835 Kings Road: Mona Kuhn
by Christina McPhee
In 835 Kings Road at UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A), Brazilian artist and photographer Mona Kuhn expands the territory and the erasures of the archive through a photographic/cinematographic study of the R. M. Shindler home at the eponymous address. The R. M. Schindler Papers, itself an archive, has been archived at AD&A since 1968. Their contents span from 1916 to 1953, the year the architect passed away.
In the early 1920s, a young Austrian architect Rudolf Schindler arrived in the area, flush with inspiration from the indigenous Native American structures he had observed in the American Southwest. Shindler sought to build a home on Kings Road, declaring: “Our rooms will descend close to the ground and the garden will become an integral part of the house. The distinction between indoors and the out-of-doors will disappear. The walls will be few, thin, and removable.” Recasting precedent by engaging indigenous typologies, Schindler styled the home in what would become known as iconic California design.
Kuhn was involved with the Schindler house, shooting a large body of still photographs of the house and grounds alongside portraits of an unnamed woman who appears to reside there. These photographs were compiled into a book, Kings Road, in collaboration with Steidl Verlag. Then, for 835 Kings Road, she cast those stills into animation, and interwove shots of textual ephemera from the R. M. Schindler Papers. Using multiple channels of video, she set these images to an original score by composer Boris Salchow. Slippage and repetition from the Kings Road book to the 835 Kings Road exhibition, combined with operatic video installation effectively entangles us, makes us more than visitors, intruders – we’ve broken in. Why is this figure of a solitary young woman appearing on repeat? Why are we sharing ‘her’ space? Scrolling shots of Schindler’s ephemerae, views of luscious plants, and concrete slab construction don’t restrict her; like a ghost she seems to move right through walls. To the figure, Kuhn applies streamline-moderne solarizations à la Man Ray. An antique gesture, to undo a century of time? Is the figure Mona? Is she us?
In an interview with curator Silvia Perea, Kuhn notes how “we are in this world for a minute, and there is nothing more important than connecting with each other because, in doing so, we pass on important things.” This is repertory, reconnaissance, and common wisdom. Kuhn’s installation offers, beyond her photography, an architecture of reverie in open time.
Curator Silvia Perea sets the stage for this spectral display with research materials that illuminate Schindler’s vision. Vitrines on early influences in Austria and the Americas lead to displays of his spare drawings for the House, together with writings and interviews with critic Esther McCoy. Quotes speak to Schindler’s desire for open improvisation in the domestic space: “The ordinary residential arrangement providing rooms for specialized purposes has been abandoned…” For Perea and Kuhn, video requires a deft swerve from Schindler’s rooms, no matter how open, towards ephemerality and temporal layering. Perea makes sure that the ‘entry code’ to the property is in the form of a letter from Schindler’s archive.
Mona Kuhn, 835 Kings Road, Installation view,
Among his writings, Kuhn unearthed what could only be described as a break-up letter, addressed to no lover in particular, copied in Schindler’s elegant hand, and signed. For 835 Kings Road, Kuhn crafts an imagined identity for this mystery lover. She projects the lady revenant, catching some sun, clad in Roaring Twenties fashion. Ghostly girlfriend, her silhouette reverbs. Video projections of the cast shadows from vine tendrils catch onto calligraphies, stamps, signatures. Forensic bits, archival debris, floating evidence, all give rise to the question- who, exactly, is living at Kings Road? Whose house is this?
The word archive, as Rebecca Schneider has observed, derives from the Greek ‘archon,’ or ruler. House identifies the archon, and what is ignored by the archive establishes its boundaries. Schindler hoped the house would announce his practice as authoritative; after all, the house of the archon identifies the archon as king. But the house is leaky, porous, prone to variations in light and darkness, to what cannot be seen as equally as what can, and to whomever can figure out a way in. The discovery of such an intimate letter gives Mona Kuhn, a century on, a way to invade Schindler House.
As I walk alongside the scrims, my body casts live shadows among projections. Did Schindler also desire this? His design is open to its own decreation. The video layers never acquire a cross section, nor elevation, nor floor plan, for more than a moment, as all cinematically melts in montage. Lust for the index is frustrated. The archon’s house is officialdom, it’s defined by the archive, itself defined by what it cannot be. Dilemma: a museum must open up to all kinds of live bodies and memories and movements and cybernetic shifts. 835 Kings Road has a consistent vulnerability to breach.
Schindler would take risks as he embraced the implications of open space, in design as in life – he will have held, always, a space for living. Schindler House in its heyday entertained couples and coupling, children, friends, lovers, and rivals. Photos of Schindler himself from the late twenties project a dreamy revolutionary élan (his portrait never appears inside 835 Kings Road). The tension of the archive, according to Foucault, is the future anterior: “it will have been (done).” In this way, Kuhn makes what would have been into a kind of undoing.
Follow the evidence at 835 Kings Road. Silvia Perea has made an exacting and bold articulation of curation. Thanks to Perea’s invitation, extended both to the artist and to us, we can receive, and unmake, an experience of 835 Kings Road as an excessive and luxurious addition to Schindler House. Its conflation of archival ephemera with performance makes the video installation behave like a lean-to on the archon and his house. The installation itself is a subtle and extensive commentary, both disappearing and adhering into Schindler’s legacy as it lives on through our participation in the museum itself, a Russian-doll-like site for a housing for the house of Schindler. This is a tour de force for curation, owing to Perea’s insistence in showing how the space of the Schindler House, and its lean-to in the museum, is liminal, bordered and yet open, transgressive, and vulnerable. She demonstrates how Schindler’s archive, alongside its remnants, holds disappearance within its own self as an ontological experiment.
