6

Cybernetic Bordello: Nicolas Schöffer’s Aesthetic Hygiene

Hervé Vanel

Worldview

“I would not hide from you that I consider myself more a programmer than a creator,” confessed proudly Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) in 1971.¹ In the artist’s career, this shift from creator to programmer certainly dated back to 1954, the year he unveiled what was considered “the first spatiodynamic, cybernetic, sound-equipped art structure”² in the Parc de Saint-Cloud outside Paris. The structure was conceived with a consulting engineer from Philips Corporation (Jacques Bureau) and in collaboration with composer Pierre Henry to create a sound-producing tower responding to environmental stimuli (light, sound, atmospheric conditions).³ From then on, collaborating with engineers, physicians and composers Schöffer pursued his long-term investigation in the field of technologically oriented and “cybernetically” regulated audiovisual environments. With Chronos 3, in 1961, this took the form of another sound-equipped tower providing a full audiovisual spectacle installed in Liège, Belgium. The following year, the Department of Ambient Programming at Philips (Département d’Ambiance Programmée) actively promoted Schöffer’s Light Wall as “a tool for mood-conditioning,” while his small monitor Lumino (1968) presented a portable, domestic version of this form of sensory conditioning. Relentlessly, Schöffer attempted, more or less successfully, to implement his art in society: from televised programs designed to induce sleep to the décor of a Tropezian nightclub, down to the aborted erection of a gigantic cybernetic tower crowning the district of La Défense.4 Considered individually, however, each project does not make much sense on its own. The full measure of the artist-programmer’s ambition must take into account Schöffer’s worldview: for it is society as a whole that the artist intended to program.

Old wine, new bottle

Starting in the early 1950s, Schöffer patiently unfolded his urban planning of a cybernetic city connecting districts and fixed buildings to which he had ascribed specific and exclusive functions: administrative center, learning center, unit for scientific research, “spatiodynamic” theater, etc.⁵ All buildings were to be distributed along three zones respectively housing seemingly immutable living functions: working, resting, and leisure time. A full-scale presentation of the artist’s design was ultimately published in 1969 under the title La ville cybernétique (The Cybernetic City). Compared to a contemporary project involving cybernetics such as Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace—conceived as a highly flexible structure integrating its planned obsolescence—Schöffer’s “visionary” design simply avoids questioning, among other things, whether “the division between work and leisure has never been more than a convenient generalization.”⁶ Unlike the Fun Palace, Schöffer’s vision evidently does not experiment with any alternative or innovative lifestyles; it presents, at best, a technologically upgraded version of existing normative ones. Overall, the reader of La ville cybernétique gets the uncanny sensation that the author’s prospective thinking is locked in a rather past-oriented vision of the future. Schöffer may have planned the city of the future, but he forgot to question the future of the city. In the end, as a true prophet of his own coming, Schöffer concluded his volume on a cryptic note invoking the trinity of art, science and religion:

Times are not far ahead when we will see the artist and the scholar [savant] reconciled in a common exploration of temporal structures. Then, at that stage of evolution, the endless inventory will be more and more widely opened to Man. Art will appear as the kernel of the energetico-temporal mass of all known and unknown universes, and as the very heartbeat of the universal pulse [le souffle même de l’universel respiration]. And the notion of a certain God will emerge clearly as a permanent and timeless phenomenon.7

To some observers, however, the artist’s very ambition to “create creation”⁸ may seem to have been unfairly restrained. Hence, a French critic reviewing an exhibition devoted to Schöffer’s career in the mid-2000s could not fail to notice that many of the artist’s projects have been left unrealized, including an intriguing Center for sexual leisure. Could it be, as this critic suggests, that the daring “novelty” of the artist’s work was too “difficult to accept” in its time?⁹ The worn-out cliché of the misunderstood genius fits Schöffer’s self-possessed vision of his art like a glove. But Schöffer’s art was not that hard to accept and his kinetic sculptures were actually dutifully admired in the 1960s for the optimistic and therefore reassuring blend of art and technology they offered (contrasting notably with the “nihilistic” version of Jean Tinguely’s machine aesthetic). Unsurprisingly, conservative and reactionary American critics such as John Canaday and Hilton Kramer awarded Schöffer’s art a very high mark. While the first critic was spellbound by the power of his rotating sculptures to “turn metals into volatile fluids and light into escaping tinted gasses,”¹⁰ the second argued that beyond the “astonishing and infinitely variable effect” of his “cybernetically programmed” creations in metal, Plexiglas, and light, Schöffer’s sculptural pieces were only the “symbolic paradigms of a new civilization” designed by the “visionary of a world that does not yet exist.”¹¹ Concurrently, in France, influential critic and historian Michel Ragon recognized in Schöffer’s art the “most ambitious contemporary body of work, the work seeking to be the grand œuvre, seeking to be at the same time sculpture and architecture, art and science, the work seeking to be the cradle of a new world.”¹² In many ways, the critics seem to have been fairly intoxicated by the old wine that Schöffer had put in a not-so-new bottle. Still, such praises articulate well enough the artist’s immoderate ambition. Insisting as they do on the prospective dimension of Schöffer’s art to the point of considering his artworks as an incidental by-product of his worldview, both Kramer and Ragon understood well that the artist’s purpose far exceeded the sculptural objects themselves.

Synthesis of the arts

Schöffer’s eagerness to impose his art upon society finds its roots in the postwar ideal of a “synthesis of the arts” (synthèse des arts). In France, this lofty goal—“without which no civilization can assert its presence”13—was notably promoted by the engineer and architect André Bloc who, in 1951, formed the Groupe Espace.¹⁴ Among other signing members of its manifesto, Nicolas Schöffer promoted then the absolute necessity of “an Art that inscribes itself in real space, responding to functional necessities and to all of Man’s needs, from the simplest one to the highest one … caring for collective and private living conditions; an Art that would be essential even to those who are less attracted by aesthetic values.” Setting the tone for Schöffer’s lifelong ambition, the Groupe Espace urgently pressed toward “effective realizations” by active and direct involvement in the “human community.”¹⁵ Understandably, the feasibility of this ambitious program raised as many doubts as it generated hopes. One could wonder, for instance, whether a “synthesis” could actually be achieved by the mere addition of a sculpture or a mural (no matter how abstract) to a separately planned architectural setting (no matter how modern).¹⁶ In parallel, British members of the Independent Group regarded suspiciously the principle of an “orthodox integration” recommended by the Groupe Espace as well as its “dogmatic ideas of a synthesis” in which “separate contributions are sympathetically bound together.”17 Conversely, explained Lawrence Alloway in an introduction to the now famous exhibition This is Tomorrow (1956), “different channels [should be] allowed to compete as well as to complement each other.”¹⁸ Such permissive philosophy, in which disjointed elements do not have to resolve into a coherent and unified totality, ran contrary to Schöffer’s confident ideology. As he formulated it in the opening line of a 1954 manifesto announcing the formation of his own artistic collective: “The goal of the Néovision movement is the suppression of the current anarchy in the field of plastic arts and the realization of the necessary conditions for a genuine and total synthesis.”¹⁹ No more, no less.

Schöffer’s use of the term anarchy, inevitably evoking an absence of governmental control, is not incidental. At the time, the artist had already encountered the new science of governing (or “steering” whenever a softer etymology is needed) in Norbert Wiener’s opus Cybernétique et société (The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society, published in French in 1952) and later enthusiastically recalled that following its reading he “immediately made the decision to create, from then on, cybernetic works [of art].”²⁰ Emblematic of what is called the “information age,” cybernetics presents itself as a mode of synthesizing a variety of inputs in order to direct actions toward the most appropriate output. As Peter Galison summarizes, Wiener’s theory originated during the Second World War when the mathematician conceived a complex calculating device [the “antiaircraft (AA) predictor”] “designed to characterize an enemy pilot’s zigzagging flight, anticipate his future position, and launch an antiaircraft shell to down his plane.”²¹ Subsequently, writes Galison, Wiener’s model expanded to become “a new science known after the war as ‘cybernetics,’ a science that would embrace intentionality, learning, and much else within the human mind. Finally, the AA predictor, along with its associated engineering notions of feedback systems and black boxes, became, for Wiener, the model for a cybernetic understanding of the universe itself.”²² And within a few years, indeed, cybernetics swiftly permeated all fields of knowledge: physics, technology, biology, psychology, medicine, sociology, management, linguistic, pedagogy, economy.²³ Schöffer carefully situated his aesthetic programming skills at the crossroad of all those influences.

Aesthetic hygiene

The influence of cybernetics could be felt everywhere indeed, more or less conspicuously. One of Schöffer’s acolytes in Neovision, for instance, the psychiatrist Paul Sivadon, promoted a cybernetically oriented theory of “mental hygiene,” when he defined it as the “optimistic theory which invites anybody to correct at any instant the line of his destiny by orienting him towards a future of social as much as individual equilibrium.”24 In this regard, Schöffer’s lifelong association with physicians, biologists, and psychiatrists, supporting the therapeutic function of his art²⁵ is as significant as his association with engineers to insure the technological viability of his art. Strongly echoing the rhetoric of the psychiatrist, Schöffer would thus characterize his art as a massive sanitary project:

Esthetic hygiene is necessary for collective societies, for any social group residing together on a large scale. How? By programming environments that obey rigorous esthetic criteria. Each time the inhabitant walks around in the city, he must bathe in a climate that creates in him a specific feeling of well-being, invoked by the massive presence of esthetic products in the environment.²⁶

In effect, Schöffer’s mysterious (yet “rigorous”) criterion for aesthetically programming our environment is none other than equilibrium, so as to guarantee that “the sound, the smell, the heat, the moisture, the light dispensed in about [us] in balanced doses,” can generate a “vivifying ambiance.”²⁷ Caring for our well-being, the artist’s hygienist theory also recalls the views of Dr. Jacques Ménétrier (1908–1986),²⁸ another one of Schöffer’s long-time acquaintances. As a biologist, Ménétrier had been in 1942 the general secretary of the Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains (French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems) created under the Vichy government.²⁹ Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) directed the institute. A 1912 Nobel laureate in medicine, Carrel was also a member of the collaborationist Parti Populaire Français and a promoter of eugenics. Ménétrier’s toxic views are fully developed in his 1947 treaty entitled La vie collective,30 in which—besides praising National Socialism³¹—he expands his theory of a complete “social Hygiene” (including “biological control”) that is nothing more than a form of “pragmatic eugenics.”³² As part of Ménétrier’s comprehensive social sanitation plan, the organization of leisure (including “all physical, mental and aesthetic activities”) includes the arts among those elements (like sport) that may “improve the quality of workers.”³³ Whether or not Schöffer had read La vie collective (Collective Life), a rather pertinent topic considering his program, the artist would later enthusiastically welcome the irreversible and accelerating process of “modification of man by man” on the “physical, psychic and intellectual” planes.³⁴ Here again, technology and cybernetics were only, according to the artist, temporarily necessary means of achieving perfection, for “thanks to the hyper-evolved technology of hyper-evolved scientists, one will find the means of suppressing the inequality in the distribution of brainpower [matière grise]; a general disparity which, up to today, prevents a large fraction of the society to reach a certain state of evolution, culturally, aesthetically and intellectually.”35

In this prospect, Schöffer was equally seduced by the Marcusian theory of “repression.” Far beyond inhibiting our sexuality, indeed, the “bourgeois society” also dramatically lowered its aesthetic standards. On the one hand, states Schöffer, art had (mostly) fallen to the level of a speculative merchandise³⁶ while, on the other hand, “parasitical commercial artists deprived of any significance” were only exploiting and debasing the ideas of genuine artists.³⁷ Thus, in the 1960s, Schöffer clearly identified with those “intellectual forces” that, according to Herbert Marcuse, were ready to “contribute to realize a free society.”³⁸ Liberation was in sight and it only required a hyper-evolved artist like Schöffer to free the arts and society from corruption by infiltrating commercial culture like a “Trojan horse.”³⁹ A great opportunity presented itself to him in the summer 1966, with the opening of the Voom Voom, the latest nightclub in the trendy, jet-set resort town of Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera. As a churchman would describe it at the time, the town was a sort of a modern-day Lourdes: “Young people come here with all their worries and yearnings, seeking to be healed by the new religion of glamour and stardom.”⁴⁰ The Voom Voom would be their temple.

Art at the speed of nightlife

A bit like Las Vegas, Saint-Tropez had become a specialized town devoted to recreational activity, therefore suitably fitting Schöffer’s urban “utopia.” Every summer, Saint-Tropez provided a backdrop of folkloric authenticity (local fishermen included) to a community of international celebrities. The launch of the Voom Voom received proper and intensive media coverage. Raising investigative journalism to a hitherto unknown level, some journalists reported that it was the manager, Jean-Marie Rivière, who found this onomatopoeic name while diving in the Mediterranean wearing a floral bathing suit.⁴¹ Or, was it Jane Fonda who christened the nightclub after the sound of the countless sport cars zipping by the port during the summer?⁴² For certain, the interior design of the new joint commercial venture was granted to local architect Paul Bertrand (1915–1994), a former movie-set designer mostly known for his Neo-Provençal villas.43 Bertrand furnished the décor of the new discotheque with several of Schöffer’s kinetic pieces selected under the artist’s supervision. Following the commercial success of the venue, a second Voom Voom, twice as big, opened the following year in Juan-les-Pins, 60 miles away. According to art critic Pierre Restany, Saint-Tropez’s Voom Voom was emblematic of the European “yé-yé” culture. Suitably defining the related musical genre (“yé-yé”) as a “lukewarm and watered down” version of rock and roll, Restany nonetheless credits the yé-yé nightclubs, including the Voom Voom, with a capacity to foster “collective trance.”⁴⁴ Echoing photographs of a rather deserted Voom Voom, a caption depicts the new disco “designed by the architect Paul Bertrand” as follows:

The walls are finished throughout in highly polished stainless steel. Two large steel sculptures by Nicolas Schoeffer rotate at a regulable speed, illuminated by coloured reflectors. Coloured lights are thrown on two large luminous plastic screens by fifty projectors, switched on and off to the music. The surfaces of the tables and bar counter are finished in anodized aluminum. (The whisky bottles lining the bar counter are labeled with their owners’ name: Françoise Sagan, Bernard Buffet, Pierre Restany).⁴⁵

As the popular TV program Dim Dam Dom reported in August 1966, the place was perfectly suited to exhibit Emmanuelle Khanh’s “mode spatiale” in the line of the space-age fashion of Paco Rabanne’s plastic and metal dresses introduced few months earlier.⁴⁶ Models would pose amidst Schöffer’s pieces scattered around the curved seating areas near the dance floor lined by light walls, “large screens on which smudges of pastel colors [disperse] continuously before slowly regrouping.”⁴⁷ Nearby, a journalist noticed, a

deep triangular niche is reserved for the elite squad of dancers, who can see their complex choreographic moves infinitely reflected on the oblique mirroring walls [Prism, 1965]. Now imagine that on a central spot of this cave, a vertical rotating mast with branches made of little mirrors and other pieces of polished plastic is erected. Without interruptions, spotlights are projected on this mast, and the intense beams of light are bouncing on the walls diffracting everywhere in blinding and darting flashes.48

In this light, it may seem that the Voom Voom fits in the development of nightclubs as a site of radical experimentation.⁴⁹ The model of the Pipers, for instance—a series of nightclubs that popped up throughout Italy in the mid-1960s—“consisted in a sort of immersion in a continuous flow of images, stroboscopic lights and very loud stereophonic music,” the goal of which was, according to Andrea Branzi’s, the “total estrangement of the subject, who gradually lost control of his inhibition in dance, moving toward a sort of psychomotor liberation.”⁵⁰ Losing one’s sense of self may have been, in this instance, a way to find oneself. According to the motto of the American collective USCO: “You’ve got to go out of your mind to use your head.”⁵¹ Such was the LSD-fueled program of the “multi-channel night club” The World, conceived by USCO and inaugurated in April 1966. Installed in a disused aircraft hangar, USCO’s disco included a stereo sound system, slide projections, 16mm films by Jud Yalkut notably and an early video transmission feeding back real-time images to the dancers.⁵² The reception of this kind of individual and collective shattering of the self varied greatly. After experiencing Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable in a Chicago nightclub in June 1966, for instance, a horrified journalist reported that the artist had indeed put together a “total environment” yet, she concluded, it “actually vibrates with menace, cynicism, and perversion. To experience it is to be brutalized, helpless.”⁵³ As the popular singer Cher is reported to have said of Warhol’s EPI: “It will replace nothing, except suicide.”⁵⁴ Warhol himself took full responsibility for this sensory overdose: “If they can take it for ten minutes,” he later said of his multimedia extravaganza, “then we play it for fifteen. That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”⁵⁵ Schöffer’s concerns could not have been more remote.

Cybernetic bordello

All in all, the Voom Voom may not have achieved a more convincing synthesis of the arts than the one promoted earlier by the Groupe Espace. Schöffer’s sculptures are visibly less integrated into the space than simply added to it. A variation on this setting can be seen in a two-minute-long segment of the TV show Spécial Bardot, broadcast January 1, 1968, during which the Tropezian icon sings a futurist pop song about a heartbroken creature from outer space (“Contact,” written by Serge Gainsbourg in 1967).56 Slightly more out of his mind, Jud Yalkut achieved a more intense and striking result with his 1965–1966 short abstract experimental short film Turn, Turn, Turn, editing close-ups of Schöffer’s kinetic sculptures to a point where they appear rather intangible. Yalkut’s film, which might have been screened at The World, thereby clarifies one of the artist’s unusually lucid remarks about his art: “What I have done,” he admitted in 1967, “are primitive assemblages, using techniques that are bound to be outdated. One will be able to go much further, getting rid of the object to reach the sole effect.”⁵⁷ The question remains of the nature of such programmed effect.

At age 54 in 1966, Schöffer had, by his own admission, no nightclubbing experience. Saint-Tropez and the Voom Voom nevertheless reminded him that, after all, “centers of sexual leisure” were included in his design for a cybernetic city⁵⁸ as a place for people to “indulge in lovemaking within an aesthetic ambience, under the influence of innumerable aestheticized programs.”⁵⁹ There, he insisted, “the act of love will be fully and totally transcended.”⁶⁰ Located in a nondescript building by the port of Saint-Tropez, the nightclub was a far cry from the rosy, smooth “giant vessel shaped like a woman’s breast”⁶¹ that the artist had in mind when he envisioned his cybernetic bordello. Once inside this colossal boob, visitors would be welcomed with a “warm, fragrant audiovisual wash in a monochrome atmosphere (light red), including sound, colored lights and scents pulsating on a very slow rhythm.”⁶² Rising to the top in a smooth elevator, couples would then walk down a spiraling ramp, surrounded by sleek, warm palpitating abstract silhouettes and all kinds of suggestive screenings (avoiding pornography). They could also experience a zero-gravity space stimulating sexual functions.⁶³ At last, properly aroused, couples would reach a dance hall and, if necessary, retreat in one of the available spaces of the adjoining hotel restaurant.64 As a dance hall, the Voom Voom only fulfilled a small, concluding part of Schöffer’s full program of sexual “reeducation” (even though Tropezian beaches certainly provided a suitable introductory equivalent). Still, the programmer welcomed this opportunity as a life-size experiment to test the (expected) transcending effect of his aesthetic hygiene on an undoubtedly sexually active community.

Schöffer centers of sexual leisure responded, altogether, to a simplistic theory of sexuality rooted in a then-popular dynamic of repression/liberation loosely derived from Marcuse’s theory. “Once the sexual taboo demystified,” proclaimed the artist in this regard, “man—free from all false constraint—will be able to blossom, reaching a normal sexual life and encounter love.”⁶⁵ At the very best, Schöffer was among those who trusted, in the 1960s, that “by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.”⁶⁶ Based on the conviction that there is something like an effectively repressed “human nature,” Schöffer’s belief is that a long-awaited realization of the essence of human beings is not only necessary but also perfectly achievable. Whatever the term “normal” is supposed to mean in terms of sexual life, Schöffer’s charitable anti-repressive logic cannot conceal a normative and essentialist discourse and his liberating prospects are equally limited. When asked to describe the ambiance at the Voom Voom, in particular, Schöffer admitted that it was “irresistible” enough for he and his wife to start dancing (a borderline state, one remembers, as it follows arousal). Still, one should not go too far, and in the end, concludes Schöffer, because “the ambience is very structured, people behave. It does not turn into an orgy.”⁶⁷ Whether this is wishful thinking is beside the point (Schöffer might simply not have been invited to the after-party). What matters, above all, is the infallible capacity of the artist to convince himself of the absolute efficiency of his art.

Dream machine

In this regard, said the artist, the experience of the Voom Voom, was “crucial” and undeniably encouraging: “I found there the proof that what I recommended was absolutely acceptable by the general public. I moved fast from the laboratory to life itself. And it’s only a beginning.”⁶⁸ Schöffer, indeed, never ceased experimenting with the potential effect of his art, occasionally conducting tests in psychiatric wards to refine his aesthetic instruments. There, subjecting individuals to the varying speed, colors, and rhythm of his Lumino, for instance, the artist only obtained what he was seeking, i.e., the confirmation that his “revolutionary” device could effectively induce

a relaxation such that, according to statistics one succeeds, in an average of two and a half minutes, to lower the state of consciousness below the threshold of vigilance … as well as triggering a strong exaltation (for those who are inclined). In other words, one can reach both the limits of excitation and the limits of relaxation.69

In these terms, Schöffer is in tune with the kind of empirical testing conducted twenty years earlier in psychiatric wards with the programming of music similarly conceived “as a means of calming the manic, stimulating the depressive, arousing the lethargic and reaching the withdrawn.”⁷⁰ It is following such encouraging studies that a company like Muzak would promote its “scientific” musical programs in postwar society as a massive tool of mood conditioning.⁷¹ Taking the pervasive presence of functional music (aka muzak, or elevator music) in our environment as granted, Schöffer naturally stressed the aptitude of his creation to be “in harmony with the background music broadcasted simultaneously. Stimulating, neutral or relaxing audiovisual mood can be produced at will.”⁷² Urging artists to come “out of their laboratory” in order to “impose their presence and their products … in the network of consumption and in the information network,”⁷³ Schöffer notably commercialized his Lumino, distributed by Clairol in the United States under the name of the Dream Machine. In late 1969, the infotainment “beauty” section of Vogue dutifully relayed a revealing sales pitch: “plugged in anywhere,” one reads, this “kinetic light-box … provides a non-stop light show in rich, extraordinary colours, shifting kaleidoscope patterns. Its visual delights energize the weary, tranquillize the tense, $75.”⁷⁴ In treating customers like mentally ill individuals, Clairol literally brought Schöffer’s aesthetic hygiene straight from its laboratory into life itself.

Exclusion

Behind the fumes of Schöffer opaque and speculative prose lies, consistently, the ever-expectant desire to reach “the necessary balance required to establish a harmonious regulation of life.”⁷⁵ Schöffer’s was certainly not isolated in his quest for universal well-being. Developing his own plan for a New Babylon, Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka Constant) equally anticipated that, “with a single leap,” a form of artistic synthesis could eventually “bridge the gap with society.”⁷⁶ Constant, a former member of Neovision, might have kept his distance with his partner’s “mystical” approach.77 Still, his design for a New Babylon parallels Schöffer’s effort to conceive a new habitat⁷⁸ understood as a “fundamental form that encompasses all facets of life.”⁷⁹ Living, at last, a life of unrestrained creativity, our existence would become a permanent happening made of “spontaneous interaction among different individuals, in which the actions of one person trigger the reaction of the other.”⁸⁰ In these terms, relationships between individuals resemble closely a series of moves and countermoves coming straight out of the theory of cybernetics’ self-regulating feedback mechanisms. Still, while Schöffer or Constant appeared to be at ease when it came to the planning of a harmonious and fully immersive collective participation, they only left out the (unthinkable) prospect of one’s voluntary exclusion from the system; there would simply be “no outsiders.”⁸¹ More than any other, however, the driving ideology of Schöffer’s aesthetic hygiene fits perfectly the general economy of our advanced capitalist society requiring, for the benefit of all and the profit of a few, that our state of servitude be not only complete but also, most importantly, absolutely blissful.

 

 

 

¹    Philippe Sers, Entretiens avec Nicolas Schöffer (Paris: Editions Belfond, 1971), 12. All translations are by the author. Hungarian-born French artist Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) is associated with the development of kinetic art in France in the 1950s and 1960s. First trained in Budapest and then Paris, where he settles in 1936, Schöffer started as an abstract painter and sculptor. His concept of a spatiodynamic sculpture, formulated at the end of the 1940s, leads him—in the mid-1950s—to elaborate a form cybernetic art capable of responding to environmental feedback. Schöffer’s limitless ambition to reform society through art will give way, in 1960s, to monumental architectural projects and extensive urban planning, supported by a generous and rather abstruse theoretical output.

²    Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture/The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 340.

³    See Jean Cassou, Guy Habasque, and Jacques Ménétrier, Nicolas Schöffer (Neuchâtel: Éditions du Griffon, coll. The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, 1963), 45.

⁴    On Schöffer’s Tour Lumière Cybernétique and on his sedative TV programs see, respectively, the very comprehensive studies published by Arnauld Pierre, “La machine à gouverner. Art et science du cyberpouvoir selon Nicolas Schöffer,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, no. 116 (Summer 2011): 41–61 and “I am the Dream Machine. Les écrans hypnogènes de Nicolas Schöffer,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne no. 130 (Winter 2014–2015): 37–61.

⁵    The date 1952 appears to be the earliest one in relation to Schöffer’s city planning in the collective volume Maude Ligier, Éric Mangion, Jean-Damien Collin, Éléonore De Lavandeyra Schöffer, Nicolas Schöffer (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, Coll. Art contemporain, 2004). Some of these early drawings appear (undated) in Nicolas Schöffer, La Ville cybernétique (Paris: Ed. Tchou, 1969). For recent critical appraisal of Schöffer’s urban planning see Carlotta Darò, “Nicolas Schöffer and the Cybernetic City,” AA Files (Architectural Association School of Architecture) no. 69 (2014): 3–11.

⁶    Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, “The Fun Palace,” The Drama Review: TDR, 12, no. 3 (Spring, 1968): 129. “Technology is the answer,” famously stated Cedric Price, “but what was the question?” Price started the design of the Fun Palace in 1961 in collaboration with experimental theater director Joan Littlewood. A mix of leisure center and experimental theater, this complex—never realized—was meant to foster self-participatory education. Relying on technology and cybernetics to receive and generate users’ feedback, the project placed improvisation at the center of the architectural program. To maintain its capacity for ever-evolving purpose, the project was firstly defined as an expandable, highly flexible and changeable unit (“Nothing is to last for more than ten years, some things not even ten days,” wrote Littlewood). See Mary Louise Lobsinger, “Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Canadian Center of Architecture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: MIT Press, 2001): 119–139.

⁷    Schöffer, La Ville cybernétique, 170.

⁸    Ibid. Schöffer’s exergue to his opus.

⁹    Philippe Dagen, “L’art total de Nicolas Schöffer, chantre de la modernité,” Le Monde, Paris, May 13, 2005.

¹⁰  John Canaday, “At the Galleries: Schöffer and Vasarely,” New York Times, January 13 1968, 27.

¹¹  Hilton Kramer, “One Inventor, One Pasticheur,” New York Times, November 28 1965, X15.

¹²  See Michel Ragon, “Nicolas Schöffer, sculpteur ingénieur,” Jardin des Arts 162 (May 1968): 28.

¹³  Preamble to the manifesto of the Groupe Espace in Art d’aujourd’hui (Art of Today), no. 8 (October 1951): 1. Close to the members of the Groupe Espace, Paul Virilio—at the time a stained-glass painter—remembered that, during the occasional meetings of the Groupe Espace, “we were talking about multidisciplinarity, about the necessity for mingling of the arts. Painters, sculptors and architects got together to invent a sort of cultural ‘melting pot.’” Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. John Armitage (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2001), 52.

¹⁴  Inspired by the Bauhaus and De Stilj, the ideal of a synthesis between architecture, painting, and sculpture formulated by the Groupe Espace was rooted in earlier collaborative efforts. André Bloc had already participated, in 1936, in the foundation of the short-lived association named L’union pour l’Art (Union for Art), in collaboration with Auguste Perret notably, and latter, in 1949, he and Le Corbusier founded l’Association pour un Synthèse des Arts Plastiques (The Association for the Synthesis of the Visual Arts), with Henri Matisse as a President. The latter association only resulted in the failure to organize a planned exhibition on the theme Arts et Architecture (See Renée Diamant-Berger, “De l’union pour l’art à l’association pour une synthèse des arts plastiques au groupe espace,” Aujourd’hui / Art et Architecture, no 59–60 (December, 1967), 4). Similarly, the level of cooperation between artists, the kind of relationship between the arts and the modalities of their ultimate “synthesis” within the Groupe Espace seem to have been a rather confusing matter. As the painter and sculptor Jean Gorin noted: “Regarding the ‘synthesis of the arts’ in general, there is a lot of confusion even in the greatest minds of our time, and this synthesis serves as a pretext for events and exhibitions from which it is completely absent.” In “La synthèse des arts majeurs est-elle possible? ‘Un problème brûlant de l’architecture moderne,’” Open letter from Jean Gorin to the members of the Groupe Espace, dated March 9, 1956. Fonds Delaunay, 105 75 /1/ 1951–1954, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris. [Box 62].

¹⁵  Manifesto of the Groupe Espace Art d’aujourd’hui no. 8, 1. Emphasis mine.

¹⁶  Such concerns are particularly well formulated in letter from January 21, 1955 addressed to André Bloc by Hadi Bara and Tarik Carim, representing a Turkish branch of the Groupe Espace. Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris, Fonds Delaunay, 105 75 / 1 / 1951–1954 [box 62].

¹⁷  Lawrence Alloway, “Design as Human Activity” (1956), reprinted in Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. Richard Kalina (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 48.

¹⁸  Ibid.

¹⁹  The manifesto is reproduced in Ligier, Mangion, Collin and Lavandeyra Schöffer, Nicolas Schöffer, 122. The architect Claude Parent (also a member of the Groupe Espace) the former Cobra member Constant and the British artist Stephen Gilbert, had joined Schöffer in the Neovision venture.

²⁰  Interview with Nicolas Schöffer by Jean-Louis Ferrier, Michèle Cotta and Frederic Towarnicki, “L’Express va plus loin avec Nicolas Schöffer,” July 7–13, 1969, 86.

²¹  Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn, 1994): 229.

²²  Ibid.

²³  See Paul Idatte, “La révolution cybernétique,” Études (September 1964), 232–233. For a contemporary exercise in applied cybernetics, see Susanne Lilar, L’ Amour au siècle de la cybernétique (Paris: Hachette, coll. L’ Avenir de notre vie, 1965).

²⁴  Paul Sivadon, “Adlerian Psychology and Mental Hygiene,” Journal of Individual Psychology 20, no. 2 (November 1st, 1964), 195. Emphasis mine.

²⁵  As the artist states clearly in his interview with André Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” La Galerie des Arts 63 (January 1969): 18.

²⁶  Douglas Davis, “Nicolas Schöffer: The Cybernetic Esthetic,” Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Science, Technology and Art (New York: Præger Publishers, 1973), 121–122.

²⁷  In Cassou, Habasque, and Ménétrier, Nicolas Schöffer, 124. Emphasis mine.

²⁸  As a member of the Comité d’Honneur-Fondateur de l’ A.N.S. (Association Internationale des Amis de Nicolas Schöffer pionnier de l’Art Cybernétique) (Honorary-Founding Committee of the A.N.S. (International Association of the Friends of Nicolas Schöffer, Pioneer of Cybernetic Art)), Dr. Jacques Ménétrier (1908–1986) is presented as the “Président-Fondateur du Centre de Recherches Biologiques et de la Société de Médecine Fonctionnelle, inventeur des Oligoéléments, ancien secrétaire général de la Fondation Alexis Carrel.” On the website devoted to the artist housed by the Observatoire Leonardo des arts et des technosciences (www.olats.org/schoffer/archives/ans.htm) [last consulted on January 2, 2016].

²⁹  See Alain Drouard, “Les trois ages de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” Population (French Edition), 38e Année, no. 6. (November–December 1983): 1017–1047.

³⁰  Jacques Ménétrier, La Vie Collective (Paris: Plon, coll. Présence, 1947).

³¹  Ibid., 292–293.

³²  Ibid., 128. The term “pragmatic” basically means that one may seek to exploit and improve the genetic potential of individuals but not to create a “superior” being. While being beyond the scope of this chapter, the case of Alexis Carrel is significant in terms of the kind of ideological slippage that one might observe in the formulation of Schöffer’s world view. Considered as a suspicious figure in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the legacy of Carrel’s theories became once again the object of a heated debate when the French right-wing extremist party Front National promoted the author of Man the Unknown (L’homme cet inconnu) (Paris: Plon, 1935, 1961) as a “father of ecology.” The ensuing controversy triggered a revision of Carrel’s writings and a reevaluation of his activities during the German occupation when Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government collaborating with the enemy between 1940 and 1944, appointed him as the head of la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains. Some scholars like Alain Drouard continued to praise the outcome of the Fondation in terms of public health while covering up the revolting ideology permeating Carrel’s work. Still, Carrel’s reputation as a brilliant surgeon, research on organ transplants and recognition as a biologist could not conceal the violence of his mystical vision of a purified race: “In order to perpetuate an elite,” asserts Carrel in L’homme cet inconnu, “eugenics is indispensable. It is clear that a race must reproduce its best elements” (p. 409). Should his position on this issue be considered as an acceptable, “positive” form of eugenics? Following Patrick Tort, it appears sensible to refute the fallacious and wicked convention naming “positive eugenics” the position attempting to promote “superior” individuals without eliminating “inferior” ones (Carrel’s view) in opposition to “negative eugenics” generally suggesting the improvement of the biological quality of the race by getting rid of genetically undesirable individuals. If anything, Carrel’s additional note to the German edition of L’homme cet inconnu, added at the request of his German publisher, leaves no doubt concerning the kinship of his theories with that of the Third Reich: “The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.” See Patrick Tort, “L’affaire Carrel: Sur la question de l’eugénisme,” Le Monde diplomatique (June 1998), 32 and Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: La Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945 (Paris : Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Collections de l’Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques), 1992. Jacques Ménétrier’s arguments in favor of “pragmatic” eugenics mirror the dubious distinction between “positive” and “negative” eugenics advanced by the supporters of Carrel’s thesis. Ménétrier might have appeared to Schöffer as a well-meaning reformer but no level of refinement in the formulation of an “aesthetic hygiene,” wrapped under an artistic guise, could really conceal the ideological slippage of the artist’s prospective theories.

³³  Ibid.,163.

³⁴  Schöffer, La Ville Cybernétique, 43.

³⁵  Ibid., 21.

³⁶  See Interview with Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” 18.

³⁷  See Nicolas Schöffer and Dr. Vinchon, “L’artiste et la société : La Socialisation du rôle de l’artiste du point de vue psychologique,” Aujourd’hui, November 1956, 13.

³⁸  The phrase by Marcuse comes from his 1967 Berlin talk “The End of Utopia,” and is quoted by Nicolas Schöffer, La Ville Cybernetique, Tchou, Paris, 1969, 13.

³⁹  See Interview with Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” 18.

⁴⁰  In John Ardagh, “On the new-style Riviera,” The Observer, January 9th 1966, 32.

⁴¹  See Jacques Borgé and Nicolas De Baraudy, “Les Tropéziens en parlent,” Paris-Match no. 897, June 18 1966, 103.

⁴²  M. B. “Dim, Dam, Dom: Vénus, Voum-Voum et Desperados,” Humanité, August 26, 1966.

⁴³  Jean-Luc de Rudder, “Saint-Tropez—L’ enfer: Tout le Monde descend,” L’ Intransigeant, July 14, 1966.

⁴⁴  Pierre Restany “Breve storia dello stile YÉYÉ,” Domus, 446, 1967, 34, and 40.

⁴⁵  Ibid., 40. Pierre Restany (1930–2003) was one of the most influential French critics in the 1960s, known to have coined the term Nouveau Réalisme and supported affiliated artists such as Martial Raysse, Arman, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, or Jacques Villeglé. While being mocked by many intellectuals, the figurative brand of painting developed by Bernard Buffet (1928–1999)—featuring his famous pathetic weeping clowns—was a commercial success in 1950s and 1960s France. Françoise Sagan (1935–2004), jet-setter and novelist gained fame with her first Bonjour tristesse (Hello Sadness, 1954).

⁴⁶  M. B. “Dim, Dam, Dom: Vénus, Voum-Voum et Desperados.”

⁴⁷  Rudder, “Saint-Tropez—L’enfer: Tout le Monde descend.”

⁴⁸  Ibid.

⁴⁹  See notably Carlotta Darò, “Night-clubs et discothèques : visions d’architecture,” Intermédialités, no. 14 (2009), 85–103 and Marcos Parga, “Experimentación radical italiana en torno al night-club: Warhol-McLuhan-Price y la arquitectura eléctrica de los años 60,” Rita, no. 3 (April 2015), 112–119.

⁵⁰  Andrea Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), 54.

⁵¹  See Michel Oren, “USCO: ‘Getting Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head,’” Art Journal 69, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 76–95.

⁵²  Ibid., 86.

⁵³  Michaela Williams, “Warhol’s Brutal Assemblage Non-Stop Horror Show,” Chicago Daily News, June 22,1966, 34.

⁵⁴  Cher, quoted in the Village Voice, September 22, 1966.

⁵⁵  Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett, POPism : The Warhol ’60s (New York : Harper & Row, 1983), 154.

⁵⁶  François Reichenbach and Eddy Matalon (directors), Bob Zagury (producer), Special Bardot, 52 minutes. Archives INA [Institut national de l’audiovisuel]. Brigitte Bardot, French actress, singer, and sex symbol, had taken residence in Saint-Tropez in the late 1950s, thereby contributing to the touristic appeal of the town.

⁵⁷  Pierre Descargues, “Juan-les-Pins: 800 personnes à l’intérieur d’un microtemps de Nicolas Schöffer,” Tribune de Lausanne, Dimanche 25 Juin 1967.

⁵⁸  Ibid.

⁵⁹  “L’Express va plus loin avec Nicolas Schöffer,” 91.

⁶⁰  Ibid.

⁶¹  Ibid.

⁶²  Schöffer, La Ville Cybernetique, 123.

⁶³  Ibid.

⁶⁴  Ibid. and “L’Express va plus loin avec Nicolas Schöffer,” 91.

⁶⁵  Schöffer, La Ville Cybernetique, 123.

⁶⁶  Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, Coll. Bibliothèque des Histoires, 1976), 208.

⁶⁷  Descargues, “Juan-les-Pins: 800 personnes à l’intérieur d’un microtemps de Nicolas Schoffer.”

⁶⁸  Ibid.

⁶⁹  Interview avec Parinaud, “La Révolution par le Lumino,” 18.

⁷⁰  Harold Burris-Meyer and R. C. Lewis, “Music as an Aid to Healing,” The Journal of Acoustical Society of America 19, no. 4 (July 1947): 545.

⁷¹  See Hervé Vanel, Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

⁷²  In Cassou, Habasque, and Ménétrier, Nicolas Schöffer, 131.

⁷³  Schöffer, La ville cybernétique, 23.

⁷⁴  [anonymous] “Beauty Check Out,” Vogue, December 1st, 1969, 108.

⁷⁵  Schöffer, La ville cybernétique, 133.

⁷⁶  Constant, “From Collaboration to Absolute Unity among the Plastic Arts” (1955) translated in Mark Wigley: Constant’s New Babylon The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: Witte de With, centre for contemporary art / 010 Publishers, 1998), 75. Emphasis mine.

⁷⁷  According to Wigley, “The Hyper-Architecture of Desire,” 25.

⁷⁸  On the importance of the notion of “Habitat” in the early 1950s among the Team X in relation to Constant, see Martin van Schaik, “Psychogeogram: An Artist’s Utopia,” in Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations 1956–1976, Martin van Schaik and Otakar Máčel eds. (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Institute of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism, Prestel, 2005), 39–40.

⁷⁹  Constant, “From Collaboration to Absolute Unity Among the Plastic Arts” (1955), 75.

⁸⁰  “The City of the Future: HP-talk with Constant about New Babylon” (1966) translated in Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocation 1956–1976, 11.

⁸¹  Ibid.