Reflections on Black: Artists Cinema
CCA, Glasgow
25/05 – 29/05/2010
Reflections on Black: Artists Cinema
CCA, Glasgow
25/05 – 29/05/2010
Laura Aldridge and Conal McStravick
Maison Domino
2009, video
3 minutes 42 s
Sound by the artists and Jamie Grier
Maison Domino is a collaborative film work made within Anniesland Tower, an archetypal Modernist block in Glasgow. Working against the modular shell of the appartment, material gestures, reminiscent of those within the artist’s individual works, are carried out for the camera. These languages of form are articulated in parallel to the idiosyncracies of the appartment owner’s own decoration and collection of personal objects. We are left with a series of self-articulations in relation to the imposition of the architecture’s specific politics.
The title of Aldridge and McStravick’s film is taken from Le Corbusier’s project for the “Dom-ino” House (1914–1915). This model proposed an open floor plan consisting of concrete slabs, supported by a minimal number of thin, reinforced concrete columns, and including a stairway which would provide access to each level on one side of the floor plan. The design corresponded with Le Corbusier’s ‘5 Principles of Architecture’ which included; pilottis (columns), a roof garden, free plan, free facade and ribbon windows. The design became the foundation for most of Le Corbusier’s architecture for the next ten years. The film is set in Anniesland Court, a 23 storey tower-block in Anniesland, Glasgow. The tower, the tallest listed building in Scotland, was designed by J Holmes and Partners in 1966, and conforms to the Modernist aesthetics of form as function.
The structures and objects prevalent in the film echo Modernist, or Minimalist, forms, but instead of adhering to the Modernist philosophy of ‘truth to materials’ (believing that a material should not be representational), they suggest a domestic, or natural environment. This is paralleled in the artists’ exhibition of the same name, shown at Generator, Dundee in July 2009, where synthetic or artificial material masquerades as, or references, natural and bodily substances. The resident’s decision to paper their walls with decorative, patterned wallpaper unconsciously challenges Le Corbusier’s vision of the high rise as a machine for living in; of clean lines, and functional space. The residents’ personal items, clutter and ornaments, embroiders the stark practicality of the flat’s design. Aldridge’s fabric, free-standing columns reiterate this displacement of the column as a functional support. Again, their patterned surface, and the cut sections of tree-trunk incorporated in their design, emphasises this.
The forms which reverberate throughout the work, as well as subverting Le Corbusier’s intent, also manage to link, or create a dialogue between, the designed and the accidental, the functional and the ornamental, the machine and the body.
