The Architectural Review - 09.2019

(Opposite) in the

sophisticated final throes

of late capitalism,

property developers can

now sell real estate

through the lens of

inhabitants' phone

cameras and their 'real

life' social media feeds

lchemy has preoccupied
civilisations obsessed with the
promises of limit less wealth and
eternal life for millennia.
Far more than vainly attempting to
generate gold, alchemy celebrates the magic
in cooking, fermenting and emulsifying,
turning one thing into another, finding value
in the valueless. Gordon J!Iatta-Clark's first
alchemical experilnents in 1969 involved
frying a selection of Polaroids of sp angled
Christmas trees, before sprinkling them
with gold-leaf, creating small rectangles
of blist ered golden skin.
The artist quickly graduated from Photo
F1·y's most literal reading of alchemy,
continuing in the next nine short year s
of his life to mast er the 'magic of
transformation' - collecting a significant
library on the subject - and to r eft·am e our
ideas of value. This p ersonal library forms
the lens for the latest edition of the
Canadian Centre for Architecture's (CCA)
Out the Box series, M ate1·ial Thinking:
Gordon Matta-Clark, which poignantly finds
value in his collection of
books, supplemented by
a selection of letters and
sketches (two proceeding
exhibitions will display a
selection of the artist's travel
snaps and film offcuts).

• . ,.._, ". • I(J

ripped open and displayed

for the world to see. But it

took until 2008, and the

catastrophe of its global

financial crisis, for u s to sit

up and take notice. Until

this moment, Gross

Domestic Product (GDP) had b een the

accepted m easure of national progress

and standard of living since its popular

adoption in the 19 40s. But when the

market s crumbled around us, G D P

falter ed, house prices collapsed, p eople's

life savings turned to dust and attention

turned to a new possible way to quantify

the progress of civilisation. Like the

ancient alchemists, pursuing the

transformation of base metals into gold, we

b egan our quest t o reassess and challenge

our existing value systems, desperately

searching for value in t h e rubble.

Cynically, and perhaps p erver sely,

in the years following the finan cial crisis

we instead found value in happiness.

'Everything, including sen sations and

AIR t1AIL

emotions', CCA director

Mirko Zardini explains,

'can now be quantified, and

in turn can b e assigned an

Under his chainsaw,

tradit ional economic

structures and markets wer e

• • T"l:l • •

economic value.' After 2008,

there ' vas an unlikely

proliferation of indicators,

rankings and indices of

'well-being' and happiness,

largely replacing GDP as our

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measure of progress.

Eleven years on, it is

time to r eflect, suggests

Francesco Garutti, curator

of the CCA's concurrent

current exhibition,

Our Happy Life. In our

new 'marketplace of emotions' our feelings

are harvested by a growing sector of private

companies for both commercial uses and

governmental policies, and a happy life

is sold back to us by a lucrative well-b eing

industry. Our most private thoughts are

exposed to, and a key protagonist in,

the most public of spheres - the global

marketplace.

Ou1· Happy Life surgically dissects and

pulls apart our new emotional capitalism

and displays its dismembered parts across

six galleries, in the sam e way that 1\{atta-

Clar k dramatically disembowelled

traditional finan cial structures on

a monumental scale. In 1975, the artist

cut away a large conical chunk of two

17th-century buildings condemned for

demolition to make way for the Centre

Pompidou in the district of Les Halles in

Paris. By slashing open the innards of the

houses, the artist evoked Louis-Napoleon

Bonaparte's 1852 speech in which he

declared: 'Let us open new streets, make

t he working-class quarters, which lack air

and light, more healthy, and let the beneficial

sunlight reach everywhere vvithin our walls'.

A year after t his speech, H aussmann began

Alchemy has preoccupied

artists for hundreds of

years. Photo Fry was one

of Gordon Matta-Ciark's

first dabblings, which he

subsequently posted to

friends as a Christmas

greeting (left). For his

lchseries (above),

Simon Fujiwara coated in

gold and bronze German

waste separation units

which come in more than

200 configurations and

cost up to €200