Unlimited-Continuous-Finite-Faraway and Contiguous
“Our period demands a type of man who can restore the lost equilibrium between inner and outer reality. This equilibrium, never static but, like reality itself, involved in continuous change, is like that of a tightrope dancer who, by small adjustments, keeps a continuous balance between his being and empty space.“—Sigfried Giedion
Emerging networking infrastructures, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, are challenging how traditional architectural space is perceived, used and produced; creating for many remarkable discontinuities. Jeffrey Huang, an Associate Professor of Architecture at Harvard University, discussed the changes in physical architecture as a result of an increasingly virtual experience of life. For example, bank architecture is disappearing or being re-appropriated for other uses, while online banking is taking its place. Classroom is being partially replaced by the virtual learning environment, retail store by online shopping, prison by electronic surveillance, playground by virtual gaming environment and so on. The implications of new Internet based concepts: cyberspace, virtual communities, and electronic marketplaces on architecture of buildings and vice versa inspire Huang’s research and development of architecture as interface, the goal of which is to create a physical space that is highly decentralized but interconnected.
Huang presented the Swisshouse project, a “radically new kind of consulate” for science and technology, which was conceived in response to the “brain drain” problem of the Swiss government. Its goal is to facilitate knowledge exchange among the Swiss scientific community in the Boston area and academic institutions in Switzerland and other countries, and to provide interdisciplinary interaction among participants from research, education, business, law and politics. The Swisshouse opened its doors in October 10, 2000, and it is located both in the city of Boston, Massachusetts and on the Internet. Jefferey Huang designed the Swisshouse in collaboration with architect Muriel Waldvogel. The project began as a donation by Lombard Odier & Cie, a Swiss private bank, to the Swiss Confederation to mark the bank’s 200th anniversary. The physical site for the project in Boston was a converted, one store building located between two universities that house large numbers of Swiss ex-patriots, MIT and Harvard. The exterior of the building remained barely changed. What turned out to be more significant for the architects is redesigning the interior space of the building and “choreographing connectivity” by creating interfaces between the physical and the virtual worlds. For Huang, the element that provides integrity for the convergent architecture “does not consist of bricks or concrete or columns; it consists of data”. The Internet is also approached as a site for which the building is constructed, thus helping to bridge the gulf between adaptability and integrity.
“Seamless Transition” between the physical and the virtual.
The Swisshouse architecture reflects its function as a physical/virtual construct. The physical building is conceived as a spatial interface, its layout is a motherboard into which one can slide visual modules, or glass walls, that act as projection surfaces. Information devices that establish connections to the virtual world are embedded in the architecture and furniture of the building and become space-defining elements. The senses of perception, acoustic, visual, touch and smell, are deliberately used to enhance the relationships between virtual/physical and public/private environments. The architects also set out to define the boundaries between public, private, as well as semi-public and semi-private spaces, both in the physical site and on the web.
The interior design of the Swisshouse relies on the links created using Web-cams, presence indicators, and various other interfaces. The physical space accommodates the flow of multiple meanings, cultural languages and modes of expression by setting up a number of separate learning environments within the one larger space of the Swisshouse. Translucent materials and projections simulate the merging of disconnected places and languages. Through the use of modular walls, interchangeable lighting systems, and interactive elements, the visual image of the interior of the Swisshouse is a composite of the works of its participants. The space is defined through fragmented information, in the forms of images, sounds, and words. Virtual elements within the Swisshouse also establish surveillance and contain memory.
Public/private. Projection. Simulation.
The Physical Swisshouse is structured to accommodate several knowledge exchange scenarios. The Arena is a trapezoid shape that forms the landscape of the building and becomes a convergence point. Activities that take place here are transmitted in real-time onto the virtual sites via “net-eyes” mounted onto the ceiling. Counterpart to the physical is the Virtual Swisshouse. What is happening physically is apparent on the virtual site, and vice versa. Whenever a visitor logs into the virtual site, a physical icon, “phicon”, starts to move in the physical building. The virtual and physical spaces are complementary, essentially coexistent and interpenetrate despite their distinct qualities.
Attempting to bring into coexistence disconnected environments, the Digital Wall is the physical public element that represents the distant audience. It is composed of three 6’x10’ room-height glass panels with a specially coated film for rear projections. Projections are often used to display live remote events and visually appear to extend the immediate surroundings to include the space that is geographically located thousands of miles away. The space is defined by projection and resembles what Walter Benjamin calls a “Kafkaesque space”, which “in The Trial situates its furthest distances – those spaces that are furthest away from each other – in close contiguity”.
By including a simulated representation of reality within the physical space of the viewer, the Digital Wall recalls Jean Baudrilliard’s “hyper-realism of simulation”, which he describes in relation to media:
“The era of hyper-reality now begins. …what was projected psychologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as metaphor, as mental or metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simulation”
The ‘hyper’ for Baudrilliard refers to a new condition in which the borderline between reality and illusion has been dissipated in a sort of “obscenity” with no clear difference between an exterior and an interior. Through the Digital Wall, the visitors of the Swisshouse interact with the simulation that blurs distinctions between the physical environments in Boston and in Switzerland, and at the same time the visitors participate in the simulated feeling of one community.
Through the interactivity between real and mediated participants, the projections of the Digital Wall converge both space and time and allow for the “instantaneity of communication.” They construct one’s perceptions of the “natural” similarly to Tomas Lawson’s photographic images, which “hold reality distant from us” and at the same time “make it seem more immediate, by enabling us to ‘catch the moment’.”
Co-presence. Transparency. Relationship to Other.
When Nicolas, a hypothetical visiting scientist, enters the building and signs in on a laptop in the vestibule, his name and icon appear on the physical and virtual guest-book wall at the entrance. The inhabitants of the physical space as well as the on-line community know immediately of his visit. Nicolas smiles as he sees his icon appear, as it shows him three years younger than he is today. The hyper-reality of being aware of one’s physical presence and the presence of the representation, or an image of oneself, suggests the feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor, according to Benjamin, “the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public.” Entering the Swisshouse then seems like entering the realm of language and establishing oneself in relation to the “others”, through the Lacanian gaze, at the same time recognizing and misrecognizing oneself. According to Lacan, one’s knowledge of the world, of others and of self is determined by language. In the third phase of the “mirror stage” the child, or the scientist entering the Swisshouse, realizes not only that the reflection is an image, but that the image is his/her own and is different form the image of the Other.
Reinforcing Lacan’s theory that the unconscious is constructed like a language, the Knowledge Café is composed of large and long tables that set out to facilitate informal groupings and brainstorming. A small kitchen adjacent to the café is intended to trigger the senses of smell and taste to allow for personal and intimate experiences. Perhaps, this is the place where ideas transmitted through language and learned through the interactive experience within the Swisshouse can be internalized. The Knowledge Café is a semi-private space that can be accessed from the web, but users in the physical site remain in control of the content that is being transmitted.
Divided by frosted glass, Media Spaces remain visually open to the arena, but stay separated acoustically to be used for private conversations. Even though the sound barrier suggests disconnection from the other physical spaces, it is difficult to imagine any notion of privacy in the environment, which is monitored, recorded and transmitted to active and passive participants located in other cities and continents. The principle of transparency, which, for modernists, “renders buildings subjects to space, absorbed and dissolved in it, penetrated from all sides by light and air” , here transcends all notions of inhabiting completely private space that belongs to any one individual. Reviving both social and spatial transparency, modernists evoke the picture of a glass city, its buildings invisible and society open. In the Swisshouse, being continuously “plugged in”, the space is penetrable and exposed to a multitude of societies, cultures, disciplines, points of view, time zones, climates, etc. Transparency effect here relates more to Baudrilliard’s “obscene”, “when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication”
The experience of a scientist within the Swisshouse can be likened to an astronaut within the Space Station. The notion of private space is obliterated for both the astronaut and the scientist, by continuous surveillance and reporting. By participating in a dialogue within a monitored environment, both willingly give up their liberties. But the transparency of communication creates an illusion of being connected. The astronaut, placed on the forefront of research, is the “barer of knowledge”, the spokesperson for the unknown. By televising his experience, he can supposedly connect with his family and colleagues. Similarly, in an attempt to compensate for the ex-patriot’s loss of community, technology within the Swisshouse transmits a spectacle of the scientist’s interaction to a remote audience and creates analogous importance of being in the center of critical dialogue and at the frontier of research.
Knowledge and Power
The semi-transparent physical architecture of the Swisshouse, the “net-eyes” and continuous connection to the Internet, all of which are intended to increase the exchange of knowledge, recall Foucault’s Panoptiocon and his view of the relation between knowledge and power. Foucault argues that knowledge is the power to define others and ceases to be a liberation to become a mode of surveillance, regulation, and discipline. In the circular building of Panopticon, no prisoner can be certain of not being observed from the central watch-tower, and so the prisoners gradually begin to police their own behavior. Foucault’s “disciplinary power” refers to a “system of surveillance which is interiorized to the point that each person is his or her own overseer.” By monitoring the thinking activity of the scientists and making it visible, is it not more efficient and profitable for the Swiss government to exercise control over the ex-patriots, than establishing prohibitions and penalty? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes that the Panopticon creates subjects responsible for their own subjection. Likewise, the scientists, responding to the acoustic, visual and informational transparency of the Swisshouse, are responsible for self-monitoring their own behavior and discourse, for their “self-enslavement”. Power for Foucaoult is not the property of an individual or class and is not simply a commodity; it has the character of a network, its threads extended everywhere.
The individual within the Swisshouse is like “ a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.” Each Personal Space of the Swisshouse is not a defined space for interaction, but rather just a personalized storage unit, the “corpus”. It is used in the physical environment and has a counterpart in the digital space. Suggesting an extension of the body, the corpus offers a container for personal objects and ideas, but also implies a parallel relationship between the individual and the information devices, which are similarly embedded in the furniture.
In the basement of the physical Swisshouse, hosted by a high-speed computer server, is located the Digital Switzerland – a neutral space in which ideas can flow freely and discussions among distant parties can be held openly. Ideas and expertise are exchanged in the Idea Marketplace, which appropriates the structure of a market, where everyone can contribute and the authorship of content is decentralized. Acting as a knowledge broker, market mechanisms determine which information persists. Knowledge becomes an information commodity that can be manipulated and exchanged. The image of knowledge becomes a dynamic system.
A fragment of visual information within the Swisshouse, the Interactive Wallpaper, is a changing image of memory. While the physical attributes of architecture appear to have no memory, the use of technology makes up for the “loss of memory” by visualizing activity that takes place over time. One of the walls, for example, shows snippets of conversations, which are captured using voice recognition software. Single words slowly fall down towards the floor to form a “residue of thought”. An overt microphone hangs low in the center of the room, so that participants are aware of being at the same time performers and activators of the wallpaper. In this way, the architecture of the building incorporates the viewer not only to complete the work of art, but “to initiate it and give it content”.
Conclusive questions: Public gathering. Phantasmagoria. Distraction
In his article “Future Space”, Huang refers to city plazas as “street theaters”, where people gather to watch others, to stroll and browse, to participate in a multitude of social interactions – chance meetings, brief chats, leisurely conversations. The visitors to the Swisshouse gather physically and digitally, in person and in image. So, what kind of public space is created between the “great screens on which are reflected atoms, particles, and molecules in motion?” According to Baudrilliard, it would not be a “true public space”, but rather consist of “gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation and ephemeral connections”.
Perhaps the hyper-reality within the Swisshouse provides an environment similar to that of a video game, but extends it into the physical space. When we observe someone play an interactive game, we notice the player’s complete abandon of the surrounding reality in exchange for total concentration and participation on the screen. The Swisshouse attempts to reconcile a contradiction between the illusory nature of the images and the physical architecture, by creating a meta-virtual reality. But now the visitors to the Swisshouse experience a “conflict between rational belief and sensual experience” not unlike the visitors to the Phantasmagoria shows in the 19th century, the exhibitions of optical illusions produced by means of the magic lantern. Phantasmagoria spectacles pursued a process of sustaining illusions and creating the “absolute reality of the unreal”, based on the manipulation and the uncertainty of the senses. The interior ‘play space’ of the Swisshouse is similarly defined by the visual stimuli of projected images.
I wonder if the fractured montage of the mediated environment of the Swisshouse does not contribute to what Benjamin refers to as the distracted state of mind of the urban dweller? Benjamin differentiates between tactile and optical perception, one in which participants experience a space by usage and touch, the other by perception. Do the visitors to the Swisshouse, being in a state of continuous participation and activity, experience absentmindedness and distraction? Do transparency and simulation disperse their concentration? Is there a possibility that “too great a proximity of everything” reveals a condition of schizophrenic openness and a state of confusion?
Bibliography
1.Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space. Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 200
In this book, Vidler offers an in-depth analysis of the relationships between the psychological conditions and urban architecture today. Some of the topics are particularly relevant to the discussion of the Swisshouse: proximity of near and distant realities, transparency in architecture, tactile and optical perception of space, as well as the state of distraction that renders the cities “invisible”.
2.www.linezine.com/4.1/features/jhmwsh.htm , April 20, 2005
This online article contains visual images documenting the Swisshouse, links to Huang’s page on convergent architecture, as well as links to the articles that served as resources for the project. It is also significant that the article is located on the Internet, which is a site for the project itself.
3.Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism. Essex, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf Pearson Education Limited, 1988, 1993
This is a comprehensive discussion of the work of key philosophers and writers of the post-structuralism and postmodernism. The writings of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault in particular, help trace the influences of the postmodernist thought on the Swisshouse project.
4.Huang, Jeffrey. “Future Space. A New Blueprint for Business Architecture.” Harvard Business Review (April 2001): 149-158
Written by the author of the project, the article is a great resource describing the details in relationships between Huang’s ideas for the Swisshouse and their manifestations in the finished project. Huang describes the influences that formed some of the key design elements in the convergent architecture of the Swisshouse as well as some of the limitations of the architecture on the Internet.
5.Rush, Michael. New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1999
As a history of new media, Rush places virtual reality within the context of the moving image, video, installation, performance and manipulated photography. Particularly, the discussion of interactivity and relationship of time and space on the Internet informs the discussion of the interactive environment of the Swisshouse.
6.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Particularly important for the discussion of the Swisshouse is Benjamin’s detailed discussion about the relationship between painting and film, the magician and the surgeon and the extent to which the mechanical equipment has penetrated into reality.
7.Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic, Foster
Baudrilliard’s “obsenity of the visible” and the changes in perception of public and private space, as well as the influences of the spectacle and transparency, provide significant context for the discussion of the meta-virtual environment of the Swisshouse.
8.Lawson, Thomas, “Last Exit: Painting.” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis
The role of the camera capturing the moment and the implications of the “more immediate” reality illuminate the possible social connotations of the public space created with the live video projections in the Swisshouse.
9.Gunning, Tom. “Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and its Specters”
This overview of the optical theater of Phantasmagoria presents a historical context for the use of projections, video and spectacle in contemporary art and offers a dialogue on the influences of environments created through optical illusion on human behavior.
Utopian Architecture
“It is good to remember that utopia is nothing but the reality of tomorrow and that today’s reality is yesterday’s utopia.”—La Corbusier, Modulor
As I was growing up in the Soviet Union I was constantly reminded of the juxtapositions between the socialist and the capitalist worlds and the benefits of the first and the downfalls of the other. When I moved to America and began to learn American history these juxtapositions reappeared again, only viewed from the “other side”. Parallel investigation of interrelated ideas in both societies in art and architecture at the turn of the 20th century offers an insight into the artistic developments that shaped the geometry of these contemporary cultures. I would like to suggest the influences the soviet architects had on the architects in America, and how the utopian explorations of architecture transforming society were realized in a capitalist society with a wealth of materials and resources and in turn had an effect on the individual. El Lissitzky’s ideas of horizontal and vertical movement, infinity, structure dictating form and a feeling of austerity are most evident in the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and his Lake Shore Apartments skyscrapers which became a prototype for glass and steel skyscrapers in America. And while Konstantin Melnikov translates the mood of the new society in circular forms, exploring man’s relationship to nature through the cylinder and the materials of wood, Frank Lloyd Wright integrates the circular geometry into architecture of a corporation in his Johnson Wax Buildings, creating a new standard for a working environment in America.
Architecture of the New Society
The October Revolution of 1917 envisioned not only the transformation of political and economic structures of the old Russia; it also became a “cultural revolution” affecting all aspects of daily life. The new socialist policy called for the complete “reconstruction of society”. Art and architecture became vital to the social changes and artists set off to find new forms and a new language of the time. Ambitious innovations in architecture became a vehicle for promoting a transformation of the way of life. Artist, the “builder of space and volume forms” became also the “organizer of mass productions”, a constructivist, arming and moving the masses. “The architect will no longer think of himself as the decorator of life but as its organizer.”1 Architecture was termed a “social condenser” reflecting its quality to mold and transform social behavior and presupposing that by the very act of living in a new environment man would shake off all associations with the old. Russia at the turn of the 20th century was primarily (80%) an agricultural society, peasants living in wood log cabins. The new Russia was leading toward the “reign of labor and liberty.”2 The factory, not the field, became the organizing center, encouraging the growth of cities; the new place of worship became the Palace of Labor. The structure of home, family life was transformed into “kommunalkas”, housing with communal kitchens to alleviate women of domestic labor. The individual, private client has been replaced for the architects by the “social commission”. Emphasis shifted from the intimate and individual to the public and universal.
1 Ginzburg, Moscow Architectural Society, from Kopp, p.22
2 A. Kopp , Town and Revolution, p.62
Architects explored the relationships between interior and exterior space, opening up to the West, aspiring to create an International Society. Relationships between outside and inside, industry and nature, communal and individualistic guided the exploration for the new language in art and new methods in architecture.
Geometry of Suprematism – El Lissitzky
To create unique ways of constructing 3-dimensional space, artists were taking fresh looks at the Euclidean geometry and perspective. The abstraction occurred in flat space on canvas, in the paintings of Kazimir Malevich. In 1925 El Lissitzky writes: “the “Suprematism has swept away from the plane the illusions of three dimensional perspective space, and has created the ultimate illusion of irrational space, with its infinite extensibility into the background and foreground”. El Lissitsky applies three -dimensional design of the Suprematism to architectonic design and applies it to space and architecture. “Prounen paintings become the links between the tabular forms and the scale requirements of architecture and city”.(1) Lissitzky compares perspective space to a geometric series of numerical relationships 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… And the space is the “sum total” of these relationships. Kazimir Malevich established the square as the “sum total” of Art. Just like in the sixteenth century a 0 changes from “nothing” to being regarded as a real number, so does Malevich’s square became recognized as the “sum total” of Art. This began a new conception of space. “Suprematism has extended the apex of the finite visual cone of perspective into infinity, … creating the ultimate illusion of irrational space.” (2)
1.Henk Putz, The Lissitzky Collection at the Van Abbemuseum, from El Lissitzky 1890-1941,p.43
2.El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution, p.145)
Lissitsky develops spatial relationships of objects in his planimetric Prounen paintings and expands the possibilities of construction to “negative infinity” and “positive infinity”. The idea of motion in the architectural building offers Lissitzky a way to bring infinity and change to a solid physical form. In the “Sky Hook” a design for the horizontal skyscraper, which takes the horizontal movement of the building and raises it above ground, the building suggests geometric infinity in both vertical and horizontal directions. There is a desire to defy the laws of gravity to overcome the limitations of the “substructure, the earthbound”. While the philosophical and scientific explorations of 3-dimensional construction occurred in plans, the practical requirements of a factory forced the constructivist architects to dismiss all irrelevant decoration. This paired with the unavailability of costly materials and labor had a “refining and simplifying” impact on their work. The constructivists began to use deliberately austere, industrial forms, flat roofs and windows arranged in bands, resembling a Suprematist painting and disregarding the character of surrounding neighborhood, which “too would soon be reconstructed” .(1)
Order and Reorganization – Mies van der Rohe
“The concept of modern architecture implies a link between architecture and the economy in general. The most efficient production derives from rationalization and standardization which directly affect working methods both in modern architecture and in the building industry.” (2) Mies van der Rohe takes the ideas of El Lissitzky and the Constructivists to America and realizes them first in a new kind of a skyscraper.
1.A.Kopp, Constructivist Architecture in the USSR, p.31
2.International Congress of Modern Architecture, 1928
The 860 Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago become a “prototype” for many skyscrapers built since. Mies believes in complete industrialization of architecture, the function of which is to “define a specific quality of life”(1). Architecture for him is “the will of the epoch translated into space”. In the Soviet Union, El Lissitzky designs buildings with open structures and glass allowing for open communication for the new International society. In Chicago, Mies uses his resources and creates a visible reinforced steel skeleton covered with glass, thus making the structure the primary form and creating a new esthetic. The steel frame is based on a 21-foot grid. Even though each apartment is partitioned off, it represents a unit, a part of a uniform structure. From the outside the two skyscrapers inspire a feeling of standardization and high order. In a culture where individualism, private ownership, and personal space are so highly esteemed, the residents of the apartments might seem just occupying a square cell, a number in the “sum total” of the whole skyscraper, making apparent the hand of the architect as the “super-organizer of the masses”. The language of austerity and simplicity, aimed at the working classes in the Soviet Union, becomes the language of the upper-middle class residents of the Lake Shore Apartments. Within “the mechanical principle of order” (2) Mies attempts to transcend the bare industrial reality of the building and create a “place for the mind and body”, creating the “idealistic order”. Lissitzky’s idea of “infinity” becomes Mies’s space in which “the spirit is given the right to exist.” In the two towers, Mies manages to create the “imaginary space” of Lissitzky’s philosophy of “nonmaterial materialism”. “Looking out through the glass walls of ‘860’, one feels suspended half
1.Fritz Neumeyer, Mies as Self-Educator, from Mies Van der Rohe: Architect as Educator, p.33
2.Fritz Newmeyer, p.35
way between the shimmering lake and the sky, floating in a calm and dreamlike world far removed from the chaos of the city” (1)
Individual and Industrialization – Konstantin Melnikov
Taking the mood of austerity to perfection, but using very personal forms and materials, Melnikov designs his private home, the Architect’s House, in the center of Moscow, a “housing laboratory”, shaped as a cylinder, without internal walls, with self-reinforcing floor construction and built-in furniture. The champions of Stalin’s “cultural revolution” called the house an “original variant of the bourgeois type of particularized housing cell”. Melnikov uses the cylinder as “practical and symbolic alternative to the super-organizing urban form of the cube”(2). His influence was American grain elevator (3) and later Melnikov applies these forms to other types of structures: he creates cylindrical housing project, cylindrical workers’ club, and proposes a cylindrical military academy. His cylinders “face outward rather than inward, and stress the glass perimeter rather than the closed center”. (4) To allow for the communication between inside and outside as well as reflecting Melnikov’s fanatical worship of sunlight, 60 hexagonal windows are imbedded through the outer walls of the Architect’s House; inspiration for which came from the seventeenth-century fortification tower, surrounding Moscow’s ancient Belgorod district. Unlike the constructivists, Melnikov takes forms and materials from the past and reinvents them, finding new and unique uses. Structurally, the house is mostly built of wood, reflecting the shortage of more durable materials as well as the domination of the
1. Peter Blake, Mies Van der Rohe, p.101
2. Starr, Melnikov Solo Architect in a Mass Society , p.125
3. Starr, p.119
4. Starr, p.130
construction industry by a peasant labor force practiced in traditional techniques only. Adapting the techniques of the peasant carpenter, Melnikov designs a highly innovative system of flooring; and the brickwork covered with plaster that he uses for walls which has been used on Russian churches since before the Mongol conquest. Melnikov challenges the driving force of function inspiring architecture of the constructivists. He makes function timeless by pointing to the “nature of man” instead of a “particular person’s taste”, reflecting temporary circumstances. Melnikov finds universal within the individual, he reinstates the importance of individuated family as the basic social unit and disengages himself from the entire political polemic. “Suppose, for example, that I am designing a house for you. You are a certain age now, but in twenty years you will be that much older. Your life will have changed and the ‘functional’ needs will have changed with it, yet you will still want to live in the same house. No, function cannot provide all the answers.” (1) “Melnikov accepted architectural challenges that life put before him without imposing some a priory hierarchy of tasks that he deemed appropriate for a Revolutionary architect. Because of this, he surpassed most of his contemporaries in the actual impact of his architecture upon society, even while yielding to them in the impact of his theoretical formulations” (2)
American Corporate Architecture – Frank Lloyd Wright
While Melnikov uses the cylindrical forms in his private dwelling, Writght creates a new ideal for the American workplace – radical, inspiring building compound in which he integrates the circular geometry of the mushroom-shaped columns with the orthogonal
1. Konstantin. Melnikov. from S. Frederick Starr. Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society. p241.
2. Starr, p. 115
geometry of the grid. The Johnson Wax Buildings in Racine, Wisconsin gave Wright an opportunity to bring to life his ideas of the Broadacre City, his vision of an ideal America and the architect as the shaper of a complete environment for work and leisure. Wright designs his first curving, streamlined building, which at this time (1930s) represented a symbol of the future. The buildings also become an example of Wright”s idea of the “destruction of the box”. “If in a building you feel not only protection from above, but liberation of interior to outside space…then you have one important secret of letting the interior space come through”. (1) Similarly to the constructivists, Wright chooses to disregard the mediocrity of architecture on the Johnson Buildings’ site and decides to turn everything inward. Wright recreates nature within –the mushroom columns and the light from above bring nature within the walls of a windowless corporation. Wright designs all the original furniture for the building, including the three-legged secretary chairs, which tip over if one does not sit with correct posture. Promoting awareness of individual physical bodies, Wright heightens the awareness of the surrounding physical space. The inner walls in this building are replaced by the columns and open up to allow the light in. Such architecture might inspire less alienation between the employees of the Johnson company, than the neighbors in Mies’ ‘860’ grid apartments. While the ‘860’ towers open communication between its inhabitants and the outside world through the glass skin, the Johnson Buildings inspire communication within the space of the corporation, without an outlet.
1. Wright, from J. Lipman, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings
The glass tubing, which fills the space between the columns admits light, but allows no view. The Research Tower for experimentation is totally enclosed and does not allow for horizontal expansion of work space. The work space becomes a “paradise”, within its functions there are limitless possibilities. “Interior space comes free, you are not aware of any boxing in at all. Restricted space simply is not there. Right there where you’ve always experienced this interior constriction you take a look at the sky!” (1) Wright creates alienation of this working “paradise” from its surrounding reality, similar to the ignorance of the outside world of the imperialistic society.
Post-Utopian Utopia in Japan
“Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is really architecture.” (2) The rate of changes in modern society has been consistently increasing and the rapid transformation of life demands rapid changes and developments in architecture. Standardization as such does not satisfy the demands of the constantly evolving society, creating alienation and social segregation. And the fervor of the Constructivists to invent structures that most efficiently satisfy the new order has found its way in the ideas of Metabolists, in Japan, and their attempt to create architecture that has organic quality and ability to change with the society. The Metabolists proposed a new metropolis: “an organism that would be able to remodel itself in continuation, making its boundaries elastic and molding itself to
1. J. Lipman, Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings, p.31
2. Frank Lloyd Wright. from Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Gerald Nordland, ed. Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas. p15
the needs of the individuals”, creating the “megastructure”. (1) Taking the constructivist geometry a step further, into the interactive 3-mensions, the Metabolists propose the Capsule Tower Building, in which the capsule becomes the hyper-intimate space, which is also a mobile place. Architecture comes ever closer to the physical bodies whose demands it attempts to satisfy, architecture becomes like skin, we, its inhabitants can communicate through the geometry it represents. The city becomes an organism, “which admits various degrees of freedom and evolves over time without losing in coherence and recognition”. (2) The individuals express themselves freely, using the “capsules”. Archigram goes even further to suggest that the contemporary world inhabitant would carry an “inflatable suit” on his back which could take form of a transparent plastic igloo, thus creating a concept of “auto-environment, of hybrid with immaterial, invisible architecture”.(3) In its ever changing pursuits to satisfy the efficiency and social and economic reconfigurations of human relations, architecture continues to reinvent our inhabitable space and thus it reinvents our social structures and habits. As the bio-genomic industry develops, I wander if the architects will cross the boundary of our skin and the mobile architecture will become “implantable” architecture? “The name of architecture is given only to the thing that expresses the soul in the age. Clarifying the soul of the age and having the philosophy are synonyms. Architecture without the philosophy is only a cast-off shell of a cicada.”(4)
1. Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Forms, Label magazine, p.50;
2. Label Magazine, p. 51;
3. Michela Comba, Archigram, Label magazine, p.54
4. Kisho Kurokawa, from Label Magazine
Bibliography
El Lissitzky. Russia: An Architecture for World. Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1970
S. Frederick Starr. Melnikov. Solo Architect in a Mass Society. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1978
Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator. Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1986
Anatole Kopp. Constructivist Architecture in the USSR. Academy Editions, London/ St. Martins Press, New York, 1985
Anatole Kopp. Town and Revolution. George Braziller, NY 1970
Frank Lloyd Wright. In the Cause of Architecture. Architectural Record Books, NY, 1975
Cycles of Consumption
by Marina Shterenberg
Terry R. Marashlian
Cycles of consumption
“I am speaking to the culture we live in”, says Terry Marashlian, who, using all twenty thousands pounds of hydrolic pressure of his “Art Crusher” compactor is preparing to make two feet in diameter ‘coins’ from recycled aluminum cans. The project is called Recycler’s Guide to San Francisco and proposes to bring to our attention the faces of the “nameless” recyclers who collect aluminum cans in exchange for money. Terry spent months on E-bay searching for the ideal compactor. When it finally arrived in his studio, he needed to inventory all his skills, from the time when he used to work in industry, in order to wire the machine and get it to operate. “I thought it would be bigger” was my first remark when seeing the “Art Crusher” in person. Of course, I grew up in the socialist Soviet Union, still living in the shadows of industrial revolution, where the notion of the machine was perhaps exaggerated out of proportions in the minds of people that didn’t work in the factories or in the fields. Today in America, the industrial machine is even further removed: “In our everyday life we don’t come in contact with gigantic machinery that makes our culture possible”, comments Terry, “The awe of seeing one of them work is overwhelming”. Injecting himself in the recycling process and freezing it in time, Terry is involved in constructing a kind of cultural archeology by bringing our attention to the function of objects in a recycling process as currency. When the ‘coins’ are completed and exhibited, they are not destined for an art collection. Terry plans to take the ‘coins’ back to a recycling plant to conclude the cycle of obsolescence and to emphasize that his investigation is apparent only in viewing the entire cycle.
As viewers of Terry’s work, we have a chance to recognize ourselves partaking in the cycle of consumption. Providing an illusory sense of freedom and choice, products today are designed to become outdated almost instantly. By having to have the “latest”, we are the prime contributors to the accelerating cycle of obsolescence and discard. The extent of individual discard is visible in Terry’s resin “time capsules”, in which he crushes discarded electronics, taken at the end of their lives, and interrupts the process of recycling. It is significant for Terry that both, the resin he uses as well as the plastic components of the parts inside, are the byproducts of oil. Crushing the objects, Terry is engaged in compressing a part of our culture as well as ‘freezing’ the passage of time.
Vectors to the Moon investigates a different kind of a cycle, a cycle of salt. Purchasing large quantities of unprocessed sea salt, Terry is compressing the salt into salt pillars, which will be placed on the beach pointing to the positions of the moon. As the tide comes up, the pillars will be slowly washed away and the salt will be returned to the ocean. The project overlays the cycles of the waves, the moon and the salt and Terry is still unclear about the details of the final installation.
Terry’s work highlights our awareness of the difficulty in conceiving a cycle that one is a part of. Collapse of the past and the future in today’s postmodern society has created a sort of eternal moment of the present. To experience a cycle, one now must enter a metaphysical space that transports the viewer into distinct points in time, which, when connected, define one continuous process.
Seeing by Reordering Visual Experiences
You cannot correctly call any human action either creative or free if the individual does not participate directly in the setting, and intending, of his or her own meaning.—Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance
Introduction
The history of western modern art can be read as a progressive reduction of imagery and of gesture. Malevich wrote in 1915, “Over the past millennia, the artist has striven to approach the depiction of an object as closely as possible, to transmit meaning, essence and purpose. Now objects have vanished like smoke, for the sake of a new culture of art, a new art with metaphysical implication.” His colleague, El Lissitzky was developing what became known as constructivism, merging art and political ideas for a new society. His “Prouns” were interchange stations between painting and architecture. Piet Mondrian in 1925 also attempted to make an integrative art, creating an environment, “Salon De Madame B à Dresden”, which was not exhibited until 1970 at the Pace Gallery in New York City.
The wonder of it all is that what looked for all the world like a diminishing horizon – the art-object’s becoming so ephemeral as to threaten to disappear altogether – has, like some marvelous philosophical riddle, turned itself inside out to reveal its opposite. What appeared to be a question of object/non-object has turned out to be a question of seeing and not seeing, of how it is we actually perceive or fail to perceive “things” in their real contexts. (9, p.145)
The context of objects and the vehicle which allows us to perceive it have become the new medium in the work of Robert Irwin and James Turrell. Working with existing environments within and outside the confines of museums, these artists examine different ways in which installation and materials activate the viewers’ awareness of their own act of seeing. The work of these artists challenges and questions our perception and psychology behind it, thus engaging the process of seeing as the most essential vehicle through which we experience all visual art.
Irwin often works with physical materials that slow or heighten our vision, scrim, translucent gels, wire fencing, plastic. But “the primary medium of Irwin’s art is neither steel nor glass, neither trees nor pavement, but our perception, our curiosity, and our desire to make sense of the world around us”. (2, p.148) By changing the physical environment in unexpected ways, Irwin provokes the viewer to question assumptions and to pay attention to phenomena which leads one to redraw a mental picture of the world, engaging the viewer in the process of discovery.
Turrell isolates and manipulates light itself which becomes the subject and the medium of his work. His installations often demand time to experience them and engage the viewer in the process of assembling and reassembling the pieces through seeing.
Expanding the role of the artist into the realm of psychology, architecture, physics, and most recently natural sciences, both artists challenge traditional modes of display by building or altering environments for the viewer to be in and experience.
These environments do not present answers, but grant the possibility for the viewer’s active participation in the creation of the work, while simultaneously seeing and being aware of the act of seeing. The viewer then becomes part of the installation display.
Psychology of Perception. Scientific experiments at Art & Technology.
When Kasimir Malevich did a white-on-white painting and was accused of nihilism, he looked his public in the eye and said, “Ah, but we have a world of pure feeling.” Perception is “unconstrained sensual experience”, in which feelings are essential in the act of looking. Influenced by the writings of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, for Irwin, perception is a “direct interface with the phenomenaly given:, involving “overbrimming synesthesia of undifferentiated sensations which exist as the plenum of experience”. Turrell expresses it as “a reflexive act”. The physical space of the art and the space of the mind of the observer are inseparable. (5, p.208).
Exploring metaphysical states of the mind, Raku, the Japanese tea ceremony, is an aesthetic which aims at elimination of movement, decoration and variation of form. Raku brings attention to our perception as part of a whole experience, involving time and discovery:
“There was this person who had collected these bowls, if your karma was right, he would let you see a tea bowl. And the way he would do it is you would have dinner with him and at the end of the dinner, he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it -very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement. “ (1, p.31)
In 1971, the Experiments in Art and Technology Project (E.A.T.) matched artists with scientists, mathematicians, technicians, and engineers from major corporations and industries. One project, led by Jane Livingston, an associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, teamed Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Edward Wortz, an experimental psychologist from Garrett Aerospace. For several months the three pursued whatever interested them: they sat in anechoic chambers; they played with light; they discussed ideas. Neither the art hardware nor the fascination with spectacle of the E.A.T. projects coincided with the true focus of the group. They took a more physiological approach in which perception precedes conception. They became interested in dissolving the object in the subject. The work that came after continuously invited viewers into an awareness of their own processes of perception, as well as their expectations of art. (5, p.71)
Circumstance – physical environment and conditions of artwork.
Controlling the space in a way that allows the artists to engage the viewer completely in the space of illusion, for the viewer illusion becomes complete. By adjusting light, environment, applied color and object to very similar, interchangeable levels of reality Irwin and Turrell achieve compelling illusions, which do not depend on anything outside the work itself.
Since his early paintings, Robert Irwin has been preoccupied with the display of his work. Continuously trying to break the confines of painting, Irwin blurs the edges and corners and even the flatness of canvas in his disc paintings, engaging in a progression of inquiry. The marriage of figure and ground in cubist painting opened questions which inevitably led to the marriage between painting and environment. The environment then became equal to the figure in importance, having as much meaning. While working on his late line and dot paintings, Irwin meticulously treated the back of the painting, laboriously finishing the walls around it, eliminating cracks and marks, experimenting with various temperatures of light until the entire presentation was wholly perfect – arriving at a situation that couldn’t be anything else and only in such circumstances could the viewer possibly see and experience what Irwin was seeing. Such controlling practices became impossible to continue as he began selling painting and they moved into new environments of museums and collections. But while searching for these “peripheral” elements of perceptual experiences, Irwin discards the painting as an object altogether and devotes his practice to the whole environment, the room, challenging the viewer’s perceptual interaction with it. (2, p.109)
Within the structure of museums, Irvwin choreographs the light and volume which exist in the space, so that the space itself becomes the pedestal for thought. The changes are usually not objects, but subtle and highly controlled use of materials that alter or challenge our perception. The viewer is given responsibility and the analytical acuteness of the work is given non-verbal and intuitive presence. In architectural work, Irwin activates preexistent qualities of the space, leaving it seemingly unchanged but elusively energized, or refocused, or he intervenes on the architecture’s behalf. “The object is dissolved in the energies that catalyze changes in and challenges to conventional perception. “ (14, p.113-114)
Turrell attempts to make the surfaces as immaterial as possible to bring it closer to the experience of looking at a traditional painting, where the square frame and the layers of varnish do not stay in the way of the viewer perceiving the subject. Working within the rectilinear format of most museum architecture, Turrell creates structures that echo the lines where the floor meets the walls and the walls meet the ceiling. When the structure becomes “transparent” within the space where it exists, the qualities of light, its volume, its density and color become important. The work and physical environment which the viewer enters are inseparable from each other. As one moves through the space and decides to see it in one way or another, the reality of the work can change. So the work becomes all about seeing. “It’s possible for you to make the reality of your experience of the piece become the determinant of its existence”. (3, p.15)
Irwin uses the layers of painting as veils to interrupt our view and to entice us in closer examination and observation. For Irwin, the installations become so much larger than our physical bodies, that the materials become abstract. Just like we experience moving through a skyscraper without being aware of steel beams, glass and concrete used to make it, when we follow a path in a garden we are unaware of the shape the path makes among the plants and trees. But Irwin creates visual interruptions, distortions, and by obscuring the subject, he invites the viewers to examine what is seen on an intimate level, bringing their awareness to subtle nuances. It’s like looking at a painting from far away and if you wish, if you are enticed enough by veils of scrim, intertwining branches, or frosted glass, you can actually walk into the painting and thus become part of it. You can simultaneously be the observer and be observed. Irwin’s background in painting becomes apparent as he creates his installations in layers of perception. The viewer becomes aware of physical distances and light that fills these spaces.
Both artists’ work is site specific and can not usually be displayed in a different setting, unless it is readjusted to the new space. Documentation of the work then becomes primary representation to viewers who are unable to experience the work in person. Yet, documenting the work which relies on phenomenological circumstances can become a real problem. Both artists resisted visual representations of their work, which almost completely takes away the personal and intimate experience of seeing the light, which is what constitutes the artwork anyway. What is interesting about the Roden Crater is that Turrell presented numerous depictions of the site, and records of his thinking process and the planning of the project but not the images of actual visual phenomena to be observed and experienced within and from the windows of the Roden Crater. In printed representation of Turrell’s work we become aware of the shape of the framing of the light more than the powerful qualities of light and their transcending effect on our consciousness.
Irwin’s work usually has a kind of “unthingness,” presenting not visual objects, but an uncanny reflexiveness to the viewer. Irwin says, “The real beauty of philosophy is the examination of your own moment, your own being in circumstance.” He continues: “When people walk into a gallery where I’ve installed some of the things I’ve been doing recently, a lot of them say, “Oh, it’s an empty room. The question then, of course, is empty of what?” The point of Irwin’s work is to draw people into a place once considered too incidental to have meaning. (2, p.148)
Pedestal and Museum.
By working within existing environments outside of the museum, the artists create the work, the pedestal for the work and the museum to house the work, creating a larger context and subtler transitions between every day reality and visual phenomena.
Roden Crater site, situated in the desert is accessible and open as a part of the ancient landscape, and yet it is removed from our daily experiences, so that approach to the site is in itself a discovery. Quite different from a traditional museum pedestal, Roden Crater’s solitary location forces the visitors to first experience its context, following the road and observing other cinder cones in the San Francisco volcanic field. The desert becomes a museum. Approach to the crater is possible from different directions, but Turrell prefers the drive from Flagstaff, which changes elevations and brings the crater in and out of view throughout the trip. At a certain distance, transportation is left in the area surrounded by lava cliffs, so that it is not seen from the crater. As one walks out from this enclosure, the crater becomes visible, and from this lower vantage, the viewer has a sense of looking at the Roden Crater full-face. “This kind of presentation and re-presentation is an important part of the work. It gives the crater a visual history and places it in time, in memory”. (3, 101)
One can arrive to the site by airplane, which then significantly changes visual discovery of the Crater. Visitors’ approach to Roden Crater presents and re-presents the crater and the desert environment it inhabits changing its relationship with the environment and the viewer’s awareness of spatial relations. How we perceive the crater is contingent upon how we make our journey to it. “The approach can order your experience. You can come in through the side door…and have a different experience than if you enter through the front door” (3, 104)
The pedestal is replaced by a path of discovery, quite like unwrapping a Raku cup, the viewer is enticed into Irwin’s garden and brought to a level of awareness where one can deal with intimacy and the most subtle kind of nuance. Starting with a grand scale, the viewer is brought down and is able to wonder upon a single flower up close. And this flower is only there now, as it will change and appear quite different at another time of the year.
Passage of time and the process of seeing.
In contrast to traditional landscape painting, which immobilizes natural phenomena, Irwin’s garden and Turrell’s crater work with experiential qualities inherent in specific moment and place, the work becomes “conditioned by the site itself”. The artists create artwork in which change is not only inevitable but the very premise of the piece itself. (5, p.157)
While painting presents preserved crystallized moment in time and allows the viewer to choose duration of being within that moment, and video presents moving moments to a relatively still observer, installation changes in meaning as the observer moves through its carefully crafted space. In this way, the presence of the viewer becomes integral to the meaning of the work, and to the viewer’s understanding and reflection of being part of the installation display.
Turrell frames natural light (sunlight, moonlight, starlight and light phenomena), while accounting and embracing its ever-changing nature, not reproducing the light, but creating a frame (space) for it to fill and to be brought to the viewer’s closer examination. Quite similarly, entering empty rooms, and questioning what it is one is looking at, the viewer is invited to open and clear the inner space of his/her consciousness and to allow the light to enter that space. This experience is potentially similar to Alice entering through the looking glass, through the experience of seeing the viewer has the possibility to inhabit the space and to create and recreate its reality as the light moves and changes. The range of natural phenomena of changing light presents an almost infinite range of its observational potential. (3, 108)
The viewer as part of the installation display. Framing.
While looking at a singe living cell organism, one can observe the visual and behavioral patterns that similarly function within the whole human body, or the ecosystem or the planet or the universe. A cell, body, planet and universe then are just names given to visual frames marking different levels of our perception of the living world, either with or without optical tools. Essentially, they are parts of each other, together being a whole complexity, a continuum, within which there is a range of possibilities. When we construct these frames and take words and meanings associated with them for granted, especially when we isolate them from their environment, we run the risk of misrepresentation and actually prevent ourselves from deep and meaningful understanding. Since they are given to us whole as independent sets of facts, even truths, it is no wonder that we fail at times to recognize them for what they really are: culturally compounded abstractions.
Since the invention of shaped panels and canvas, the western art practice has been participating in the process of framing our visual reality and by taking it out of context displaying it for the viewer’s contemplation.
Both artists invite the viewer back into their carefully structured and controlled visual reality which exists harmoniously within the existing physical space and by only slightly altering the viewer’s perception of it, draw viewer’s attention to their own process of knowing and experiencing reality through seeing.
What the viewers see inside the chambers at Roden Crater depends as much on their orientation as the space’s. One can look outward with it or turn around and look into the light the space perceives. Metaphorically, the viewer is able to look at the space’s vision, “watching the space look at something”; the art presenting a model for our perceiving our own perceiving. (3, p109).
The role of the artist, in Irwin’s terms, is to learn to see not only a physical, quantitative reality but the qualitative aspects of a situation, and to empower the viewer to gain access to that vision as well-to engage in a process of discovery. The real subject of Irwin’s art is not the object, then, but the viewer.
Conclusion
Since the early constructivist experiments in the former Soviet Union, artists have become aware of the environments that display artworks as integral part of the visual experience and understanding, often determining and altering meaning of presented work. But what happens when artists not only create environments and situations as their artistic work, but take part in the design and creation of the museums to house work of other artists?
I recently visited the Dia:Beacon, which was recreated within the old factory building by Robert Irwin. As I walked through the parking lot I recognized a sense of order and simplicity in the layout of islands of trees. But when I entered the building, I was overcome with a feeling of perfection. It wasn’t the kind of perfection with polished surfaces and sharp corners. Rather it was a feeling of wholeness, where every detail, every mark made sense and was filled with meaning. In a very natural way, the light was not uniform, but changed from luminous and bright on one end of the large open space into soft and shadowy on the other. The white of the walls changed depending on which direction I was facing. Paintings by Agnes Martin, Blinky Palermo, Sol LeWitt appeared to hum and vibrate, to recede into the walls, or to melt into them. As if unwrapping a Raku cup, I was seeing everything for the first time, with a heightened awareness and a pleasant feeling of finding myself seeing without the hierarchy of preconceived meanings. The texture on the floor and the treatment of windows was just as important as the lines on the painting, they were both responsible for what I was experiencing.
The inquiry into relationships between emotional/ perceptual and conceptual experiences of art questions the function of a traditional museum. Walking away with the sum of experiences becomes vital to seeing artwork and opening ourselves to its meaning. By Irwin’s measure, a work of art succeeds when it challenges our perceptions to such a degree as to cause us to reconsider our environment and invest it, and ourselves, with greater potential:
Now we are presented and challenged with the infinite, everyday richness of “phenomenal” perception (and the potential for a corresponding “phenomenal art,” with none of the customary abstract limitations as to form, place, materials and so forth) – one which seeks to discover and value the potential for experiencing beauty in everything. (9, p.145)
Bibliography
1. Robert Irwin Getty Gardern, Lawrence Weschler, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2002
2. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler, University of California Press, 1982
3. Occluded Front James Turrell, Edited by Julia Brown, The lapis Press, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1985
4. James Turrell, Long Green, Turske & Turske, Zurich
5. James Turrell, The Art of Light and Space, Craig Adcock, University of California Press, 1990
6. Being and Circumstance, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, Robert Irwin, The Lapis Press in conjunction with the Pace Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985
7. James Turrell, Light & Space, exhibition organized by Barbara Haskell, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1980
8. Robert Irwin, edited by Russell Ferguson, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 1993
9. Robert Irwin. Notes Towards A Model. Catalog: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977
10. Some Notes on the Nature of Abstraction, Perception and Pictorial Representation. Edited by Calvin Nodine, Praeger Publishing, 1979
11. James Turrell: Into the Light (exhibition catalog), The Mattress Factory, 2002
12. James Turrell: The Roden Crater Project, essays by Craig Adcock and John Russell, University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tuscon), 1986
13. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, edited by Peter Noever, MAK (Vienna, Austria) in association with Hatje Cantz Verlag (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany), 2002
14. Robert Irwin, MOCA, Rizzoli
Collapse of Oppositions
With the emergence of the great modern styles society has begun to fragment and form separate groups: “each group speaking a language of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect and each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else”. Pervasive ideologies of the modernist art defined territories marked off by impenetrable borders and hierarchical structures. In order to subvert these established cultural, sexual and ethnic powers, in the 80’s and 90’s artists focused on destabilizing the border, which functioned as the center that upheld contradictions that lay to either side of it.
The method of differentiation, according to Foucault, is at the same time an operating condition and the result of every power relationship. “The system of differentiations”, he writes, “permits one to act upon the actions of others”. He emphasizes the importance of the element of freedom, as “power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free”. Insubordination and confrontation strategies on the part of the free principles are essential conditions for the existence of the relations of power. This relationship is true only if “the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused”. The success of the artists’ subversive actions that I will discuss lies not in the strategy of opposition, but in the strategy of confusion and superimposition. The deconstructive practices in the films of Sally Potter and Trin T. Minh-ha and the performances of Gomez-Pena and the Guerrilla Girls undermine the very mechanism of power by disorienting the layout of distinct positions between all notions of difference: men and women, American and Mexican, civilized and primitive, viewer and object, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, individual and society.
In 1984 in Arizona, Gomez-Pena collaborated with Roberto Sifuentes to present a performance installation that challenges the perception of the Chicano as the number one enemy in America. “The Temple of Confessions” combines pseudo-ethnographic diorama with the diorama found in the Mexican churches, in which Pena and Sifuentes present themselves inside plexi-glass boxes simultaneously as cultural specimens and holy creatures. These characters are constructed images of “border citizens”, both in literal terms (Pena grew up on the border, his family divided by the border line between the US and Mexico), as well as metaphorically as characters that exists in-between different realities and at the same time encompass elements of both. The notions of familiar borders are obliterated as the artists push the American culture to the margins and treat is as exotic and unfamiliar. Humor and parody binds together symbols, the exact original location of which is difficult to determine. The border citizens are dressed in snake boots, Aztec Cascabeles, authentic bones from audience members who were eaten, vest made from the leopard that was hunted on the streets of Tijuana; they use American flag, rifles, feathers, etc. A “reverse anthropology” is a term Gomez-Pena gives to his practice of representing a meeting of two or more cultures. Even the viewer’s responses in “The Temple of Confessions” are confused when their fears meddle with desires, repulsion mixes with excitement.
The performance group Guerrilla Girls also constructs hybrid identities as women wearing gorilla masks, while creating a media hype to bring public’s attention to the under- representation of women and minorities in the art world. When power relations are institutionalized, as in the case of a state or a museum, complex systems endowed with multiple apparatuses, bring into being its own regulations, carefully defined hierarchical structures and the distribution of all power relations in a given social ensemble. Exposing the corruption of the art world structures – secrecy, insider trading, and manipulation, Guerrilla Girls bring attention to the architecture of museums resting on close interrelationships between board members, collectors, critics, curators, and family relations. Guerrilla Girls choose a comical symbol to dispel the impenetrable separation between men and women – the phallic symbol of bananas. According to Lacan, phallus is a signifier for the cultural privileges and positive values, which define male subjectivity within patriarchal society but from which the female subject remains isolated. It signifies that thing whose loss inaugurates desire. The phallus, in other words, is a signifier both for those things that are lost during the male subject’s entry into culture and for those things that are gained. The use of banana by the Guerrilla Girls as the most overt phallic symbol in the hands of women subverts the notions of sexual power. It is at the same time seductive and humorous and initiates questions about the relational aspects of subjectivity, which comes into play through the principle of difference between the male and female and between the ‘You’ and the ‘I’.
Our consciousness is the self-assured center that also represents a borderline. Unsettling the center of structures and shifting the meanings of differences collapse the certitude of our consciousness. Both, Minh-ha in her film Reassemblage and Sally Potter in the film Thriller, create a disoriented reality that threatens our stable center of consciousness, which constructs and maintains ideas of otherness. We are thrown off balance by the contradictions in meanings and the actions of the characters, as well as by the contradictions within ourselves. The absence of the familiar cinematic reality, which is organized into explanation of itself, challenges our function as viewers and displaces our authority as viewers or participants. Sally Potter questions the power of the male artist through the reversal of roles, by posing herself as the hero: “What if I have been the subject of this scenario instead of its object?” The woman sits on the artist’s chair and is thrown into the light of the camera as the shadow of the observer passes over her. As part of her deconstructive practice, Sally Potter deliberately reverses perspectives as often as possible, in the process undoing opposed perspectives, showing that the two terms of an opposition are merely accomplices of each other: “For centuries she has been jumping into his arms over and over again”.
Absence of sound is used in both films to open the door for the viewer to participate in the game of reexamining the meaning of signs. Like the children in Reassemblage that blindly submerge their arm deep into the earth to dig something out of the mud, as viewers we dig into our subconscious in search of explanations, definitions, answers. “The habit of imposing a meaning to every single sign” narrates the voice of Minh-ha and emphasizes our impulse to conquer the world as we make sense of its images. Our act of looking is challenged by a notion of being looked at: “What I see is life looking at me”. The boundary between the inside and the outside, the surface of the lens that separates our immediate reality and reality within the film is a reflective surface and it is being repeatedly flipped: “I am looking through a circle in a circle of look”. Potter and Minh-ha employ questions as a way to penetrate the separation of the lens and the screen. “Can this be the fact?”, “Why?”, “What if..?” In fact, Reassemblage concludes with a question: ”Do you have a husband all for yourself?” The viewers are invited to step outside of their roles of passivity and to merge with the reality of the film: “I look at her becoming me, becoming mine. Entering into the only reality of signs, where I myself am a sign”
Interrupting the boundary between the audience and the artist both Gomez-Pena and the Guerrilla Girls employ confusing modes of performance – museum installations, news and talk show appearances, public lectures, and street and TV broadcast interventions. They are able to wear many costumes and mediate between being provocateurs, reverse anthropologists and citizen diplomats. Gomez-Pena comments on the significance of the on-going negotiation of cultural hybrids: “As artists we are accepted as extremists doing things that politicians cannot get away with. We can justify what we do as extreme esthetic behavior and we can always speak the truth.” And the truth that emerges from their practices is not a singular truth won with the argumentative language of physical combat. The work of these artists has to do with a kind of fluidity and movement back and forth, which resists meaning, a movement, of which the fundamental inner logic is the exclusion of the emergence of distinct themes. Perhaps, the truths resemble “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; truths that are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions…coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.”
The significance of the work of these artists is in undermining a capitalistic consumption of images and their classification, privatization and abuse of images for the instituting of power structures. Their films and performances dissolve the saturated imagery of a stereotype and replace the cynicism that surrounds the way we look at images with a discourse of questions. Do images and ideas exist within cultural contexts, layered with all sorts of meanings that are inseparable from them, or is their existence universal and cannot be conquered or possessed or belong to any particular person, group, religion, ideology or political establishment? How do we explain their meanings through language? And are we ever free from participating in the power structures as long as we are bound to language as the means of our discourse? Perhaps, in the public realm of the World Wide Web, the border that determined the principle of difference through a set of power relationships has become a point of connectivity and has taken on the significance of the screen, “a switching center for all the networks of influence”.