My head, Michel Foucault

"My head, for example, my head: what a strange cavern that opens onto the external world with two windows. Two openings -I am sure of it, because I see them in the mirror, and also because I can close one or the other separately. And yet, there is really only one opening- since what I see facing me is only one continuous landscape, without partition or gap."

Michel Foucault, "Le corps utopique" (1966)

Ugo La Pietra "La grande occasione"

La grande occasione from ugo la pietra on Vimeo.

Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Ethics of Dust, 2009

Anthony Vidler

“How do we define, and thereby ensure the individual integrity of each art as a practice when there no longer seems to be any division between the spatial and the textual, or more problematically in the case of sculpture and architecture , between the aesthetically constructed spatial and the functionally constructed spatial?”


“ When artists like Vito Acconci are experimenting with architecture and architects like Frank Gehry seem as preoccupied with the sculptural form of building as with its functional role, it seems that what Rosalind Krauss once termed the “expanded field” of sculpture as involved architecture, or, as the experimental constructions of Dan Graham and others demonstrate, architecture has invaded sculpture.”


“This ambiguity has been present at least since the 1960’s when it was equally possible to see Dan Graham taking his inspiration from architectural theory and practice as it was to see Louis I. Kahn constructing a “minimalist” aesthetic akin to that developed by Donald Judd and his peers. But with the current exploration of digital form common to the architecture of Frank Ghery and his younger contemporaries and to sculptors like Richard Serra, the distinction seems to have come to rest in the narrow territory of “use” versus “uselessness”.

Anthony Vidler. Architecture's expanded field  in: Anthony Vidler, ed., Architecture between spectacle and use, Williamstown, Mass. : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute ; New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press, 2008.


The image is from: Haus-Rucker-Co live again : Lentos-Kunstmuseum Linz, 16.11.2007 - 16.03.2008 / Ausstellung und Katalog Andrea Bina.

WORK LINES

After spending almost two months in New York working, reading and over all thinking in what I am going to study [or at least try to] during the next two years, I think I can write it down. Next week I will return to Spain for a short time and I don't want to leave without saying it.

WORK LINES

1. PERFORMANCE IN ARCHITECTURE
or
From the use of action in architecture to the use of Internet as the new battlefield.

I am interested in how the architectural field have used the performance as a means of stating discourse. I would like to know who used this format and how it was developed. I am thinking in people such Vito Acconci, Ant Farm, Haus-Rucker-Co, and so forth. This line will force me to study what exactly means "performance" in architecture. Performance could be an experiment at the street, a self-made prototype or a video record of a lonely action in a laboratory.
I want to link that research to the use of internet as a new public space and how contemporary experimental architecture uses that space. The study of actions on the web.

2. THE EXHIBITION AS A MANIFESTO
This work lines is related to how the exhibition has been used as a way to show new ideas and to produce a direct communication within the society. I would study witch architects have used the exhibition as a way to show their projects. In that sense, I am interested in the exhibition as a rehearsal of experimental practices. The exhibition hall as a production space instead of an exhibition space. The idea is to connect this concepts to the curator figure. How an architect could become a curator, focusing its role in the idea of cultural producer. In conclusion, this work line aim is the reappraisal of the exhibition of architecture and the redefinition of the curator of architecture.

3. EDGE CHARACTERS BETWEEN ART AND ARCHITECTURE.
I am interested in architects who work in the field of art and artists who work over architecture. Or simply I am interested in the collision of this two different fields and the people who work on this subtle line.


Let's see what I can do.

Arthur Drexler

"There are different ways of discussing architecture," he explained. "There is the chore of the journalist, the task of the academic historian or critic; people expect different things." There were also multiple institutional prerogatives for a curator which "Transformations" "refuses to gratify": "The first is that father or mother will tell you what to do.: the missionary role" Second was the expectation that the museum will validate great achievement" by presenting only the best recent work. Third was the role of reappraisal, a role he believed more easily accomplished for work of 1920s than of the present. Distancing his position, he proclaimed: "The missionary role is expressly disavowed; the validating role is disavowed. The reappraisal role is not entirely disavowed. It does occur in the manner in which the material is presented, in the juxtapositions and the quality which do result in a reappraisal."

Arthur Drexler "Response",6.
In: Felicitty D.Scott Architecture or Techno-Utopia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980)

The death of Modern architecture

"Happily, we can date the death of modern architecture to a precise moment in time. Unlike the legal death of a person, witch is becoming a complex affair of brain waves versus heartbeats, Modern Architecture went out with a bang.
[...]
Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15,1972 at 3:32 p.m. [or thereabouts] when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the coup de grâce by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalised mutilated and defeaced by its black inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive [fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting] it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom."

From:
Charles A. Jencks "The language of Post-modern Architecture" (New York: Rizzoli,1977)

blu

BIG BAG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Gil Heitor Cortesao

Born in Lisbon 1967. Lives and works in Lisbon.
Works on the representation of a lonesome, dirty and decrepit modern architecture.

2008 Atrás do Vulcao#1

2008 Atrás do Vulcao#2

2009 Atrás do Vulcao#3

2009 Atrás do Vulcao#4

Amir Zaki at Perry Rubenstein gallery

"Relics",  body of photographic "portraits" of elevated lifeguard towers taken along different beaches in Southern California. 
Zaki has digitally altered the images in order to remove any visible access leading to the tower platforms. This is a work that follows earlier artist's interest in architectural structures.