Open Lecture with Jack Halberstam: “Broken Windows: The Art of Demolition”

Researcher in Residence 2025 English and American Studies: Jack Halberstam (Columbia University in the City of New York)

While New York City is a now thoroughly financialized and gentrified space, New York City in the mid-1970’s was the terrain for a competing set of relations to masonry, buildings, walls, glass and the business of art and architecture. Through a prismatic juxtaposition of artists who are rarely read in relation to one another, we can assess these competing visions of the city, some utopian and others dystopian, some committed to improvement, others to destitution. And while artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Beverly Buchanan, in very different ways, shared a love of decaying walls and crumbling brick and saw in them alternative forms of vitality, as we will see, businessman architect, Philip Johnson, entertained fascistic visions of social domination through architecture and of individual greatness through monumentality. A closer look at Johnson’s work demonstrates that there is a potentially sinister side to improvement, expansion, repair and shiny surfaces. This talk examines the dynamics of building and unbuilding in relation to queer community, aesthetic practice and discourses of urban renewal.

https://www.angam.phil.fau.de/2025/05/25/researcher-in-residence-2025-jack-halberstam-columbia-university-in-the-city-of-new-york/