Our preliminary scoping suggests a rich and diverse field, where artists’ intentions vary greatly both in terms of criticality and depth. However, certain provisional themes emerge. Some artists explore mass, scale, voids, distances and repetitious formal ideologies of the highrise (e.g. Langlands & Bell [1]); others make ephemeral or itinerate work in situ (e.g. Marcus Coates); others use the highrise as a site of personal or collective memory, commemoration and entropy (e.g. Wiebke Loeper); others create participatory interventions with mediational or therapeutic effects in a context judged to be deficient (e.g. Further a Field, Liverpool and dostoprimetschatjelnosti, Berlin [see sidenote 1]). Finally, we note that virtually the entire oeuvre of conceptual artist Stephen Willats draws on highrise and council estates, using quasi-anthropological, sociological and urban studies techniques, (see his Vertical Living (1978), Between Building and People (1996), Person to Person, People to People (2007) [see sidenote 1] and his Tate Online interviews). If, as we hypothesize, such art practices are drawn to the many contradictions inherent in the form of the highrise, we believe that there is more important work to be found, particularly from beyond Europe.

Artists working with highrises include amongst others:

(© the artists)

Langlands and Bell [image_1]; Stephen Willats [image_2]; Dostoprimetschatjelnosti - Sehenswürdigkeiten - Sights [image_3]; Further a Field [image_4]; Peter McCaughey [image_5]; Andreas Gysi [image_6]; Rachel Whiteread [image_7]; Andreas Tschersich [image_8]; Rut Blees Luxemburg [image_9]; Catherine Bertola [image_10]; Ella Ziegler [image_11]; Jeffrey Smart [image_12]; Anna Fox [image_13]; Film KH-4 [image_14]; The Artworksprogramme [image_15]; and Tenantspin [image_16].