Architecture For the Year 3000Lys Hansen · 1979

Al Hansen is one of the protagonists of the American Fluxus and Happening movement. The materials used in his works are the remnants of consumer society and its throwaway ethos, collected by Hansen during his daily forays and encounters. These works do not just provide clues about the artist’s personal and artistic environment; they also document and offer commentary on social life in the 1960s and 1970s. After participating in John Cage’s classes along with Dick Higgins and Larry Poons, Al Hansen founded the New York Audiovisual Group in 1958. The group staged Happenings in public spaces, coffee shops, and alternative exhibition spaces across Manhattan. For Hansen, the urban and artistic landscape of these years is what produced New York. “Architecture for the Year 3000” contains his interventions on maps of Manhattan. Hansen’s map projects continued with other works that intervened in the maps of Berlin. Hansen offers a utopian proposal to atone for the ecological damage humankind has wrought by resettling all of humanity in a tower built out of consumer waste that will rise higher in conjunction with increases in the population and its garbage.