Finders Keepers

For centuries the art of building has been, to the dismay of some, coupled with the art of unbuilding. The Romans re-used stones for roads and other buildings in order to spare themselves the laborious task of cutting new stone. To many this is ingenious as it reduces waste and it forces creativity and ingenuity. When materials were "pilfered" from the great pyramid of Giza in order to build mosques by an Arab Sultan in AD 1356, many complained. The original limestone casing on the great Pyramid was a valuable commodity. This seems like a natural opportunity to rebuild, for this Sultan it was the perfect chance to reinvent Egypt, and build what is now Cairo. To this day many of the beautiful and historic structures of Cairo are made from pilfered materials.

Centuries will pass, and the structures, the materials, and the context of the world will change meaning. Everything changes, an old vacuum is trash to me but to an avant garde artist it is an opportunity to represent something, a sort of iconographic translation of material. What once encased a great Pharaohs tomb, would soon become the dome of a mosque, or the floor of a fortress. This is the same contextual shift. Art and Architecture are subject to the test of time, and sometimes the self-destructive cycle of creation.

Object orange is a project that involves painting decaying homes in Detroit hoping to get the homes demolished by the city in order to beautify. This is a predecessor to a much older organization known as, the Heidelberg project. The Heidelberg project reclaims homes and changes their context, rather than painting them an intense color to call negative attention, they paint the house crazy colors in order to change their souls. These homes are transformed with everyday objects, strange collages of life. What was a home in the 1950's would be viewed by many as a disaster in the present, Heidelberg chose to change the context of these homes, turning them into the focal point of the communities that they reside in. Each home is completely unique, some bedecked with old television sets on the porch and roof, others plastered with old dolls, in every case, the homes speak a new language.

Art and Architecture change every second, people die, children are born, and with this comes the new ideas and the dead concepts. So much can be said for the reinvention of building and creating, but what can we say for the destruction of otherwise beautiful art? Is the unbuilding justified?

Paint the Town 'till it Falls Down

As I look around me I see more of the beautiful flaws in the streets of the United States. Some of the wonderfully horrible art, the seering graffiti, and the failing buildings that they adorn. I really begin to notice the effect of the imagery whether it be positive or negative.

Recently I happened upon a post on the Wooster Collective that made so much sense to me. It is a seemingly simple artistic statement but it really goes beyond tagging a few walls. In an effort to change the urban landscape a group of artists, going by the name "Object Orange", has undertaken a nearly impossible task. With Paint rollers on massive extensions and buckets of bright orange paint they have set out to make the streets of Detroit safer for the children and cleaner for the world. Over night these skeletal homes become glowing celebrities, everyone stops to wonder and the flash bulbs immortalize their new orange coats. Object Orange is successful everytime a frame of film is developed, revealing the now obvious sore thumbs in what could be beautiful neighborhoods. These houses, once painted, will no longer be a safe haven for drugs and they will no longer be a danger to curious children. In many cases the city has demolished the day glow disasters soon after they were painted. Object Orange takes graffiti to an almost ironic level. In most cases graffiti is buffed in order to clean up the wall or building it is residing on, in the case of the orange houses, the walls of the building are taken down to clean up the graffiti, thus cleaning up the city.