Writer: Sara Garzón
Essay Mentor: Mónica de la Torre
This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Tenet: Wall Begins to Know Itself, mentored by Maren Hassinger and on view at CUE Art Foundation from March 5 – April 2, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
Wall Begins to Know Itself, 2020, tile, mortar, plywood, hardwood, plastic bottles, paper, pulp, 48 x 27 x 14 inches
[Image Description: Two white decorative pillars support a wooden shelf. The shelf protrudes from a wooden panel, which is nestled inside a rectangular slab of white subway-tiles.]
Following the practice of a contemporary flâneur, the New York-based artist duo Tenet (Julia Eshaghpour and Kevin Hollidge) investigate the history, functionality, and taste of our contemporary built environment. Producing sculptures with unique yet recognizable iconographies, Tenet’s works incorporate elements of vernacular architecture, home renovations, and site-oriented narratives. Paying particular attention to found forms, Tenet’s artworks mimic the city’s collapsing architectural styles and spontaneously made structures, which are also characteristic of what Croatian artist Lana Stovicejic (b. 1990) termed the “Neo-ornament” – mass-produced plaster, plastic, or vinyl classically-oriented architectural motifs used to achieve an impression of high-end interior designs.
Tenet is drawn to NYC’s architectural history. In Wall Begins to Know Itself at CUE Art Foundation, the duo’s first solo exhibition in New York, their artworks focus on tenement buildings, which, albeit shadowed by the city’s renowned skyscrapers, lie at the center of city life. Tenements emerged in the late nineteenth century and were designed as long rows of low-rise masonry buildings to house working-class, migrant, and minority populations, most commonly in areas such as the Lower East Side and Harlem.
Thanks to fast urban transformation and rocketing real estate prices, landlords have sought to maximize profit by conducting abrupt modifications to housing interiors that confine residents into evermore fragmented spaces. The exponential change to these interiors has led to the ubiquity of eclectic architectural motifs. Combined styles in domestic spaces now reflect vernacular sensitivities that collapse class aspirations and mobility with the materiality of Neo-Classical, Baroque, and even Rococo forms. In fact, the artist duo points out how these architectural palimpsests encapsulate the city’s identity, underscoring how the real character of NYC life can be found not in the city’s luxurious high rises but throughout public housing complexes.
Tenet’s combined objects counter preconceived ideas of the built environment, blurring the lines between sculpture and architecture. In the three-dimensional piece Wall Begins to Know Itself (2020), the artists combined an artificially made tile wall with an encrusted wooden top that is simultaneously supported by two bulky yet stylized balusters. Molded in shaft, square, or lathe-turned forms, balusters were invented to hold and decorate staircases, parapets, and exterior patios. Here, in what the artists call a “sculptural aberration,” the balusters are integrated into an unexpected structure that looks either like a kitchen table, a bathroom, or an awkwardly angled wall. The white color of the baluster also emulates the off-white sheen of a marble carving. Despite its luster, and upon closer look, the artificiality of the piece becomes quickly evident to a viewer, as the unpainted paper pulp surface exposes the faux motif.
Lana Stojićević, Betonicus, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
[Image Description: A person is dressed up as a decorative column, with only their face and their arms showing. They are standing between other columns within a stone structure.]
The baluster is, by nature, an eclectic form. Depending on its purpose, the ornament combines shoulders and bold rhythmic shapes in a complicated mannerist base. While the sober top alludes to the forms of Neoclassicism, further referencing a Greek amphora, the distinctive twist-turned and saturated patterned designs in the body of the column can also be found in seventeenth-century oak or walnut English furniture. The abundance of stylistic reference contained within the single feature, moreover, makes a forceful statement about class and taste. Its unnecessary inclusion in modern furniture or architectural features makes the ornament serve its inherent function. That is, lacking any real utilitarian purpose, the motif overpowers the gaze, demonstrating the luxury of its pointless excess. Like balusters, other classical elements such as Corinthian columns, friezes, and pilasters constitute the type of ornamentation revival used today to randomly, and at times awkwardly, decorate the interior of middle-class apartment buildings.
In a similar vein, Lana Stovicejic has humorously addressed the systematic expansion of classically styled plaster ornaments in contemporary housing and hotel constructions through a series of photo-performances such as Botanicus (2020). Mocking the commonness and arbitrary inclusion of these features, the neo-ornament proposed by Stovicejic points to a new architectural style, but one that simultaneously exposes the motif’s fakeness and anachronistic nature. In the case of Tenet’s Wall Begins to Know Itself and other artworks, the neo-ornament is evident in the visually intrusive and almost quaint aesthetics of affordable housing in New York City. To this, Tenet writes:
“The classic tenement buildings that surround it [the city] are littered with motifs and ornaments of European Classicism, defining historic East Coast urban poverty. These tenements were controversial in their time, built using new machines to produce iconography, which up until then were built only by skilled craftsmen for the wealthy. The exteriors of New York’s tenements were offensive, distastefully pastiche, but built by hustling immigrants aspiring to reach the new American dream as this was then a symbol of success.”(1)
The imitation of these materials, their colors, textures, and overall finish has become, nevertheless, pervasive in most housing constructions in metropolises worldwide.
Ana Kazaroff, Russian For Free, 2021. Oil on wood. 8 7/10 × 3 9/10 × 7 1/2 in. Photo by Damian Griffiths for Galería Kupfer. Image courtesy of the artist.
[Image Description: A sculpture made up of three pink discs, a turquoise cylinder, and a blue curved form atop a white cylindrical base. The surfaces are painted to look like marble.]
In cities like New York, Mexico City, and London, assemblage-like structures emerge when corporate interests collide with individual tastes. That is why the incorporation of massively reproduced and cast architectural styles to decorate domestic interiors is not unique to tenement buildings in New York. Because the cost of high-end materials such as stone, marble, and oakwood is an impediment to construction at all class levels, expert artists are commonly hired to build entirely faux neo-ornamented interior designs. The London-based Argentinian sculptor Ana Kazaroff (b. 1985) is one such artist. An active member of the City & Guilds of London Art School, Kazaroff has dedicated her training to replicating these interior motifs and styles, which are most typically employed by the British elite. In a prototype titled Russian for Free (2021), the artist demonstrates how materials, surfaces, and textured styles are all informed by the hybridization processes that happen when elements from one culture travel and are adapted to new ones. Like Tenet, found images, memories, and objects in the urban space also influence Kazaroff’s artistic practice. In her artworks she makes unexpected associations to create new relationships with the fictions of these constructions.
Henry St. Study, 2020, mdf, epoxy clay, paint, and wood trim, 56 x 27 inches
[Image description: A rectangular wooden frame. The top right and the bottom left of the frame are painted gray and adorned with small three-dimensional clay faces. Inside the frame is a grid of small rectangles, most painted a rusted orange, a few painted red, and one painted a pale yellow.]
Through an array of free-standing and high relief sculptures together with intimate studies of painterly assemblage-like structures, Tenet provides a variety of takes on the contrasting urban environment. In Henry Street St. (2020) the artist duo frames a fake brick wall. Emulating the unevenness of the brick color, different hues are used to mimic the wall’s natural deterioration. The frame, moreover, combines the simple molding of a cheap plywood mount with signature elements of eighteenth-century Grotesque ornamentation. Obscure human masks decorate the surface of the frame near the corners. Making strange gestures, the uncanny figures seem to embellish the otherwise plain surface of the brick wall and its unrefined frame. Produced using grout, the ornamental figures are also left bare and exposed on top of the wood. In fact, the unfinished neo-ornament recalls a cement gargoyle standing on the outer surface of a building, again blurring the lines between interiority and exteriority, design and architecture, classical ornament and modern eccentricity.
A much overdue conversation on contemporary vernacular styles and domestic neo-ornaments, Tenet’s seemingly strange and even aberrant sculptures allow us a unique entry into our own homes. Their multimedia works offer us a reflection on the eclectic non-style, or rather anti-style, of New York City’s interior spaces. By bringing into view a collection of awkwardly cut furniture, as well as collaged and combined structures of varying sizes, they help us better understand the constant layering involved in the fabrication of modern taste, one that is everything but modernly styled. In their research process, Tenet’s embodiment of the flâneur underscores that ambivalent figure of the affluent modern urban subject who, by wandering detached from society, becomes an acute observer of our post-industrial contemporary life.
1. Tenet, “Seen but Not Noticed,” Institute for New Connotative Action Journal, (May 2021).
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Sara Garzón is a curator and writer based in New York, focusing on issues relating to decoloniality, temporality, and indigenous ecocriticism. Sara has worked as the Jane and Morgan Whitney Curatorial Fellow as well as the Lifchez-Stronach Curatorial intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and before that was Audience Engagement Associate at the Brooklyn Museum. She has curated a number of exhibitions and is the co-founder of the curatorial working group Collective Rewilding, which looks at the intersection between curation, ecology, and care.
Sara has contributed to exhibition catalogs, anthologies, peer-reviewed journals, and art magazines, including DASartes Magazine, Ocula Magazine, Terremoto, Hyperallergic, and others. Her recent editorial project Worldmaking Practices was published thanks to the support of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (2020). She was awarded Best Essay in Visual Culture Studies 2020 by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Sara was a curator in residence at Casa GIAP in Chiapas, Mexico (2019) and at the Emerging Curators’ Workshop at Para Site in Hong Kong (2019). She was part of the Science and Technology Society at the Delfina Foundation in London (2020).
Mentor Mónica de la Torre is a poet and essayist born and raised in Mexico City whose writing engages translation, performance, and the visual arts. Her most recent book is Repetition Nineteen, which centers on experimental translation. Other books include The Happy End/All Welcome—a riff on Kafka's Amerika—and Public Domain. She has published several books in Spanish, including Taller de Taquimecanografía, written jointly with the eponymous women artists' collective she co-founded. With Alex Balgiu, she co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79. Her work has appeared in Midst, Artforum, Granta, the Believer, the Paris Review, and NY Review, among other publications. She is recipient of a 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant and teaches at Brooklyn College.