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CONTENTS

Hallucinogenic Precision Neil Denari Friends of Friends Jane McFadden

Deltascope Joe Day

Scope Attempts Utopic & Critical Museo Matta 3/2/3+1

34 40 50

Pattern Dayware Silver Lake House

72 78 94

Perspective C-Glass House 4/Way House

112 118 150

Vectors Ferrari Maserati Sagewater

180 186 196

Projection Media Center CCH Blow x Blow

204 210 228

Prospecting Additions Competitions

246 248 268

Methodology Project Specifications Acknowledgments

304 306 326

I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. David Foster Wallace, from “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”1

It was the “lines and lines athwart lines” phrase within DFW’s essay on his days playing tennis in Illinois as a youth that lodged itself deeply in my memory and I’d always wonder when and where I’d refer to it—to use it to explain or confer a reading upon something of great formal or geometric complexity. Now, in Forays, seemed like the perfect time. Besides the expectorate-like sound, it was the word athwart in particular that struck me as being an altogether different term used to describe a configuration of lines. It made me think instinctively of how architects work, drawing lines over lines, nervously thinking about what they all say or mean but hoping that somewhere in this criss-crossing matrix lays an idea to be excavated. Here, architects can operate either like a chirologist (palm reader), guessing what each line says about a possible future, or as a cryptographer who attempts to precisely decode the value and content of the field, but either way, lines athwart lines dare us to envision a new world. Athwart: 1) to cross in an especially oblique direction; 2) in opposition to. In Joe Day’s version of this world and in his work with Deegan-Day Design, lines and vectors emerge from the inner workings of visioning machines just as Foster Wallace’s Midwestern grids are redrawn under the forces of nature, which is to say that Day sees his world kaleidoscopically, in geometric patterns that move, distort, and change dynamically in space and time. Through Duchampian filters loaded with the effects of desire and the body and Matta-Clark’s boring out of achitectural viscera, Day peers into environments of his own making that fuse accuracy, error, anxiety, and spirituality into a substance that escapes exact material description. If a scientific experiment depends on a controlled set of conditions and observational techniques and if a drug trip depends on a willingness to have absolutely no control over anything, then in between these two outcomes, I suggest, is a way of seeing on which Joe Day not only depends but has also invented, that is through

David Foster Wallace, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (London: Little Brown and Co., 1997) pp.3–20. An earlier version of this essay entitled “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” appeared in Harper’s in 1991. See https://harpers.org/blog/2015/09/ tennis-trigonometry-tornadoes/ accessed 10/02/2019. Opposite Media Center CCH, model, 2016

Neil Denari

a lens that distorts as much as it sharpens, indeed, a lens that produces as much mystery as clarity. In this, I’d argue that Day’s C-Glass House fools you into believing its simple bounding box is the entire story, ghost authored by Californian Modernism, while in fact its channel glass envelope is only the most obvious element in the more, shall I say in light of my drug reference above, narcotically driven aspects of the project. A gauzy, dreamlike state surrounds the house, its gridded lines shimmering and wavering before our eyes, its prismatic surfaces playing on our senses. The trip Day takes us on, guided by all those lines athwart lines, is a type that, thankfully, you never come down from.

Opposite C-Glass House, night view, 2012

Friends of Friends

Jane McFadden

I have had a great variety of exchanges with artists over the years, but it is something else entirely to live in the work of another. Theory becomes practice on the most intimate of levels, as one engages the premise that “the subject is first of all a guest.”1 Life in the Days’ Silver Lake House was for us both an aesthetic experience and an experiment in hospitality—a lens I might choose for Joe Day’s work as a whole as well. How does one “house vision,” he questions—and, in doing so, share it? Within the practices collected here, I find myself circling a particular manifestation of Blow x Blow, where architecture not only shares perspectives with the educational institution, art gallery, and history of cinema, but also with other artists. Three invited guests brought work into Joe’s SCI-Arc installation, and it became briefly, Friends of Friends—a binary echo with the potential for dizzying idiosyncrasies. For his foray into this realm, Joe invited Andrea Fraser, An Te Liu, and Josh Melnick into his work. In turn, they gave the viewer an opportunity to encounter, if only fleetingly, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989), cat videos (Liu, Pookie x Pookie, 2009), and New York’s 8 Train (Melnick, The 8 Train, 2008–2009). Resulting in a striking sampling of sites for human exchange, each reminds us that we often see standing shoulder to shoulder, rather than eye to eye. Even as viewers of the installation contemplated the strictures of seeing in a museum or online, for example, or pondered the parallels between the urban alienation of the subway and the etiquette of cultural consumption, Joe’s faceted installation challenged these conditions by interlacing perspectives. The specific act of hospitality of Friends of Friends speaks to a much larger trend in Joe’s way of being in the world: projects privilege experimentation, friendships and acquaintances multiply, ideas flow freely, houses fill with guests. After the SCI-Arc installation, the projection armature of Blow x Blow went to Paul Young Projects, a gallery devoted to new media art, where the Okapane screens and faceted NidaCore surfaces were reconfigured to suit various installations. Relief models from

1 Anne Dufourmantelle and Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford University Press, 2000)

Opposite Blow x Blow, installation view, 2009

Friends of Friends

the SCI-Arc exhibition, each combining a museum and prison plan, also found a new site at a group show, Residence, at Track 16 Gallery in 2011. There, the reliefs were hung beside a safe door, a more emphatic prelude to Day’s Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2013). Early in this volume, Joe recalls “the Mattas” as a ground for his development, but to his arrays of understanding for these predecessors I might add Roberto Matta’s ability to host the global avant-garde wherever he was, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s propensity to serve food, not only in his experiments with the Food cooperative, but also the improvisational feasts he orchestrated for his ephemeral works: in Paris in 1975, he roasted and served 750 pounds of beef. These instances shadow more canonical practices, yet speak to the spiraling complexity of bringing others into a shared mode of seeing. Material structure is but one part of the social endeavor. In exploring architecture’s potential to shape and share sight, Joe turns to the glass house, not only a modernist paradigm, but also a vehicle and metaphor for an openness to the world. The C-Glass House figures a relationship to scope and site, which, as Joe notes, resonates with transformations of late 20th-century sculpture as much as with canonical predecessors in architecture. An essential transformation of art in this era was to house a viewer within the work, leading to a recognition of diverse constituent identities of viewing, itself: who sees? Simultaneously, this period also realized the increasingly fractured and fleeting nature of our mediated world, a condition that 4/Way House reflects upon as well with its projections and rotations: how we see. Perched on the western coast, each house offers a respite, but also a reminder of the instability of any vision: to experiment in shared ways of seeing is to risk exposure and change. In 2011, both houses were part of the LA/TOK Houses exhibition that Deegan-Day Design mounted with Tokyo curator Masataka Baba during Little Tokyo Design Week, where houses from Japan and Los Angeles were paired (20 x 20). The exhibition explored architectural innovation and relation across cultures; and the inclusion of the two houses reflected Joe’s broader conceptual explorations across the history of architecture, various modernisms, and art. Like Joe’s many array diagrams, they reveal a constellation of interest and knowledge over time. We might then understand that Joe’s practice of layering perspectives depends as well on multiplying them. This potential resides in the scope, scape, and shape of each project here as Joe figures them, as well as in the book itself. For, as Joe reminds us, one method of seeing is to read, to become, momentarily, a guest in the work and vision of another.

Top Paul Young Projects, inaugural exhibition, 2010 Lower left Residence, Track 16, 2011 Lower right LA/TOK Houses, Little Tokyo Design Week, 2011

Jane McFadden

Deltascope

Joe Day

62 62

Scope

North-by-Northwest screening, 2018 Previous page View from Southeast

159

185

Vectors