The Misfit Eye: Scoping Space Inequality, Planned Obsolescence, Isolation and Commodification through the Eyes of Contemporary Art

Abstract

Why have the problems of dwelling, urban living and built environment become intrinsic to a significant part of nowadays’ artistic production? Why do so many artists use space as their medium and interact as creative users of space with the redundancies and contradictions of lived space? How can artworks ranging from portable objects, fixed images and built environments give an assessment of the reification of space in post-Fordist societies? I conjecture that through a critical inquiry into many of modern architecture’s values, Contemporary Art (or, more materialistically speaking, the visual arts produced in our time of existence), has been, in a productive and creative way, addressing built spatiality, the physical awareness of space-time, the length of movement and stillness, and the problems and contingencies of belonging and indeterminacy, of permanence and isolation, of placement and displacement. I argue that the visual arts field has inquired, reconceived and reinterpreted the human dwelling, the tectonic and anthropological processes of construction and montage, with a clear perception that architecture works as a life mediator and lever, a purveyor of power and a far reaching image of power. I have been studying a set of art works developed between 1960 to the present day by artists like Constant Niuwenhuis, Claes Oldenburg, Hans Haacke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kristof Wodszicko, Dan Graham, Vitor Burgin, James Casabere, and Angela Ferreira as examples of a bottom-up poetics which deals with such relational concepts as community, street, dwelling and utopia and also as examples of a deferred cultural counter-measure against the colonization of the public domain by the holy alliance between “Bureaucracy and Property” (Benevollo, 1979: 26), what David Harvey (2003) characterizes as “accumulation by dispossession” (pp. 145-152). In this paper, I debate the artworks developed by some of these artists claiming they are strong visual analogies of many of today’s “dynamic orders and disorders”2 (apud Atlee, 2007: 11) of urban space.