Scott Johnson
Uncommon Ground, Notes on the Visual Arts + Architecture
2021
159 pages, full color illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-890449-79-7
In my time, viewing works of art and architecture it has been my experience that artists and their critics spend less time protecting their borders than do architects and their critics. My experience with art generally, and as an architect work-ing with artists, suggests that at the end of the day the artist tends toward a kind of creative opportunism, taking up means and methods, wherever and whatever they may be, constructing a vision, and seldom carrying an intrinsic sense of limitation as to where a vision must begin and end. Alternatively, most architects, whatever artistic or theoretical goals they may have in mind, formulate a legible and defined sense of the ‘problems’ to be solved.
The term, “uncommon” in the title of this book refers both to the uniqueness of the works displayed and to how the two disciplines, even within the same movement, frequently tend toward uncommon ground. While I consider myself reason-ably savvy about the nature of practices in art and architecture, as an avid creator of both, I am interested in how, in intent, and in means and methods, these practices occasionally align and frequently diverge. Examining the adjacency of selected works of visual art and works of architecture can be informative in a way that examining each work independently fails to do. Uncommon Ground explores this complex interface between the visual arts and architecture so that readers may draw their own conclusions by seeing both art and architecture as part of creative continuums that may or may not intersect. - Scott Johnson