Preface

Since 1968, the Triennale India has been one of the world’s significant visual art events. This major exhibition of contemporary art is one of the Australia Council’s important international commitments, and in conjunction with a range of other international visual arts events, it enables the promotion of Australia’s leading visual artists to the world.

Australian artists have been part of the Triennale almost from its inception: from Robert Hunter to Eugene Carchesio, through Simeon Nelson, Peter Atkins, Gareth Sansom, Marion Borgelt, Jenny Watson and Fred Cress. In 2005, the Australia Council is delighted to present the work of Callum Morton in a new exhibition Tomorrow Land, curated for the Triennale in New Delhi by Stuart Koop, with the support of the Australia India Council, Arts Victoria, and Asialink.

For over a decade Morton’s work has incorporated sculpture, photography, sound and digital imagery to set familiar forms from architectural history against their original idealised function. Callum Morton has made architectural motifs his calling card: structures, balconies, awnings, as well as iconic modernist buildings such as the Schroder House in Utrecht, Adalberto Libera’s Casa Malaparte in Capri, the Farnsworth House in Illinois, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat in Montreal, Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Le Corbusier’s Cabanon. These icons become in Morton’s work curiously dysfunctional, at once mundane and touching, an ode to capitalism, human frailty and artistic genius.

Morton presents an ironic view of the intersection of public and private space. Weaving drama and humour into his work Callum undermines the seriousnessof many buildings, filling them with narratives drawn from life, movies or books. His buildings come alive with the sounds of domesticity and dreary conflicts. His work is a compelling mix of personal narratives, past histories, transformation, community living and utopian concepts.

Specially commissioned for the Triennale, Tomorrow Land refers to Le Corbusier’s design for the Punjabi capital, Chandigarh. Callum’s digital images and sculpture suggest alternative uses for Le Corbusier’s symbolic architecture, comparing international style architecture to a fun park. It’s the perfect exhibition for our times, obsessed with the sexy icons of contemporary architecture yet indifferent to their ultimate inhabitants and their needs. We extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to Callum Morton for his imaginative and powerful work, the Curator, Stuart Koop, and to Asialink, who have worked to support the exhibition. We also thank the Australia-India Council for its assistance and commitment to the Australian exhibition in New Delhi, and gratefully acknowledge Arts Victoria for its support and interest.

We invite you to enjoy this unique exhibition.

Anna Waldmann
Manager Visual Arts/Craft Board
Australia Council for the Arts


Tomorrow Land  
 
Stuart Koop 
Curator 

Callum Morton grew up with a picture of Le Corbusier’s Capitol at Chandigarh on the living room wall. His father was an architect (working with Moshe Safdie on Habitat in Montreal) and Callum was born the day Le Corbusier died. He studied architecture before dropping out to go to art school. Vikram Prakash, who writes in this catalogue, is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington, but also the son of Aditya Prakash who worked with Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. He is the author of a critical Indian perspective on Le Corbusier. I grew up wanting to be an architect, Mike Brady, in fact, from the TV show The Brady Bunch, since he was a great guy and my favourite house was his Frank Lloyd Wright ‘rip-off’ in which the family lived (and show was set). 

My point is all three of us (artist, essayist and curator) belong to a subsequent generation, dealing with the failure of modernist architecture in one way or another, living in the remnants of a dream which has been gazumped by commercial imperatives, capital investments, not to mention free trade. Relative to these overwhelming global forces, architectural vision seems to have diminished or dissipated amongst our more immediate, prosaic concerns with making a living, preserving our lifestyle, having a good time. We are certainly witness to a different future than the one our fathers imagined; one that some of the work here grimly or amusingly approximates at reduced scale, and in virtual form. 

For example, in Morton’s 2001 print series Local +/or General, celebrated houses are merged seamlessly with multinational franchises. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is combined with a convenience store, The Eames’ House is combined with a hardware store, Glen Murcutt’s outback home becomes a Souvenir store, and Adolf Loos’ House for Josephine Baker becomes a strip joint. Similarly, in the 2003 series lnterbau wow wow, various high-rise housing developments by Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer and Alvar Aalto are transformed into hotel/resort accommodations (lnterbau was the housing estate designed by some of the world’s leading architects for an expo in Berlin in 1957). 

The Farnsworth House also appears in Morton’s other work. In one model, a party rages within, ending with gunshots and screams, possibly a murder. In another model, the House is duplicated and arranged to form a compound or court, in which we can see and hear the occupants of one house watching a horror movie on television, while others are throwing a party, while their neighbours are getting burgled. 

The combinations seem odd at first, the images and sculpture charting the expansion of everyday life and commerce into these singular, remarkable places. But really there has never been a clash between high and low, just the matter of their slow, constant mediation, which we now feel less and less compelled to remark as anything other than the usual texture of daily life. After all, the Farnsworth House is finally a museum. McDonalds has been building in heritage sites for years all over the world. And in the 1960s Mobil employed Bauhaus graduate Eliot Noyes to design its service stations.  

To this end, Morton’s work charts the inexorable ebb of ‘cultural capital’ into just plain capital. He presents a few final scenarios within the unfurling of these worrying, dynamic forces shaping the world, combining international styling with multi-national retailing, confusing high status with low-rent, proposing the applications of modernist design to all sorts of global enterprise, almost exactly as intended (from Brazil, to Australia, to Mexico, to India and elsewhere). Thus it suggests a calamitous, unending modernisation and commercialisation of the world in a not-too-distant future; a ‘Tomorrow Land’, where Philip Johnson’s Glass House at New Canaan has become a drive-in petrol station, or where the remote Casa Malaparte has been taken over by a popular chain-store. 

Morton’s transformation of Chandigarh provides another apposite case in point; by his reckoning, it’s a theme park gone wrong. Across a series of four prints and one model, Le Corbusier’s iconic works for Chandigarh – The Secretariat, The Assembly Chamber, The High Court, The Tower of Shadows and the Open Hand monument – have been merged with aspects of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld. The film (from a book, also by Crichton) is based around a theme park which evokes different world epochs through highly stylised architecture and robotic inhabitants; Morton’s inference being, the ‘international style’ architecture of Le Corbusier is not dissimilar in its fantasy of perfecting the domicile of populations everywhere in line with some epochal style. 

Vikram Prakash has made it clear that Le Corbusier designed Chandigarh based on an idealised and romantic view of Punjabi village life. While 17 villages were cleared for the new capital, the rather forced orientation of the Capitol to the nearest village to the North (today Kansai) framed a single vestige as a distant idyll, set in the Himalayan foothills. And of course, the singular, uncompromising vision of Le Corbusier is well known and widely remarked, even down to the manhole-covers at Chandigarh. Balkrishna V. Doshi, Le Corbusier’s supervising architect, has said nobody really demurred from Le Corbusier’s edicts, and that Le Corbusier ‘didn’t listen’, even though – as senior architect Charles Correa has remarked – many of Le Corbusier’s ideas for Chandigarh just ‘didn’t work’. Thus Le Corbusier’s buildings might compare to Roman World, Medieval World and Westworld – as a kind of Modern world – another example of some fantastic vision or specious simulation imposed upon inhabitants. 

Indeed, Chandigarh was also a Tomorrow Land for Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future’ after Partition in 1947. And just as each of Crichton’s fantasy worlds promised to fulfil the desires of visitors in myriad period ways (from can’t-lose gunplay and whorehouses in the West, to what seems like an unending toga-orgy in Rome) , and just as they each failed technically with dire consequences, so too Chandigarh has been thoroughly checked and critiqued for its grand utopianism and impracticality. Several of the proposed buildings may never be completed, leaving large holes or gaps in the town plan. The grand space of the Assembly Hall, a symbol of unification, has been divided since 1967. And Prakash notes, ironically, that villagers today hang laundry and bathe water buffaloes in the reflecting pools of the Capitol. 

In this sense, Chandigarh (like Brasilia, like Canberra and like other designer cities, which are the folly of a single architect) comes closest to a theme-park. Indeed, Roy and Walt Disney were building Disney Land in California (including Tomorrow Land) at the same time as Le Corbusier was designing Chandigarh. Both might now appear as prototypes informing the new international ‘fantasy cities’ remarked by sociologist John Hannigan; capital developments incorporating retail, leisure, entertainment, and popular culture, which reflect the consolidation and diversification of multinational commercial interests that mark late capitalism. 

According to Hannigan, most of these developments are driven by ‘deep-pocketed global entertainment companies, like Disney, Universal, Sony, Warner Bros., Paramount and Rank’ – companies who these days trade across commodities, brand names and media. Typically the ‘fantasy city’ provides a high tech virtual and architectural means to convene these interests under one roof, brought together via some cinematic motif or character which can be reiterated endlessly through merchandising. 

From which perspective, Crichton is the perfect broker of these compounding interests in technology, fantasy, and leisure. He embodies these millennial obsessions: a designer of computer software, a science fiction/fantasy writer, film director and producer, and he maintains an abiding interest in theme-parks (Wes/world, Jurassic Park). Crichton also wrote one of the first books about the impact of information technology on lifestyle (Electronic Life 1983), has developed game and film production software and Westworld was one of the first films to use digitized images (Crichton won an Oscar for Technical Achievement in 1994). 

Like Eliot Noyes, Crichton ‘goes-between’ high art and popular culture, adapting aesthetics and high ideals to more practical (and often commercial) purposes; in short, he is a lynchpin between Le Corbusier and Disney. On the one hand, Westworld arguably derives from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean exhibition, opened in 1968, a slow-moving boat ride through an audio-Animatronic adventure where pirates take over a Spanish fort and pillage and plunder the town. Yet on the other hand, Crichton is seriously engaged with the ethics of science, and the author of a monograph on American Pop artist Jasper Johns. 

In a 2003 public lecture on environmentalism, he curiously noted the ‘greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda’; curious for someone who depends on the willing suspension of disbelief for a living. Of course he stands between these two poles, characteristically blending scientific fact with fanciful drama Uust as he did in writing/producing ER which combines his training as a doctor with the tenets of soap, just as Time magazine wrote in tribute to Lost World: ‘he got the science right’). Indeed, he is a very powerful broker of all the predominant commercial interests in popular culture. 

Media critic Walter Benjamin wrote as early as 1937 of the diminishing aura – the tangible presence or trace of the real – in the work of art, due to the popular or public demand for entertainments, which could only be supplied through mass reproduction. 

He famously suggested that cinema was the embodiment of these burgeoning material conditions of production in the early 20th century, and that all the other arts could be seen through this predominant means. And thus cinema was the ultimate means for envisioning our epoch, to which architecture and literature were subordinate. 

Crichton proves the point. His potted history of Western Civilisation in Westworld (Roman, Medieval, the West) – apart from its American bias – also conforms to those periods best represented in cinema, from King Arthur and Lancelot blockbusters, to westerns, to gladiator pies. (Indeed the action-sci-fi-thriller-western is shot on old sets on the MGM backlot and Crichton describes the film as a sequence of cinema cliches. Brynner even reprises his character Chris from The Magnificent Seven.) Thus in Westworld world history is rewritten through the predominant tropes of cinema, and film genre is predicted a determining factor in leisure experiences of the future, such that for $1000 per day guests of Westworld can pretend to be John Wayne. 

It’s not surprising then, that Morton uses cinema (and a prescient scenario such as Westworld) to reconvene the architectural complexity of Chandigarh in 2004, the future having come to pass in the construction of ‘fantasy cities’ around the world. (Indeed, most of the global entertainment companies were originally movie corporations.) So when Jagdish Sagar, Chief Executive of Chandigarh from 1997 to 1999, ‘revisits’ Chandigarh in his memoir, he does so through the lens of cinema too, perhaps affirming a final link between Disney and Le Corbusier (or between film and architecture) in describing Chandigarh as the supreme location for a chase across town at the climax of some thriller: ‘the end must of course come somewhere in the moonscape grounds of the Capitol after the camera has exploited the drama of its great buildings – action among the forest of columns in the foyer of the Assembly, on the ramp and rooftop of the Secretariat, in the tall shadows of the High Court portico, under the open Hand monument as it rotates ever so slowly … Directed right, the camera’s eye should discover in Chandigarh a visual personality that is sufficiently self-consistent, distinctive, stylish – and strange – for some slick cinematography of that genre: though a certain amount of scruffy Indian reality would have to be edited out.’ 

And finally, it’s not surprising that these links between film, commerce and architecture are manifest using digital means, the latest envisioning tool, which casts everything now in critical retrospect; replete with skeletal remains beneath a slowly turning open hand indicating the way that once led to Tomorrow Land, overturned chariots in front of the Assembly at Roman World, pooling blood in the High Court’s moat at Medieval World, and the smouldering remains of the Secretariat-cum-fort at West World. Inside the Tower of Shadows – here converted to a car park for day visitors touring the attractions at Chandigarh – we can hear the footsteps of Crichton’s manic, robotic, dysfunctional citizenry echoing endlessly in search of absent prey. The scene is truly forlorn; the future (envisaged by Disney, Le Corbusier, Nehru, Crichton, our fathers and mothers) abandoned. Westworld has failed. 
 
References 

Vikram Prakash, Chandigarh ‘s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, University of Washington Press, 2002 

Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier: Architect of the Twentieth Century, Harry N. Abrams, 2000  

John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis, Routledge, 1998 

Michael Crichton, ‘The Religion of Environmentalism: Remarks to the Commonwealth Club’, San Francisco, 15 September 2003 (transcript) 

Jagdish Sagar, ‘Revisiting Chandigarh’, in Jaspreet Takhar (ed), Celebrating Chandigarh, Chandigarh 2002 

Eastworld 
 
Vikram Prakash 
Professor of Architecture, University of Washington 

A Fictive News Report with Commentary on Callum Morton in Chandigarh Wednesday, April 16, 2003. 
 

By the time the news reached Seattle, Monday morning September 1, 2004 at 6am, it was already many hours old on The East Coast, i.e. in New York where, of course, it mattered most. As is with most things that matter just to New York, this news mattered just as much to the rest of the world. The news was that the Hare Krishna World Society had offered to pony up the money to build the new Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center Site. Yes, 1.5 billion dollars was to be financed by the Hare Krishna Society! Where would they get all this money from? Turns out that the Hare Krishna own a diverse portfolio of global assets, professionally managed like that of any successful corporation – actually managed by a professional corporation – for whom investment in the Freedom Tower was in fact an outstanding business opportunity. They claimed that their vision was much larger the Silverstein’s ‘tunnel vision’. Whereas Silverstein only thought of its rentable commercial space, the Board of Directors of the Hare Krishna World Society, Inc. regarded the Tower as a Global Icon, and intended to market it to corporations around the world who would, one assumes, find the address – Freedom Tower, NY NY – sufficiently recognisable as to be a value worth paying top dollar for. 

Hare brained as that scheme sounds retrospectively, it was not however the proposal from the Hare Krishna’s itself that had caused my colleague Professor Mark Otero-Cavaliari to rudely arouse me out of my slumber. No. That there even was a financier for the Freedom Tower could only be welcome news in the aftermath of the shameful public feud – a vitriolic verbal blood-bath – we had witnessed in the months past. The Silverstein-Liebeskind World Trade Authority mutual acrimony society had deteriorated into a legal shark-fest with one accusation following another, and one countersuit following every suit, and vice-versa. As the public watched first with horror, and then with disbelief, and finally with indignant resignation, and as the newspapers slowly pushed the story to the 2nd, 

3rd and then 7th or 8th page, many of us had actually begun to nurse the quiet hope that the site may in fact be left unbuilt. This would have been, for us, a wonderful opportunity to construct a large public park – at a very nominal cost – for the commoner. There seemed to be some ‘larger-vision,’ holistic, what-comes-around-goes-around kind of justice to that eventuality (if it luckily and stealthily came to that) as it would have been the loss and pain that was experienced by the public at large on 9-11 that might have finally found a place to express itself, and come and rest. A public park: Open to receive. Open to give. Open to all. Open for all. 

But that was not to be, and most architects and critics, in fact, did want the tower to be built; and if it was not going to be Larry Silverstein, they wanted someone else, perhaps even the State, to finance it. So the reason my colleague Mark had called, so early in the morning, was not because the money might be at hand, but because the one condition that the Hare Krishna World Society had imposed on financing the project was that the tower had to be built not according to the design won by Liebeskind, but according to their own design. They had their own plan for symbolic world dominance. They wanted to build the Tower – a hundred story skyscraper – according to the calculations of a mandala in the image of a Hindu temple!  

‘A hundred story 1.5 billion dollar Hindu temple in Manhattan, full of global bankers and lawyers and service men and women. Can you imagine that?’ That is what Mark was screaming into the telephone, forcing my groggy-eyed self to tumble into my home office to power up the internet. I shook my head in disbelief. How could this have happened? What were they thinking? No one is ever going to buy this, I knew, right away. 

And they didn’t. Google, the internet know-it-all, immediately informed me that The New York Times called the proposal ‘Outrageous and presumptuous’, The New Yorker considered it to be ‘a travesty of aesthetic judgement’ and dubbed it an ‘invasion of religious fundamentalism of the worst kind’, the Washington Post made a joke out of it, entitling their piece ‘Eastworld: Theme Park Proposal for the WTC’.  

No one, even for a moment, took the proposal seriously, although it seems that the Hare Krishna people had in fact made the offer in all earnestness. And naivete. The spokesperson for the Hare Krishna Society was later reported as arguing on television that they did not intend the tower to actually be or even imitate a Hindu temple, but that they were only interested in building according to the design principles of the mandala. Like the Greek and Roman orders that adorn banks and offices, he argued, this was simply their attempt to bring to New York and the world another great aesthetic tradition. ‘We are inspired by the Renaissance and Postmodernism,’ he is reported to have pleaded, ‘We wish to link the present to the glorious past.’ 

But to no avail. Only the night-time talk show hosts had carefully memorised all the Hare Krishna arguments, which they mimicked frightfully (at times with unfortunate racially toned accents) to peels of resplendent laughter. A good time was had by all. 
 
* * * 

This was the context in which I began thinking of Callum Morton and his proposal for Chandigarh’s Capitol. Laughter and irony always betray hidden anxieties and unmentioned truths. Like the quips of a jester in a despotic ruler’s court, they enable the voicing of facts and ideas that would otherwise be abhorred. Architects in general, and modern architects in particular, more often than not prefer to photograph their buildings uninhabited, without any occupants, human or animal. Architecture is considered by them to be self-referential, engaged in the internal play of its own significations. But when one puts people into them, and voices, and life stories, and commercial signage – as Callum Morton does – we are forced to consider all the inhabitants of architecture, both real and phantasmagoric. This is a revelation, that must come like something of a shock, when one moves closer to satiate the curiosity provoked by Callum’s ‘live’ models and prints. 

The symbolic content of Le Corbusier’s magisterial edifices in the Capitol Complex at Chandigarh, as also of the design of the Capitol itself, has remained something of an enigma ever since the architect designed them in the 1950s. We know that Chandigarh was meant to unequivocally be a ‘modern’ city; a city, that, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s unambiguous dictum, was to be ‘a new city, unfettered by the traditions of the past.’ It is one of the foundational fictions of modernity that it offers to conjure up a future that is totally without a past. This was Le Corbusier’s charge in Chandigarh. 

We now know that Le Corbusier invested the Capitol with his own conceptions of a link to a primordial past. Visions of linking to the raw earth of the cultivated soil and the hard toils of the village peasant; an atavistic connection to the bull; a quasidivine homage to the potentate sun; and even a distant reference to an edenic landscape – all melded together in Le Corbusier’s messianic and curious mind. 

At the same time, and in the same place, for many of the Indian architects and engineers working on the project Chandigarh’s modernity was interpreted through old colonial habits. To be modern, was – simply – to be like the West. For them Le Corbusier was indeed a wise man from the West bearing the gift of modernity. 

Two ships passing in the night. When one designs from a clean slate, when one, in other words, has the opportunity to be ‘modern’, fantasy is always likely to rule the roost. 

For hundreds of years the non-western world has been openly impregnated with visions of the progressive West. In times past this intercourse was often a consensual affair with knowledges and ideas of the Eastern world happily making their way into the West with the silk, mathematics and spice. Now, as the episode of the Hare Krishna proposal evidences, this is no longer permissible. Western modernity can be regionalised in the East. But an Eastern modernity has yet to find its way across the world. It is specifically an invention of the colonial and modern world that the West’s fictions of itself, as the only standard bearer of an Enlightenment have managed to impress themselves as the sole purveyors of progress and modernity. The problem here is not in the claim itself – for all such claims have to in some way be fictions – but in its hegemony, its monopoly, over claims to modernity. Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh is an affective part of this economy. By cladding the Capitol buildings in amusement park images of the ‘West’ – from Crichton’s farce Westworld – Callum’s project brings out the irony inherent in the Capitol design. 

His work underlines the fiction of the Indian (the East’s) construction of the West, by cladding the Capitol in the image of some of the West’s own iconic fictions of itself. He produces, in other words, a hall of mirrors, a funny house of architecture. Two ships passing in the night. Auld lang syne.