Jeremy Beaudry
Projects, Research & Texts

This is my practice

Posted on February 2nd, 2005 in musings and

1. I am not an Architect.
2. My creative practice constitutes a provisional architecture, a “minor architecture” which appears and disappears peripheral to Architecture. A “minor architecture” is here defined as any (de)construction which frames the implicit, blurs the explicit, activates the underused, denigrates the pretentious, derails the teleological, reconnects the ahistorical, forgets the answer but remembers the question—i.e. situates that which exists outside of Architecture.
3. Let’s be honest: I am not an Architect, but I do practice architecture.

In no other profession (that I can think of) is one asked so repeatedly to evaluate themselves and their work so explicitly. So, the artist considers what it is that he does and writes a statement:

4. I situate my practice in the places where Architects can no longer build, or in the places they ignored or overlooked, where they destroyed, or lost control, or just forgot.
5. It’s like the time we drove from Austin to San Antonio in the middle of the night with a chunk of reinforced concrete in the trunk of the car that we took turns carrying through the streets just to place as a solemn and ridiculous offering at the doorstep of the Alamo. Remember?
6. How do you situate yourself in a place? An individual is a site unto her-/himself. Six billion sites moving with purpose about the earth; bumping into each other, conjoining, expanding, contracting, and multiplying, bouncing off each other, devouring each other, mostly overlapping, loving and hating.
7. I now understand that hauling that concrete around created a living, provisional site of extraordinary richness and fluidity. Dozens of sites—personal, historical, institutional—changing each other, situating memory and experience and narrative. Coming together. This is my practice.