Sherrie Levine, Large Krate Table, 1993. Unfinished ash, 25 × 31½ × 32½ inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
There is a practice common among painters of reproducing an image by placing a fine grid over it, then carefully drawing on another grid only what was seen in each small frame. This is an old and laborious process of reproduction and the results are uncanny in all the ways we might suspect. It seems strange, in the age of mechanical reproduction, that the production of a copy might be about a pathologically slowed-down and narrowed focus rather than a fast copy of the “whole.” The pathology is only partly in the narrowed focus; some of it is in the subsequent arousal of our curiosity about where these images, first and second, drift apart from each other. Where has the copyist fallen short? Where does the copy betray itself as a copy? From both the copyist’s and the observer’s point of view, concentrating on the minute details of shadow and line, shades and shapes, has the effect of deferring the comparison between the twin images for a long time.1 The kind of reproduction that I have just been describing is not what Sherrie Levine is doing in her after pieces. But I started with this example because it remains a puzzle to me and I think its lessons in irony, if that is the right word, have bearing on Sherrie Levine’s work, particularly here in the “after Rietveld” work.
While I want to argue that the act of aftering architecture is substantially different from the aftering of art—because of the scale and expense of architecture—I want first to say a few more things about the “reproductive technology” that Levine sometimes uses. She does not reproduce something piecemeal (Duchamp’s Bachelors … or Brancusi’s Newborn …) in order to regenerate it as a whole copy. Instead, she takes the outline of the whole original and regenerates it as outline. Thus the inside, or flesh, of the piece is not a reproduction but an “original Levine,” made from different materials, cast at a different scale, and replicated. Only the outline is borrowed. The Duchamp is Duchamp’s in outline but Levine’s inside; the Brancusi is Brancusi’s skin and Levine’s flesh. This “giving flesh” to an outline proves to be particularly interesting in Levine’s “after Mies,” where the Seagram’s Building and the Farnsworth House are reproduced on the computer as a series of lines—an elevation of lines with no interior. What would it mean to actually rebuild the Farnsworth House with different materials at a different scale, a larger scale for example? One thing it might mean is that the historically complicated relationship of architecture to functionality would be loosened and explored.
“Functionality” is the idea that still holds architecture in a domain that is just beyond, and slightly larger than, say, the domain of sculpture. What would it mean to build six Farnsworth Houses at a slightly larger scale and display them in a museum? Scale change in the aftering of architecture, interestingly enough, can only go in the direction of larger, and this larger scale, in the case of architecture, is necessarily much larger and more consequential than the scale change in sculpture. To go smaller, in architecture or sculpture, would be to go toward the maquette—a mode of representation so familiar that it almost swallows up the ironies of scale to which it, too, is subject. The scale of the architectural project is a delicate and intricate matter and shifts in some already determined scale, such as Mies’s Farnsworth House or the Seagram’s Building, constitutes a massive ideological move. But as we shall see, Levine is extremely sensitive to these issues of scale. Here, in the after Rietveld, we are not asked to engage with the extremity of a rebuilt Farnsworth House but, rather, with the relatively small and modest restructuring of a piece of furniture.
Some of Levine’s line and outline “technique” undergoes an interesting reversal in her republished book where the Flaubert story remains intact while the disposition of the lines on the page, the typography, the pages in the book, the binding, the title page, and so on are all changed. One might say in a general way that one of the curious by-products of Levine’s work of appropriation is to underwrite and examine the difference between text and object—between lines on a page and outlines in space, between the voided shape of writing and the all-shape of the object. This would also have particularly interesting consequences in architecture, where the difference between text and object is drastically upheld. The architectural model and drawing—precursors to the object in space—seem to absorb the textual energy, the play of significance, of the building itself, releasing it to stand falsely as a silent monument that can be celebrated or vilified.
A quite bizarre way of characterizing Levine’s relation to word, line, flesh, object comes to mind here. Her work resonates, in some way, with the same issues that one finds in the science of taxidermy. Donna Haraway recently theorized taxidermy in her remarkable book Primate Visions. In this book she talks about Carl Akeley, who began in the art of taxidermy in 1880 by stuffing P. T. Barnum’s elephant Jumbo, and who went on to create the most magnificent scenes of human and animal origins in natural history museums everywhere. As Haraway says, “The end of [Akeley’s] task came in the 1920s, with his exquisite mounting of the Giant of Karisimbi, the lone silverback male gorilla that dominates the diorama depicting the site of Akeley’s own grave in the mountainous rain forest of the Congo, today’s Zaire. So it could inhabit Akeley’s monument to the purity of nature, this gorilla was killed in 1921. … From the dead body of the primate, Akeley crafted something finer than the living organism; he achieved its true end, a new genesis.” Taxidermy, as Haraway argues, is a foundational modernist instance of genetic experimentation that helps prepare the way for later experiments in genetic restructuring. As she goes on to say: “Decadence—the threat of the city, civilization, machine—was stayed in the politics of eugenics and the art of taxidermy.”2
Taxidermy is a science of preservation, curatorial restaging, and facsimile reproduction. Without going into the details of Haraway’s argument here—which are interesting but not important to this particular discussion—I want to suggest that there is a somewhat parallel, and unsuspected (i.e., surprising to me), critique of “concepts of animacy” in Levine’s work. Architecture is also taxidermic in the sense that architecture outlines specific spaces with specific skins in order to “animate” that space. Part of my point is that Levine is already practicing a kind of architecture with respect to her art—through her technique of outlining—even before she explicitly afters Rietveld. The stuffing part (of taxidermy, architecture, Levine’s objects) is important, but I will return to it later.
First, let me speak generally. Architectural practice seeks—like an organism—to maintain differences in the face of undifferentiated space. Among other things, architecture classically partitions space. But architecture also “animalizes” space in the sense of maintaining its distinctness as object from the realm of the subject. And, further, architecture acts as animal in the sense that it makes culture and is made by culture in much the same way as the animal—by filling in, with classifiable difference, the place of the inert, spatial, speechless other. This is also the place, classically, of the sexless, genderless, nameless other. But this form that architecture assumes—the form we see finally as building—can never be, and indeed never is, the form of the human body. The strangeness of this fact is made only more strange by the existence of a humanist tradition in architecture that takes the human body as scaling mechanism. The humanist tradition—broadly stated, the idea that architecture addresses the problem of the human body and spirit in space—is differently configured by different theorists. In Alberti’s Ten Books of Architecture, for example, the building itself is repeatedly likened to an anatomy (presumably human), whereas in Le Corbusier’s architecture, the body, fluidly drawn as the modular, is supposed to act as a measure for proportional harmony. I am often stopped in my tracks by one thought whenever I consider this humanist tradition: How can it be, how can it be, that these (architectural) forms came out of, and are set in relation to, this (human) body? In other words, I am struck by the almost total incommensurability between architecture and body, both physically and conceptually. Rietveld, in the context of this question and the problem of scale and taxidermy, becomes an interesting case.
Rietveld’s theory of both furniture and architecture, like those of many of his contemporaries, was that these acts were about space, the partitioning of space. The Zig-Zag Chair (and, of course, the Red Blue Chair) diagrams the space of its occupation by dissecting it rather than containing it. It tries to “leave the space untouched.”3 The “inside” of this chair is not a positive space of identity. It contains nothing. The planes and planar dissections of modernist buildings in architecture were also attempting to outline space, not contain it as shape. Rietveld came to architecture through furniture. The interesting thing about furniture is that it is also intimately tied with theories of the human body and with the idea of that body in motion and at rest. Rietveld, as with all interesting furniture designers, troubles this difference. One of the most problematic things about designing a chair, for example, is the fact that the body is always moving in it—the chair must be strong enough to endure constant jolting but light enough to be moveable. And, on the other side, the built-ins that Rietveld used in a number of his houses are about attaching this moving furniture to the static house in order to anchor it. So stasis and movement change places frequently in the proprieties of furniture and architecture. But furniture is never felt to impinge in any way on architecture. It is resolutely held at domestic scale and is considered to be a matter of interior design, not architecture. Rietveld was working on both sides of this seemingly immutable difference between furniture and architecture.
Because of the many problems attending the position I am setting up, it will be difficult to maintain the deceptively simple distinction between matter and outline, shape and flesh, space and partition. Both the success and the failure of the modernist project were about the confusion of these distinctions. Certainly the idea of the inside—of containment—proved to be more tenacious than many modernists thought. One might say that modernist architecture was undone by its inside stuff. Under scrutiny, the modernist vocabulary of formalism in architecture became a morass of inarticulate limits, falsely held differences, and romantically maintained theories about the inside and outside. At what point does the outline end and matter begin? Where—thinking of Jacques Derrida’s parergon—does the inside begin and the outside end?4
Along with the problem of the inside comes the problem of the original, although the connection is, at first, not so obvious. There has been, perhaps, no theme, no central problem, no conundrum so great in the twentieth century as the so-called “loss of the original.” From Benjamin to Baudrillard, the problem of the original is intertwined with technologies of production, reproduction, and media—photography, film, computer, photocopy machines, television, advertising. All of this is familiar to us and we wouldn’t need to go over this ground again except that there is an ongoing perversity to this discourse—mainly the fact that the problematic of the original, indeed the aura of the original itself, never disappears. The idea of the “original copy,” in contemporary culture, is not an oxymoron. Simultaneous with the production of the copy was the desire to frame it, sell it, make it legally binding, make it valuable, etc. Since the discovery of mediation, which is always at work in the appropriation of “originality,” is an infinitely fascinating subject from a critical standpoint—particularly in its early days, when it was a ubiquitous critical strategy that could be deployed with amazing results practically anywhere—it is not surprising that much of the work on Sherrie Levine’s appropriation projects has concentrated on what one might call “degrees of loss and separation.” I am curious about this myself but I am even more curious about the less ideologically clear territory of the “inside” of the forms that are being copied.5
But I do not mean to say that “originals” and “insides” have remained intact and inviolate throughout modernism and poststructuralism. Instead I want to suggest—and this is why Levine’s work seems so interesting to me from an architectural standpoint—that at some point the inside began to be the same as the taxidermic inside, a different substance than the outline suggests. Thus “space”—partitioned, contained, furniture space, architectural space—can no longer be seen as staying the same, staying neutral, once it has been animated. Taxidermy gives flesh to an outline but not “content” in the usual sense. Levine’s (genetic) alteration of the inside of her pieces—her meticulous dealing with the flesh of the piece—weighs against the borrowed outline just as a stuffed deer weighs against a live deer.
The Rietveld table that Levine has “copied” is widely available now in a kit of Rietveld drawings and plans. It was part of the crate furniture that Rietveld began working on in 1934. “These [were] an armchair, a low table [Levine’s model] and bookcase made of deal boards measuring 14.5 centimeters across and varying in length from 45, 60, 90 to 105 centimeters ... joined together with tongue-and-groove screws. The chair also has six smaller boards which are necessary for the construction. The furniture was delivered as a do-it-yourself kit and had to be assembled by the customer.” The crate furniture was packaged by Metz and Co. as “weekend furniture.” The deal planks, a cheap crating material, in the table that Levine has copied are of equal width. This, along with the open joints, struck Rietveld as producing a “tranquil impression.”6 Later Rietveld designed many pieces of furniture out of deal planks, often combining, in his architectural projects, crate furniture with his zig-zag furniture. Crate furniture could be easily broken down and packed in a crate of the same material for shipping, which produced a strange sense of inside-outness to the table.
Sherrie Levine, Large Krate Table, 1993. Unfinished ash, 25 × 31½ × 32½ inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
Rietveld, until recently, rightly or wrongly, has been known to us through only two projects, one of them the Red Blue Chair, the other the Rietveld Schröder House—both done during the de Stijl period of his work. Rietveld designed more than 680 furniture and architectural projects in his life—most of which were built. To pick out one table from this obscure crate-furniture series, enlarge it a bit, fabricate it six times out of white ash, and then exhibit it is complicated in ways that many of Levine’s projects are complicated. Since exhibition instantaneously produces a kind of history of the object exhibited, we might say that Levine’s “after Rietveld” has the same curatorial cast as some of her other projects. She wants to bring out something that has been hidden, give it some play. But in this case, I would add another persona to the curatorial personas of taxidermist, historian, museum director: namely, the collector—the one who makes certain parts of the past valuable by giving it a price. Her interest in the economy of art and exhibition is long-standing and intimately tied to the issues of originality and authentic/inauthentic interiors that I have been discussing.
In Levine’s “after Rietveld,” Rietveld’s table has been troped, as I began to discuss earlier, primarily by a change of scale. On the surface, scale seems as close to a purely formal issue as one can get, and needless to say, like all such apparent neutralities, the issue of scale is loaded. Unlike, say, architectural materials or proportion (relation of parts to whole), there has never really been a theory of scale in architecture. While I find it of immense interest that Levine often changes the material of her “originals,” I find the change of scale (and for different reasons the choice of the number of iterations) even more interesting. In the case of the Rietveld table, Levine enlarged the scale by fifty percent. This was, to paraphrase Levine, a way of giving the table a “sculptural” rather than “furniture” identity. The scale change may push this piece into sculptural space, but it also pushes it in the direction of architectural space. And, further, to make furniture sculptural, and then exhibit it as sculpture in some other space that is, probably, architectural (larger, designed), is a curious twist on the three conditions of furniture, sculpture, and architecture. This would not be true if the piece were “merely” sculptural in the sense of achieving a kind of objecthood different from its functional objecthood as furniture. To after Rietveld is, then, to enter into these problems since Rietveld, perhaps more than most modernists, worked in the midst of these tensions.
Architecture is always already an after condition—which is also a point often made about the photographs, painting, and sculpture that Levine copies. Nothing about artistic production is given a priori. But in the case of architecture, it is not only the force of precedent or social and political representation or technical mediation that predates and preconditions the building; it is also the impossibility of doing architecture directly. Architecture is not the science of building a building, it is the science of translation from blueprint to building, where we know that the translation is neither linear nor complete. It is not that I want to make Levine’s work an honorary architecture—which is not only a dubious honor but a presumptuous one. But the architecturality of her work—an architecturality that is embedded in these tenuous issues of how to govern space with an object, the matter of the outline, the outline/interior disjunction, the progression up the ladder of object scales, problems of originality and translation—seems to find an unexpected appropriateness with the subject of architecture that she is now undertaking.