Art & Architecture

Named one of The Art Book's Best Books of the Decade (March 2003). Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the mental condition of modern life.

Known for–and even overshadowed by–his brutal and spectacular building cuts, Gordon Matta-Clark’s oeuvre is unique in the history of American art. He worked in the 1970s on the borders between art and architecture and his diverse practice is often understood as an outright rejection of the tenets of high modernism.

Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the mental condition of modern life. They became incorporated into the media and arts, in particular the spatial arts of architecture, urbanism, and film. This "spatial warping" is now being reshaped by digitalization and virtual reality. Anthony Vidler is concerned with two forms of warped space. The first, a psychological space, is the repository of neuroses and phobias.