"Seigelraub"--pathetic. Young fogey Kingwell did some homework but is dead wrong about Gehry, et al. His description of 60s-style conceptualism (Their works included lined-up bales of hay, grids laid over fields, chunks of plaster removed from gallery walls. Titles and descriptions took on new importance, overshadowing, even contradicting, the “works” themselves. Ads or mock contracts referring to artistic works became the works. Often elaborate imperative or passive-voice instructions—“A can of aerosol paint is sprayed for exactly two minutes six inches from the floor”—defined the projects, making their actual execution more and more irrelevant.) is accurate, as far as it goes, but the common denominator is that it's all about rigor and reduction. It's the exact opposite--a violent reaction to--the kind of arbitrary, confectionary design you see in the so-called "monumental/conceptualists." Gehry is an abstract expressionist wannabe, an "intuitive artist working in architecture." Libeskind, too--even though his forms are faux-crystalline. The conceptualists were "all about the grid," to the extent they had formal concerns at all.
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- tom moody 3-08-2004 12:45 am