A arquitectura na sua ausência. Presença do objecto de arte para-arquitectónico no Modernismo e na Arte Contemporânea

Abstract

In this thesis, we define and discuss an artistic phenomenon related to the themes of urban form and architectural form; we describe the object (its final product, the work of art) of this particular phenomenon as having para-architectural features and propose to discuss the genealogy of this object-problem in the period of modernism and contemporary art. We also try to demonstrate that the practice behind the object in discussion, the practice that constructs and permeates the artistic condition of this object, is cross-representational: it is, we argue, a process of approximation, a neighboring effort towards the urban phenomenon produced by industrial and post-industrial societies. We studied and reflected upon an assorted group of objects that included: 1) the paramount of constructivist culture: the sotsgorod (socialist city) and its new way of life based on social condensers, the agit-prop of everyday routines, (the new beyt), American efficiency and the power of the Soviets; 2) the non-stop camping of libertarian and ludens engagement designed by Constant Niuwenhuis, a performative example of Henri Lefebvre concept of spaces of representation; 3) baudelairian poetics, its sense of life as a struggle between survival and unproductiveness, of urban space as simultaneously foreign and familiar; 4) the concept of unheimlich seen by surrealist artists (Paul Aragon, Max Ernst, André Breton, Georges Bataille) as a turning movement of the inner self developed through symbolic stimulus and where urban and architectonic space acquire a magnetism of belonging and disbelief; 5) the Hannoverian Merzbau as a primal editing site where one can perceive the Being as an environment, post-war german cultural and social predicaments in action, the modernist novelization of historical, patriarchic and sexual subjects ; 6) the ruinments of the expressionist space subtractor and minimalist improviser called Gordon Matta-Clark; 7) the images of interference developed by Victor Burgin; 8) the contemporary works of Portuguese artists Angela Ferreira and Pedro Cabrita Reis. And due to that research we came to the following conclusion: The artistic field questions the space, its appropriation and transformation, through two chief approaches: i) taking space as an abstract entity, a trope of geometry, a figure-ground relation, but in fact mediating it through western aesthetics, class differentiation, serialization, property laws and bureaucracy. Or, instead: ii) assuming it as an anthropological and non-productive construction where metaphorical processes, poetic and visual analogies have their social and cultural income. For this matter the city (as a reality of routines and a positional and ideological mechanism) became the most audible content worked out by artistic modernity; we observe also that this same modernity explored in a productive sense the ambiguities and dialectics of the twofold house/home, i.e., it explored the synergies and pains of constructing an individual identity in a space of intimacy as well as the ups and downs of the aesthetic encapsulation of that process of subjectivity: the building as a nurturer of aesthetics and isolation.