Central figure of the New York art scene in the seventies, Gordon Matta-Clark directly involved the communities within the urban spaces in which he intervened, to the point that in an era of renewed interest in sustainable urban development policies, the his work becomes a model collaboration with existing communities. Matta-Clark developed a singular method with experimental actions and works that include large-scale architectural intervents which he physically cut the buildings destined for demolition. His

In Greek mythology there was Icarus who, after being given wings by his father and learning to fly, flew too close to the sun and died. J.B. about men floating in the air is inspired by the story of two Lithuanian-American pilots who tried to set a new world record by flying across the Atlantic to Eastern Europe in the early 1930s. Unfortunately, like Icarus, these two aviators did not achieve their goal and

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and “lives” of images—their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times. Volume 1 of the series, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation, addresses the mul

Since the beginning of the century, the field of architecture has fervently turned its attention to documenting the contemporary urban condition. Every city has been examined as a repository of architectural concepts, scrutinized as an urban manifesto, and recorded as a series of found objects. The Ordinary articulates a potential genealogy for this practice and for the genre of books that derived from it. Organized around conversations with the authors of three seminal texts th

Art, says William Kentridge, is its own form of knowledge. It is not a simple integration of the real world, nor can it be considered only in the rational terms of classic academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial place for the creation of meaning: it is the place where linear thinking gives way to eye, hand, paper and charcoal, to the material processes that give creativity its vital spark. The act of drawing, of