Art for Modern Architecture Al-Ayyam
Al-Ayyam: Arafat’s death (November 7 to 13, 2004)
Cut outs extracted from Ellsworth Kelly’s book Line Form Color onto vintage newspapers front pages
2004
Art for Modern Architecture (homage to Ellsworth Kelly) is formed of seven series of collages on vintage newspapers (Le Monde (FR), Herald Tribune, Al-Ayyam (Palestine), Die Tageszeitung (GR), New York Times (USA), The Times (UK)). Cut-outs extracted from Ellsworth Kelly’s book Line Form Color (1951) are pasted onto all front-page images. Each series is a continuous week – six to seven newspapers – corresponding to the MH’s travel during the making of these works in 2004/2005.
This project’s aim is to forward Ellsworth Kelly’s explicit argument detailed in his book, which claimed that art should to be made in and for the public realm to match the scale of modernist buildings; escaping the bounded quadrature of gallery walls thus establishing a project of an “art for modern architecture”. The series here is a literal prolongation of Kelly’s idea where newspapers are used in lieu of this “architecture”.
The ultimate version of this project is to take-over a newspaper kiosk, to intervene directly into daily newspapers. The Rambla in Barcelona – in reference to Walter Benjamin’s passion for Kiosks – is the favoured place for this project.