Alice in Wonderland: «Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant»
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2039-9251/20813Keywords:
Alberto Burri, Poor Art, Philosophy of image, Informal Art.Abstract
What are the contaminations between art and architecture in today’s world? In the relationship with the architectural and urban space, what role does art play whenever art and architecture come into contact? Quoting James Ballard, the title of the present essay represents a sort of provocation, especially in case of association with Canaletto’s famed Capriccio palladiano and to the in some ways inappropriate usage that Aldo Rossi made of it. Starting from the observation that the composition made by Canaletto is, in a certain way, truer than Venice itself, one might wonder about the role of art in the construction of the architectural and urban image and, through some examples, affirm that in the present time art is a kind of seismograph that pushes architects to look beyond, to investigate the field of the unspoken or the unthinkable and it is used, in many cases, as a device to substantiate architecture itself and its outcomes.
How and through which instruments? The answer lies in the works as mere instruments used to go back to the (implicit or explicit) canons and codes used, or perhaps to get to admit that, conversely, they often fade into a hermeneutic of the indeterminate, in relation to which identifying limits and boundaries seems increasingly difficult.
Who makes what, between art and architecture? Ballard explains it masterfully and some artists show it clearly. The whole complex of these experiences is bound to the (solid) architecture and its theoretical corpus together with the desire to reflect on processes, procedures, transcriptions, and metamorphoses capable of feeding architecture and its languages.
References
A. Armando, La soglia dell’arte, Edizioni SEB27, Torino 2009.
C. Aubin, C. Mínguez Carrasco (ed. by), Bodybuilding. Architecture and Performance, Performa, New York 2020.
J.G. Ballard, Theatre of Cruelty (1998), interview by J.-P. Coillard, in “Disturb_magazine”, https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1998_disturb_magazine.html.
G. Bruno, Superfici. A proposito di estetica, materialità e media, Johan & Levi, Monza 2016.
A. Denes, Wheatfield, Porta Nuova, Milan, 2015, https://www.fondazionenicolatrussardi.com/en/mostre/wheatfield_/
C. Dumont d’Ayot, Un bâtiment, un dialogue. L’Ambassade de Suisse à Berlin, in “Faces”, 50, 2001-2002.
C. Haberman, L. Johnston, Urban Waves of Grain, in “New York Times”, August 2, 1982.
M. Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England 2004.
S. Lavin, Kissing architecture, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford 2011.
J. Lucan, M. Bruno, A Matter of Art: Contemporary Architecture in Switzerland, Birkhäuser, Basel 2001.
J. Rendell, Art and Architecture, I.B. Tauris, London/New York 2006.
A. Ruiz, Radical formalism, in “Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory”, 26/2-3, 2016.
E.W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso, New York 1989.
R. Spence, Do Ho Suh in Venice: the lives of others, in “Financial Times”, May 11, 2018.
J. Thorn-Prikker, Clad in Glass. The Novartis Building Façade within Helmut Federle’s Oeuvre, in Novartis Campus – Forum 3: Diener, Federle, Wiederin, Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel 2005.
A. Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2000.
S. von Moos, Peter Fischli, David Weiss: Haus, Walther König, Köln 2020.
I.L. Wallace, N. Wendl, Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, Ashgate, Surrey 2013.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Francesca Belloni
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The authors who publish in Itinera are required to accept the following conditions:
1. The authors retain the rights on their paper and lincese the journal the right of first publication. The paper is also licensed under a Creative Commons License, which allows others to share it, by indicating intellectual authorship and its first publication in Itinera.
2. Authors may adhere to other non-exclusive license agreements for the distribution of the published version of the paper (ex. deposit it in an institutional archive or publish it in a monograph), provided that its first publication in Itinera is indicated.
3. Authors can disseminate their paper online (ex. in institutional repositories or on their website) before and during the submission process, since this can lead to productive exchanges and increase quotations of the published work (See “The Effect of Open Access”).