Vacant spaces NY; Houses for sale

In the essay, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’, Rosalind Kraus highlights the impossibility of identifying a singular throughline or aesthetic style that connected the contemporary art of her day. Seventies American art, she concluded, cannot be organised into a coherent list; in fact, it ‘is proud of its own dispersal’ and seems to intentionally negate ‘that need for a list’. The ‘index’ of Kraus’s essay title is not the alphabetical organisation of terms in a list, but rather denotes a mark or trace left by an action or object. Despite this alternate definition, and the nonconforming nature of seventies art, Kraus cannot fully discard the desire to instil a linear organisation and, thus, the list prevails in the structure of her essay. Each paragraph begins with a numeric marker providing some semblance of order to the reader and fulfilling the longing for a ‘synthetic’ device that lingers in the introductory paragraph of the essay. Kraus’s inability to avoid the impulse to list suggests not only the rhetorical power of the list, but perhaps speaks to her inability to embrace the entropy of the art of her day. A will to list is of course nothing new. Amongst architects, perhaps no one has committed to the practice of making lists more than Michael Meredith and Hillary Sample, the pair that heads the architecture firmMOS. In exhibitions and books, Meredith and Sample have previously made ‘visual lists’, to borrow a term from Umberto Eco, of scale figures, houses for sale, lo-fi architecture, and, most recently, vacant spaces. The image-based indexes made by MOS present items with a cool rationality that seems to eschew politics or really Review by Michael Robinson Cohen Founding member, Citygroup Architecture, Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA mcohen@bard.edu 310 Book Reviews