Artforum: Katarina Burin: Providence College Galleries
April 8, 2020
Description
April 8, 2020
Reading to the letter is the ancient lie of fundamentalisms everywhere. As Michel de Certeau has written, the dream of a “‘literal’ meaning is the index and the result of a social power, that of an elite.” When I consider Katarina Burin’s disarticulated architectural imaginary of the Eastern Bloc, I think of how a certain kind of mundane object also manifests a claim to literality, a building-to-the-letter of how people live. Her architectonic vocabulary derived from Soviet plazas and public housing—abstract fragments, mostly béton brut of course, spread in reticulated clusters with a humorously straight Constructivist sensibility—speaks to the way that modern power showed itself in the erotics that backhandedly accrued to the supposedly utilitarian. Burin’s work in general often addresses the enactment of high modernism in vernacular Soviet architecture—that inevitable whiff of an aesthetic “in excess of mere survival” (to quote Elizabeth Grosz) by which, despite the Communist directive to nip the commodity fetish in the phenomenological bud, Soviet subjects, like everyone else, formed “irrational attachments” (as this show’s title suggests) to their built environments.
