028 The Garage Will Do

Type: group exhibition
Location: MAK Center Los Angeles, US
Year: 2020 
Photographs: Tag Christoph, Studio Jakob Sellaoui


The Garage Will Do is a temporary installation in the backyard space of the Mackey Apartments realized within the duration of the MAK Schindler Residency in Los Angeles, with invited talks by eleven LA-based artists, architects and writers.

The project draws upon a quote by Frank Lloyd Wright referring to Rudolph Schindler’s buildings as well-designed, but badly executed. He nevertheless concludes that so far none have fallen down. The intervention reassesses assumptions surrounding the way things are made— or ought to be made. Departing from constructional shortcomings, not-quite solutions and average arrangements, the project explores crudeness and make-do, not as lack of finesse or quality, but rather as a form of resilience and robustness— perhaps not because they are “well made”, but because they are just “good enough”.

In a series of talks, the invited participants (Cristobal Amunategui, Wendy Gillmartin, Andrew Kovacs, Emanuel Rohss, Julia Tcharfas, Claus Benjamin Freyinger, Fiona Connor, Jia Gu, Jimenez Lai, and Luis Ortega Govela) were asked to contribute stories that mark out a way of rethinking the notion of deficiency not as a disadvantage, but possibly as a virtue. Making a building or telling a story is never an exact or definite process. Details might be left out and characters forgotten. Things get lost in translation. Nevertheless they persist. At least most of the time.

The installation and conversation series was realized during the course of the six-month MAK Schindler Residency and was exhibited as part of the group show Final Projects: Group XLIX together with artists Ting-Jung Chen and Veronika Eberhart.