Following 5.1’s boundary-eliding focus on artist-writers, fictional art writing and art as writing, un Magazine 5.2 turns to the relationship between art and architecture as both built form and metaphor.
ephemeral, provisional, temporal, relational spaces:
In ‘Walking is not a medium, its an attitude’, Liang Luscombe brings together three local artists who use the simple act of walking as means to seek, engage and create. Through text and diagram, Esther Anatolitis builds a complex series of relationships between bodies, ideas, spaces, histories, the city and more: ‘the city is a complex set of relations actualised by you.’ While Andrew Atchison evaluates the future management of the fading Collingwood mural completed by Keith Haring back in 1984; a monument beleaguered by the ‘the volatile dynamics of ephemeral expression’.
‘architecture on the fringes of legality’:
Intrigued by the notion of retreating from modern day culture, Tom Melick interviews David Harris (aka DJ Toecutter) about his decision to build and live in a portable dwelling system known as a yurt for an entire year. Jason Workman compares the practices of Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda and Japanese architect and artist Kyohei Sakaguchi who both hold a strong interest in architecture that is socially-orientated and responsive to a city’s—and its people’s—needs. And Sven Knudsen considers the significance of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy which, situated on the front lawns of Old Parliament House for almost forty years, remains unrecognised by the Australian National Heritage List.
collaborations and crossovers:
Artist Max Creasy and architect John Wardle build a collaboration around shared Reference Material, whilst urban designer Nigel Smith, artist Katie Lee and art theorist Jan Bryant conduct an in-situ analysis of Baptist Place, a Melbourne city laneway in flux. In Suspension Test for Three Voices, Conical Inc. director Adrien Allen, architecture lecturer Hélène Frichot and artist Bridie Lunney build a retrospective text around an exhibition that inhabited this ARI in the process of renovation.
drawing, displaced:
Kirsty Hulm’s Hotel Drawings are melancholic and airless: ‘The Hotel of my Dreams is the one you Die In. No Vacancy’. In Lachlan Petras’s Displacement Drawings, crystalline protrubences exit from floors, stairs realign. The scale of these drawings is, we imagine, 1:unknown. And, finally, our cover features moiré patterns by Nathan Gray; drawings that make a virtue of the spatial artifact…
We thank the un Projects board for the opportunity to edit and sub-edit un Magazine volume 5, it’s been a pleasure.
Kyla McFarlane, Editor Patrice Sharkey, Sub-editor
