Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Gordon Matta-Clark, an architect, artist, and James Dean rebel. Recognized as a key contributor to the conceptual, process, and performance art that emerged from New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s, Matta-Clark is a big deal in the context of the underground art world. By the second half of the 1900s, New York had seen better days. With crime and the financial crisis as the dominant themes of the decade, Gordon Matta-Clark declared himself an “Anarchitect. ” Like any good anarchist, he blamed capitalism and what he described as the failures of institutionalized architecture as well as the modernist movement for what was happening to his city. Capitalism: what we have already heard. But how could you blame the beautiful geometric simplicity of modernist architecture? In the words of a bitter and comically defined Marxist, Mikhail Lifshitz explained in 1966: “Among them (the modernists) there is a cult of power, a joy in destruction, a love of brutality, a thirst for reckless living and blind obedience. Did the words of this seemingly distraught critic inspire Matta-Clark to shake up the architectural establishment? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay As far as we know, the answer is maybe. Matta-Clark's work includes performance and recycling pieces, spatial and structural work. His most famous "building cuts," as the name suggests, involved cutting large sections from the facades of structures and playing with the light that filtered through the new openings. Seen from the street, the extraordinarily deconstructed buildings shocked people's reality. Living in New York, forty years after his passing at the age of 35, society is still experiencing similar problems, hypergentrification, growing inequality, a general doubt about institutional authority, to name a few, 2018 is It's been a wild ride. everyone probably likes to get off. Inspired by the iconic work of Gordon Matta-Clark, today's architects and artists have realized that manipulating buildings or copying old structures is an effective way to communicate messages. A London-based artist and architect, Alex Chinneck, uses his pieces to challenge the preconceived perspectives viewers have while walking the streets of English cities. His most recent piece (just released in August), “Open to the Public,” is a converted derelict office building in Ashford, Kent. Chinneck cheekily added two hinges that appear to unzip the building's exterior, revealing a dilapidated space inside. Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen created a replica of the Villa Savoye, one of Le Corbusier's most famous buildings, and sunk it in a Danish fjord. Villa Sovoye is considered the emblem of the modernity movement. According to the artist, sinking it is a commentary on the current political landscape and a representation of the values of modernity that have been submerged by technology in both the United States and Great Britain. On the coast of Taiwan, a team of artists have transformed a brutalist 30-foot-tall concrete loudspeaker, previously used to broadcast anti-communist propaganda to China, into an art installation. The artists intend for the project to "play with the idea of the territory as a geographical entity, but also as a sonic and mental entity". With a degree of vagueness sufficient to give us an idea of what he is talking about, Augustin Maurs explains: “Art does not have to be explicitly political to be political”. This installation is most likely a commentary on the tensions always..
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