Support Structures

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.
Support Structures is a publication project for the creation of the missing bibliography of support structures. Support Structures is the culmination of several endeavours. The first is the collaborative project ‘Support Structure’ by ourselves, Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, from 2003 to 2009. The second, prompted by the first, is a critical enquiry by Condorelli that exposes an almost complete absence of literature or theory on what constitutes ‘support’, and therefore the imperative need to create a bibliography on the subject. Lastly, this book, Support Structures, is itself articulated as a supporting structure, a manual for engagement in and with its subject, which attempts both functionally and structurally to operate much like it.
Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations, and activations for practice. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of support structures alongside its ten-phase project, different writers, thinkers, and practitioners were invited from various fields to elaborate on frameworks and work on texts , which form the theoretical backbone of the publication. A collection of contributions offers different possibilities for engaging in this unchartered territory, from theoretical frameworks to projects, existing systems to ones invented for specific creative processes. ‘Support Structures’ offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations and activations for practice, and addresses important questions for art and architecture practices on forms of display, organization, articulation, appropriation, autonomy, and temporariness, and the manifestations of blindness towards them.
Contributors include: Essays by:Céline Condorelli, Mark Cousins, Jaime Stapleton, Andrea Phillips, Bart de Baere, Wouter Davidts, Eyal Weizman & Rony Brauman, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Jan Verwoert.
With works by: Michael Asher, Artist Placement Group, Can Altay, Conrad Atkinson, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Filippo Brunelleschi, Banu Cennetoglu, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Martin Beck, Cevdet Erek, Flatpack 001 (Mark and Stephen Beasley), Andrea Fraser, Buckminster Fuller, Ryan Gander, Ella Gibbs, Gareth Jones, Frederick Kiesler, Lucy Kimbell, James Langdon, El Lissitzky, Gordon Matta-Clark, Enzo Mari, Antoni Muntadas, Peter Nadin, ‘The offices of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince & Robin Winters’, Radim Pesko, Lilly Reich, Jane Rendell, Support Structure, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kurt Vonnegut, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, Carey Young, a.o.