All Fall Down: Post-Industrial Demolition Projects and the Aesthetic of Collapse

While urban planning in the middle of the last century in Europe and the US was indelibly influenced by the plans for social order and control produced by Le Corbusier and his acolytes, by the 1970s small groups of activists and artists envisioned another kind of city, one which emphasised access and revelled in the disorderly arrangements of transport, buildings and life that cities fostered, created and sustained.

For Le Corbusier, architecture was the structural answer to a social problem, but for Gordon Matta Clark, the artist who coined the term “anarchitecture,” architectural resolutions were the gateway to massive new problems for the city’s poor and unhoused. "Anarchitecture,” he proposed, “seeks to solve no problem.” Matta Clark built emptiness into abandoned forms, organic shapes into collapses architectures, and he made the demolition site into a monument to the minor, the fallen, the forgotten. Another group of mostly queer Black artists (Alvin Baltrop, Beverly Buchanan and others) also turned to demolition. In this talk I will lay out an aesthetics of collapse based on readings of their work.

Co-presented by the Power Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.