The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Fat
BLOOD MONEY
Outpost attempts to encourage practitioners and viewers to develop a more
critical and intimate relationship with artwork by setting up structures
within which participants can escape the passive roles of production and
contemplation and become the real critics, collectors, and curators of the exhibition.
Within these more proactive roles, participants can explore concepts
such as taste, value, and the economies of art. Historical influences are
impossible to escape; however, Fat would like the viewer to be free to evaluate
artwork aside from economic influences enforced by a system intent on
promoting certain artists’ works as being in “good taste.” Outpost addresses
the “value” of artwork—the signatures are priced by the artists according to
their own conceptions of value. This results in a diverse range of exchanges
that include blood, money, spit, urine, kisses, and so on, according to the
concept of the specific artwork. The decision as to whether they value their
collected works enough to make the required exchange is left to the viewers.
DECORATIONS AND ORNAMENT
Throughout Fat projects, the main concern is with surfaces—with the
meanings that are inscribed onto surfaces. From Red Dot—the application
of small, round red stickers to the walls of the Royal Academy during the
“Summer Show,” where the ornamental addition of a red dot below a piece
of art communicates a cultural and economic value; to Chez Garçon—the
cladding of a stud partition with shiplap, where the surface of the partition
wall gives it a meaning through its reference to particular building type and
so to a range of associated environmental, geographic, and programmatic
meanings; Fat is interested in the direct communication of information (as
opposed to the modernist legacy of the “dumb box,” which demands that
one regard surface as neutral, at times able to be without meaning). Fat uses
a range of tactics to this end, involving the appropriation of forms and sites
and cutting or pasting alternative functions and meanings. The appropriation
of the “for sale” sign as a site for the display of art has immediate consequences:
the message of a familiar form of communication is altered, the
nature of the art object changes through its relocation, and the experience
of the street is altered as it becomes the site for a gallery.
Within Brunel Rooms, the program of a nightclub is combined with
alternative forms and uses. A garden shed becomes a bar, a suburban living
room a chill-out area; and surfaces are used to communicate meanings—the
carpet linking the main room with the chill-out room patterned with running
track, the cloakroom a glowing swimming pool.