Allan Wexler: Ritualizing the Daily
Architecture performs many key functions for us at all times. Architecture can be sacred, private, public, or purely a shelter against the elements. Allan Wexler has made a career in questioning this function between the body and the building and its broader relationship between landscape, nature, and the built environment. Over a forty-five-year career, Allan Wexler has constructed an impressive body of work that has seen site-specific performances that re-evaluate basic assumptions between our bodies and our built and natural environments (Wexler et al., 2017).
A Biography
Allan Wexler has worked in the fields of architecture, design, and fine art and he currently teaches in the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons New York City. He has worked across mediums investigating the relationship between humans and the built and natural environment to create series, permutations, and chance outcomes for site-specific performances rather than definitive solutions. Often working at the scale of installations, his works become site-specific performances that ritualize our daily activities of dining, sleeping, and bathing to isolate, elevate, and monumentalize them to create ritual, ceremony, and movement. Allan Wexler’s unique takes on daily activities have created hyper-specific installations that human performers activate, but additionally sculpturally situated within sites to perform in their absence—creating pieces that have ever-changing compositions (Allan Wexler, n.d.). His performances engage with sites to engage with their conditions through the use of mechanisms and assemblages, in an age with greater technological involvement to achieve these experiences, Wexler can achieve them through incredible insight and involvement of the occupant. This is most evident in the following site-specific performances which are situated in the last twenty-five years: “Hearing Aid”, “Pratt Desk”, “Brick- I Want to Become Architecture”, and “Two Too Large Tables”.
Hearing Aid
Hearing Aid, from 2016, is an interactively worn construction that amplifies the sounds of the site for the occupant. A wooden construction with clear structural design characteristics from conical cones and ribs, it is a site-specific performance devised to be portably worn to highlight both natural sounds and those that the occupant produces in the performance space (Allan Wexler, 2016).
Pratt Desk
Located on a patch of grass at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2012, this site-specific performance is constructed in a balancing act in which the puppeteer (occupant of the desk) must work to counterbalance the desk working with the aluminum branching trellis to achieve perfect stasis. This creates a constant performance of the sculpture which verges on an interactive architecture as it houses the function and constructs an enclosing scaffolding (Allan Wexler, 2012).
Brick – I want to Become Architecture
Taking cues from Louis Kahn’s famous quote to students:
You say to a brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ And brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to brick, ‘Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.’ And then you say: ‘What do you think of that, brick?’ Brick says: ‘I like an arch.’ (Wainwright, 2013)
Allan Wexler works to engage the artist in this sentiment by making “Brick – I Want to Become Architecture” at Ohio University in 2008. The work blurs between sculpture, architecture, and portrait through the extension of the architecture into an architectural element—the stair—this morphs into a path that cuts across the quad to construct a bench that has been carved to leave the imprint of the artist within the sculpture. This expression of a portrait invites occupants to interact and sit in the imprint of the artist in this site-specific performance (Allan Wexler, 2008).
In addition to its interactive component, this sculpture and its site-specific performance works at the level of the material as its choice speaks to the importance of brick manufacturing which has played a large role in the history of the region (Allan Wexler, 2008).
Two Too Large Tables
This site-specific performance is diptych as a construction of two pavilions, both constructed of brushed stainless steel and Ipe wood. What differs is the plane of engagement—one constructs a community table and the other constructs a shade pavilion. Thirteen chairs are arranged to enable occupants to act as the anchors—anchors of structure and anchors of conversation—devising unusual pairings that allow a wide range of conversations to commence in this site-specific performance (Allan Wexler, 2006).
The final piece was a commission at the Hudson River Park in New York City in 2006. Exhibitions of Too Large Table in 2002 at the Feldman Gallery and the scale model of the Table for the Utopian Cafe in 2001 acted as a basis for the commission inception (Allan Wexler, 2006).
Conclusion
In a time, where site-specific performances may become synonymous with digital or augmented technology, it is important to take note and recognize the work of constructed works that are hyper-specific and adaptive without the need for heavy mechanisms or technological filters—only a rigorous understanding of site and artistic application of sculpture by the artist. This is what I see when I see a Wexler in the wild.
References:
Allan Wexler (2006) Two Too Large Tables. Available at: https://www.allanwexlerstudio.com/projects/two-too-large-tables-2006 (accessed 17 March 2024).
Allan Wexler (2008) Brick – I Want to Become Architecture. Available at: https://www.allanwexlerstudio.com/projects/brick-i-want-become-architecture (accessed 17 March 2024).
Allan Wexler (2012) Pratt Desk. Available at: https://www.allanwexlerstudio.com/projects/pratt-desk-2012 (accessed 17 March 2024).
Allan Wexler (n.d.) Biography | Allan Wexler. Available at: https://www.allanwexlerstudio.com/biography (accessed 17 March 2024).
Hearing Aid (2016). Available at: https://www.allanwexlerstudio.com/projects/hearing-aid-2016 (accessed 17 March 2024).
Ohio Outdoor Sculpture (2008) I Want to Become Architecture. Available at: https://www.sculpturecenter.org/oosi/items/show/1805 (accessed 17 March 2024).
Wainwright O (2013) Louis Kahn: The Brick Whisperer. The Guardian, 26 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/feb/26/louis-kahn-brick-whisperer-architect (accessed 17 March 2024).
Wexler A, Phillips PC, Anderson S, et al. (2017) Allan Wexler – Absurd Thinking: Between Art and Design: With the Close Collaboration of Ellen Wexler (ed. A Simone). Baden: Lars Müller Publishers and the authors.
