Urban poetry
Paradoxical, ambiguous, carefully built, explicit and puzzling.
If there is something similar yet at the antipodes of the finely crafted, thoughtfully detailed and of course ambiguous and perplexing drawings of accomplished artist that was J. C. Escher (1898-1972) in terms of surrealist architectural upside-down realities, it can be found on what is left of the work of Chilean architect Gordon Matta Clark (1943-1978).
Gordon, who was the son of one of the most recognized Chilean artists of the century (Roberto Matta) was, as a character in real life, someone who stood at the opposite spectrum of the Dutch artist. Indeed, he was the creator of the term "Anarchitecture", a term that from its very first letter aim to thrive in chaos and recognizes it as a system; an architecture of anarchy.
Certainly, the title of his practice says it all since he flourished in a new approach to the understanding of space. Had he been a practising architect, his work, filtered through the collective effort of the industry, would have been something of a "starchitect" avant-la-lettre. But it was never the case, and his spatial explorations derived to a middle space where interventions and installations formed a poetic and hardly classifiable body of work. Space becomes a malleable element in the hands of the godson of Marcel Duchamp. By virtue of the friendships of his father he met people like his godfather and that left a mark on him and his approach to the artistic practice.
When coming to the actual works, he personally tore down houses in different ways, cutting floors and walls in different shapes to create new perspectives and spaces. There, the vision of the house, the apartment and the office are twisted, flattened and ripped as an idea as returned as poetical paradoxes, all in the open to remind us that in human experience, there is always a moment for contemplation and the rumination of the surroundings.
Matta was Chilean but his work was developed across the cities of developed regions of the Global North. Latinoamerican cities may have a specific vibe, but the modern, industrial city is a universal experience, portrayed in the cultural nous as soulless, alienating and hostile in its cold technology.
Now I will call social media to the stage and take something probably out of context, but that is not clear even for me. Although bordering the plain mockery, it helps -for me- to see the tropes of this artistic approach, an interesting take is made also by artist student Polina Gazeeva on Instagram in a series of reels called "Berlin Art Scene" which also deals with the display of such elements, adding an element of theoretical nous, being the main element of the videos the descriptions of such scenes in the manner of an art critic.
I mention it here because after all, humour is a good way to assimilate or question things and for me, these videos pushed the practice of interpretation to its limits.. The dissociation experimented while listening to the high-minded concepts of the narration and the humbleness of the displayed elements creates a dissociation no dissimilar from what a person not familiar with artistic jargon feels when entering a gallery of modern art and the author highlights this tension in ways that could feel ironic but verging on ambiguity and mote feels like tours de force.
Moving now to the south, we find, among many, one of the artists exploring this aspect of the reality and whose work I have followed. Pedro Chuquicaja, is a talented and polifacetic Peruvian -musician and visual artist. In his social media accounts, he displays a series of images of under the term of temporary installations.
Usually photos of disarranged displays of discarded furniture, traffic elements, and trash placed in the middle of the street, with names such as "la inactividad de los objectos ("the inactivity of the objects") ) or "antes y despues de un poema visual" ("before and after of a visual poem") among others, titles that betray an artistic intention, a redefining will that uses the contemporary art approach to objects to re-frame its surroundings, behind the apparently random configuration that has been selected by the author.
The work of Chuqicaja encompasses videos, photos, installations and collages expressing in each of them the contrast of his daily life in one of the northern suburbs of the grey capital and his vast cosmopolitan knowledge as well as reusing in his reality the conventional practices of interpretation used nowadays in the art world.
It is also to note the preferred tone of the publications in these platforms, specially Instagram, prone to a shiny image of the daily existence, colourful and glamourous, and above all, filtered socially (influencer dynamic) , visually (visual image filters) and technologically (algorithms) that are in the opposite side of the spectrum (by now) of these photos of discarded menagerie. As Eco said the advertising image that becomes decontextualized to reality becomes a call to action, but which action? .
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Maybe it is not for everyone but likes to surprise beyond the sacrosanct formats of art of previous eras, it wants you to look at the corner of the street, of the common walk, of the noisy and alienated minutia of the urban life.
While these examples point out different aspects, they converge into an exploration of the urban space from different points of view. In the ever-evolving search for poetry, for hacking the very same conventions that allow us to work as functional societies (sic), It is certainly, the spirit behind art-canonicalized phrases such as the unexpected surrealist encounter in a dissection table and in doing so, reconsider our very own existence in the world.
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Notes
1) About Mata-Clark. Tate galllery https://www.tate.org.uk/documents/362/tate_papers_7_james_attle_towards_anarchitecture.pdf
2) Trash as an artistic act https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305000381_Transforming_Trash_as_an_Artistic_Act
3) A little more conventional - in some sense- art practice using trash as its material https://www.storre.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/26307/1/a-rubbish-idea.pdf
4) Polina Gazeeva's Instagram reel series "Berlin Art Scene" , https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtvtwnRoCyd/?igsh=MWp3OHZxcmFkdnd5eQ== and https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cs5yeWHIXBO/?igsh=aDBhMml5bDNyOG42
5) Pedro Chuqicaja's collage work https://lavanguardiaesasi.tumblr.com/ and his "installation" reels: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7C38D0vevv/?igsh=cDlyajRzMmNqYzdm