night pictures

AREA THE NIGHT CLUB AS ART by GLENN O’BRIEN Night pictures by OLIVIER ZAHM purple dinners by STÉPHANE FEUGÈRE   AREA. Even the name proclaimed the concept, intentions, and ambitions of the new nightclub: to be unlike anything that preceded it. Area? A prescribed-extent two-dimensional planar surface. It could have been called Space, but that would have been too 2001. Area had the perfectly circumscribed tone to describe an unprecedented project. Area was named the way artists reckon a place. It had the deadpan formality of Artists Space (1972), The Performing Garage (1975), or Storefront for Art and Architecture (1982). And as Area revealed itself, it was essentially a space that was made to be completely built up and torn down repeatedly in a series of thematic identities. It was to be nightclub as art. Nightlife had flirted with art before. In 1912 Frida Strindberg, the wife of the playwright,…