Kill the Modernist Within: FAT

Described as the most "seminal and influential of the Britarch generation", FAT came to Cube to present their largest and most ambitious exhibition to date - one that seeks to extend the possibilities of architectural practice through engagement with fine art, popular culture and communications technology.

Through a critical analysis of architectural representation, ideology and iconography, the exhibition raised 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.

'Kill the Modernist Within' introduces the visitor to 'Fat World', aspects of which are represented and experienced through 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.

KILL THE MODERNIST WITHIN
"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." FAT

Eleven new pieces were created for Cube. This is how FAT describe the work:

Gallery 1
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'."

Gallery 1- Gallery 2
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."

Gallery 2
Rope Trick
Fibre optic cable, wall clips
"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."

Atrium Wall
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."

Gallery 3
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."

When the Conceptual Steaks are HIgh
Acrylic on canvas
"Think of cowboy wall paper in a bedroom under the Heathrow flightpath. The painting celebrates a domestic fantasy of distant times and far off places."

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. They believe 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

website www.fat.co.uk