn at all.

There are accomplished, professional renderings are, including works by political prisoners Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet. All the works are rich in feeling: sadness, pity, confusion, rage and grace. But the most affecting are those by untutored artists, perhaps because the content comes across so plainly. I was stunned by Angola prisoner Herman Wallace’s drawings. During more than forty years in prison he drew, over and over again, with relentless clarity, his cell in solitary confinement (bed, door, toilet) and the dream house he hoped to move to (two floors, bay windows, a one-car garage). Completed with pencil and ball point pen on scrap paper, these sketches were mailed to relatives and friends.

It’s facile to compare art to language, and drawing to speech. But this exhibit makes a strong case that drawing is, like speech, a human need.

Herman Wallace, 2002-07.

January 23, 2020 by Nalina Moses