CUBE
12.11.99 - 03.02.00

Through a critical analysis of architectural representation, ideology and iconography, FAT's first major UK exhibition - Kill the Modernist Within - seeks to raise relevant cultural questions about the current limits of modern day architecture and the means of its production. Tactics such as irony, humour and narrative are deployed to produce visual commentary designed to engage both popular and specialist audiences.

The exhibition introduces the visitor to 'Fat World', aspects of which are represented and experienced as  a series of installations suggestive of widely different architectural environments. These 'environments' step outside the conventions of modernism and take advantage of the boundless opportunities opened by a rejection of modernism's puritan aesthetics:

"Welcome to fatlands...this exhibition is a manifesto arising out of our struggle to turn our backs on the myths of Modernism. Form follows function was a lie - the justification for so much of this century's aesthetic preferences. We ask for architecture to return to its rightful role as a medium - a device for communicating. 'Kill the Modernist Within' is about exploring built cultural meaning in its broadest terms. This is not to suggest this or that, or a simple reversal of good taste, but rather is part of a search for a more eloquent and beautiful architecture. One that embraces more than it rejects. The pieces on show at CUBE are about architecture.

Kill the Modernist Within (Half Timbered Slogan)

Wall piece, black paint on modernist wall

Half timbering is symbolic of history and tradition. Here a language of construction is used decoratively. The aesthetic, which resonates with an acute sense of traditional Englishness, is appropriated for sloganeering ends; it shifts the character of the wall from abstract plane to figurative symbol.

Architectural Slogan

MDF and lights

A slogan which challenges the traditional modernist privileging of space as the medium of architecture, suggesting instead that taste is the mechanism through which architecture is engaged by its users. The sign appropriates the language of a debased architectural style.

Aint got no truck with the truth

MDF, sequin fabric

An historically inaccurate model of a church built at an indeterminate scale. The church form is chosen for its communicate qualities - its symbolic and material resonance - rather than its appropriateness according to a modernist legacy of 'form follows function'.

Ornament is Fine

Laminated print on MDF

Using a historical language of communication produced via a contemporary and commercial graphic style, the picture pleas for debased and unclean ideology of architecture. One that revels in and learns from the demands and tastes of those other than architecture.

Rope Trick

Fibre optic cable

Fibre optic cable traces a line on the wall that travels from coast to desert to mountains to forest evoking, through economic means, widely different spaces and experiences.

Let there be lights, let there be magic

'Air-Movies' on plywood

A Gothic facade rendered in super glamorous 'air-movies'. There's no business like show business."

Kink Kong

Laminated print on MDF

Architecture as icon and global symbol. This piece deals with architecture 'known' not through physical experience but through secondary media - TV, films, advertising etc.

Once upon a time there was this liar who said "the plan is the generator"

Laminated prints on MDF

Le Corbusier claimed that the plan was the generator. He was wrong.

Neon House

Neon, acrylic, laminated paint

A machine for communicating the symbol of 'House'.

Rod (is in the details)

Soundscape, produced in collaboration with Memphis Industries

Fat prefer Rod Stewart's interpretation of ocean liners to that of Le Corbusier's. Stewart recognises what Corbusier doesn't: that cars and boats and planes are not just machines, they are things imbued with hope and sadness and sentimental journeys - things that travel across geography, connecting disparate places and people through time and space. They take us home." FAT 

Organised and curated by Graeme Russell