The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Fat’s architecture is generated via the use of familiar icons that are altered
and collaged together to create new environments, in which the elements
are recognizable yet uncanny. Rather than creating idealized urbanisms that
look to mythical utopias of the past and present, Fat’s urban projects attempt
to deal with and give creative and critical expression to the economic,
social, and urban realities of the twentieth-century city. These architectural
projects are informed by urban art events that appropriate familiar urban
sites—such as the bus shelter, the billboard, and the “for sale” sign—to promote
work that invites the active participation of the viewer and exploits
the idea that the urban environment is experienced as movement between
sites as well as a series of urban spaces.
JUST DO IT
The art events that Fat instigates aim to set up structures within which both
the artist and viewer can participate in a more proactive and thereby critical
way. The tactics employed in the projects attempt to penetrate the mythology
that currently protects the business of contemporary art production and
consumption. Mythologies that stem from a historical tradition are inbred
in fine art education, nurtured in the media, and confirmed in the institution/gallery
in its promotion of the artist as individual genius/product. Fat
aims to force a critical debate between the general public and artists, one that
is more usually only voiced in a reactionary vein in response to sensationalist
tactics. Fat rejects the sensational because it remains generally unreadable,
or readable on only a few levels and therefore exclusive. Members of Fat
are not cultural terrorists. To explode myths and address core issues Fat
works, controversially, from the inside out. Utilizing the tactic of leaching—intervention
and recoding within existing structures such as the media,
advertising spaces, prestigious/exclusive art events, urban transport
systems—we aim to explore, challenge, and possibly explode current notions
of what is perceived to be art and to oppose traditional conceptions of
authenticity, authorship, and value endorsed by the art world.
THE EXPLODED GALLERY—FAT AT THE LIMIT
OF ARCHITECTURE
Gallery is, of course, a far from neutral term, describing a far from neutral
space. The space of the art gallery is a dependent territory of the institution—which
acts by conferring cultural and economic status on the objects
and events occurring within its jurisdiction. When the boundary that