David Sarafyan

GRID

Detroit -- a machine city, a child of the industrial expansion. Riddled with economic problems. Accumulating catalytic shifts in the economic and social structure. Inevitably leading into a decaying urban fabric. The physical damage of Detriot invokes possible interventions within the voids and foreclosures of the financial grid. The vacant hardscape provokes social, economic, and politically didactic interventions, in which figures like
artifacts begin to narrate.

Syntax can be revealed through various means - one is Hejduk, another is surrealism, Thus Magrette. In a surrealist painting, Rene Magritte paints a cup, and continues his efforts to paint the perfect cup withholding water.

But -- as he paints, his subconscious delineates to the bottom curve of the cup and extends creating an umbrella (Hegel’s Holiday, 1958).
The process of one leads to the inclusion of another.

The grid, plays a pivotal role in syntax. There have been many ways of using the grid--ranging from purely abstract statements of this continuity to projects of “reality,” that itself conceived more or less abstractly like the work of Agnes Martin, Larry Poon, or Mondrian.

Through the work of John Hejduk the grid used in the Diamond
Museum, has a correlation to Mondrian’s compositions consisting of multiple grids framed and beyond. The placment of Hejduk’s curved figures within the spaces(cubist approach)allows for a,
reinterpretation of its original language into a new syntax.

The contemporary question for syntax is how can one move from the abstract diagram machines usually associated with the linguistic paradigm, aka Eisenman, to one where syntax becomes a producer of figures against the normative expectations of abstract geometries such as the grid.

One contemporary discussion can be located in Jason Payne’s
Projekti Bunkerizimiton (Albanian post U.S.S.R bunkers), where the process of addition to their numbers in the form of doppelgängers designed, raise the variability of the objects becoming characters of a stark political history.

Syntactical operations in plan juxtapose and shift the vast landscape of Detroit. The shifts and juxtaposition of a rural agriculture figures in the vast urban hardscape help create a multidimensional
immersion of the city. The voids of Detroit were all weaved into the center, where all the grids of Detroit collide.

These operations both aesthetically and narratively inhabit both its history and future. The infinite expanding modern city is now the correlation of multiple syntactical operations, carving and adding, creating alternative non-ideal figures which explore their dis-associations as narrative surrealist objects.