Projects for Total Urbanisation
Today’s World
Projects for Total Urbanisation
Architectural models for future housing
PhD Exhibition
November 2009
My practice develops, explores and reveals various outcomes and shifts in position, relating to domestic architecture by extending the key ideas of sixties English architectural group Archigram. Archigram believed that English architecture maintained ‘a continuing European tradition of well-mannered, but gutless architecture that had absorbed the label “Modern” but had betrayed most of the philosophies of the earliest ‘Modern’” (Archigram 2007). Archigram ‘refused to be shackled by the past’ (Archigram 2007); rejecting modernism and its minimal approach to architecture preferring to embrace technology and consumer choice that they believed would provide people with a sense of freedom. My practice extends Archigram’s philosophies by producing works, through a DIY aesthetic, that are playful, pop-inspired vision of a technocratic future with no links to past architectural styles. I take my inspiration from consumer goods and organic forms found in the environment. These art pieces note our embracing of technology, which extends my practice to produce works that comment on mass consumption and sustainability.
Similar to Archigram my works are less defined by a set of rules of how a structure should look and function. Rather than create works based on traditional forms of architecture that have removed creativity from our domestic landscape, my works challenge the accepted role that a domestic structure should take and provides scope for further research into the possibilities that organic forms and shapes found within our consumer goods and environment can provide alternative design solutions.
The proposition developed throughout my practice is that even though specific forms of architecture employ various materials and features in construction that seeks to maintain the accepted traditional order of domestic architecture, there is potential for visual art practice to ‘re-territorialise’ this space and existing objects to provided an alternative point of view of how our domestic space should appear and operate.
Archigram 2007, Design Museum, viewed 20 August 2009, http://www.designmuseum.org/design/archigram
Studio and unfinished works 2010
Development of an architectural model for future housing
Development of an architectural model for future housing
‘The Duel Meaning of Things’ at Westspace (The use of the word ‘duel’ as opposed to ‘dual’ is a play on words in reference to the murder of Lawrence King.
The Duel Meaning of Things
Cardboard, mirror tiles, skateboard wheels
2009
The Duel Meaning of Things displays everyday items such as family portraits and baseball bats whose original purpose changes due to a single event or action. Referencing sixties Italian architectural group Superstudio, ‘anti design grid,’ I reconfigure mass produced objects and images to emphasize the dual purpose they can have both positively and negatively on our lives. The use of the word “Duel” is a play on the word in reference to the murder of Lawrence King.
Prototype for Sophisticated Living 4 (Team Australia) Curated by Veronica Tello
Team Australia. Group show at the Carlton Hotel and Studios. December 2008
Team Australia is:
jeremy drape, emily ferretti, veronica kent, annika koops, brendan lee, natalie ryan, utako shindo, jackson slattery, salote tawale, glenn walls
Curated by Veronica Tello
Prototype for Sophisticated Living 3
Prototype for Sophisticated Living 3 exhibited at RMIT gallery, December 2008
Prototype for Sophisticated Living 1 (Broke exhibition)
Prototype for Sophisticated Living 1 exhibited at the Carlton Hotel & Studios 2008 in the group show Broke
Prototype for Sophisticated Living 1 for the exhibition Broke At the Carlton Hotel & Studios 2008
Let’s talk about it, or new utopias
By
Rebecca Coates is an independent curator and writer, Adjunct Curator at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), and currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Melbourne looking at site-specific, ephemeral based installations.
Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness , a new book by Elizabeth Farrelly, coins a new term for a new form of architectural horrible-ness. For Farrelly, Western society is now a “Blubberland”, a society in which ‘most of us have more than enough of what we need and more than enough of what we want as well’. As she continues, most of the inhabitants of Blubberland have far too much and more not only of material goods but also bodily fat, ‘to a degree that is dangerous for them and for the future of the planet.’ Thus the development of the McMansion: vast sprawling architectural monstrosities with too many bedrooms, an equal number of bathrooms, four-space garages, and so many windows that those commissioning them can’t afford the curtains. And filled they are to groaning point with all the stuff and possessions a family could not possibly want, let alone need.
The disillusionment and rejection of modernist architectural ideals by the 1960s Italian group Superstudio might be akin to a similar rejection of today’s faceless, tasteless, mass-consumist architecture in what was once the green belt. Once only the domain of savvy architects and design aficionados, Superstudio’s little-known architectural vision is undergoing a cult revival as architects and artists look to articulate their dissatisfaction with popular trends and developments.
Founded in Florence by a group of radical young architects in 1966, Superstudio laid out their vision of a built environment, ‘an efficient minimalist space that provides an ordered existence .. [The space should] not [be] constructed on the whims of consumerism and fashion.’ The location of this new form of avant-garde thinking is of course not accidental: Florence, Italy: a town ‘where all such contradictions become evident … [a town which] stands historically symbolic.’ And what better vehicle to launch their manifesto than Italian Vogue: anarchy and avant-garde are nothing if not fashionable.
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How to avoid Modernism
How to avoid Modernism at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, April 2008.
In 2005 l created a scale model of Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949). As with Farnsworth House I was attracted to Johnson’s simple lines, geometrical forms and large floor-to-ceiling windows that opened up the interior to the outside world. It was not until 2008 that the thought of using the model for the work How to avoid modernism (2008) came to fruition and was exhibited at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in April 2008. The original intention for this work was to create a queer space using objects and materials in the model making reference to Johnson’s homosexuality. However, in researching the building, Johnson’s personality, his politics and the history that surrounds the structure began to dominate the work.
Philip Johnson, Glass House, 1949
How to avoid Modernism (2008) consists of video of a lone male figure pouring blue- coloured water down the chimney of a scale model of Johnson’s Glass House. The model is constructed of masonite, cardboard, clear perspex and balsa wood for the internal kitchen bench. The video was filmed in my studio in Melbourne. Shot in one sequence, the video runs for less than a minute,[1] and was looped in Final Cut Pro to emphasise the constant flooding of the building.
In a 1950 article in the Architectural Review, Johnson listed Mies Farnsworth House as one of the inspiration for the Glass House. However, Peter Eisenman, in his introduction to Philip Johnson: Writings, claimed the house was not based on Mies at all but rather, as Johnson stated, ‘from a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of bricks’ (Eisenman, cited in Friedman 2006). Eisenman claimed that the Glass House was a result of deep psychological conflict that Johnson had suffered due to his involvement with fascism during the Second World War. According to Friedman, ‘the Glass House is Johnson’s own monument to the horrors of war. It is at once a ruin and also an ideal model of a more perfect society’ (Friedman 2006, p. 151). Eisenman concluded ‘that the house was an expression of Johnson’s “personal atonement and rebirth as an individual”’ (Eisenman, cited in Friedman 2006). But all this seems to be Johnson’s way of deflecting issues relating to his sexuality. On his estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, Johnson presented the world with a public image of himself through the Glass House. His private self was kept closeted metres away in the windowless guest house. (To read further click on Articles then click on How to avoid modernism)
[1] A version of this video can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfdJHZrNU44
Text Me
Text Me at Spacement
Text Me at Spacement
Text Me at Spacement
Text Me at Spacement
Text Me
Spacement, Melbourne
August 17th to September 2nd 2006
By Christine Morrow. Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Published in Eyeline Number 61: Spring 2006
Text Me presented artworks on the theme of messaging. Curator, Glenn Walls, assembled a group that included him, four artists who regularly work with text – Rose Nolan, Sanné Mestrom, Gabrielle de Vietri and Danielle Freakley – together with the design duo Pandarosa.
The works incorporated the motif of text, or oblique references to it, across various technologies of expression not restricted to the typographic form. Although the artists showed an awareness of the history of concrete poetry, conceptual art and particularly the Art & Language movement, they avoided rehashing any of the old concerns of structural linguistics about the systematic features inherent in language’s operation.
The exhibition did not focus on the structures of language per se but its instrumentality in building relationships or communities. By foregrounding the social functions of language and privileging individual utterances, the exhibition closely examined various intimacies created by speech and writing. Certain of the artists achieved this by inserting themselves into the work, or by using first-person to second-person speech, as if to whisper to the viewer, this is about you and me. Others created this intimacy by expressing personal vulnerability. These various strategies seemed to run the spectrum bounded by the two extremes of what the imperative Text me can signify: on the one hand a breezy sign off meaning let’s talk and on the other a neediness of the you never write, you never call…variety.
Sanné Mestrom has become known for large-scale painted wall texts of quasi biblical messages rendered with dizzying spatial illusions. By contrast, in Text Me she presented a series of large black and white images that were so degraded they appeared to be copies of copies. They depicted a performance by the artist that involved smearing her painted body along a wall. There was no typographic text in this work; instead Mestrom presented the evidence of using her body as a writing instrument to create what could be seen to function like a kind of graffiti tag, based on the body leaving behind its own indexical signature on the wall. However, the immediacy of effect it sought to create was undone by presenting the documentation of the work rather than either performing the work or exhibiting the smeared wall.
Pandarosa presented a wall-painting framed by two freestanding cardboard forms painted with ink drawings of each of the two members of the collective. The painted wall featured their signature style of silhouette shapes overlaid with organic-looking spidery drawing. It appeared to spell out Pandarosa. It too functioned as a graffiti tag, but in a more literal way than did Mestrom’s work. The work’s main content was a representation of its own authors who signed it thrice over: once by creating it in their signature style, a second time by writing their name large within it and a third time by presenting images of each of the two of them framing the work like bookends. As we might expect from graphic designers, there was an overt concern with the way text’s typographical features mediate its signification. But in this instance, the duo achieved a kind of anti-typography for there as a partial breakdown of legibility in the individual letters and their sequencing.
Glenn Walls presented an installation that featured a crumbling wall supporting a puzzling assortment of images. These functioned like conceptual clues needing interpretation. This work was also a kind of graffiti tag, or signature writ large, but a very subtle one. By exhibiting a wall, the artist invoked his own surname, Walls, in the form of a rebus. The wall was papered with a repeated pattern of symbols reminiscent of a personal coat-of-arms based on an assortment of mementi mori: including a modernist building, a retro car, three skulls and an urn. An image of the artist appeared separately in each of the framed photographs displayed on the wall, but in them he was not really himself. Instead he functioned as a kind of blank person on which to hang messages and monograms. The entire effect was to generate a slippage between logos, the plural of logo (or logotype), and logos, the word. This wall appeared to simultaneously break down and reconstitute itself; through its self-referential play, it absorbed the signature, transformed and diffused it……….
Christine Morrow
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