Schindler Junkie: Johan Freeman & Justin Lowe, debris and simulation of the modern American. By: Gonzalo Carrasco Purull.

Last October, the artist Justin Lowe Johan Freeman and mounted an installation called «Bright White Underground» that radically transformed the Buck House, one of the most famous works of the architect Rudolf Schindler. Under the auspices of the Country Club Gallery, artists Freeman & Lowe spoke on the same house, making this place the last scene of a fiction fueled by drug use and the scene of the American counterculture of the sixties.

Based on the figure of Timothy Leary and LSD clandestine experiments conducted by the CIA in the sixties. Freeman & Lowe represented a story featuring Dr. Arthur Cook, a Hollywood psychiatrist who had experimented with a drug known as maras. Hallucinogen capable of producing disturbances in perception, causing the body to be recognized as something foreign, something strange. A state of dissociation, in which the other – body image – is identified with the negative, distorted.

Assembly is from this tragedy, that the same Buck House appears as an image divorced from the bright and ornate architecture of Rudolf Schindler. Its interior was modified to appear as vestiges of a turbulent past, where the body like a junkie, the house account of wounds, breaks, cracks and decays on their surfaces. A series of photographs accompanied the visitors on this trip to a fictional past, sparking a golden age in the house, where Dr. Cook and his group performed their lysergic meetings, where the sophisticated and modern are fused with uncontrolled and decay.

Newspaper clippings covering the large windows of a former architecture heating, while the premises were radically altered its original destination. This is how the kitchen became a laboratory to produce drugs, while the cabinets are returned in music halls. The voices of the guests of Dr. Cook emerged behind the walls of the house, trapped in the registry of recordings that are repeated constantly as they moved along a floor that serves as a container for all the forgotten and rejected by time.

While the work of Freeman & Lowe is halfway conceptual art and scenery, relocates to the architecture of the sixties in that location is indeterminate ruin, plunder and waste. A space where the fetish masterpiece disappears and is replaced by the detritus of everyday life. Where the entropy seems to fill everything, overwriting through the patina, rust and dirt with a new text which acts in opposition to official historicity. A necessary exercise in the middle of a scene in which contemporary works of architecture tend to become fossils themselves, as mere records of a past made monument. A state of dissociation, where the subject is always left out. VKPK.