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Superstructure, March 16 2018, RMIT Design Hub Melbourne VIC, Australia 1,2 ,3 ,4 & 5 Experimental Jetset – Superstructure The city is a discourse, and this Parallel to the exhibition, a broadsheet De Stijl, and Bauhaus – expanding the city, ultimately, it was the city characters what he does for a living. discourse is actually a language: newspaper has been published, the scope of Constructivism that manifested itself in the graphic “I study reification,” he answers. The the city speaks to its inhabitants, created in collaboration with local even further. language of Constructivism. girl then assumes he must be working as we speak to our city… practitioners – providing possible links “with big books, and a huge table between the exhibition in general, and 1.2 (EJ) cluttered with papers” – to which the – Roland Barthes, ‘Semiology and the more specific context of Melbourne. The city is the ultimate modernist Debordian protagonist replies: “No, I Urbanism’ (1967) platform – it’s not surprising therefore walk… I mostly walk.” The implication We hope the exhibition serves as that Constructivism had a vested The Situationist City is clear – streets are meant to be read, an invitation for further research – interest in the urban environment. and to drift is to study. Superstructure and, if nothing else, as a place to As the poet and playwright Vladimir Subversive Cartography dwell poetically. Mayakovsky declared, in 1917: “the Diagrammatic Nihilism Since the city was seen as the main If the notion of modernism should ever streets are our brushes, the squares Proto-psycho-geographies text, it also meant it could be annotated. be encapsulated in just one sentence, a Experimental Jetset our palettes.” Within the Constructivist Bitter topo/typologies And thus, the streets were inscribed good contender would be that famous imagination, the city became a Monochromic Schematics with footnotes – in the form of graffitied line by Marx and Engels: “If humans language machine, a spatial poem, a Disinfographics slogans, subversive posters, and are made by their environment, this The Constructivist City constant source of graphic agitation Labyrinthic Urbanism political pamphlets. environment has to be made human.” and propaganda. Through a system Already in 1953, Debord famously If there is one common denominator Paper Architecture of para-architectural structures 2.1 painted Ne Travaillez Jamais on a wall that seems to connect that wide range Scale-model Socialism (newspaper kiosks, typographic Out of the ashes of the great near the Rue de Seine – and in that of disparate views and conflicting Maquette Modularity pavilions, pop-activist billboards, movements of the early 20th century same year, Dutch photographer Ed van movements otherwise known as Bauhaus Bolshevism speaker’s tribunes), the city was turned (Bauhaus, Dada, Surrealism), a new der Elsken took pictures of Lettrists in ‘modernism’, it surely is the acute Flatland Futurism into a three-dimensional manifesto – generation of painters and poets the streets of Paris, their baggy clothes awareness that we are shaped by Utopian Geometry language as a place to dwell in. emerged. Embittered by WWII, and filled with proto-punk slogans. our surroundings, coupled with a highly critical of past avant-gardes, deep desire to shape those 1.1 The Section for Artistic Labor (the this new breed of modernists pushed This apparatus of spatial footnotes surroundings ourselves. Modernism is often described as a revolutionary Soviet committee an agenda that was meaner, leaner, grew to new heights during the monolithic, singular entity – in our view, responsible for inviting artists and and far more aggressive than student riots of 1968, when Paris was Following that line of thinking, it makes it is far from that. Modernism is designers to develop these new previous efforts. completely filled with Situationist- sense to interpret the city as the ultimate a multitude of languages, dialects and forms of street-furniture) was actually In France, a theoretical street gang inspired slogans, political graffiti, platform of modernism – the metropolis accents – a maelstrom of opposing, headed by a poet rather than an called the Lettrists splintered in two typographic posters, and billboards as the quintessential human-made clashing voices. Manifestos, architect, which might explain the factions, one headed by the poet turned into barricades. In the French environment, a forest made of walls movements, tendencies, schools, strong focus on typography within Isidore Isou, another centered on the journal Utopie (1967–1978), Jean and words. And needless to say, the groups, and splinter groups. Fictions, these projects. But even the more filmmaker Guy Debord. Baudrillard described this brief notion of the city as an extension of factions, fractions, and fragments. massive architectural proposals (such In Denmark, the CoBrA-affiliated moment (of ‘applied situationism’) language plays an important part within It’s a storm blowing, spiralling us as Vladimir Tatlin’s titanic Monument painter Asger Jorn founded the as follows: this concept of urban modernity. After forward, propelling us right through to the Third International, 1919–1920) International Movement for an all, what better way to create a human history – from the invention of the were treated as platforms to distribute Imaginist Bauhaus (MIBI). And back in Walls and words, screen-printed environment than to create a linguistic printing press up until now. (To speak language – after all, Tatlin’s tower was Amsterdam, another CoBrA-member, posters and hand-made flyers, environment? Language lives inside us with Walter Benjamin: “this storm is meant as a gigantic radio transmitter, artist Constant Nieuwenhuijs, turned were the true revolutionary media – so our most modernist urge might be what we call progress”). the giant spiralling structure designed his attention to architecture and in May 1968. The streets where to try to reverse this situation, by living to broadcast live speeches, straight urbanism – an interest that would speech started and was exchanged: inside language. Within this messy modernist from the Comintern. lead to his long-running New Babylon everything that is an immediate continuum, the beginning of the 20th project (1956–1974). inscription, given and exchanged. To speak with Heidegger: “poetically, century occupies an iconic position. Even factories were re-imagined as Speech and response, moving in the man dwells.” Our cities are poems, our From the rubble of violent wars, intense devices for communication – in this When these groups eventually ran same time and in the same place, words are buildings. revolutions, grave disasters, and times regard, we should mention composer into each other (during a tumultuous reciprocal and antagonistic. of deep crises, small groups of artists Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of conference in Alba, in the summer of This relationship, between language and designers somehow managed Factory Sirens (1922), a musical 1956), the resulting collective named 2.3 and the city, is one of the main themes to develop new aesthetic languages, performance that included actual itself the Situationist International (SI). While the graphic language of the of Superstructure – an exhibition that is trying to envision (with equal parts industrial sirens and smoking Situationists manifested itself simultaneously a 20-year retrospective optimism and pessimism) possible chimneys Through a strategic process of in the city, the notion of the city of our work, and an installation in which ways out of the ruins. purges, expulsions and exclusions, simultaneously appeared in the we address the very notion of the city as 1.3 the leadership of this platform fell graphic language of the Situationists a platform for language. Among these groups, we find the Most of these para-architectural more and more into the hands of Guy – in the form of cartographic maps, Constructivists: a loose subculture structures remained unbuilt – like Debord, who streamlined the SI into diagrams and collages. By focusing on four (sub-)cultural of artists, designers and writers, the October Revolution itself, an ultra-political, ultra-theoretical movements that have greatly informed mainly working in the Soviet Union the scale-models, drawings and fighting unit. Militantly iconoclastic, the Guy Debord and Asger Jorn shared a our practice (Constructivism, (and other parts of Eastern Europe), collages never fulfilled their utopian movement dedicated itself to Marxist- fascination for the schematic language the Situationist International, the roughly between 1917 and 1927 – in potential. Tatlin’s tower, a true icon of inspired attacks on the ‘Society of the of subway maps and street plans – a Provo movement, and the Post- other words, during that unique, Constructivism, was never erected Spectacle’ (a model of current society language that perfectly lent itself for Punk continuum), we have tried to utopian moment between the – although the existing scale-model in which everything is reduced to mere détournement, that typical Situationist explore some of the ways in which Russian Revolution and the rise of can be regarded as an impressive forms of representation). It seems method of visual appropriation. the languages of these movements Stalin. Names often associated with piece of para-architecture in itself. only fitting that the twelve issues of manifested themselves in the city, Constructivism are Kazimir Malevich, Looking at historical photos of this the movement’s