In its early days, collage, characteristically
messy and rough, captured the
energy and restlessness of a yet undefined
Modernism – of a need for change
driven by social and economic changes,
and by the optimism of technological
progress. These days some collage has
turned clean and realistic, and seems
to mark the other end of the modernist
spectrum: a time focused on making the
modernist remnants liveable again.
Many architects are face-lifting, inflating
or blasting the modernist block that in
many of its sites, often originally on the
urban perimeter, have created zones of
social and environmental unrest. Where
their revitalisation schemes are ofttimes
driven by a sense of practicality
– of new cleanliness through full glass
sur faces and parasitic structures living
on the existing rigid systems – it is
the work of the occasional ar tist that
brings the modernist vision to a different
level all completely. A few years ago
Filip Dujardin, a Flemish artist, started
reconstructing a new idiom out of the
modernist condition. It suggests a so
far undiscovered modernist reality of
extreme cantilevers that take Frank
Lloyd Wright's ambitions to the extreme,
of alien iconic shapes that make Rem
Koolhaas look conser vative, and of
intense living blocks that bring the necessar
y joie-de-vivre to Le Corbusier's
ideas. People often expect Dujardin's
"buildings" to be undiscovered pieces
of Eastern European or Russian constructivism;
while in fact, they only exist
in Dujardin's prints. They are the result
of his scouting trips around Belgium,
where he collects the occasional wonder
ful moment of often fairly conventional
20th-century structures, and then
uses them as digital matter from which
to collage his buildings.
Dujardin's approach is reminiscent of
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter's 1978
Collage City, which describes the technique
of collage as a way to utilise certain
objects and things in a new context
without necessarily having to trust them
fully in their original setting. Dujardin
does not share that conviction either,
but as Rowe and Koetter express, these
moments do allow him to create a strategy
that may turn the utopian illusion
of immutability into potential stimuli for
a reality of change, movement, action
and history.
Dujardin's works occupy an interesting
edge condition between reality and
fiction that may occasionally enable
us to allow for a little more flair in the
current revitalisation of the modernist
block. Perhaps a fanatical pastiche of
Modernism on Modernism may turn
otherwise dreary moments into monuments
of their own.
Philip Dujardin: Modernism on steroids
Between reality and fiction, the Belgian artist-photographer recovers the art of collage to create a new language based on the modernist architectural tradition
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- David van der Leer
- 05 October 2010
- Brussels