Contemporary Art About Architecture

An important resource for scholars of contemporary art and architecture this volume considers contemporary art that takes architecture as its subject. Concentrated on works made since 1990 Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility is the first to take up this topic in a sustained and explicit manner and the first to advance the idea that contemporary art functions as a form of architectural history theory and analysis. Over the course of fourteen essays by both emerging and established scholars this volume examines a diverse group of artists in conjunction with the vernacular canonical and fantastical structures engaged by their work. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Matthew Barney Monika Sosnowska Pipo Nguyen-duy and Paul Pfeiffer are among those considered as are the compelling questions of architecture's relationship to photography the evolving legacy of Mies van der Rohe the notion of an architectural unconscious and the provocative concepts of the unbuilt and the unbuildable. Through a rigorous investigation of these issues Contemporary Art About Architecture calls attention to the fact that art is now a vital form of architectural discourse. Indeed this phenomenon is both pervasive and in its individual incarnations compelling - a reason to think again about the entangled histories of architecture and art.