Instructor: Florencia Pita, AT Majeda Alhinai

SCI-Arc

Spring 2017

 

‘Charles Jencks argues that postmodern art, as distinct from modern art, is “double-coded”, meaning there is no single reading and no unified structure. Indeed, Ruhwald’s work lends itself to multiple readings, and it involves a variety of structural elements, all highly differentiated and conspicuously incommensurate, with no on dominating any other...It is impossible to reduce the works in this exhibition to a few simple, “essential” terms, more broadly, as Greenberg said, to their material medium. Greenberg insisted on speaking of “painterly abstraction” rather than “abstract expressionism”, for the latter called attention to the feelings the paint seemed to express and evoke rather than to the properties of the paint itself, made evident by the painter’s handling of it. (He famously dismissed the “spiritual” feelings aroused by Rembrandt’s paintings as an illusory byproduct of Rembrand’s brilliant manipulation of pigments.’

 

Donald Kuspit, Overthrown in Denver, Catalog introduction, 2011.

 

This class will investigate the lineage of ready-mades (objet trouve) as a body of research that originated in the art world and has permeated to architecture. Indeed, instead of investigating architecture’s earlier forays into historical familiarity, the 80’, we will dwell onto contemporary notions of familiar figures and their versatile maneuvers of digital geometries. The images above, by Chippendale and Hockney, take two very familiar objects and flatten them by means of the medium of representation: drawing and photography. In this class we will look at objects with delineated volumes and will convert them to flat panels. These panels will aim at maintaining the allure of the familiar forms and their sense of volumetric mass by producing a texture relief (CNC milling) and an image imprint (offset printing and vacuum forming). These ‘flat’ models will oscillate between the realm of representation and object making.

Featured Students

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Nithya Subnamaniam, Abagael Warnars, Elisha Ratansi, Hyoseon Park, Melissa Alvarez, Maria jose Meza, Palak Mandhana, Jackson Lukas, Helena Melgar, Jiaoyang (Joyce) Huang, Yan (Yannie) Leng, Javier Cardiel, Alessio Grancini, Dongwoo Suk, Cynthia Abi-Naked, Anna Bahudian, Omar Baqazi, Winston Alford-Hamburg, Jianing (Millie) Yang, Thamer Alsubie, Hashim, Khalid

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