The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Fat
marks the perimeter of the gallery is erased, the seal that prevents the contamination
of the art space from external influence is broken.
Now Fat is not interested in destroying the gallery. Through a series
of urban art projects, members are proposing architecture at its very
limit—an architecture that arises out of provisional and negotiated relationships
between objects, environments, and programs. It is an “extended
architecture,” in which the architecture resides not in the making of boundaries
but in the relationships between event (function) and territory (space).
These projects construct new urban experiences by the redistribution of the
gallery program through a variety of existing urban situations. The program
either becomes a device used to slice through the city (Outpost), making a
new set of connections between its previously unconnected parts (the go-go
bar, the National Gallery, a Burger King), or is parasitically attached to existing
forms of urban program (the “for sale” sign, the bus shelter, the advertising
site). The projects are sited outside the gallery so that we can
explore how the meaning and significance of a work of art are read against
the context in which it is experienced. A number of artists involved in the
projects subvert the conventional identification of “artists” as a small number
of “inspired” individuals.
Fat aims to invest architecture with a critical agenda that draws on
current conceptual tendencies in fine art as well as on contemporary architectural
practice and theory. Through a critical analysis of architectural rep-
20.1 | Fat, installation for Fused at the Royal Institute of British Architects, London,
1997.