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Seize
the City!
Form
and Function Re-mixed
by
Leire Vergara
Jakob Kolding's collages, drawings and posters reflect a wide range
of references and techniques that can be inscribed within the act
of cut & paste reproduction. This technique of mixing opens
up the possibility of engaging with diverse specific subjects such
as architecture, visual arts, subculture, popular culture and social
theory. Some early works by Kolding lead us to understand this dynamism
as resembling Russian Suprematism, in particular the influence of
El Lissitzky's approach to innovative typographies and photomontage.
However, the artist's construction of a personal vocabulary based
upon a play on repetition - where visual and textual elements of
one montage are further repeated in continuous variations - has
given an additional edge to this technique of appropriation. This
has to do with a reminiscence of hip-hop culture and its constant
present reconfiguration by younger generations.
Decades after the term International Style was coined in 1932 by
the organisers of the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture
at the New York MoMA, architects and planners still found it difficult
to identify the structural and functional limits of such a model.
Their utopian belief was firm: architecture was to become not just
a symbolic witness, but also a powerful agency in the creation of
a new society. Thus, housing for the ordinary citizen became a vehicle
for the new idea of urban planning that eventually emerged as a
result of the newly born mass culture of production, consumption
and communication. However, although this so-called social architecture
was based on the idea that form follows function, it ended up pursuing
a strict demand for harmony in architectural design. This led to
the application of stringent functional standards by some well-known
architects - even to the point of expecting tenants to keep their
standard-coloured blinds in the right position.
Those early architectural ideas, once broadly assimilated, would
operate during the 50s and 60s as the model for the worldwide fast-built
suburbia. The consequent acceleration of urban development gave
rise to a new social fabric within the city that architectural order
alone could not control. One of the many examples of the back-stage
of such urban idealism would be the South Bronx where hip-hop developed
in 1970's. Rapping, DJ-ing, graffiti and activism were the tools
for the conforming of a political consciousness within the Afro-American
and Latino communities. This movement would spread out globally
in the 1990s, pressing ahead with its call for counter-culture contestation
as well as other forms of self-expression such as sampling.
Parallel to these local/global phenomena, the work of Jakob Kolding
generally departs from certain case studies of urban development
to intentionally transcend specificity. The collection of elements
that conforms his collages constantly evidences a personal investment
in the idea of the example, in order to reveal the urban and social
collapse between macro- and micro-political scales. The result surpasses
the intention of simply registering the countless strategies of
spatial regulation to provide improvised imagined scenarios. This
is, again, a sort of recuperation borrowed by Kolding from Russian
avant-garde so as to better express the potential of abstract imagination
for encouraging social contestation.
For All Audiences catalogue. Published by Rekalde, Bilbao 2006.
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