| dc.description | "In December, another invitation elicited a similar expression of rage against the aarchitectural machine, but with a return to a more acute conceptual edge. The title of the show was "Idea as Model"; the venue was a glamorous architectural think tank, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Resources in lower Manhattan. Among the participants were high-profile architects from the so-calledNew York Five: Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and Peter Eisenman, ... for whom highly refined drawings were then the most prominent vehicles for their work and reputations. ... His proposal for "Idea as Model" - considerably more modest - was to expose an existing space by cutting out square sections of a seminar room clad in windowless Sheetrock, opening it up to the rest of the building; the removed pieces were to be stacked inside the room.
But late in the process of installing the show, he arrived armed - literally - with another conception, one that put in the foreground his activist's concerns with housing conditions for the city's poor. In each available window casement of the Institute he placed a photograph of a building in the South Bronx, some old and some new, in which the windows had been broken out ... Looking to avoid the trap of merely aestheticized representation, he secured the anxious permission of the organizer to break a few of the windows that were already cracked. But after a late party ..., he returned to the exhibition space and shot holes in each of the windows with an air rifle borrowed from his old mentor Dennis Oppenheim. The fellows of the Institute were, predictably, outraged when they arrived some hours later; the glaziers were called in and the piece eradicated by the end of the day ... The critical point was neatly made, with greater power than any polemic, because the subject of the piece - the Institute itself - was maneuvered into acting out its message: If this deterioration was intolerable to Eisenman and his colleauges for even a moment, why was it tolerable day in and day out in the South Bronx or Lower East Side?"
(Diserens, Corinne, Ed. Gordon Matta-Clark. New York: Phaidon, 2003. Pages 102-105.) | en_US |
