Barbican Guide
Jul/Aug 2021

Enter a magical world of creatures, flora and fauna inside London’s second largest conservatory and embark on a free audio trail this summer. Aimed at families aged 7+ but welcome to all, we invite you to escape into nature on a journey of stories, sound and imagination.

As you walk around our magnificent glasscovered structure, put on your headphones and discover stories by writer Emma Hayes, sound artist Xavier Velastin and illustrator Aleesha Nandhra. Explore the koi carp in the fish pond, see new plants, and learn about the secret creatures that hide among the leaves. Plus, there’s an illustrated activity sheet that you can draw on and collect your thoughts throughout the adventure.

Created by Barbican Creative Learning, this is an opportunity to immerse you and your family in the calm of our green oasis.

The Secret Life of the Conservatory
2 Aug–31 Oct
Supported by Wellcome

Architect, activist, educator and writer Jos Boys was a founder member of Matrix, and co-author of their book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Here, she talks to our Assistant Curator in Architecture and Design, Jon Astbury, with whom she has curated an installation about the work of Matrix, open on Level G now.

Tell us about the formation of Matrix.

Jos: It began in the mid-70s, which was already quite a political time, particularly in London. Feminist architecture work was coming out of the States, but there wasn’t really anything here. There were groups of women who were frustrated by how the architecture profession was organising itself and the fact that there wasn’t a gender-based or feminist analysis of that work. The initial founding members of Matrix, Anne Thorne, Fran Bradshaw, Barbara MacFarlane and Sue Francis, led the way in starting an architectural practice taking on board all these things.

There was also a real aim to understand how gender and the built environment interconnect because we’d all been trained in a system that believed the built environment was completely neutral, that it wasn’t affecting different people differently. Unpicking how women were treated differently, how class and race intersected with those things was a major subplot, and that’s where I was mainly involved, in what was called the Book Group, which started working together in 1979. The book, Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment, was published in 1984.

Do you think things have improved since Matrix was founded?

Jos: It’s not a notion of ‘progress to something better’. I think a lot of things have changed. When Matrix was starting, we were still in a situation where it was a hangover from the Victorian period, which was an attempt by the government through big local authorities, and star architect-led private practices, to fix gender in space. All the guidance was about what women do and what men do. It was a map of this incredibly stereotypical world of public and private space, and male and female space.

There are some gains, but they’re gains defined in a particular way because they’re around functional and technical access, for example, shopping centres having crèches for kids, because they’ve worked out it’s very good for their profit margin.

Jon: It’s worth adding that architecture is incredibly slow, which is why groups are turning to each other to co-operate.

There’s a very nice quote to the beginning of the Matrix book, which is (to paraphrase) this idea that our buildings don’t control us, but they are a reflection of what we value in society. What we want this project to do is allow people to identify where those structures and patterns exist, and start thinking about how you could do it differently.

Jos: If you actually value our really rich bio- and neuro-diversity as a thing to design from, rather than saying, right, ‘there are normal people, and then we retrofit for these other people’.

We don’t live our life as stereotypes. But there is a tendency when you’re designing, to either fall into stereotypes or invent new stereotypes, and then there are the ‘others’ who can be dealt with later as a retrofit. People who fit the norm don’t need to notice built space – it just works, so what’s interesting is all those moments of it not fitting.

Do you think the pandemic has thrown these issues into sharper relief?

Jos: What’s really interesting about the pandemic, if one is thinking about what is ‘normal’, and what ‘normal people‘ do: they don’t have to take notice of the built environment. Where you live, where you work, how you relate to what’s going on in a domestic setting has all changed. All my disabled friends are like, ‘We’ve been living like this for years. Now you’ve finally noticed it.’ And it’s the same around gender stereotypes. All the data shows that women are doing much more of the childcare, that men are making use of the situation.

Jon: The pandemic has questioned the idea that having a centre with suburbs full of people who commute in, which is based on the structures we’ve mentioned about the man commuting to work and the woman staying at home. Is that going to shift as more people decide they want to move further away, and work from home? What happens when there’s that hollowing out of inner city areas?

How did the online Matrix Archive, and this project come about?

Jos: Some of the women who were a part of Matrix have kept in touch over many, many years. And one of our discussions has always been, ‘it’d be really good to get a Matrix archive together’. I think that the 1970s and to some extent, the 80s is still quite a missing period on the web, because it wasn’t digital native, but the rediscovery and digitisation of earlier periods is still very much working its way through the 50s and the 60s.

Jon: In terms of how we approached the display of the archive, we didn’t really want to want to just put a plan drawing on the wall. It’s not about saying there was this great period then, but it can’t happen now. It’s about inspiring people to think more deeply about the way in which their surroundings are designed.

How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative
Until 23 Dec
With Art Fund Support

Art Brut and Brutalism both share use of the French brut, meaning ‘raw’, ‘crude’ or – if we are talking about champagne – ‘dry’. But beyond their linguistic similarities, these movements, which both emerged in the late 1940s and early 50s, shared a deeper set of concerns about what art and architecture could be.

Today it’s common to refer to any piece of monolithic architecture made from a rough material (ideally concrete) as ‘Brutalist’. While not inaccurate, it’s worth separating this use of Brutalism to define a visual style from Brutalism as a concept with its own set of philosophical ideas. Put simply, Brutalism was about more than rough materials and big forms, and also served as a byword for a number of different concerns.

‘Art Brut’ is a term that was coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet to refer to art made by people working outside of the established cultural mainstream. In English, it tends to be translated as ‘Outsider Art’. By the end of his life, Dubuffet had collected more than 5,000 works by these artists who were a powerful source of inspiration for him.

While we can look at the work of Dubuffet and the artists he termed ‘Art Brut’ next to the concrete exterior of a building like the Barbican and feel much of the same ‘raw’ force, underneath both were ideas about reconsidering the ordinary, the throwaway, the ‘ugly’.

Brutalism has a few tangled origin stories, but the most widely accepted is that it grew out of the work of Swiss-French architect Charles-Éduoard Jeanneret, by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier. He rose to fame in the 1920s designing sleek, steelframed and white-rendered villas and entire urban plans that were at the centre of what was known as the International Style, an approach to architecture that championed industrial production and function.

Le Corbusier’s designs followed his idea that ‘a house is a machine for living in’, and this functionalist attitude is what lay behind their neat and clean facades. This architectural approach emerged at the turn of the 20th century as a rebellion against the teachings of French art schools École des Beaux Arts, which stressed the importance of the classical architecture of the ancient Greeks and Romans. They also promoted prescribed ideas of what constituted beauty or ‘high’ culture. These were the same schools that, in their fine art teaching, so rigidly enforced ideas of what was picturesque that Dubuffet quit as a student just six months into his studies.

Interestingly, in 1945 Le Corbusier met Dubuffet during the artist’s visit to Switzerland on an early period of research into what he would define as Art Brut. He visited self-taught and marginalised artists, including those who were institutionalised or in psychiatric care.

It was at this time that Le Corbusier’s work – at least in terms of its appearance – underwent a dramatic shift. While there were no doubt some influences from Dubuffet for Le Corbusier, his own turn towards a brut aesthetic was driven as much by necessity as anything else. Steel shortages in postwar France meant that rather than using his preferred construction method of a steel frame, a cheaper concrete structure was used. Le Corbusier embraced this new approach, terming this material treatment ‘beton brut’, literally translating to ‘raw’ or ‘crude’ concrete.

In a sense, this is where Brutalism was born. The acceptance of materials as raw and untreated would go on to become a central tenet of a Brutalist approach, an honesty about what makes buildings stand up.

Later, the architect couple Alison and Peter Smithson, who were great Brutalist enthusiasts, embraced not only an Art Brut concept, but a Brutalism aesthetic when they came up with proposals for the Golden Lane Estate, near the Barbican. While their designs were not selected – the winners of the competition were architects Chamberlin Powell and Bon. The Golden Lane site – much like that of the Barbican – was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, and the Smithsons’ designs proposed a series of elevated walkways that, rather than replacing this damaged landscape, were lifted above it, retaining it like something of an open-air museum. These walkways were intended to bring back the feeling of the street that had been eliminated by Modernist urban planning.

How could Art Brut relate back to Brutalism?

There was clearly a mutual appreciation and a strong line of communication between Art Brut and Brutalism – but this is not to say that Brutalism was simply the Art Brut answer to architecture. On the contrary, Dubuffet and the artists he championed through his Art Brut collection had their own points to make about architecture, despite not necessarily being obvious companions. As Dubuffet scholar Kent Minturn observed: ‘It’s hard to believe that this self-described ‘anti-cultural’ artist and writer [Dubuffet] would try his hand at an art so essentially connected with structure, tradition, and permanency.’

Dubuffet’s turn towards architecture emerged out of his jigsaw-like L’Hourloupe series in the 1960s; works that began on paper were translated into structures that blurred the boundary between sculpture and architecture.

Brutalism remained preoccupied with ideas of function and with buildings that looked like what they were made from. Dubuffet’s forays into architecture were wholly antifunctional. The critic Marcel Cornu, evoking Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, described Dubuffet’s approach as creating châteaux for dreams rather than machines for living.

Many had the benefit of either never making it off paper into the real world, but they were a response to the architecture of the day, which Dubuffet described in a letter to Cornu as being ‘devoid of imagination’.

His works were not simply about translating a visual preoccupation with ‘base’ materials and patterns, as Brutalism was doing. Rather, it was a challenge to some of the most established and basic ideas about the spaces we occupy and how we create them. It is perhaps here, rather than in any Brutalist building, that the idea of an ‘ethic’ to match all the rough materiality might be found.

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty
Until 22 Aug

Since the 1930s some experimental artists have said no to the most emblematic of film equipment and made movies their own way. They draw or paint on film, or scratch directly onto it, fix materials to the filmstrip, or purposefully decay the film stock using a variety of fluids. As our season Splash, Scratch, Dunk! shows, they use these techniques to explore issues such as feminism, identity politics, human experience, and the nature of film itself.

Los Angeles-based Jennifer West has been making films in this way since 2004. In her early work she decayed film stock using things like pickle juice, candle smoke or even urine, and in 2009 her live performance Skate the Sky saw her tape strips of film to the ramp at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, for skaterboarders to ride over. Lights, no camera, action Embodying a true DIY ethic some filmmakers create movies without using cameras. Our new season, by Cinema Curator Tamara Anderson, will showcase some of these innovative artists.

She says she’s interested in ideas of physically engaging with a location because it means the film itself has a relationship with that place. ‘It’s this collapsing of multiple marks of time: when the film was shot, and when it gets scratched or painted on or altered in any other way.’

We’ll be showing her 2017 film Pink Beach, Red Desert Dream Sand Film, which embodies this concept, as it ties together filmmaking, site location and physical records. West was invited to Sardinia by a film curator, who asked if she would make a film there. A long-time fan of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up, The Passenger), she wondered if he had shot any films in Sardinia. One scene stood out, from Red Desert (1964), in which there’s a fairy tale sequence featuring a girl playing on a beach with pink sand. After acquiring the 35mm film from Russian eBay, West took that sequence to where it was filmed on ‘Pink Beach’, Budelli Island, and dragged it through the pink sands. It got wet, scratched, and covered in sand. ‘The film was actually back at that beach again, materially,’ says West. ‘It’s like collapsing both the construction of this place in the movie as this hallucinatory space of the character, and at the same time, it’s connecting that cinema history with the site where it was made, with the actual sand.’

On her return to Los Angeles, she painstakingly digitised every frame, then allowed her computer to order the images into the final edit. The results are erratic, and seem to have an additional layer of dream-like quality about them.

Australian film director Tony Lawrence seeks out damaged film as his creative starting point. We’ll be showing his film Girl on Fire (2010), which he created from 8mm footage of underwater ballet found on eBay. ‘It was cheap because of the obvious rust-like damage, which is gold to me as I know there’s a fine line between damage and transcendent destruction,’ he says. ‘Usually footage inspires ideas while I watch it and often it’s not the subject of the film but something random like a piece of film damage that happens in a synchronistic way to bring a new and deeper meaning or a glimpse into humanity.’

Lawrence transfers the film and then slows them down and watches them on a loop, while he plays piano and synthesiser ‘until I feel I have conveyed the emotion I felt when first seeing the footage’.

The red dust effect of the oxidisation reduction reaction which damaged this film seems only to have affected the woman performing. It looks like she has fire dancing over her. ‘Carl Jung said that in dreams water is often a representation of the subconscious and Freud said fire represents passion,’ says Lawrence. ‘To me the girl is wading through her subconscious while being engulfed by flames of passion and desire. In the final frames we see as she sinks further she has a wry smile on her face, she is enjoying being burnt in the primeval fire of instinct.’

Boris Kazakov’s 1999 film Stakes sees him paint over clips of feature films and documentaries, to deconstruct the Soviet idea of the conquering power of science and technology. He says part of the film was made from Silver Heads (1998), edited by his friend Evgeny Yufit. ‘We met at the film studio and he gave me the takes, doubles and all the rest of the material,’ he remembers. ‘Everything fitted in the trunk of the car and I took it to my place. I combined it with the film I’d acquired earlier.’

Stakes is Kazakov’s second film made this way, after Nestlings of See (1996) – he further develops the techniques he used in that first film.

Usually very short – just a few minutes long – all these films have a real impact on the viewer. The innovative techniques and perhaps the romance of the found footage leave a lasting impression that will only be enhanced by seeing them on the big screen.

Splash Scratch Dunk! Films Made by Hand
8 Jul–5 Aug
We’ve curated this season to complement the themes in our exhibition Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty.

There’s an exclusive Members’ Handmade Film Workshop, called Noisy, Licking, Dribbling and Spitting with artist film maker Vicky Smith who will guide you to make marks and scratches directly on to filmstrip before watching your work transformed when projected back. 20 Jul 6pm, Fountain Room.