Big Sign - Little Building

BIG SIGN - LITTLE BUILDING - OSLO, OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART - A selection of slides from the lectures of Steven Izenour from the archives of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. With works by Dan Graham, Allan D'Arcangelo, Claes Oldenburg, Charlotte Posenenske, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson and Jeff Wall. Catalogue ed. by Marta Kuzma. Oslo 2014. Texts by Robert Smithson,Venturi and Rauch Architects and Planners, Peter Eisenman, Steven Izenour & Marta Kuzma.

The publication addresses the steady encroachment of commercial vernacular that made itself ever present throughout the 1960s and that lent to a commercial persuasion of the roadside eclecticism to provoke an revision in the notion of landscape as an expression of the artifactuous. BIG SIGN - LITTLE BUILDING also addresses how artists such as Charlotte Posenenske, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, and Jeff Wall, who further challenged such traditional notions of space in order to explore new interpretations of landscape within the fields of aesthetics, art and architecture without succumbing to any one category. Other artists, such as Claes Oldenburg and Allan D'Arcangelo, cited as inspiration by the three architects, contested the sign system altogether, which increasingly reflected an attempt on the part of capital to claim nature, landscape, and public space as commodities.