ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Rita McBride’s central concerns are the implications for the politics of space of the techno-logistical determinants of capitalism’s expanded self-reproduction. Air-conditioning units, shopfront awnings and ventilation ducts are among the overlooked features of built environment that McBride has sought to cast in an unfamiliar light, typically by reproducing them in a wide range of alternative materials. A number of McBride’s works suggest a sceptical stance towards architecture’s critical pretensions on something like the basis, a questioning of the possibility that any built statement might nowadays meaningfully disrupt or challenge what has become an almost entirely affirmative architectural culture. McBride’s vignette invites an analogy between the ruthless efficiency of her fictional assassin and both the structural and visual economy of the sculpture itself. Marking the sculpture’s own contours in this way, the bleachers also at first appear to promise some kind of relationship of continuity with the surrounding topography.
