The Handyman Aesthetic: The Re-Emergence of Artists Using the Subordinate Material of the City in the Gallery

Abstract

To place the fabric of the city in the gallery is to draw out a comparison between the city as a machine-whole and the breakdown of its elementary units. The 1960's Factualists (Kluver) presented everyday objects from a Postmodern New York permitting a transference of what was not art to become art (following Dada and Duchamp) - contrasted between the clean lines of Judd's ordered and highly-polished sense of postmodern representation and the roughness of Oldenburg, blurring the boundary between detritus and artwork. City streets became the sourcing ground for l'objet d'art and critics extracted the political messages buried deep within the embodied energy of metal, burlap, cardboard and paint. Fifty years on, amidst the fashion of deconstructivism in building design, designers are consumed by the idea of surprise and trickery, the invention of an architectural gimmick, like a magician or illusionist. The affordance of the city to provide concept and meaning to the artist runs low, particularly in the tired, re-branded realms of relational processes drawing on the unsuspecting participation of a public. Emerging are a new breed of artists who are resisting the cheap deconstructivist illusion, exercising a process-led methodology, a technique of simply 'making', challenging value and use of material. In particular, the work of three artists; Oscar Tuazon (Tacoma/Paris), Gedi Sibony (New York) and Michal Budny (Warsaw), begins to hint towards a future representation of space, a curious arrangement of experiments, building blocks made out of subordinate construction materials. It is possible to acquire an epiphenomenal reading of their work in order to understand what has come from the city - to the gallery - and can return back to the city, to learn from their forms and use of material at a time when it is increasingly difficult to read our globalized built-environments.