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Much
of what is discussed under the rubric "Art and architecture"
offers the almost obscene spectacle of an attempt to create siamese
twins out of two corpses. The cadavers are the professional ideologies
of art and architecture.
Both
need to confer special status upon the mysteries of their practices.
An artist is supposed to be more than just a maker of decoration and
an architect more than just an organiser of building. Past practice,
more grandly known as the history of art and architecture, is pressed
into service. The notion of great artists or architects serves to
bolster the status of current practitioners: they are descendants
of gods. In practice, both groups tend towards a craft conception
of their activities; just look at the bulk of art and architecture
education: much of it is concerned with handing on technical knowledge
and unquestioned professional beliefs.
Looking
at some of the publications and remembering the public forums around
the issue ' art and architecture', the abiding motive for them seems
to be the nostalgia: the desire for a return to secure, homogeneous
culture. Contributors look back to a time when art and architecture
were in some kind of union, and look forward to some coming synthesis
when the artist and the architect will again share a common language.
The implication is that the diverse and contradictory practice of
art and architecture in the twentieth century was a mistake, an arbitrary
neglect of the true and the beautiful, a wilful aberration by immature
men and women. A new union would be possible if sensible folk could
get together.
The
first refutation of this argument is provided by the kind of work
which it singled out for attention as produced under the rubric of
'art and architecture'. They are predominantly banal buildings with
decorative kitsch. One senses behind art and architecture club-able
and complacent architects and confusedly eclectic artists and craftspersons,
clever with their hands and conceptually innocent. Nice
enough people, but what they desire is authoritarian. A shared symbolic
order is only possible in a totalitarian culture.
What
is productive about bringing art and architecture together is the
mutual destruction they bring to each other's professional ideology.
To take two examples: the specialness of artists is expressed in the
uniqueness of their artefacts; their most highly priced objects are
one-offs. Artists' drawings, for instance, are valued as intimate
prints of their unique minds. So for artists to make drawings from
which others can construct something, a drawing devoid of the rhetoric
of self-expression, is for some a radical act. Such drawings are of
course, the bread and butter of architecture. Similarly, it is troubling
to most architects to work on the assumption that a judgement of what
is functional and what serves utility is as ideologically contingent
as is an aesthetic judgement. The technological authority of architecture
and its supposedly value-free codes are put into question.
What
this suggests is not art and architecture brought into synthesis,
in an attempt to construct an apparently homogenous culture, but rather
both serving to de-define the other: a fracturing of boundaries. This
opens up the possibilities of a critical visual practice that de-habituates,
that can, with humour and seriousness, explore culture across professional
ideologies.
Andrew
Brighton is a critic and curator.As well as publishing in art
magazines in Uk and USA he was one of the authors of "The Economic
Situation of the Visual Artist" (1985), and the author of the
"Francis Bacon" (2001)
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