Lebbeus Woods was an original thinker. You can’t say that about most people: We are born copycats (what species isn’t), and becoming otherwise requires serious effort. Staying otherwise is the work of a lifetime. Such work is also called thought, and for Woods—the late, iconoclastic architect who engaged politics, philosophy, and speculation to argue for a different future—thought manifested through language and drawing, model and collage, teaching and criticism, and his own muscular hybrids of these pursuits. His visual style was entirely singular, too, such that describing it is as futile as trying to imitate it. (The unfamiliar reader should start with 1980’s Pamphlet Architecture #6, Einstein Tomb, and grab a flask.) But describing his thought: This is a worthwhile task.
Undercurrents, which was on view at a83 over the summer, staged a dialectic between two projects by Woods, created at either end of a decade: Turbulence (1991–92) and The Storm (2001–2). The first took primary form as a series of drawings; the second, as a gallery-size installation at Cooper Union. Both are conceptual in nature, revolving around Woods’s concerns with constructed conditions of violence, a powerful curatorial choice that set this show apart from other New York exhibitions on Woods since his death in 2012. Eschewing his fantastical (and more easily consumed) architectural propositions for buildings and cities, Undercurrents instead created a vibrating proximity between works that explicitly tugged at, as Woods wrote in 2008, “the main ideational threads—conflict and transformation—that run through my work.” The sparse gallery text may have required the visitor to perform some conceptual stitchwork to piece the conversation together, but this was a welcome invitation in our current era of extreme museological didacticism.
As the exhibition’s deft design highlighted, Turbulence and The Storm are critical nodes in Woods’s lifelong intellectual project; the narrative of their development cannot be confined to one medium, let alone a singular object. The Storm, which manifested as a maelstrom of red wooden rods suspensefully tensed in midair, was neither re-created nor dutifully conjured through photography. Instead, a marvelous scale model glowed from within a windowed black monolith, itself located in a dark room on whose walls hung the actual rods that comprised the construction. The effect was that of a well-stocked armory built to house an arsenal of lines, Woods’s weapon of choice. (He was one of its most dedicated proselytizers: “The drawn line is one of the great human inventions, and it is available to all of us—a tool both common and esoteric, personal and universal.”) In the installation of Turbulence, the line was again framed as a tool to be wielded, not an end unto itself: Ten of the series’s works were displayed face down in cantilevered vitrines, their painstaking physical assemblage from various pieces of paper, taped together in a process of editing, deemed almost more worthy of attention than the final compositions. (“Almost” because each was accompanied by a new print edition, created by a83 for the occasion, mounted directly above.) The result was a show with a distinct yet intangible center, a calm eye of rigor around which a widening gyre of drawing, writing, and sculpture swirled.