The husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Diller, 48, and Ricardo Scofidio, 67, have built almost no conventional structures, but they express their cleverly subversive ideas in projects–mostly art installations–that comment on culture, technology and our dearly held assumptions. Some of their best work is on view through May 25 at the Whitney Museum in New York, in the show “Scanning: The Aber-rant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio.” In “Master/Slave,” a battalion of toy robots loops endlessly on conveyor belts, under constant video surveillance (a frequent D?S theme). “American Lawn” sends up our suburban obsession: museum visitors step around a video projection of grass on a gallery floor as if it were a priceless Aubusson. A small display pays homage to “Soft Sell,” their 1993 video installation on a former 42d Street porn palace of a giant pair of luscious lips. And now Diller + Scofidio are so hot they’re actually going to get something built. They’ve designed a new Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston and won a high-profile competition to redo the outdoor spaces at New York’s Lincoln Center.
Those museum-speak labels at the Whitney show don’t reflect the wit in so much of Diller + Scofidio’s work. It’s brilliant and serious, of course: the couple struggled for years, maxing out their credit cards to build their projects and crafting a lot of the stuff with their own hands. But clearly, they’ve been having a blast thinking outside the box. Diller, known as Liz, met Scofidio, called Ric, when she was his architecture student at Cooper Union. When asked how their collaboration got going, Scofidio says, “I’m not sure either of us truly understands that.” But Diller busts in brightly, “I have an answer! I think Ric and I fell in love with each other over ideas. It was a physical attraction for sure. But when we started to communicate about architecture, that’s when I fell for you.”
Scofidio is majestically calm; Diller is talkative and frisky. Their reading runs to pulp fiction (him) and gossip magazines (her). They’re influenced by such artists as Marcel Duchamp, but Diller also confesses to a fascination with reality TV. “It’s research,” she says–then laughs at herself. Won’t their breakthrough into reality architecture ruin their cred as conceptualist outsiders? No, they say. They promise not to let their office get any bigger (they have 15 in staff), they swear they’re not printing up business cards and they’re starting new experimental work. Whew. We can’t wait to see their real buildings, but we don’t want them to stop messing around in their heads–or messing with ours.
