ARTIFICIAL HELLS

former west
Green, whose proposal directly tackled the problem of being invited to
work site- responsively: she wore a jacket bearing the word ‘immigration’,
slept in a tent in the apartment, and kept a diary of her time in the building,
which she compared to ‘the big hotel that Jack Nicholson is supposed to be
the caretaker of in The Shining’. 12 Aupetitallot hoped to engage some of the
working- class Algerian immigrant residents in discussion with the artists;
he saw the site as a way to deal with art’s relationship to society, with the
building as a perfect frame for this question. 13
In the event, however, most of the artists chose to use the apartment
spaces as self- contained galleries for their work, many of which inevitably
addressed the building and its architecture. Mark Dion and the French
collaborative duo Art Orienté Objet’s installation Scenic Drive 1993 dealt
with two aspects of Le Corbusier’s architecture – its relationship to nature
as vista, and its present- day condition as half inhabited and half ruined. 14
Müller’s Individual Comfort dealt with the poor acoustics in each apartment,
which had turned the utopia of collective living into the nightmare of being
permanently aware of one’s neighbours; he hired a sound- proofing
company to prepare a report on the building’s acoustic sound insulation,
had the pages framed in gold, and hung them on the walls of a ‘bourgeois’
interior furnished with soft beige carpets and curtains.
Some artists managed to engage directly with the building’s inhabitants.
The US duo Clegg & Guttmann devised a Firminy Music Library, in which
residents made tape compilations from their music collections, and stored
them in a cabinet that formed a model of the Corbusier building, each tape
placed in a slot that corresponded to the location of the donor’s apartment.
Clegg & Guttmann, Firminy Music Library, 1993
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