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Because of the way in which it governs our daily experience and reflects the larger social order, the built space has attracted the regular attention of artists for more than a century. For many early modernists, architecture held utopian possibilities, which were frequently expressed through proposals for visionary projects that seldom came to fruition. Naum Gabo's Column (ca. 1923/reconstructed 1937), for example, is a model for a (then improbable) monumental tower, which reflects the heady idealism of Soviet artists in the years immediately following the 1917 Revolution. Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, artists have cast a more critical eye, exploring embedded ideologies of architecture as it plays out in real space and time. Gordon Matta-Clark staged direct interventions in the urban environment, cutting into abandoned buildings to create uncanny voids and recesses which he documented photographically in works such as Office Baroque (1977). Employing a very different approach, Sarah Morris decodes the built space by isolating and abstracting iconic architecture. Far from exercises in formalism, the colorful, gridded compositions of works like Mandalay Bay (Las Vegas) (1999) reference the network of social, political, and economic relationships that permeate architecture. Liam Gillick’s Plexiglas and aluminum platforms resemble actual elements of Modernist architecture or design, but are intended to create spaces for viewers to reflect on the ways in which they are structured by the urban environment. |
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