Plans, perspective drawings, modeis and diagrams have enjoyed a conspicuous boom in art over the last ten years. A number of younger artists are again pursuing a concept of open work by investigating the projection, production and Organization of space as a narrative. Is there a specific agenda that makes architecture appear attractive to art? Or is this a fashionable crossover, an exploitation of chance interferences between two contexts that generally function independently of each other? We are looking at two tendencies in this issue: firstly, the kind of approach that uses techniques and notations applied in design processes. Secondly we are introducing positions that examine medially conveyed images of space. This almost filmic transformation of architectural phenomena, which works with suggestive and parodic 9 Statements, is the subject of an essay by Daniel Kurjakovic. And Philip Ursprung identities a precursor of the current interest in the paradigm of architecture: from about 1960, Tony Smith, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt developed architecturally inspired concepts that could be marshalled to resist the dominance of painting. This „depersonalization“ of art was a response to the private signatures of Abstract Expressionism. But the aesthetic of Minimalism was inevitably reduced to a formal cipher when crossing the borders of art became part of some architects' programmes during Postmodernism: now it was sixties Minimalism of all things that lent a radical aura to the new creative subjectivity of design.
When Jakob Kolding or Karim Noureldin cite the radical iconography of Constructivism today, one of the things they are concerned with is the topos of bygone spatial visions. When contemporary art is interested in making spatial and structural connections visible, it usually tends to turn to „outdated“ design instruments. The authorless sign language of plan, pictogram and perspective serves here as an aesthetic and the starting-point for a new narrative technique. Usually, installations form the setting, thus provoking the conscious doubling or rivalry of pictorial reality and concrete spatial Situation - for instance in the case of Noureldin's drawing installations, in which an architectural pictorial programme becomes the actual spatial Container (page 6).
The diary-like bündle of perspective spatial diagrams was assembled in such a way that the sheets with their different constructive Statements come together like components in an all-embracing draft for the world. The Utopian element inspiring a panorama by Yves Netzhammer is put together in a quite different way (p. 10). While Noureldin spreads out his abstract grammar on the craft base of the drawing, Netzhammer provides a fully digitalized datascape framing organisms, architectures, touristic settings, technological Systems and biological manipulations. Its carefree approach, reminiscent of murals by an artist like Hans Erni, does not look like a plan for a cloned upside-down future until you take a Second look.
André Bideau (Translation: Michael Robinson)