Alex Schweder is a clean person. He comes across as clean right
away. His clothes, even his jeans, fit his body like they’re tailored.
His shoes are tidy, his mouth closed tight. His demeanor is calm; it is
impossible to imagine him spilling into awkward emotion. Trained as an
architect, he bears that awareness of form that makes the people in the
profession look as though they’ve built themselves rather than
simply gotten dressed in the morning.
“I’ve really tried to fit in,” he says, squirming slightly in his
seat.
As you get closer, things begin to break down. He wears a jacket
riddled with zippers. A pair of bright yellow pants bring to mind
rubber rain gear. White feathers embroidered thickly on the shoulders
of a black shirt add an unsightly hairiness.
Things get strange where his body meets the world. It is not a clean
seam at all.
Schweder’s art is about this seam—not the one particular to
his body, but the one we all share if we can bear to think about it.
Bodies leak, Schweder reminds us, they decay. And our desires let them
get away from us. Architecture, by contrast, provides the body with a
second, ideal skin. A stable skin.
For the last seven years, Schweder has been exploiting this contrast
to its fullest, making art by designing anti-ideal
architecture—architecture that heightens, rather than disappears,
the uncomfortable experience of real, messy bodies by instigating
desire between bodies and buildings. This is art that, before it makes
its way to the parts of the body most associated with art—the
eyes, the brain—hits you in an involuntary organ (the stomach?
the liver?) first.
In one installation, titled Still-Life of Beefsteak and
Cheese and owned by the Tacoma Art Museum, a video screen is set
into a wall covered in red-and-yellow striped wallpaper scented like
donuts. The wall is like food; it draws you close and makes you
salivate. It also is an organism with a window into its digesting
intestines: The glistening video footage is made from a colonoscopy
wand poking around in Jell-O.
Another installation, Lovelorn Walls, is inside two
bathroom stalls at the Tacoma Convention & Trade Center. It’s as
though the white porcelain walls have gone mad. They buckle, protrude,
and pucker. Extra crevices are filled by white caulk applied thickly,
like frosting. Lovelorn Walls is private, unsettling,
taboo—easily the most transgressive work of public art in the
Northwest. It is a miracle, and a testament to Schweder’s offsettingly
professional demeanor, that it was built at all.
Schweder, 37, studied architecture at Pratt Institute in New York,
and then in graduate school at Princeton. At Pratt, his designs were
wild-looking but, at heart, tamely formal. A turning point came between
his two degrees, when he designed a house based on avoidance, a place
where the central room is for doing whatever it is you most don’t want
to do. Psychology had begun to enter the picture, and psychoanalytic
theory would become an influence. In another early project under the
tutelage of radical architect Elizabeth Diller at Princeton, Schweder
proposed a “scenic” road through the ruins under the ground in
Seattle’s Pioneer Square, a road with a “view”—of structural
decomposition.
His longing to explode the idealizing impulse in architecture made
him discontent at a mainstream architectural firm in New York (once he
proposed that a road be sent through the base of a client’s priapic
tower, and a grim silence spread across the room), and so in 2000, he
picked up and moved to rainy, cheaper Seattle to become an artist. At
the same time that he began making art about all the bodily functions
that buildings help us deny, he began working a freelance day
job—one he still has—waterproofing buildings.
This job might be unappealing to some people, but for Schweder it
reinforces his desire to see a building as a process rather than an
object, something like Erwin Wurm’s deliberately imperfect one-minute
sculptures, which are performed by people rather than sculpted in a
studio—and which reveal some of our deepest desires about
sculpture, especially that it should be immortal and monumental.
Schweder’s next building will perform itself over time and out in
the elements. It is a commission from Seattle collectors Bill and Ruth
True, who recently built a new house. Schweder will create a miniature
version of the old house that stood on the site before the Trues
demolished it. He’ll make the house out of biodegradable plastic that
will be loaded with seeds and set in the backyard of the new house. As
the house rots in the rain, a garden will spring up from it. Schweder
will keep rebuilding the house, which will keep moving, rotting, and
leaving a garden in its wake. It will be called This Apple Tastes
Like Our Living Room Used to Smell.
After a huge year, Schweder is at a break. His International
District studio is bare. Heavy machinery is set up for the kinds of
objects he used to make, from materials like resin, vitreous china,
urethane rubber, and sugar. In one early series, back when he was still
hiding the potent anxiety of his work behind humor, he made customized
urinals that directed pee to form a momentary landscape before it got
flushed down. Another work from the same period, a little more
dejected, is a white porcelain carwash building. It sits in a pool of
dark oil, having shat itself.
But he doesn’t make objects like he used to. Since last fall, when
he returned from a year in Italy on the Rome Prize, he has shown five
new installations: Folded Murmur and Sick Building
Sequence at Howard House, his former gallery in Seattle; A Sac
of Rooms Three Times a Day at Seattle’s Suyama Space (it will be
seen again this winter at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art);
Spit Skin, in the Northwest Biennial at TAM; and
Flatland at SculptureCenter in New York.
Eventually, he wants to make actual buildings. A Sac of Rooms
Three Times a Day was a bungalow inside an envelope of stitched
vinyl that was slowly inflated at mealtimes, the interior rooms
squishing together and warping each other like distended organs. He’s
teaching a class this fall at the Southern California Institute of
Architecture on how to perform your own building, how to foreground
action as opposed to object—and these are questions he’ll be
asking himself as well as his students.
“If rotting buildings can be turned into something productive,” he
says, “then rotting bodies might not be so terrifying.”
The image on the homepage of his website is a photograph of a room
taken from a waterproofing site. A swarm of mold spots as beautiful as
a Yayoi Kusama abstraction has risen from above what looks like a
doorway and spread across the ceiling, reaching out toward the viewer.
Rot is home. Welcome. 
