Mary Ellen Carroll & Charles Renfro
- Toby Kamps -
Mary Ellen Carroll is a conceptual artist based in New York who explores the fields of language, subjectivity and power. She is currently planning an architectural and landscape-art intervention in Sharpstown, a subdivision of Houston. Charles Renfro is an architect with the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, whose most recent projects include the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Blur Building in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, which obscures its own design in a cloud of artificial fog. Carroll and Renfro have been collaborating since 2002.
Toby Kamps: How did you meet and how did you decide to collaborate?
Mary Ellen Carroll: It was at a dinner party in New York. I was seated between two photographers and growing bored by the conversation when I looked up and saw this man wearing a kelly green cowboy shirt with white piping who made this hilarious and overt sexual comment and…
Charles Renfro: …it was kind of love at first sight. It was like we were lost siblings, and that green shirt was the passage that allowed us to reconnect. We are both willing to put ourselves out there, and that’s what that shirt stood for. So we struck up a conversation. We both knew a little bit about each other’s work and realized that we were exploring several related themes. We walked away from that evening knowing something would happen.
TK: What are your similar interests?
CR: Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s work isn’t simply about being in the service industry and utilitarian solutions. It’s about making problems. Making problems helps us make conceptually based work that still functions programmatically as architecture. Architecture is the mode of investigation, even if the work can be read as an exploration of extra-architectural issues. I think Mary Ellen has a similar kind of reciprocal bent in her work.
MEC: In a certain sense, we ask ourselves the same questions to begin solving a problem—of how to make the thing we are working on disappear. How do you make it something other than what the viewer expects? We have a similar approach; it’s just that we occupy different disciplines. That is also the reason why we can continue a dialogue. We share formal and intellectual concerns, and they go back to the consideration of the problem from the maker’s viewpoint—that is our viewpoint. Consideration of the work from the position of the creator is what distinguishes conceptual work from the impulse or intention to create for an audience. It’s not utopic. This is important to consider—the point at which things break down.
CR: We both like to investigate the rules of a given project. Sometimes they reveal themselves, sometimes we prod them out and sometimes we invent them. There’s not always formal or visual continuity from piece to piece or project to project. We’re excited about the uniqueness of each proposition. While we do bring formal issues to the table, the investigation usually generates responses unique to each project. The questions generate the content. I think that’s what makes our practices similar.
MEC: We both avoid cultivating a signature style.
TK: Can we rewind to not making something for the viewer? What do you mean?
MEC: Fundamentally, as makers we have to ask ourselves, what is it that we are doing and should it be done? Simply put, what is a work of art or architecture? One needs to define this for their own practice. You need to understand what it is and how it fits in.
CR: As an architect, I’m lucky because we don’t have to ponder that question so much. If you’re building buildings, they have to be useful by definition. They have programmatic necessities to fulfill. Unless you are doing projects like the Blur Building in Switzerland, which had absolutely no function except to titillate, you have to address functionality if you want to get something built.
MEC: I always consider the audience and the distribution and dissemination of the work. What architecture does is put things in the public in a way that art can’t. It is inherently a political practice. How do you make the viewer aware of his or her own existence in some new way? That’s a primary question we both ask ourselves. We both like to grapple with a certain immateriality—in making the invisible visible.
CR: Let me add a little about our desire to make architecture disappear. We’re constructing an experience more than we’re constructing a building. The mechanics by which that experience is made are often less important than the experience itself. We like it when people don’t think, “This is a Diller Scofidio + Renfro building.” We’d rather they think, “This is a fantastic experience.”
TK: Did you decide after your first encounter that you wanted to collaborate?
MEC: No, but we kept having conversations. In life, you meet a lot of people and have a lot of conversations—boring conversations, mostly, as Lydia Davis so brilliantly distilled in her short story “Boring Friends.” This was different. We immediately realized that we could have an interesting conversation.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, 2002
Courtesy Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York
Photo by Beat Widmer
CR: It’s a little like developing a sexual relationship, even though it’s not. There’s an exchange of pheromones: you get excited. I could say that we started dating. We went to each other’s studios and said, “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” When we discovered that we both liked to ride bikes around New York, we thought that was pretty cool. We didn’t know what the collaboration would be, but after the first round of studio visits, we started looking for something to work on together.
TK: What forms do your collaborations take?
MEC: They’re going in many different directions. First, I consider our relationship itself a project.
TKDo you have a name for it?
CR: Yes! No. (laughs)
MEC: Many things have to do with expectations. There’s a lot of back and forth, agreement and disagreement, but it gets to the point where once we make a decision about what direction things will take, the project begins to flow. One thing we’ve talked about is “what is the studio?” For our recent collaboration in the architecture studio course at Rice University, we wanted to look at how changes in ideology are affecting building typology. In Houston, you see it everywhere, because of a total lack of zoning and rapid population expansion.
TK: How do you develop ideas? Are there white boards and dry erasers and binders of notes involved?
CR: Yes. Yes. No. (laughs) Alcohol, late-night conversations. We didn’t want to do a traditional architecture studio. We wanted to bring both of our skill sets and interests to the table and explore the ways they overlap and diverge. We also wanted to make something that was unique to a place, in this case Houston. Houston is a conundrum, and we started thinking about all the weird and crazy contradictions in the city and the ways we could make the studio connect with them. For instance, we started looking at ideology and megachurches. I’d say, “Let’s do a megachurch,” and Mary Ellen would say, “Yeah, but the program is limited to a specific group, a congregation.” And then we hit on the idea of George Foreman. He’s many things to many people: an ex-boxer, a grill salesman, a celebrity, a minister and a developer. He’s building all kinds of things in Houston.
MEC: But let’s not forget Joel Osteen and his megachurch in the old basketball arena. He uses the media and spectacle in remarkable ways. Lakewood Church has a state-of-the-art production studio. And then there’s the issue of celebrity. George Foreman came to mind, along with the question of what is celebrity architecture. Foreman is a celebrity of capitalism. It turned his life around, and he knew it would. We decided to meet George Foreman, and that he would become the client. This was the way to make it all practical—make it real.
TK: Did you do a charrette with George Foreman?
CR: I would say we willed ourselves into his life. We went to a service at his church and walked away with contacts. We were interested in celebrity, in the idea of a local hero, and in the role of media in contemporary life. George has built a church, a gym, a daycare center, and we also learned he’s building a boxing arena that will seat 2,000 people. This isn’t idle musing; it’s real. We engaged him in the process, little by little, and he learned he’s doing architecture and making the city whether he likes it or not. There ended up being a reciprocity between his world and the studio project that made something that was real. That’s what we were after from the get-go.
TK: What was the product?
CR: The real product was that he came to the final review with his bevy of sons and bodyguards. Actually, we don’t know for sure what the product will be. If he uses something other than a prefabricated building to make his boxing arena, that will be the product. If he calls Mary Ellen or me and asks us what we think about building something for him, that will be the product. George meeting the students, shaking their hands—almost crushing their hands, actually—that was the product. The fact that he learned that we care about his project in a way that no one had ever expressed to him is a product, too.
MEC: Charles and I were very straightforward with George. There was no sense of irony in cultivating a relationship with him and his family. We interviewed George about what he wanted to see, and he brought up academic training centers for children in marginalized areas; this was something that he could imagine building. A number of sports figures have started academies. Following that interview, we went to Las Vegas to meet Andre Agassi and learn about his academy, and we also watched a boxing match.
CR: And we took all the students with us! This is evidence of the flow we’re talking about. We had a supple studio. It wasn’t set in stone. It was an additive process. We kept saying yes and yes and added things that contributed to the theme.
TK: Would it be fair to say this changed your work—Charles, you speeding things up, and Mary Ellen, you slowing things down?
MEC: I think we created something unique to both of us. In some ways, it’s like Fischli and Weiss’ video The Way Things Go that was co-opted in a television ad by Honda, in which there’s this huge, Rube Goldbergian perpetual motion machine. One idea slips into another and triggers something else. We developed a great momentum that allowed the work to evolve fluidly. It’s similar to Terry Riley’s Composition in C, in which musicians can come in or out at any time during the performance, as long as they do so on a C note.
CR: We have a childlike enthusiasm for things without losing our criticality. It’s a kind of dance. There’s craziness and joy and yet precision.
MEC: There’s this intention.
TK: Can you round out the idea of intention?
MEC: You have to have intention that allows you to ask the question why? You should set out with self-awareness. There’s always potential for something to happen. It’s not without desire, either. We don’t know what form it will take, but in our looseness, we stay focused on our roles as artists and makers. In the case of the studio, you have to be committed to engaging with the process. And there needs to be a certain taughtness, too—taughtness in terms of the intention. It has to retain its integrity and not become diluted.