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LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS |
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In the last issue of the Butlletí we published an article by Martí Peran in which he traced the relationship between art and architecture, and now publish a text by Martí Anson, who exhibited at the CASM a year ago. An artist who has utilized architectonic elements in many of his works, Anson here puts forward a critical exercise on contemporary art and architecture on the basis of a rereading of Robert Venturi’s book Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form.
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MARTÍ ANSON
Architecture has always offered material for study, and the book Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form is a good example. In place of a concrete study of the architecture of Las Vegas, the book uses the city as a pretext for putting forward its points of view on architecture.
The points that follow are reflections on architecture as a way of talking about contemporary art.
Architecture without architects
The plywood panels available on the market come in different sizes, but the most usual dimensions are 244 x 122 cm and 366 x 183 cm, in a range of thicknesses. If we take a measuring tape to the structures that artists tend to use in constructing their installations, we find that the sizes of these generally fit, one way or other, with those of the standard panels. And if we then attach a 4 x 4 wooden batten to reinforce the structure we have a piece with an extremely familiar external appearance.
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| I am a monument. Recommendation for a monument. From the book Learning from Las Vegas |
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Constructing in this way makes the product more economical.
Builders
Whether a roller-coaster structure is made of wood or of steel is like the difference between drinking milk from a bottle or from a cardboard carton. What matters is the milk.
As Bruce Lee said:‘Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.’
Ikea is not only in the home
We all have some piece of Ikea furniture at home. Installations and exhibitions are no different; they, too, have Ikea furniture.
The new buildings. Talking about art
We have become used to theme parks that copy architectures from around of the world as part of the spectacle: Disneyworld, Port Aventura, Terra Mítica, etc …, and curiously, with the passage of time the city itself has come to be a theme park, mixing what is genuine and what is not. Perhaps one interesting way of resolving the issue of tourism in Barcelona would be to construct a fake Barcelona on the outskirts for people to visit. This is not a new idea: there is a very recent example in Julian Barnes’s novel England, England, in which Barnes’s fictional Sir Jack Pitman constructs another England on the Isle of Wight, a country concentrated into a small space especially for tourists, where a day will suffice to visit all the typical sites of the original England — the Tower of London, the White Cliffs of Dover, Sherwood Forest and so on. The project is so ambitious and so monstrous that in the end the phoney country is as real as, or more real than, the original.
Closer to home, the shopping centre of La Roca is notable for its exact reproduction of a Mediterranean village —streets, houses, squares, even the town hall— in which none of the buildings performs its true function: they are all boutiques. We are not dealing here with some theme park in which the copies of buildings contain shows related to the countries they represent; the copy here has taken a far more interesting step, assuming another significance: these are shops. Just as in Las Vegas, the façade is more important than the building, and once inside, a diaphanous architecture devoid of all decoration contains the product on display, waiting to be sold. The building is constructed to perform its function.
Contemporary art is no exception: it too has installed itself in the utilization of the theme park. Many artists use spectacularity as a theme in their work, introducing the public into the concept of leisure.
Interior oasis
We live in the architectonic monumentality of exhibition montages, excessive walls, strident colours, informative texts. Things tend to be simplified: easy to understand, easy to explain, as simple like porridge. The public has the sensation of reading a children’s book.
The other architectures
Many artists are generous with the world around us, and try to understand it. How lovely! The all too frequent interventions in spaces that are not ours treat conflict from a childlike and provocative point of view, seeking the solution to a problem that has no solution from the standpoint of construction. To a certain extent, it’s more fun to see the contrasts in the contemporary city.
The revolution will not be televised,’ as Gil Scott-Heron declared in a rap, and he was absolutely right, why because no one remembers him.
Gulliver
The artist produces a lot of works on the basis of a prior model, which gives him a position of authority, and once the project has been realized he comes to see it from an impossible distance.
The story of Gulliver is repeated time and time again.
Everyone is in show business now
La Oreja de Van Gogh: ‘We don’t make music to sell.’
When Chicago was destroyed by fire, a new city was planned. One of the factors that changed was the method of construction: all of the buildings now had a steel structure. But the new city was also conceived as a competition; the owners of the new buildings competed to see who could make theirs highest.
What we have to accept is that the spectacle is not confined to the theatre, but part of everyday life. Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame no longer exist; the thing now is to be famous all day, every day.
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| Exhibition On Water by Tomas Saraceno at the CASM, 2006 |
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The everyday
The work of the contemporary artist is to make what has been made before attractive again and communicate it well. This is each day’s challenge. The age of discovery is past and what is left are the derivations.
Being misunderstood nowadays does not increase an artist’s stature, but means they are finished.
Walking
I’m fond of quoting a line I came across in a book I read some time ago: ‘Well, you know what they say: Rockefeller made his fortune always buying too late and selling too early.’ In the contemporary world, not knowing what you’re doing has its advantages.
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“Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame no longer exist;
the thing now is to be famous all day, every day.”
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We need to rediscover the stroll. We have lost the concept of wasting time on the reading of exhibitions. Hurry swallows up everything. Robert Walser makes this clear at the start of his novella The Walk: ‘I declare that one lovely morning, I don’t know at exactly what time, I felt like going for a walk.’ A eulogy to the passive walk.
But we can also react to what there is around us:
‘The farmer’s uncle spent his free time walking round the edge of the pond, blowing the heads off snakes with a .22. Sometimes he even shot the turtles.’
The result
Pieces of art go out of date faster than cars. |
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