[Previous entry: "Jane Station Southerly"] [Next entry: "Kensington Stop"]
04/21/2006: "Urban Deconstruction"
Last night, the Goethe-Institut hosted a panel on the theme of Urban Deconstruction, with the discussion centred around the documentation of two architectural projects currently on display at the Institut.
One project describes the deconstruction of 163 King Street West, the building where the Goethe-Institut currently occupies the first floor. A looping computer animation shows the facade of the existing building, and then the panes of glass and building infrastructure and floors begin to fall away, eventually leaving an empty white screen.
The other project documents an intervention by architects David Warne and Paul Raff on an old, dilapidated cottage in a downtown Toronto laneway about ten years ago. Writes curator John Bentley Mays, “The project involved peeling away the house’s skin, undoing its bones and uncovering its histories, and dropping the whole building through 45 degrees of arc into the ground: a lingering apocalypse, a disappearance in which everything is made visible, laid bare.”
The conversation began with the assertion that architecture and film are inherently different, that architecture is about being present in a dynamic space whereas film is fixed and constant in its presentation. Mr. Raff was particularly concerned with the dangers inherent in letting an image of a building stand in for the building itself.
Marc Gloede, a film academic visiting from the Free University in Berlin, showed a film by Gordon Matta-Clark in which the artist cuts a suburban New Jersey home in half, such that a line of sunlight shines through the opening. Then the artist tilts half the house by carefully removing from its cinder block base, before completing the intervention by completely cutting out one corner of the house. Evocative stuff.
Mr. Warne expanded the conversation to include the Situationists, and in particular mentioned the term phsychogeography, to introduce the possibility of rethinking what an urban space is, about using confusion to shock people into a state of awareness, thereby creating a space for questioning. He said that by tilting houses on their side, or removing the front façade (as Matta-Clark did in another suburban project), or taking buildings out of their usual context, it creates a sense of what a deconstructed space can feel like.
And then the conversation really got intellectual, talking about whether the work in the Goethe-Institut exhibition was art or architecture. Though on further consideration, this seems a silly conversation to me, because architecture is a craft and art an approach. It seems we live in an age when pretty much any craft is acceptable as a medium for artistic communication, be it architecture, film, teaching, or garbage collecting. The question as to whether a project has a creative resonance seems an altogether distinguishable matter.
And at least in the case of the interventions and documentations by Gordon Matta-Clarke, there appears both a high degree of skilled craftsmanship as well as some inspired artistic approaches. In conversation with Mr. Gloede after the panel, he said that a reel of Matta-Clark film documentations would be on display at Goethe-Institut all next week (Apr 24th through 28th), so interested psychogeographers can stop by and have themselves a look.
