When I first saw Federico Díaz’s biomorphic sculptures and architectural projects, I invited him to design a pavilion for P.S.1’s annual radio broadcast from Art Basel Miami Beach. During one week in December, we create a temporary broadcast station in a public plaza by the boardwalk. Thousands and thousands of people who gather in Miami come to this plaza to relax, listen to interviews, and watch performances broadcasted from this location. Díaz proposed to create a radio space station to house our Internet radio laboratory, “Art Radio International,” and attract a large and enthusiastic public to this lunar lounge.
My understanding of Díaz’s futuristic project was informed by my visits to a number of architectural and sculptural works primarily constructed in the 1960s. The projects from this period crossed a wide variety of categories and conditions, from indoor to outdoor, habitable to uninhabitable. Some structures came out of performance‐based concerts, while others, like Drop City in Colorado, were inspired by the vision of Buckminster Fuller. Still other designs culminated in inflatable tents. Another important reference was the work of USCO, founded by Michael Callahan and Gerd Stern. Both a collaborated group and commune, they created immersive, multimedia performances and environments that produced a sensory overload of sights and sounds. In a more meditative manner, Alexandra Kasuba filled a New York brownstone with cocoon‐like constructs. Calling them Space Shelters, Kasuba explained, “The intent was to abolish the 90‐degree angle.”In some of the interior designs of New York nightclubs, artists developed a series of light shows that attempted to duplicate or amplify the visual experience of the drug culture of the time. The short‐lived Cerebrum club and the more renowned Fillmore East were just two emblematic venues. Describing Cerebrum, critic and curator Alastair Gordon writes, “Was it a participatory nightclub? A pleasure dome? A sensory‐stimulation laboratory? It certainly wasn’t a nightclub in the normal sense. There was no dance floor, no live music, no alcohol. Upon entering an unmarked storefront at 429 Broome Street, patrons encountered a small black room in which a disembodied voice invited them to remove their clothes and don translucent togas. They then proceeded down a ramp into a cavernous space with imagery streaking across the walls. The main space was designed to disorient the spectator, obliterate the normal body‐to‐ground relationship, and open a door to new sensations.”
Díaz’s installation, ULTRA, is in many ways a visualization of a metaphysical space. With roots in Eastern Europe and South America, Díaz’s interest in futurism and modernism stems from two continents. His practice encompasses the utopian attitudes of the 1960s as well as the advanced materials of this century. He is truly an artist more than an architect and his work is closer to landscape and earth art than it is to installation.
Alanna Heiss
under, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
In my references to 1960s counterculture I am indebted to Alastair Gordon
and in particular to his book Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the
Psychedelic Sixties.