Sensationalising the Countryside: Another Gimmick?

Countryside, The Future
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
20.02.20 – 15.02.21

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

With its dubious yet attractive promises about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value, […] the gimmick is […] capitalism’s most successful aesthetic category but also its biggest embarrassment and structural problem.¹

In November there were very few people on the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. The elite were enjoying this rare silence, but with the dual weights of the pandemic and the election, anxiety about the future was palpable. Amid this nervousness, a huge Deutz-Fahr tractor, worth 300,000 US dollars and controlled remotely by an iPad, suddenly towered over the front entrance to the Guggenheim. This display was a new gimmick that traded on the concept of the ready-made, and provided a loud, aggressive opening to the exhibition: ‘The countryside has besieged the city.’

This was not just a revolutionary declaration made by Mao Zedong; it was also how Donald Trump won the election. His four-year term has fully revealed the irreconcilable divide between cities and rural areas in the United States.

At the Guggenheim, curator and ‘super-starchitect’ Rem Koolhaas and his army of curators used this tractor to reveal their predictions for the future. In a massive gimmick entitled Countryside, The Future he simply wanted to highlight and sensationalise the city and its technology and modernity, in an attempt to accelerate the city laying siege to the countryside.

In the audio guide, Koolhaas announced that, as a general rule for all non-urban space, the countryside covers 98 per cent of the Earth, but it ‘is largely off ( our ) radar’.² With the ‘our’ in parenthesis, which is very meaningful but not entirely clear, is Koolhaas really skewering all of the architects, himself included, who have always been partial to cities? Or is he taking aim at all of those ideas that, since the Enlightenment, have viewed the countryside as a mere blood bank for the city?

The questions do not stop there – this exhibition is comprised of a massive string of questions. In the first gallery, a 7-metre-high wall is covered with nearly 1,000 questions that Koolhaas has been pondering, impressing the viewer with the depth and breadth of his thinking. But if you move closer, many of the questions wander outside the subject of the exhibition – specious questions such as ‘Will we find an alternative to death?’³ Following the sloping spiral ramps designed by twentieth-century master architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the exhibition unfolds upwards and forwards in the style of a ‘pointillist portrait’.⁴ Koolhaas uses his immense curiosity to take us from the otium of ancient Rome to the xiaoyao in Tao Yuanming’s fable, The Peach Blossom Spring ( 421 CE ), from Stalin’s land reforms to the revival of Germany’s agricultural towns amid the surge in migrants, to how science and technology are changing the ocean, the land, the forests and the atmosphere. Every example is just a superficial flirtation… The exhibition is best summarised as a mega-World’s Fair condensed to the Upper East Side.

In a career spanning nearly forty years, Koolhaas’s feelers have never left the city. In 1978, Delirious New York, the ‘retroactive manifesto’ he wrote for Manhattan, cemented his exalted position as an observer of the city. Later, he would redefine cities through large-scale designs, such as the new China Central Television ( CCTV ) Headquarters. The viewer cannot help but ask: Is he curating this exhibition because he’s bored with cities?

Countryside, The Future is a gimmick that establishes its purpose through a series of negations. Koolhaas clearly declares, ‘It’s also not an architecture exhibition’.⁵ Therefore, he avoids direct historical examples of master architects intervening in the countryside, including the many experiments of Le Corbusier and Wright in the 1930s. Because ‘[t]his is not an art show’,⁶ Koolhaas exhibits only replicas or test pieces, attempting to reshape the Guggenheim with his ideas and explorations in Walter Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction. ‘It’s also not […] a science exhibit.’⁷ However, the ubiquitous textual explanations, the dazzling charts, and the steady stream of pictures and videos are removed from their complex original contexts and comprise a mirage of information that eventually traps the viewer in a cage of video screens and picture walls. In this way, the exhibition design replicates a social media aesthetic. Will the visitors, who are mostly urban residents and tourists, be compelled to scroll and like, together engaging in a pastoral dream with a sci-fi, cyberpunk sensibility and not a trace of those barnyard smells?

The use of vague questions and constant negation to produce a new curatorial purpose has already become a common gimmick in research-based exhibitions, which take the easy way out and avoid critique from architectural circles. As architectural historian Joan Ockman critiqued in her article ‘Slashed’, at a time when history and theory have been gradually replaced by research and curatorship in architecture schools around the world, the critical capacity of architecture lies in the ‘process of being profoundly reshaped by market forces, by consumer values, by globalisation, and by digital media’.⁸ Through a series of negations, this exhibition develops new possibilities and holds tightly to the false avant-garde of ‘research’. In fact, by avoiding the interrogation of the exhibition’s ontological value and meaning, the curators overlook the production that comes from fear of the society in which we live.

This omission received its most direct confirmation in the fact that the three Russian farm women in 1909 from the promotional materials only appeared once at the beginning of the exhibition before becoming a gimmick designed to attract urban audiences. The growers that Koolhaas documents are agricultural scientists who come from colleges and wear white lab coats. Where are the other true protagonists of the countryside – the farmers and labourers? Koolhaas shines a dazzling light on agricultural science and technology that is rising worldwide, but neglects the historical origins, expansion, and current state of uneven urban-rural development in Latin America, Southeast Asia and even North America. Perhaps this is because poor farmers would not invite Rem Koolhaas to create a project.

This kind of evasive gimmick is Koolhaas’s sole privilege as a global architectural celebrity in the current neoliberal system. Only someone like him, who has abundant financial resources and academic support, could present his journey of rural exploration on the Upper East Side. ‘Curatorship’ is only determined by where his sponsors and admirers lead him. When the seriousness of a curator is replaced by the auteur-ship of a megastar, an awkwardly concocted montage blanketed in a celebrity’s aura occupies most of the exhibition space. He flattens the complexity of his examples in the name of ‘the saving of time’, he avoids tough questions in the name of ‘the reduction of labour’, and he wears away the exhibition narrative in the name of ‘the expansion of value’. In Theory of the Gimmick, Sianne Ngai commented that, in a world overflowing with advertising and markets, ‘thought is simultaneously reified and fetishised, “gimmick” and “concept” are well-nigh synonymous’.⁹ After the final disconnect between exhibition content and idea, observation and criticism, I would rather watch a world travel documentary with Koolhaas as a guide.

Looking up from the museum lobby, a line of text traces the ramp on every level. I felt compelled to follow the direction of the text, such that I was awkwardly spinning in place. It was only when I finished reading that I realised that it was admonishing viewers to go to the countryside to experience real life in nature. The exhibition catalogue was made pocket-sized, seducing visitors into believing that the entirety of the vast countryside could be found in just this little booklet – another capitalist gimmick. Is this exhibition just a massive advertisement in a society of the spectacle, sensationalising the countryside as a site for large-scale invasion by architects? Rem Koolhaas and Li Ziqi seem to be coordinating from afar to take a group of flâneurs on an imaginary holiday in the countryside.¹⁰

I may have missed the most profound part of the exhibition. On Fifth Avenue, in addition to that unfathomable tractor, an independent tomato grow module was built at the entrance to the museum prior to the pandemic. Under bright pink neon lights, the module showed urban visitors cutting-edge farming technologies – what a great gimmick! However, because of the pandemic, the exhibition had to close just three weeks after the opening, and those urban audiences fled Manhattan island in a panic to seek refuge in the countryside. David Litvin, the farmer in charge of the module, decided to continue tending the plants and distribute the 45 kilograms of tomatoes that the module produced per week to the homeless and unemployed, who were urgently in need of food. In August the module was dismantled and shipped back to the production line in Ohio.

Gimmicks will always elicit some interest from those in cities, in exchange for short-lived applause that invariably dies. However, land cannot be transformed into a deceptive gimmick, whether that land is the fertile soil of technology illuminated by pink lights or the vast fields under the open sky. In addition to crops that are planted in the ground once a year, the farmers maintain their perseverance and commitment because they are clearer than anyone that there is no harvest without labour. This may be the implicit criticism that the countryside has to offer: honesty and tenacity rooted in backward production methods may be the last line of defence against the city of gimmicks, which has been fully infused with capital, technology and spectacle. In the countryside, they examine a problem for a long time and do not expect shiny gimmicks to replace essential labour. Perhaps we should all go on Koolhaas’s journey; we should sit on ( any country’s ) slopes and learn from the countryside and the farmers.

1. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form ( Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press ), 2020, p. 2.

2. AMO and Rem Koolhaas, Countryside, A Report, exh. cat. ( New York: Taschen ), 2020, p. 2.

3. Countryside, The Future, press kit <guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Countryside-The-Future_PressKit_021920.pdf>.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Joan Ockman, ‘Slashed’, E-Flux Architecture, 27 October 2017 <e-flux.com/architecture/history-theory/159236/slashed/>.

9. Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, p. 204.

10. Li Ziqi is a popular YouTuber, who makes videos about traditional food preparation and handicraft techniques in a rural village in Sichuan, China.