The Imbrication of Art and Architecture in the White Building
- foliomag
- Feb 17
- 3 min read
By Mirabelle Brunswick
When I consider visual art, typically in a museum space or even online, I usually take the context for granted (blank walls and a placard are the only things that contribute to the painting) or I’m seeing it on my computer, lacking context, lacking physicality and place in the world. Yet, the context not only governs the aesthetic experience and but is also a contributor to the artistic context.
While reading A City In Time by Pamela Corey, a book on Vietnamese and Cambodian artist’s works in relation to urban form, focusing specifically on Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh (a great book for anyone interested the urban and visual arts), Corey’s analysis of the The White Building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia took my interest.
The White Building, also known as simply “The Building”, was a modernist building constructed in the 1960s by Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann and his team as an affordable housing solution for people of lower classes and civil servants. The design is modernist, an icon of New Khmer Architecture. It was demolished in 2017.
Architecturally speaking, the building had many functions; it was a living space, a commercial space, and an artistic space. Corey writes how artistically speaking the building acted as artistic subject, medium, and site. In 2016, Miles MacGregor (El Mac) painted a mural titled Thread of Life, which was a portrait of one the residents, Moeun Thary, on the buliding, making the structure the base of the visual art.The building itself has been the subject of many artists’ works, such as in Neang Kavich’s film “White Building”. The mural was whitewashed by the government shortly after its creation because it presented an inappropriate subject, that being a civil servant rather than someone of high class considered worthy of a portrait. This highlights how visual art is not only governed by the structures it’s on, but also the politics of that time and place. The building also housed installations such as The Sounding Room, an interactive sound installation, making the building engaged in the reception and movement of the sounds of the work.
The building demonstrates the flexibility of artistic form, becoming simultaneously an symbol, a site, and a medium for artistic practice as well as an architectural structure. Traditionally, visual art pieces are separated from their environment, viewed as a singular, independent works, their internal meanings separated from the external environment they inhabit. Euro-American Modernists such as Clement Greenberg in his iconic essay Modernist Painting emphasized this approach, attempting to reduce painting to merely the materials it was made out of and its meaning as pure self-reflection. Yet I find that this reduction is a sort of minimalizing of medium, but also of the human aesthetic experience. Our experience of places and of art is not governed by the art itself, we do not view art in a vacuum, but guided by the institutions and locations that they occupy. Their context also pre-determines certain judgements, the way we view paintings in museums and in our families homes is different. In terms of sonic creative works, their reception and quality are also governed by their venues. The multiple roles of locations and of buildings challenges this divide between artwork and environment. How do the boundaries between art and milieu blur? Can they be simultaneous?
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