Artforum: Alex Schweder's ReActor
April 5, 2017 - Cynthia Davidson
The rituals of domesticity have long been a focus for cutting-edge practices in both art and architecture. Examples abound: Architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio slyly subverted the politics of gender and labor underpinning household chores in their Bad Pres: Housework Series, 1993-98, which included a set of men's dress shirts pressed into bizarre shapes according to "Instructions for a Dissident Ironing"; artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins literally recalibrated the topography of the domestic landscape in their 2008 Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), which sought nothing less than to challenge humankind's acceptance of its own mortality. Over the past ten years, the artists Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley have made a significant contribution to this ongoing and cross-disciplinary inquiry, teaming up to test the relationships between architecture and domestic inhabitation in four performance projects, the most recent of which is ReActor, 2016, a boxcar-like-structure balanced on a single column and set on a hilltop at the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York.
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