PRINCIPLES OF ANARCHITECTURE

“Completion through removal. Abstraction of surfaces. Not-building, not-to-rebuild, not-built-space. Creating spatial complexity reading new openings against old surfaces. Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut. Breaking & entering. Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point – the point of collapse. Translating the diagram into its structural context. What’s beyond the building’s surface. Rather than using language, using walls. Looking through the thing. The ambiguity, what’s there & not, as much as the whole.”

– Gordon Matta-Clark, Manifesto (1978)

“All the blocks of houses on the barricaded street must have their outer perimeter walls knocked through in such a way that combatants are able to come & go by the parallel road to the rear, out of view & range of the enemy… When a house located on the defensive front is particularly vulnerable to attack, demolish the ground floor staircase & make openings in the floors of various rooms on the first floor in order to fire on soldiers who will storm the ground floor.”

– Auguste Blanqui, Instructions for an Armed Uprising (1868)

 

1. FORM FOLLOWS DYSFUNCTION

2. ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL INTO FRICTIONLESS INTERSECTING PLANES

Utopia is a non-place the intellect retreats to in order to fail on its own terms & without contradiction.

VENICE STATEMENT

After 30,000 years of market consolidation, the diagnosis. Hurrah! Global Alienation continues apace! Merci monsieurs RANDcorp-Delgado-Fukuyama-Zuckerberg. In a psych-ward far far away, the “Last Man.” Let us now shed a tear. 

ARTIST’S HEAD IMPRISONED IN PLEXIGLASS

It’s the future you’re already dead – an itinerant anachronism inside a vacuum tube, inside the shape of facts-as-given. When’s an idea not its own medium? Certain there’re /only/ questionable things – though less puzzled by them than they are by you. Here the cameras are turned to ensure a reluctance more picturesque. On the third day, the news you’d forgotten, returned – gripped by fear of the crucial /missed moment/ – like the cryogenic avatar who embarrasses us in dreams. What dark /art/ possessed it?

In the future already dead, you’re an itinerant anachronism in a vacuum tube no-one will ever switch on. Construed fact-wise, these aren’t the only questionable /things/ – the presence of the camera, for example, nautilus to its own inhabiting image. Harmless as it seems, history still revolts you. Like a dog-hair coat, like a contracted zero-hour. This is a calculated emotional response – a /change in emphasis/. But salvaged from reflections in an /empty/ screen, who will fathom it?