there is a crack, a crack in every- thing | it’s how the light gets in
stephanie white
f or this issue on housing, I started to write about two things: a beautiful 2003 Phaidon book on Gordon Matta-Clark, New York artist who in 1974 sawed a house in half. Space was the solid: building material was simply the edges of it and deserved to be peeled, inter- rupted and sliced. The other subject was a small 1970 83-unit housing project in east Calgary, part of a $200 million CMHC project to build innovative low cost housing across the country for families earning between $4,000 and $6,000 a year [today that would be $1 billion 48 million for the project, and income eligibility would be $21-31,000/year]. Matta-Clark’s Splitting and Calgary’s Residen- tial Experimental Area N o 3 both happened thirty years ago. Since, we have had a socio-eco- nomic revolution and are now assailed at ev- ery turn by arguments that art is commodity, if not advertising, and that homelessness has nothing to do with the removal of govern- ment interest in the housing sector and everything to do with cracks in the provision of social services. Looking back is not helpful. We will never again have a government with a one billion dollar national experimental housing project,
and unless sponsored by a corporation, environmental art remains small, subversive and ephemeral. [Christo’s The Gates in Central Park, witty when proposed in 1979, merely represents a triumph of 26 years of self-fund- raising through the art market. But Christo is not my subject here.] I read two critiques of Bruce Mau when his exhibition, Massive Change , in an unusual version of Canadian core-periphery relations, spent Fall 2004 in Vancouver before mov- ing off to Toronto. One was by Hal Foster in Design and Crime (and other diatribes) [Verso 2003], the other was Mark Kingwell’s article ‘Interior Decoration; Politics as lifestyle ac- cessory’ [ Harper’s Magazine June 2001]. Foster retraces the conflation of culture and com- modity from its modernist beginnings (hence his title) ultimately condemning those who embrace hybridity and its blurring of identi- ties [ viz. Mau] as predominantly neo-con- servative. Kingwell wants critical selection not wild inclusion, and demands that we see the significance of Mau’s work as part of the ‘economy of appropriation’ built on maquila- doras and burning rainforests. Well, may be. I would say that Mau has leapt, bravely, into a messy, commodified, unfair,
unkind present and is trying to swim in it with whatever that takes, and his critics are acting as sea anchors, examining the autobi- ographies of the present to find where it all went wrong. This is, in a way, as useless as writing an article on the 1970 20’ x 20’ split- level row houses with front and back yards at 15 units/acre built for low income people to buy , and hoping that someone will say — Right! Let’s try that one again! Brave as it was, we now work in a different economy, with different expectations, in a different time. If we don’t appear to learn from history, it is because the present is so different and so accessible, not through a great effort of em- pathy with the past but simply by being here, now. We must look at it with, if not bravery, at least bravado. Rather as did Gordon Matta- Clark, as did the Canadian government, once.
c
above: Splitting. Gordon Matta-Clark . London: Phaidon 2003. below: Innovative Housing Project , Penbrooke, Calgary 1970. title: Leonard Cohen ‘Anthem’ The Future 1992. Stephanie White is editor of On Site and would like to take a sawsall to the house she is cur- rently working on.
50
on |site 13
housing | houses | house
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator