{"id":22768,"date":"2014-09-08T14:01:29","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T12:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/scrivere-lo-spazio-gordon-young-2\/"},"modified":"2016-02-01T19:05:12","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T18:05:12","slug":"scrivere-lo-spazio-gordon-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/scrivere-lo-spazio-gordon-young\/","title":{"rendered":"scrivere lo spazio – Gordon Young"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing space
\nThe artistic narration of places in the work of Gordon Young
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\nThanks to the written language we can recount a story, describe an event, share a desire, protest or praise, condemn or absolve. The power of writing is so great that literature, criticism, the communication of events can even change the course of the life of every one of us. Sometimes what is written is poetry, artistic expression, more rarely art is writing, or in other words assumes the sign of the word both as the form of the content, and as aesthetic value of the formal aspect of the word itself. Gordon Young uses words to create art. He avails himself of words, sentences and texts to create within the dual value of the linguistic sign: content and form, significance and signifier are both used by the artist, extrapolated from the usual context, modified as to measure and materials, in such a way that they can relate to the observers as new expressive entities, even if loaded with memory and habit. But Young\u2019s work goes further than that, the art he conceives and realizes ventures beyond the usual spheres for which it is intended, exploring the places where life unfolds, invading and inexorably changing them. The work of the British artist consolidates and brings up to date the historical relationship between art and architecture, between city and monument, between emergence and context. What is most amazing about Gordon Young\u2019s artistic interventions \u2013 in some cases intended for urban sites, in others for architectural spaces or uncontaminated natural settings \u2013 is precisely the ability to propose art with an extreme simplicity, in the spaces of everyday life, changing and transforming them in a single emotional and significant tale, freeing them from the functional requirements and marking them, for always, as paths exploring memory, reflection, knowledge. He does this by using simple signs, usual objects and, above all, words. Words presented in their most noble appearance, through typographic forms, that is to say by exalting the expressiveness of the characters, the formats, the colours, the arrangement and the very organization of the texts.
\nThe artist thus defines and designs places within the instruments of architecture, inventing spaces and proposing them merely by describing their significance, or in other words an added significance capable of clarifying their purpose and use. He builds spaces, without defining their margins, limits, conformation and articulation, basing his work directly on their content, describing, or rather writing, the web of possible aspirations of that place by means of signs that are however presented in completely new ways, positions and dimensions.
\nHis early works, dating from the Nineties, represent a moment when the typographic signs appeared discreetly together with other basic and recognizable forms, simple objects and materials taken from everyday life, composed to trace itineraries, identify webs and connections in the urban tissue and in the spaces between the architectures. It is towards the end of that decade, and in particular with the staircase dedicated to Robert Burns (1998) and the memorial to Eric Morecambe (1999) that words, textures, typographic characters have begun to prevail on forms and objects; above all, it is in these works that Young\u2019s language is indelibly linked to the morphology and material treatment of urban sites. His work intervenes on the typical surfaces and objects that define the spaces of a city: pavements, benches, walls and steps, all of them elements that are normally a part of building methods, of techniques and technologies that are not just typical of architecture and urban spaces, but also of the current building tradition. By doing so, he not only absolves the urban public scene of its banality and habitual nature: he also makes it significant by superimposing a multiple discourse which come to interact with the attention and participation of the users. On the one side, in fact, his interventions propose and suggest an aesthetic of the graphic form of the word and of the typographic character, while on the other they invite us to reflect on the significances of simple terms which, seen in a different context, or by themselves, can once again evoke contents, messages or memories in the same way as Proust\u2019s madeleine. Young\u2019s latest works have \u2013 since 2000 \u2013 followed two parallel tracks, on the one side a recovery of an ancient form of inscriptions and writings which reintroduce the traditional value of words and messages indelibly engraved on stones, trunks and walls (Cursing Stone, 2001; Listening Stone, 2004; Drovers Stone, 2005; Wall of Wishes, 2007; Typographic Trees, 2009), and on the other a transfiguration of the form of the characters into something else; gigantic letters that become chairs, immense words that are used as climbing walls, long carpets of names that accompany passers-by as if in a rite (Walk of Art, 2002; A Flock of Word, 2003; Flag Map, 2003; Road to the Isles, 2004; POBL + Machines, 2006; Climbing Towers, 2006). These approaches are not alternative with respect to one another, they are two different aspects of the same cultural attitude, which consists of seeing how, both in tradition and in antiquity \u2013 steles, inscriptions and tablets \u2013 and in the contemporary reality \u2013 graffiti, signs and advertising \u2013 the word has played a fundamental role and that only the present, with its superimposition of signs and images, has gone as far as to destroy the unitary character of the sign, too frequently proposing empty forms without content. The recovery of the semantic value of the word and of symbolic forms becomes, to Young, an opportunity to re-examine also the sense of the spaces where humans live. Spaces which have suffered the same loss of values of the word, spaces that are only a function and solution of the needs, and that are becoming less and less narrative and descriptive of individual lives.
\nGordon Young\u2019s work does not merely restore a civic sense to the relationship between architecture, city and art; it above all represents a reaction to oblivion and banality, as a cultural sign that is necessary in order to activate a participative, active and creative relationship between Man and the environment in which he lives.
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