1 The landmark “International Style” exhibition of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 was much criticized for its emphasis on style over function. Yet style came to be a primary function of much of that design, and this is even more the case with “global styles” today.
2 This book consists of case studies, which are hardly complete analyses; I might have chosen other figures, too, but these are the most telling ones for me. On the reordering of art after Minimalism see Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983). Anthony Vidler offers his own map of “Architecture’s Expanded Field” in Vidler, ed., Architecture Between Spectacle and Use (Williamstown: Clark Art Institute, 2008). In Nothing Less Than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), Michael Linder focuses on the role of architecture in the discourse of Minimalism. And in “Minimalism: Sculpture and Architecture” (in a special issue of Art and Design of 1997), Stan Allen suggests that “what lies between the arts” is not “theater,” as Michael Fried claimed in “Art and Objecthood” (1967), but “architecture”—i.e. that the expanded field of art after Minimalism was an opening to space as much as to time.
3 See, among other texts, Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, transl. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992), and Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, transl. Michael Pollack (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). I also adapt the term “banal cosmopolitanism” from Beck. As for skepticism, I agree with T.J. Clark that “modernity” is largely mythical in its promise of mobility, and I agree with Fredric Jameson that it tends to aestheticize whatever it touches. See T. J. Clark, The Painter of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), and Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002).
4 See B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Theater a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 1999). Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, speaks of an “attention economy” in which corporations compete for “eyeballs.”
5 See Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typology,” Oppositions 1 (1977).
6 So defined, a medium cannot be wholly invented, as some suggest today, or rather, to the extent that it is so made up, it can have only little purchase on the present, let alone on history. Even as modernist art aspired to specificity (e.g. “purity”), it was also tempted by hybridity (e.g. the Gesamtkunstwerk), so this difference does not distinguish it adequately from postmodernist art. However, they do have different proclivities, and, by analogy with “object-choice” in Freud, we might see modernist art as “narcissistic,” as it cathects its own image first and foremost, and postmodernist art as “anaclitic,” as it is often “propped” on other forms. This propping of art on architecture and vice versa is a central dynamic of the complex in question here.
In 1978 Rosalind Krauss opened her crucial essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” with a description of Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys by Mary Miss: “Toward the center of the field there is a slight mound, a swelling on the earth, which is the only warning given for the presence of the work. Closer to it, the large square face of the pit can be seen, as can the ends of the ladder that is needed to descend into the excavation …” Krauss located “site-constructions” such as this one between “architecture” and “landscape,” and thus unfolded her structuralist map of practices, beyond sculpture proper, located vis-à-vis other oppositions such as “landscape” and “not-landscape,” “architecture” and “not-architecture,” and so on. In 1910, in an essay simply titled “Architecture,” Adolf Loos presented a similar scene with a different moral: “If we were to come across a mound in the woods, six foot long by three foot wide, with the soil piled up in a pyramid, a somber mood would come over us and a voice inside us would say, ‘There is someone buried there.’ That is architecture” (Adolf Loos, On Architecture, transl. Michael Mitchell [Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2002]: 84). An origin-myth of architecture, it can also serve as such for the primordial marking that is sculpture: architecture and sculpture might be said to fight over that burial mound. This speaks to my sense of medium-differentiality, which assumes a field less of conceptual oppositions and negations à la Krauss than of similarities and differences that are material, formal, functional, conventional, above all historical.
7 For more on how some artists have responded to this aspect of the “experience economy,” see Tim Griffin, “Compression,” October 135 (Winter 2010).
8 Here, “complex” returns us to the structuralist field of recent art mapped by Krauss. The theorist A.J. Greimas pioneered the semiotic configuration also known by this name, but it has a different valence in his work: as Fredric Jameson writes, “it constitutes a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still of the closure of ideology itself, that is, as a mechanism which while seeming to generate a rich variety of possible concepts and positions remains in fact locked into some initial aporia or double bind that it cannot transform from the inside by its own means” (A.J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, transl. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]: xv). In short, expansion can harden into constriction.
9 This term has a specific meaning in architectural circles, where it is used to draw a line in the sand after the reflexivity of such architects as Peter Eisenman, yet it also bears on a general dissatisfaction with critique. See, for example, Bruno Latour and Peter Galison, eds, Iconoclash (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2002).
1 Of course, architecture as sign or advertising precedes World War II, as in the Reklame Architektur of the 1920s. For a helpful account see Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
2 On Pop vis-à-vis this changed semblance, see my The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter and Ruscha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
3 See Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960).
4 See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). The book began as a studio conducted in fall 1968 at Yale and Las Vegas; its historical argument was prepared by Venturi in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). For a recent review of the postmodernism debate, see Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010).
5 Alison and Peter Smithson, “But Today We Collect Ads,” Ark 18 (November 1956): 50. This paragraph and the next are adapted from Chapter 1 of The First Pop Age, where more can be found on the Independent Group and “This is Tomorrow.”
6 Ibid.
7 Banham, Theory and Design: 11.
8 Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” Art 1 (September 1, 1955): 3.
9 As the Smithsons suggested, this move was in keeping with a shift in influence away from the architect as a consultant in industrial production to the ad-man as an instigator of consumerist desire. “The foundation stone of the previous intellectual structure of Design Theory has crumbled,” Banham wrote in 1961; “there is no longer universal acceptance of Architecture as the universal analogy of design.” (“Design by Choice,” Architectural Review 130 [July 1961]: 44). On this point see Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
10 Banham in 1960, cited in Whiteley, Reyner Banham: 163.
11 Alison and Peter Smithson, “Thoughts in Progress,” Architectural Design (April 1957): 113.
12 Banham, “A Clip-On Architecture,” Design Quarterly 63 (1963): 30. John McHale, a fellow IG member, was an important advocate of Archigram as well.
13 Banham in Peter Cook, ed., Archigram (London: Studio Vista, 1972): 5. Like Tom Wolfe, his enemy-twin in gonzo journalism, Banham developed a prose that is also a key Pop form, for it mimics linguistically the consumerist landscape of image-overload and commodity-glut; it, too, is plug-in and clip-on in character.
14 Banham, “Clip-On Architecture”: 30.
15 At least in part, this difference stems from their formations. Venturi was trained in the Beaux Arts tradition at Princeton in the late 1940s, and spent an influential year at the American Academy in Rome, while Scott Brown, though schooled at the Architectural Association in London in the early 1950s, departed early on for the United States, where she eventually partnered with Venturi. Banham came to the States, too, in 1976, but his Pop concerns were always inflected in other ways, as a comparison of Learning from Las Vegas with his Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) reveals.
16 Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas: 101.
17 Ibid.: 87.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.: 90.
20 Ibid.: 13.
21 Ibid.: 52. One might argue that this conflation of corporate trademark and public sign was another lesson of Pop art, yet it was rarely affirmed there: for example, the “Monuments” of Claes Oldenburg—his giant baseball bats, Mickey Mouses, hamburgers, and the like—do not champion this substitution so much as they underscore its inadequacy.
22 Ibid.: 9.
23 Ibid.: 75.
24 Ibid.: 74. This is actually a quotation from Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964): 5.
25 Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas: 139. Despite their critique of modern masters, the Venturis drew their strategy from Le Corbusier. In Vers une architecture (1923) Corb juxtaposed classical structures and industrial commodities, such as the Parthenon and a Delage sports car, in order to argue for the classical monumentality of Machine Age object-types. The Venturis adjusted these ideological analogies to a commercial idiom: “Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza”; billboards punctuate Las Vegas as triumphal arches punctuated ancient Rome; signs mark the Strip as towers mark San Gimignano; and so on (Ibid.: 18, 106, 107, 117). If Corb moved to classicize the machine (and vice versa) in the First Machine Age, the Venturis moved to classicize the commodity-image (and vice versa) in the First Pop Age. Sometimes the association between Las Vegas and Rome became an equation: the Strip is our version of the Piazza, and so the “agoraphobic” autoscape must be accepted (on which more follows).
26 Their studio visited Ruscha at the time, but in the end the Venturis might share less with Ruscha on Los Angeles than with Tom Wolfe on Las Vegas, especially his version of Pop language (see note 13) as practiced, for example, in his “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!” in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965). Previously, Venturi made the connection to Pop in “A Justification for a Pop Architecture” in Arts and Architecture 82 (April 1965), as did Scott Brown in “Learning from Pop” in Casabella 359/360 (December 1971). Aron Vinegar touches on this topic in I Am a Monument: On “Learning from Las Vegas” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
27 On both Warhol and Ruscha, see (among many other texts) chapters 3 and 5 of The First Pop Age.
28 Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas: 80. The Venturi take is only slightly different: “Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square … they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television” (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: 131).
29 Richard Hamilton, Collected Words: 1953–1982 (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1983): 233, 78; Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas: 161.
30 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1980): 281. This dystopian shadow is also present, for instance, in the New Babylon project (1958–62) of the Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who re-imagines select cities in Europe as liberated spaces for play—yet such is the ambiguity of his diagrams that these spaces can sometimes be read as constrictive enclosures.
31 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): 46 et passim. This phrase can also be reversed: the fantasy of the technological.
32 Koolhaas has defined his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Dalíesque terms as a “machine to fabricate fantasy,” but some of the OMA “fantasies” have come true at a Corbusierian scale (Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL [New York: Monacelli Press, 1995]: 644). Koolhaas also has a Corbusierian knack for catchy concepts (possessed by Banham and the Venturis, too), which, in good Pop fashion, he has presented as if copyrighted. In a sense the Corb-Dalí combination is not as singular as it might seem: a Constructivist-Surrealist dialectic was at the heart of the historical avant-garde, and its (impossible) resolution was a partial project of several neo-avant-gardes—from the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Situationists, through Archigram and Price, to Koolhaas and OMA.
33 Koolhaas, Delirious New York: 203.
34 Rem Koolhaas and OMA, Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2003): 489.
35 Ibid.
36 Just to be clear: the critique here is not that Gehry violates the (semi-)mythical principle of structural transparency, but that this disconnection often produces null spaces that deaden the architecture and disorient its subjects.
37 Already in his 1989 project for the Sea Terminal in Zeebrugge, Koolhaas posed this effect as an architectural question/ambition: “How to inject a new sign into the landscape that—through scale and atmosphere alone—renders any object both arbitrary and inevitable?” (Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL: 582). I return to the transformation of image into “atmosphere” in Chapter 7.
38 Michael Hays writes of this phenomenon:
It is as if the surface of the modern envelope [his example is the Seagram Building of Mies], which already traced the forces of reification and commodification in its very abstraction, has been further neutralized, reappropriated, and then attenuated and animated at a higher level … This new surface [his example is the Seattle library by Koolhaas] is not made up of semiotic material appropriated from popular culture (as with Venturi and Scott Brown) but, nevertheless, is often modulated through procedures that trace certain external programmatic, sociological, or technological facts (what designers refer to as “datascapes”).
See Hays, “The Envelope as Mediator,” in Bernard Tschumi and Irene Chang, eds, The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003): 66–7.
39 A further twist on Pop architecture has become apparent. If in the 1960s there was talk of “meta-forms,” and in the 1970s of “mega-structures,” today one might speak of “hyper-buildings.” Ironically, such architecture has returned the engineer, that old hero of modern architecture, to the fore. One such figure is the Sri Lankan engineer, Cecil Balmond, without whom some hyper-buildings could not have been conceived, let alone executed (he has collaborated with Koolhaas since 1985, and with other celebrated designers more recently). Another is Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish artist-designer also in great demand for his emblematic structures, and we will meet others in subsequent chapters. Such engineering-as-architecture might signal a return to tectonics, but, if so, tectonics are here transformed into Pop image-making as well. Consider the transit hub designed by Calatrava at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan: he intends its roof of ribbed arcs to evoke the wings of a released dove, no less. If Daniel Libeskind proposed a design for “Ground Zero” that would have turned a site of personal trauma into a field of national triumphalism, Calatrava proposes a post-9/11 Prometheanism in which humanist spirit and imperial technology are also difficult to distinguish—and this phenomenon is hardly confined to Manhattan. In such (post-9/11) instances, advanced engineering is placed in the service not only of corporate logo-making but also of mass moral-uplift, and it will likely serve in this way wherever the next mega-spectacle (e.g. the 2012 Olympics in London) lands.
1 Kenneth Powell, Richard Rogers: Architecture of the Future (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006): 241. All other page references given in the text are to this volume.
2 So it goes, a pragmatist would say (perhaps too quickly), for any successful practice in this neoliberal era; the test is what one can accomplish given these conditions.
3 Reyner Banham, “A Clip-On Architecture,” Design Quarterly 63 (1965): 30.
4 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976): 17.
5 Rogers was born in Florence to Anglo-Italian parents who left for England just prior to World War II; his older cousin was the important Italian architect Ernesto Rogers (1909–69).
6 See Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament, ed. and transl. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). That such participation is not opposed to spectacle is a possibility I explore in Chapter 10.
7 Most recently, in 2010 Prince Charles intervened to squash the redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks in Belgravia, which the Qatari royal family had commissioned RRP to do (its scheme called for 548 apartments, half of which would be affordable, spread over fourteen glass-and-steel buildings). This was done in utter disdain for the planning process (the design had won support from council officers).
1 See Norman Foster, “Introduction,” in Catalogue: Foster and Partners (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005): 6–15. All other page references given in the text are to this volume.
2 This was as of 2005; there are far more today.
3 Its value is comparable to that of some clients, too. In 2007 the private equity firm 3i acquired Foster + Partners for circa £350 million; at the time Foster was reported to have owned more than 90 percent of the business.
4 The dream of total design is a recurrent one over the last century—from Art Nouveau and the Werkbund through design teams of the 1950s and 1960s such as the Eameses—but none of these instances matches the technical capacity of “Foster.”
5 They are also often in conflict: for example, glass walls offer transparency but not sustainability, and so must be shaded with expensive devices—fret patterns, louvers, and the like. On another topic, the talk of a reinvention of types seems immodest, but, as I suggested in the Preface, “Foster” might be involved in the invention of a new typology altogether.
6 For Freud the exhibitionist is the double of the voyeur. If this double position is our desired one as social subjects today (that is, if we love to look and be looked at), does this mean we are beyond the paranoia about the gaze that informs the accounts to which I refer here, namely the panopticon of Foucault and the spectacle of Debord? This question recurs in Chapter 6.
7 See Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
8 In prior affirmations of modernity, too, there was sometimes a theological dimension; think, for example, of how Hart Crane and Joseph Stella celebrated the Brooklyn Bridge as a cathedral (Rockefeller Center asks to be seen as one as well).
9 See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Rizzoli, 1978).
1 Its website (as of 2010) opens with a picture of an atelier filled with the old tools of the trade.
2 This firm remains very active, often represented in grand projects by the Sri Lankan engineer Cecil Balmond, who, as noted in Chapter 1, has worked closely with Rem Koolhaas, among others.
3 Patrick Buchanan, Renzo Piano, vol. 1 (London: Phaidon, 1993): 28.
4 This suggests that the piece is scale-dependent, and the diagrid of Foster is indeed more effective in smaller buildings. At the same time the piece has shifted somewhat from an objective element to a signature sign.
5 Philip Jodidio, Renzo Piano Workshop 1966–2005 (Cologne: Taschen, 2005): 10; Buchanan, Renzo Piano, vol. 1: 16.
6 I return to this ambiguous third way—of structure as decoration and/or atmosphere—in Chapter 7.
7 Buchanan, Renzo Piano, vol. 1: 27.
8 Buchanan, Renzo Piano, vol. 2 (London: Phaidon, 1995): 13.
9 Buchanan, Renzo Piano, vol. 1: 28, 19.
10 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today (1925), transl. James Dunnett (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987): 103.
11 Jodidio, Renzo Piano Workshop: 293.
12 A skeptic would say that the Center is a gesture of apology from a French government that gives back to the New Caledonians a simplistic version of their own Kanak culture, for which they are then asked to be grateful.
13 Piano quoted in Jodidio, Renzo Piano Workshop: 6.
14 Ibid.
15 Such lightness is exemplified in the 2004 redesign of MoMA by Yoshio Taniguchi, on which more in Chapter 7.
16 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (New York: Vintage Books, 1993): 8.
17 I return to this topic in Chapter 10.
18 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, transl. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, transl. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
19 Buchanan, Renzo Piano, vol. 1: 33. The assumptions and projections, though condensed in this passage, are apparent enough not to require unpacking here.
20 Piano quoted in Jodidio, Renzo Piano Workshop: 9.
21 On the familiar trope of classicism within modernism, see Chapter 1, note 25.
22 See, among other texts, Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000).
23 See, among other texts, Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, transl. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992).
24 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960): 193.
25 The classic text is Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983); but also see his Studies in Tectonic Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
1 Zaha Hadid quoted in Zaha Hadid: The Complete Buildings and Projects (New York: Rizzoli, 1998): 24. The catalogue for her 2006 show at the Guggenheim (also titled Zaha Hadid) contains useful essays by Germano Celant, Joseph Giovannini, Detlef Mertins, and Patrik Schumacher.
2 See Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: The Architectural Press, 1960). As for the reception of Constructivism in architecture at this time, see Stan Allen and Hal Foster, “A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton,” October 106 (Fall 2003); for the corollary reception in art see Chapter 10. Suprematism was not as occluded historically: for example, an extensive sampling of Malevich paintings remained in Western Europe after they were exhibited in Berlin in 1927, and El Lissitzky was active in the West as a writer, editor, and lecturer.
3 Whether this connection is borne out is a question to take up in what follows. I allude here to an old distinction between kinds of postmodernism first proposed in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983).
4 Kasimir Malevich, “Non-Objective Art and Suprematism” (1919). There are various translations; I have used the one in Larissa Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910–1920 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982).
5 Hadid in Zaha Hadid (1998): 68, 24.
6 Aaron Betsky, “Beyond 89 Degrees,” in Zaha Hadid (1998): 9.
7 Patrik Schumacher, Digital Hadid (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2004): 5.
8 Hadid in Zaha Hadid (1998): 19, 20.
9 Ibid.: 82.
10 Ibid.: 20.
11 Ibid.: 130, 126.
12 Schumacher, Digital Hadid: 17. As Schumacher points out, these distortions can also unify space. In this respect, too, Hadid is part of a neo-Baroque turn in contemporary architecture, which I take up briefly in Chapter 8.
13 Hadid in Zaha Hadid (1998): 135.
14 Ibid.: 74.
15 As projects brought to Hadid have increased in scale, her attention has turned to the skyscraper (which certainly complicates her prior privileging of the horizontal axis). For a discussion of this direction in her office, see Patrik Schumacher, “The Skyscraper Revitalized: Differentiation, Interface, Navigation,” in Zaha Hadid (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006): 39–44.
16 If Eisenman updated this operation, Greg Lynn made it semi-automatic through the digital generation of designs. In Chapter 6, I explore a different relation to field work proposed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
17 Ibid.: 64, 133. “Frozen motion” is a play on the famous definition of architecture as “frozen music,” usually credited to Goethe in Conversations with Eckerman (published 1836), though Schelling used it previously in Philosophy of Art (published 1802–03).
18 Umberto Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973): 63. Here Boccioni points to what a truly Futurist architecture might be more persuasively than does Antonio Sant’Elia (who was largely dragooned into the movement). Boccioni also used axonometric projections in his sculptural practice.
19 For example, her Pau media complex and London aquatic center resemble giant seats or mammoth mollusks (in keeping with the fascination with biomorphology among digital designers). Her recent emphasis on image (especially in projects in the Middle and Far East) often overrides her commitment to abstraction, and aligns her practice with the sculptural architecture of Gehry.
20 This rethinking of architecture in terms of temporality points to the possible influence on Hadid of another young teacher at the AA during her years there, Bernard Tschumi. As we will see in Chapter 8, Richard Serra introduced temporality and mobility into sculpture precisely to disrupt its status as an image-object.
21 Hadid has designed not only exhibitions and displays but also sets (for opera and other performances).
22 One need not refer to Minimalism; this tension is already active in modern architecture, as in the Villa Savoye (1929) described here by Le Corbusier: “In this house, we are dealing with a true architectural promenade, offering constantly varied, unexpected, sometimes astonishing aspects. It is interesting to obtain so much diversity when one has, for example, allowed from the standpoint of construction an absolutely rigorous pattern of posts and beams” (Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2 [Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006]: 24).
23 Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum (Summer 1967): 80. See also Peter Eisenman, “Notes on Conceptual Architecture” (1971), in Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963–1984 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). On matters of translation see Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), and Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture Technique + Representation (New York: Routledge, second edn, 2009).
24 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), transl. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Although I critique his model in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), it seems appropriate in this case.
25 Schumacher, Digital Hadid: 7.
26 Like Gehry, Hadid is attracted to total design, which in her case includes a “Z” line of silverware, furniture, and jewelry as well as a prototype for a futuristic car. The iconography of the Second Machine Age was self-evident (grain elevators, skyscrapers, bridges, ocean liners, and so on); that of the Third is uncertain: how to make visible, let alone iconic, contemporary technologies? The Hadid swooshes already look dated; in some ways we are back to the past of the House of Future mentioned in Chapter 1.
27 Schumacher, “The Skyscraper Revitalized”: 44. This suggests that design is fated to be little more than a disciplinary diagram (on which more in Chapter 11).
28 Betsky, “Beyond 89 Degrees”: 13. On montage within the computer, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
29 Schumacher, Digital Hadid: 20. Jürgen Habermas first used this phrase in the early 1980s, and, following Hadid (see her first quotation in this text), her supporters have adapted it to describe her practice as well. Yet the Habermas term is “modernity,” not “modernism.” This slippage may seem slight, but it suggests a detachment of modernism from the greater project of modernity, a detachment that tends to reduce it to a repertoire of styles less able to engage the values of modernity, let alone the processes of modernization, critically.
1 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio founded Diller + Scofidio in 1979, and Charles Renfro joined as a partner in 2004; for the sake of simplicity I refer to the studio as DS+R throughout.
2 Although the ICA avoids excessive iconicity (it also turns away from the city toward the harbor), it is still intended by Boston authorities to be an economic attractor. The “Fan Pier” of which it is a part is under development by the Fallon Company as a link between the harbor front and the business district.
3 Nicholas Baume, “It’s Still Fun to Have Architecture: An Interview with Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro,” in Baume, ed., Super Vision (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): 186.
4 Ibid.: 187.
5 Nearly ten years later DS+R used a shallower arc to generate the scheme for Slither Building (2000), a 105-unit housing project in Gifu, Japan. Here each of the fifteen stacks of units is shifted 1.5 degrees from the one before it. As in the Eyebeam scheme two years later, tropes of seeing and snaking are combined—as if architecture might incarnate sight as live and mobile.
6 Diller in Baume, ed., Super Vision: 186.
7 Renfro in ibid.: 183.
8 Scofidio in ibid.: 186. DS+R are also “creative partners” in two prominent art museums to come, one for financier Eli Broad in downtown Los Angeles, another for the University of California at Berkeley.
9 As even a great proponent of this mode, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, has commented, “Collaboration is the answer, but what is the question?” (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, vol. 1 [Milan: Charta, 2003]: 410).
10 DS+R press release, n.d.
11 DS+R project note in Aaron Betsky and K. Michael Hays, eds, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio (New York: Whitney Museum, 2003): 51.
12 Project note in Betsky and Hays, eds, Scanning: 56. Of course, interdisciplinarity is (or was) a function of theory, too; here the theorists in question are Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.
13 Diller in Baume, ed., Super Vision: 179.
14 There is a relation here, too, to one segment of Interim (1984–89) by Mary Kelly, which shows images of black leather jackets twisted in the hysterical positions as typed by Charcot.
15 With allusions to Duchamp and Surrealism, some DS+R projects also disclose a neo-avant-garde aspect, but again it is in the register of art.
16 See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, transl. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005).
17 Betsky, “Display Engineers,” in Betsky and Hays, eds, Scanning: 23; note the appellation “artists.” To frustrate and to surf at the same time is an unlikely trick.
18 Hays, “Scanners,” in ibid.: 130, 133.
19 As suggested, there are a few models of interdisciplinarity in DS+R: on the one hand, a “fusion” of art and architecture; on the other, the sense that architecture is always already present in any art arrangement; on the one hand, a hybrid practice of installation, performance, and dance; on the other, design as a “creative partner.” In general, I will suggest below, there is a movement from the former to the latter in each pair, but sometimes they contradict one another in their discourse.
20 Edward Dimmendberg argues as much in his essay “Blurred Genres” in Betsky and Hays, eds, Scanning.
21 However media-savvy, DS+R design is not digitally driven. “We could have drawn this building completely by hand,” Renfro insists of the ICA (Baume, ed., Super Vision: 191).
22 DS+R, “Project,” in Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds, CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002): 354.
23 Ibid.: 355.
24 Ibid.
25 Diller in Baume, ed., Super Vision: 182.
26 On the other hand, the people can seem almost irrelevant here. The lush design and the video display above the bar are so attention-grabbing that hardly anyone seems to watch the actual arrivals.
27 Diller in Baume, ed., Super Vision: 183.
28 I return to this problem in Chapter 7.
29 This is not to suggest that site conditions (or, for that matter, program dictates) are the alpha-and-omega of good design; it is to say that I find the DS+R approach to site more persuasive than the Hadid approach. For more on this topic see Stan Allen, “From Object to Field: Field Conditions in Architecture + Urbanism,” in Practice: Architecture, Technique + Representation (New York: Routledge, second edn, 2009).
30 The plan did have its opponents. Extending Juilliard and Alice Tully changed both, and fans of Pietro Belluschi, the architect of Juilliard (1969), took umbrage. Moreover, the restaurant altered the North Plaza pool, the work of the beloved landscape architect Dan Kiley, which also ruffled feathers. Yet in general DS+R are respectful of the late modernist styles of such Center architects as Eero Saarinen (Vivian Beaumont, 1965), whose signature curves are echoed in their restaurant, Max Abramovitz (Philharmonic Hall, 1962), Wallace Harrison (Metropolitan Opera House, 1966), Philip Johnson (New York State Theater, 1964), and Gordon Bunshaft (Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, 1965). Indeed DS+R seem devoted to this period style; for example, with details like stone patio flooring and white leather chairs, the Brasserie anticipated the retro fashion of Mad Men.
31 Diller in Baume, ed., Super Vision: 190. This is not to say that DS+R shy away from media images; on the contrary, there are five screens scrolling text in front of Alice Tully Hall, and thirteen four-by-eight-foot LED screens (with thirty-seven different video sequences) on West Sixty-Fifth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues.
32 I return to this opposition in Chapter 8. Hopefully, similar benefits will accrue from Governor’s Island, a 172-acre former military base in Upper New York Bay that DS+R will refashion as a parkland in collaboration with West 8 landscape designers and Roger Marvel Architects.
1 Le Corbusier borrowed two photographs of grain elevators from Gropius, who had published them in Jarhbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes in 1913.
2 See Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: US Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
3 See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Structure plays a dual role here: on the one hand, its materiality aligns it with mass (if not always volume); on the other, its clarity aligns it with transparency.
4 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (1928), transl. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1995): 153. As Giedion states here, in the nineteenth century transparency was evident in engineered buildings, but not in architected ones. For an overview of the principle of transparency see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000): 286–8. On later reinterpretations see Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), and Terence Riley, Light Construction (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995).
5 See László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: Dover, 1938), and Chapter 9. Even more than Giedion, Moholy celebrated “dematerialization.”
6 Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 46. “[I]nterpenetrate without an optical destruction of each other” is a quotation from György Képes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobold, 1944): 77. A second part of the “Transparency” essay was published in Perspecta 13/14 (1971).
7 I return to this tension in Chapter 10, where I address the ambiguous afterlife of Minimalism in recent art. One could also argue that Rowe and Slutzky represent a sophisticated understanding of both structure and surface, and thus are equally aligned with Minimalism; certainly other Rowe texts, such as “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,” are concerned with the Minimalist tension between objective form and perceived shape.
8 On this point see Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Parts 1 and 2,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), my “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), and Stan Allen, “Minimalism: Sculpture and Architecture,” Art and Design (1997).
9 For some people this is what Minimalism signified all along. See Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in Maurice Tuchman, American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles: LACMA, 1967), and James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001): 211–21. In a sense “Minimalism” is to recent architecture what “Cubism” was to modern architecture; elastic in its adaptation, it can be taken to support either the literal or the phenomenal.
10 This Constructivism is very different from the deconstructivist version, which is concerned with the disturbance of structure more than the transparency of construction.
11 Again, see my “The Crux of Minimalism.”
12 “Dia” means “through” in Greek. The modest word implies that the original foundation was a facilitator only, but many complained that Dia was courtly in its operation and elitist in its taste. Wright brought a new openness to the operation.
13 In a similar way a commitment to Minimalism also helped other architects emergent at the time, such as Herzog and de Meuron.
14 This space was closed in 2004, as funds were diverted to support the expensive Dia:Beacon project, on which more follows. Dia bucked the trend, which started in the early 1980s (at the dawn of neoliberalism), of lavish new museums of modern and contemporary art (for example, the Staatsgalerie designed by James Stirling in Stuttgart, the Museum für Moderne Kunst designed by Hans Hollein in Frankfurt). So did the Hallen für Neue Kunst in Schaffhausen, which was founded in 1982–83 by Urs and Christel Raussmüller for “the new art” also supported by Dia, in the converted Schoeller textile factory (c. 1912) on the Rhine, one of the first ferro-concrete buildings in Switzerland.
15 On this score Dia:Beacon is a disappointment: Govan anticipated 100,000 visitors a year, a number not met.
16 See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer 1967).
17 This empowerment cannot help but be illusory, that is to say, compensatory for the actual diminishment of individual agency in advanced capitalism. I return to this Minimalist sublime in Chapter 10.
18 Again, the prime determinant here is a greater culture given over to experiential intensity. What relation might this art have to such experience? Does its intensity counter the other one—or aestheticize it and cover for it somehow? I return to these questions in Chapter 10.
19 See Hal Foster, “On the Hudson,” London Review of Books, July 24, 2003. Dia:Beacon might risk status as a period piece not in spite of this insistence on “a continuous present” but because of it.
20 See Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), and Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Fall 1990).
21 In this silence it is still as though the recovery of modernist art in the form of the “Triumph of American Painting” were offered up as a cultural compensation for the actual devastation of Europe. The strong version of this story, developed by Clement Greenberg, was affirmed by William Rubin, who was curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA from 1967 to 1988. For Greenberg, advanced abstraction did not break with the artistic past but preserved its greatest qualities through self-critique. Such “modernist painting” served, then, not only to bracket other avant-garde practices, which indeed posited a break with tradition (the readymade, constructed sculpture, the found image, collage, photomontage), but also to paper over historical rupture as such: in effect, this account concentrated history on one medium, abstract painting, which provided a sense of continuity not to be had elsewhere. This salve also involved a sublimation of political energies into aesthetic ones, as Greenberg proudly admitted in the early 1950s: “Some day it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into ‘art for art’s sake,’ and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come” (“The Late Thirties in New York” [1957], in Art and Culture [Boston: Beacon Press, 1961]: 230). Although the new account is less Francocentric in the prewar and far less Americocentric in the postwar than previous presentations, MoMA still uses the arc of “modernist painting”—as testament to liberal democracy as well as to historical continuity—to bridge the mid-century cataclysm. As a result some practices in the late 1940s and early 1950s that address this cataclysm (for example, New Brutalism) but do not fit the MoMA story are given short shrift. See my “Museum Tales of Twentieth-Century Art,” in Therese O’Malley, ed., Dialogues in Art History (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2009).
22 The presentations of such departments as Architecture and Design, Drawings, and Photography, occur on the third floor.
23 On the founding of MoMA in 1929 there was no divide between modernist and contemporary, and as late as 1949 MoMA agreed to sell to the Metropolitan Museum of Art all work that had become established, to keep its focus on the new and the now; but that agreement was voided only four years later.
24 This effect underscores the pictorial bias of a collection governed by the trajectory of “modernist painting,” as noted in note 21.
25 Riley curated “Light Construction” at MoMA in 1995; Taniguchi was hired in 1997.
26 Widely reported at the time, this statement sounds apocryphal, but it still suits the refinement of the design. Is that what money wants—to disappear? Or is this only, or especially, true in an age of finance capitalism?
27 Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” in Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2004): 170. This comment plays on the notorious text “Ornament and Crime” (1908), by Adolf Loos.
28 This sublimation is also techno-scientific. As we saw in Chapter 4, Riley concurs with Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millenium, whom he quotes here: “ ‘I look to science to nourish my vision in which all heaviness disappears’; and further, ‘the iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightlessness’ ” (Light Construction: 21).
29 Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in Wilfried Wang, Herzog & de Meuron (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1992): 193, 187.
30 Herzog and de Meuron, “Essays and Lectures,” in Wilfried Wang, Herzog & de Meuron (Zürich: Artemis, 1994): 142.
31 Jean Nouvel, “The Cartier Bldg,” n.d.; Riley, Light Construction: 11.
32 Herzog and de Meuron, “Essays and Lectures”: 145. “Glass isn’t glass anymore,” they comment elsewhere; “it’s as solid and stable as stone or concrete. Conversely, by printing on concrete, it suddenly becomes porous or shiny like glass” (Herzog & de Meuron [1992]: 194).
33 “The cloud is the appropriate symbol for the new definition of transparency,” Riley writes in Light Construction, as if in anticipation of the Blur Building; “translucent but dense, substantial but without definite form, eternally positioned between the viewer and the distant horizon” (15). Here “atmosphere” begins to emerge as a soft version of the sublime (on which more in Chapter 10).
34 Recently the enigmatic was advocated as such by Charles Jencks, for whom a wide range of monumental buildings—from the Guggenheim Bilbao to the Swiss Re in London to the CCTV in Beijing—answer to this “injunction”: “You must design an extraordinary landmark [in his revision of Horace it must “have the power to amaze and delight”], but it must not look like anything seen before and refer to no known religion, ideology, or set of conventions” (Hunch 6/7 [Amsterdam: Berlage Institute, 2003]: 257). For Jencks the epitome here is the Guggenheim Bilbao: only Gehry, he writes, had the “courage [to] confront a major problem of the moment: the spiritual crisis, and the loss of a shared metaphysics.” Talk of spiritual crisis and metaphysical lack is always ideological, but at least Jencks is more forthright than others in this respect. Finally, however, such “enigmatic” architecture is another form of spectacular effect. (“Enigmatic” has a very different valence in psychoanalysis. For Jean Laplanche it describes the messages that as young subjects we receive, traumatically, from a world that we cannot understand. They are enigmas to us because they are signifiers of the unfathomed desires of the unfathomable others in our lives; as a result they lock us in a state of fascination, often paranoid in character. This effect of the “enigmatic signifier” is not too distant from the effect of some of the monumental buildings championed by Jencks.)
35 Herzog and de Meuron, “Essays and Lectures”: 145.
36 “The architectural project is, as its name denotes, a projection” (ibid.: 146).
37 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: 221. Vidler refers here to the Paris library project of Koolhaas, but this description is appropriate to some buildings by Herzog and de Meuron, and others, too. Riley advocates such “a vertigo of delay, blockage, and slowness” (Light Construction: 29), and he alludes to the Large Glass (1915–23) of Duchamp as a model of light construction that creates enigmatic surfaces and ambiguous spaces. But who wants an architecture based on the cold seduction of the “bachelor machine”?
38 “This is precisely the level we want to reach,” Herzog and de Meuron comment, “to incorporate in our architecture: the mental level of perception” (Wang, Herzog & de Meuron [1992]: 186). This Pop collapse of the phenomenological into the imaginary is what I mean by “faux phenomenology,” which I address again in Chapter 10 (where we will encounter artistic equivalents of this architectural position).
39 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, transl. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). As in Chapter 4, note the fetishistic structure here (“I know but nevertheless …”).
1 Richard Serra, Writings/Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 35.
2 In other words, even as Serra is committed to the internal necessity of (his) sculpture in a modernist manner, it has driven him to transform the medium beyond modernist recognition.
3 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975): 184.
4 Tony Smith as quoted by Robert Morris in the epigraph to his “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” Artforum (October 1966), reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993): 11.
5 Tony Smith in Samuel Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum (December 1966), reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art (New York: Dutton, 1968): 386. For more on these transformations see my “The Crux of Minimalism” (1987) in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), and Chapter 10.
6 For artists such as Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Morris, and Serra, pictorial conventions of figure and ground underwrote a model of art that is not only residually representational but also implicitly analogous to a private interiority of artistic conception that they wanted to bracket. For this generation meaning is public, performative, a matter of open research. See Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” Artforum (November 1973). As we will see below, Serra revises this position in work of the late 1980s and later; see also Chapter 11.
7 See Serra, Writings: 3–4. This is the first text included in this volume, which suggests its importance to Serra. On this logic of materials in the late 1960s, Serra commented in 1980: “What was interesting about this group [he mentions Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Michael Heizer, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, and Michael Snow] was that we did not have any shared stylistic premises, but what was also true was that everybody was investigating the logic of material and its potential for personal extension—be it sound, lead, film, body, whatever” (112).
8 See “Richard Serra in Conversation with Hal Foster,” in Carmen Giménz, ed., The Matter of Time (Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum, 2005). On prime objects see George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962): 33–9.
9 Not all prime objects came early. The first torqued ellipse appeared in 1996, and in 2000 Serra added to this list with new pieces that consist of spherical sections and toruses. To understand these forms, imagine a doughnut: its outside edge describes a spheroid section, while its inside edge describes a torus. Each has the same radius; yet Serra bends the inner edge of his toruses back around, so that, when put together with the spheroid sections, the two lock together like the nonsymmetrical shells of a collapsed clam or the warped sides of a wing, as they do in Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2000). Serra had never made a sculpture that cannot be entered bodily or visually somehow, and its closure troubled him, so in subsequent pieces he separated the sections and oriented them in different ways, as in Between the Torus and the Sphere (2003–05), which consists of four toruses and four spherical sections put together in an ensemble that produces seven passageways over a length of fifty-four feet, with entrances that range from six feet to thirty inches wide. One intuits that the modules of Between the Torus and the Sphere are the same as in Union of the Torus and the Sphere, and each work does appear as the obverse of the other: while Union foregrounds the surface qualities of the torus-sphere units—for it is all exterior that cannot be penetrated—Between elaborates its spatial possibilities—for its complex of corridors is all exterior. This play between object and passage continues in his work (on which more follows).
10 Serra, Writings: 7. For Serra, the line of painting that Minimalism diverted into object-making passed through Newman more than Pollock. Serra claims a lineage from Pollock, but a different one from the “legacy of Pollock” claimed by Kaprow (“the mystique of loosening up remains no more than a justification for Alan Kaprow” [7]).
11 Ibid.: 98.
12 Ibid. On the first, “phenomenological” move see Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra: A Translation,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); on the second, “picturesque” move see Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara,” October 29 (September 1984). For a time the Minimalist fixation on the object obscured the very shift to the subject that it otherwise inaugurated.
13 Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll”: 15; Serra as quoted in Bois, 34.
14 Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra/Sculpture,” in Richard Serra: Props (Duisberg: Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, 1994): 102. This essay was originally published in Richard Serra: Sculpture (New York: MOMA, 1986).
15 On these concepts see Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). As I suggest below, in such projects as the Monument to the Third International (1919–20) Tatlin had already combined architecture and sculpture, which is to say that Constructivism served as an architectural precedent as well as a sculptural one.
16 Serra, Writings: 45.
17 Michael Govan and Lynne Cook, “Interview with Richard Serra,” Torqued Ellipses (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997): 26. I do not discuss these different types at length as there are individual catalogues devoted to most of them.
18 “Despite what he says about it,” Bois remarked in 1984, “all of Serra’s work is based on the deconstruction of such a notion as ‘sculpture itself’ ” (“A Picturesque Stroll”: 36).
19 Serra, Writings: 141.
20 On the becoming-siteless of sculpture in Brancusi, see Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983).
21 See Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism.”
22 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Sculpture,” in Chantal Pontbriand, ed., Performance, Text(e)s & Documents (Montreal: Parachute, 1981): 55.
23 Ibid.: 56. Serra might agree—up to the last phrase “as sculpture”.
24 This critique of modernist sculpture as a compromise-formation between art and industry is anticipated, in elliptical form, in this “excursus on Art Nouveau” by Walter Benjamin in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935): “The transfiguration of the solitary soul appears its goal. Individualism is its theory … The real meaning of art nouveau is not expressed in this ideology. It represents art’s last attempt to escape from its ivory tower, which is besieged by technology” (Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, transl. Edmund Jephcott [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978]: 154–5).
25 Buchloh, “Michael Asher”: 59. Serra opted for Tatlin, as it were, over Duchamp, for the (un)making of sculpture over its (un)naming. He was wary of the emphasis in the readymade on consumption, at least in its neo-avant-garde reception. Indeed his credo remains productivist—“not a manipulator of a ‘found’ industrial product, not a consumer” (Serra, Writings: 168).
26 As suggested here, I differ from Buchloh in that, in my view, the effect of these paradigms was not immediate or total; see “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde” in Foster, The Return of the Real.
27 Serra, Writings: 169. The text in question is titled “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road.”
28 See, for example, Buchloh, “Michael Asher”: 59. This insistence on material and structural self-evidence might also appear regressive in relation to architecture today, where such values can only seem old-fashioned, but the statement was made in 1985, with postmodern design in mind.
29 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in The Mirror of Art, transl. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Doubleday, 1956): 119.
30 Ibid.: 119–20.
31 On Diderot see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). The Diderotian tableau underwrites the “modernist painting” advocated by Clement Greenberg as well as Fried.
32 This is how Fried glosses this passage in his brilliant essay “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet”: “I take this to mean that having irrevocably lost contact with its origins, the art of sculpture is unable to mobilize its past at all and so will forever lack a viable present” (Critical Inquiry [March 1984]: 521).
33 Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846”: 120.
34 See G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1820s), transl. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993): 76–97. Hegel understands architecture in a very peculiar way (his prime examples are almost sculptural, the obelisk and the pyramid) in part because he wants architecture to represent a “symbolic” modality in which material is inadequate to idea; hence its low position in his hierarchy.
35 In other words, Serra proposes first a reversal of the old Hegelian hierarchy (as with the Constructivists, the critique of painting pushes him toward architecture) and then a release from this hierarchy. Of course, this pressure from the middle is also a way to expand the adjacent categories.
36 Serra, Writings: 146. He returns to this principle at several points in this volume. I have aligned Serra with the different approach of deconstruction, which works within a given language in order to critique it.
37 As Bois noted in 1984, Serra betrays an ambivalence regarding the picturesque as it suggests a static, optical imaging of a site as well as a peripatetic, parallactic framing. He also seems to have regarded it as a discursive field already occupied by Smithson.
38 Serra, Writings: 171.
39 Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll”: 45. No one photograph will deliver the sculpture either, which is why a diagram is often required to comprehend the layout of a piece.
40 Serra, Writings: 163, 142.
41 See Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre, The Case for the Tectonic,” Architectural Design 60: 3–4 (1990), reprinted in Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture Theory 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). In particular Frampton bemoans “the universal triumph of Robert Venturi’s decorated shed … in which shelter is packaged like a giant commodity” (518). Frampton develops his position in his masterly Studies in Tectonic Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
42 Ibid.: 519. “We intend,” Frampton continues, “not only the structural component in se but also the formal amplification of its presence in relation to the assembly of which it is a part” (520). It might seem obvious that construction is fundamental to architecture—but it was not, say, to the Le Corbusier of Toward An Architecture (1923), who nominated surface, volume, and plane. Moreover, the tectonic is not, as it may sound, a technocratic notion; on the contrary, Frampton insists on the “poetic manifestation of structure in the original Greek sense of poesis as an act of making and revealing” (519).
43 Ibid.: 522. “Stereotomic,” Frampton tells us, is derived from the Greek for solid (stereotos) and cutting (tomia). The joint, he also reminds us, was primordial for Semper as well.
44 Ibid. To say that this apposition is universal is not to say that it is uniform: for Frampton cultural differences are marked in the different inflections given to the joint. Nonetheless, he lets the phenomenological slip into the ontological in a way that sometimes detracts from the specificity of his argument.
45 Serra, Writings: 180. In a sense Serra goes beyond Adolf Loos: not only is ornament a crime but imaging is taboo. And here he participates in an important iconoclastic (sometimes Protestant, sometimes Judaic) genealogy within modernism that gathers disparate practitioners like Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mondrian, as well as theorists like Greenberg and Fried.
46 Perhaps this sharing is also primordial. As Frampton tells us, tekton means, etymologically, carpenter or builder, a vocation that might be taken to precede and support architecture and sculpture alike.
47 Serra, Writings: 169.
48 See Marcel Duchamp, “The Richard Mutt Case,” The Blind Man 2 (1917). Especially in work after Tilted Arc, Serra referred to literary figures—from Herman Melville, cited in Call Me Ishmael (1986), to Charles Olson, cited in Olson (1986)—who were central to this American tradition of making as self-making. For its importance to Serra, see “Richard Serra in Conversation with Hal Foster”: 23.
49 T.S. Eliot made this phrase famous in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), in which he claims that a dissociation of thought and feeling has bedeviled English poetry since the seventeenth century.
50 Or, more precisely, it reveals an inconsistency in this structural logic, as Serra details in his description of the piece in Richard Serra: Sculpture 1985–1998 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998): 77.
51 Serra, Writings: 67.
52 The Constructivists worked in anticipation of a new industrial communist order, while Serra emerged amid the rusting of an old industrial-capitalist order. His position, then, is not as a futurist celebrant of the industrial tectonic but as an interested investigator of its structures. “We cannot repeal the industrial revolution, which is the cause of the urban glut,” he stated in 1986. “We can only work with the junk pile” (ibid.: 175). For Buchloh in 1981 this position appeared ideological; in figures like Smith and Chamberlain he saw “the image of the proletarian producer” combined “with that of the melancholic stroller in the junk yards of capitalist technology” (Buchloh, “Michael Asher”: 58).
53 To assist in the torqued ellipses, Serra employed the CATIA program used by Frank Gehry in the design of the Bilbao Guggenheim, but the ellipses provide an instructive contrast, “the total opposite of the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is built like a traditional nineteenth-century sculpture” (Govan and Cook, “Interview with Richard Serra”: 27).
54 In “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Intelligentsia” (1929), Benjamin suggests that the Surrealists were “the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded,’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them” (Reflections: 181). Here Benjamin looks back to the products of the Industrial Age circa eighty years before his moment; this same outmoded status has now overtaken the products of the Machine Age circa eighty years ago, and it is this status that might render this material more critical than nostalgic.
55 For a useful counter-proposal see Jesse Reiser, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). As we saw in Chapter 5, the logic of Hadid designs is more representational than tectonic.
56 In this sense the principle Serra stated in 1980—they “do not relate to the history of monuments. They do not memorialize anything. They relate to sculpture and nothing more” (Writings: 170)—is adapted but not violated. Rather than a disguised return to the monumental, there is an innovative recovery of the commemorative. Whereas the monument usually serves the authority of the state, the memorial sometimes bespeaks a different kind of collective remembering and marking.
57 See note 6. Important though they are, phenomenological readings of Serra à la Krauss and Bois cannot account for this psychological dimension.
58 Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”: 38.
59 Serra, Writings: 69.
60 Ibid.: 7.
61 In a 1988 meditation titled “Weight,” Serra writes of “the weight of history” threatened by “the flicker of the image,” by the dissolution of memory in media, which he seeks to counter through an evocation of “the weight of experience” (Serra, Writings: 185).
62 There is a “presentness” here, but in the sense less of Fried in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) than of Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940): “Thinking involves not only a flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (Benjamin, Illuminations [New York: Schocken Books, 1969]: 262–3).
63 This refusal of representation is also political—a refusal of populist gestures, a refusal to represent a public that no longer exists as such (as figurative public sculpture imagines it still to exist). By virtue of this same abstraction, the spiritual meanings of The Drowned and the Saved and Gravity do not constitute a secret or second-order symbolism. However, such pieces do insist on significance—as opposed to the lack thereof flaunted by most spectacular sculpture (for example, Jeff Koons) and most affective architecture (discussed in Chapter 7); at the same time, they also ground this significance in actual bodies and spaces—as opposed to most installation art (discussed in Chapter 10).
64 Over the last two decades experience and spirituality were often set in the register of trauma, with the Shoah turned into the paragon of history. Gravity commemorates the Holocaust but not in this manner. Its arrest is also different from the suspension discussed in Chapter 7.
65 Serra, Writings: 184.
66 See Chapter 11. As noted above, Minimalism conceived the body of the viewer in phenomenological terms as “preobjectival,” abstract, not disturbed by an unconscious. Feminist art subjected this phenomenological body to critique—it agreed that no one exists without a body but added that no body exists without an unconscious—and subsequent artists influenced by feminism (for example, Rachel Whiteread) have looked to a Minimalist idiom to draw out its psychological implications, which also suggests that they were there all along.
67 Serra, Writings: 112–14.
68 Krauss, “Richard Serra/Sculpture”: 56.
69 Peter Eisenman captures this relation in a 1983 conversation with Serra: “You are interested in self-referentiality, but not in a modernist sense … The context invariably returns the work to its sculptural necessities. The work may be critical of the context, but it always returns to sculpture as sculpture” (Serra, Writings: 150).
70 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, transl. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992): 28.
71 Ibid.: 29.
72 Govan and Cook, “Interview with Richard Serra”: 22.
73 His own description of these pieces summons attributes of the Baroque: “When you walk inside the piece, you become caught up in the movement of the surface and your movement in relation to its movement …” Or, “You become implicated in the tremendous centrifugal force in the pieces …” Ibid.: 17, 22.
74 Ibid.: 16.
75 This Constructivist/Surrealist dialectic is not an historical artifact, for it continued, say, in the opposition between deconstructivist and blob architectures in the 1990s.
76 See Anthony Vidler, Warped Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Elsewhere Vidler explains:
Ostensibly, there is as little to distinguish Alberti’s [perspectival] window from a computer screen as there is to differentiate an eighteenth-century axonometric by Gaspard Monge from a wire frame dinosaur generated by Industrial Light and Magic. What has changed, however, is the technique of simulation, and, even more importantly, the place, or position, of the subject or traditional “viewer” of the representation. Between contemporary virtual space and modernist space there lies an aporia formed by the auto-generative nature of the computer program and its real blindness to the viewer’s presence. In this sense, the screen is not a picture, and certainly not a surrogate window, but rather an ambiguous and unfixed location for a subject.
See Vidler, “Warped Space: Architectural Anxiety in Digital Culture,” in Terry Smith, ed., Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 291.
1 We can enter at other moments in the loop, and recognize it as “a line describing a cone” at any point. Although the film seems to invite us to accompany it, it is, of course, oblivious to our presence. In the days of grungy venues McCall relied on ambient dust and smoke to articulate the light; now he introduces mist.
In this chapter I focus on “the solid-light films,” especially the vertical ones, but McCall has produced other kinds of works, too, including pieces involving fire set in landscape, a photo sequence, a slide installation, as well as pieces that involve light without film per se, one of which he describes here:
Room with Altered Window was the first solid-light piece, made in 1973, a few months before Line Describing a Cone. I masked off my studio window using black paper with a vertical slit cut into it. The room was left dark, and light could only enter through the one vertical slit. Facing south, the blade of sunlight was projected through the aperture into my studio, and it traveled slowly around the room as the sun moved across the sky.
Lauren Ross, “Interview with Anthony McCall,” Museo (June 2010): n.p. On structural film see in particular P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–1978 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979).
2 For an excellent account of the intervening work see Branden Joseph, “Sparring with the Spectacle,” in Christopher Eamon, ed., Anthony McCall: The Solid-Light Films and Related Works (Evanston: North-western University Pres, 2005). Attention was returned to McCall with the exhibition “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977,” curated by Chrissie Isles at the Whitney Museum in fall 2001.
3 Tyler Coburn, “Interview,” in Serena Cattaneo Adorno, Breath [the vertical works] (Milan: Hangar Bicocco, 2009): 81.
4 In an email communication McCall comments on the ambiguity of the word “film” as follows:
I personally still use the word “film” as a convenient, descriptive short-hand for a “work,” even though “film’ is, strictly speaking, the word for the medium. Yet “film” is a simple, modest, familiar word, and it correctly connects the recent pieces to their materialist film-practice roots, even though they have in some way grown beyond them. And other terms are cumbersome (“projected sculpture,” “time-based light installations,” etc.).
5 McCall in Coburn, “Interview”: 76.
6 McCall: “From the start the films were intended to be shown in empty spaces, without a projection room, a screen or rows of seats. Just a large empty space” (ibid).
7 Anthony McCall, “Line Describing a Cone and Related Films,” October 103 (Winter 2003): 41.
8 This shift also has to do with a shift in venue and audience; see ibid.: 56–64. George Baker probes the relation of the films to sculpture incisively in “Film Beyond its Limits,” in Helen Legg, ed., Anthony McCall: Film Installations (Coventry: Warwick Arts Centre, 2004).
9 One might also mention the correspondence to dance. On this connection see McCall, “Line Describing a Cone”: 59–60.
10 Chrissie Isles makes this point in “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” in October 104 (Spring 2003): 80. Three works that follow Line are essentially installations: Long Film for Four Projectors (1974), Four Projected Movements (1975), and Long Film for Ambient Light (1975). See McCall, “Line Describing a Cone”: 51–6.
11 Line in particular evokes classical origin-stories of representation, such as the shadows on the cave wall in Plato and “the Corinthian maid” tracing the silhouette of her lover in Pliny.
12 See McCall, “Line Describing a Cone”: 57–62, and Joseph, “Sparring with the Spectacle.”
13 McCall:
I try to set the speed of motion at a threshold between no movement and movement. You recognize that change is underway, but you can tell that it is going to take a while. It reduces the anxiety about what may happen next. And it enables you to really watch change, which is actually a rather rare experience. You, the watcher, become the fastest thing in the room.
See Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone, “Anthony McCall,” Bomb Magazine (2006): 75.
14 In an email communication McCall elaborates on another crucial difference as follows:
People commonly attribute [the emotions they experience in the projections] to the magic of the veils of light, but I am not so certain that this reported pleasure would work if they were walking into or around projected slides of similar forms. I suspect that it is the slow motion—or the slow disclosure of structure—embodied, of course, as veils of light, that is the key to this. So I don’t think it is just the permeability of light that separates my pieces from those made of Corten steel. Rather, it is the fact that there is an additional element in play: in a Serra torqued ellipse the motion (and therefore the arrival at disclosure) is offered by the walking visitor. The same is true with my projected installations, except that the forms themselves are on the move as well. So there is a dynamic between the disclosure being offered by the mutation of the projected work and the disclosure as a product of a visitor’s walking exploration. This is roughly what you get when you fuse cinema and sculpture!
15 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972): 34.
16 A title like Line Describing a Cone cannot but recall a text like From Point to Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky, one of the great treatises in modernist training. (Also suggestive here is the famous definition of drawing offered by his Bauhaus colleague Paul Klee: “a line going out for a walk.”)
17 I consider these effects in recent installation art in Chapter 10.
18 See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” (1938); Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943); and Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Principles of Psych-Analysis (1973), transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978): 96, 106. For a rich account of this skepticism regarding the visual, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
19 McCall in Ellard and Johnstone, “Anthony McCall”: 71. McCall again: “Our whole experience of our corporeal selves is in relation to others. So representation sort of got it wrong, because it thinks the body is an object, which it isn’t. Cybernetically speaking, you have a circuit of communication, the bodies being two nodes within the circuit” (McCall in Coburn, “Interview”: 83–4). This ethics, perhaps evocative of Martin Buber or Emmanuel Levinas, is also intimated by the titles of such recent projections as You and I, Between You and I, Meeting You Halfway, and Coupling. For a provocative intervention in this philosophy of affective analogies see Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). And yet, as we will see, not every element of the projections is benign.
20 McCall uses these terms frequently in the two interviews cited above.
21 In addition, we tend not to be as interruptive of the light as we are with the horizontal pieces. This double connection to body and architecture is also remarked in the titles of two works-in-progress—Skin and Skirt.
22 In an email communication McCall distinguishes the floating wipe as follows:
The wipe used in Between You and I simply enters the frame from the left, passes through the frame, and exits right. As a result, the elliptical form begins complete and whole; then it is very slowly replaced by the traveling wave form, which produces a shifting combination of the two figures. By the time the wipe has exited, the ellipse has vanished, replaced by the traveling wave form, complete and whole. The “floating” wipe, on the other hand, never leaves the frame, but floats back and forth within the frame in a continuous liquid motion with both figures always in play.
23 For Serra’s discussion of these effects of his own recent work, see Chapter 11.
24 McCall:
I suppose that it is necessary to start with the reminder that these solid-light works exist in the dark, and that the dark holds all kinds of terrors. Even if we as adults have forgotten, every child understands this. Fire and light have traditionally been the protection against this void. In this context, a projected beam of light is at once an acknowledgement of the existence of the void, and at the same time an offer of safety (like the light-house beam was once for the sailor at sea).
See Bertrand Rougé and Charlotte Beaufort, “Interview with Anthony McCall,” Figures de l’Art 17 (2009).
25 McCall in Ellard and Johnstone, “Anthony McCall”: 73. This interview focuses on Between You and I, which was first shown at the decommissioned Round Chapel in London. As noted in Chapter 7, there is a modernist version of this spiritual light, too, as advanced by such visionary writers and designers as Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut, for whom light, transformed into a social medium by glass architecture, was to conduct us toward a utopian way of life.
26 László Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light,” in Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970): 31.
27 See László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, transl. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), and The New Vision (New York: Dover, 1938). See also my “The Bauhaus Idea in America,” in Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed., Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (London: Tate Publishing, 2006).
28 In this respect his neo-avant-garde move is not the stylistic gesture discussed in Chapter 5.
29 Broached in Chapter 8, this topic is central to Chapter 10.
30 McCall:
I have certainly been looking with considerable interest at the time-based work [in film and video installation] over the past few years. Obviously, this interest has not been dispassionate. What has often struck me, I think, is less what I have seen than what seems to be absent from what I have seen, namely, a focus on the physical here and now (“Round Table”: 96).
His aesthetic is also relational in a manner more profound than is usual with practices grouped under that rubric.
1 I refer to Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975). What I mean by “illusionism” is simple enough; it is captured here by Clement Greenberg in his summa “Modernist Painting” (1960): “The Old Masters created an illusion of space in depth that one could imagine oneself, but the analogous illusion created by the Modernist painter can only be seen into; can be traveled through, literally or figuratively, only with the eye” (The Collected Essays and Criticism, volume 4, ed. John O’Brian [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993]: 90). Illusionism, it might be argued, is all the more pure when all the more optical.
2 See my “The Crux of Minimalism” (1987) in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Almost all of these peers (Carl Andre is one exception) began as painters. Sculpture was not as discursively charged as painting, and Flavin insisted on his difference from it—really his indifference to it—even more than did Judd. “Please do not refer to my effort as sculpture and to me as sculptor,” Flavin wrote the curator Jan van der Marck on June 17, 1967, “I do not handle and fashion three-dimensioned still works, even as to Barbara Rose’s Juddianed ‘specific objects.’ I feel apart from problems of sculpture and painting.” See Dan Flavin: three installations in fluorescent light (Cologne: Kunsthalle Köln, 1973): 95. All other page references given in the text are to this volume.
3 Illusionism was also retained, indeed heightened, in much Pop art, especially in contemporaneous silk-screens by Andy Warhol. In “The Crux of Minimalism” I proposed a kind of dialectic of Minimalism and Pop in this regard—between the specific and the simulacral, the embodied and the disembodied, perceptual presence and mass-mediated representation—with the Pop terms not simply opposed to the Minimalist ones but also internal to them. However, as suggested in Chapter 7, this dialectic has reached a new level, with the Pop term now dominant.
4 Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum (May 1966): 24. See also Yve-Alain Bois, Donald Judd: New Sculpture (New York: Pace Gallery, 1991). On the early reception of Judd see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001): 45–61, 134–41.
5 Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion”: 24. Here the twenty-four-year-old Krauss is still under the sway of the Greenbergian reading of Smith. In his condemnation of Minimalism Greenberg related its objects to the pictorial rectangle and the Cubist grid. See “The Recentness of Sculpture” (1967), in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968).
6 The very seriality of much of his art sometimes seems to virtualize it as well.
7 Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975). For another account of “polarity” in Judd, see Richard Schiff, “Donald Judd, Safe from Birds,” in Nicholas Serota, ed., Donald Judd (London: Tate Publishing, 2004).
8 “All that art is based on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like”; see Judd in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd” (1966), in Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: 151. (Flavin participated in this radio conversation, which aired in February 1964, but edited his remarks out of the transcript.)
9 Judd, Complete Writings: 124, 200 (my emphasis).
10 In 1965 Robert Smithson wrote incisively of the “uncanny materiality” of Judd boxes made of Plexiglas and stainless steel, and suggested that it sometimes “engulf[s] the basic structure” (Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996]: 22). See also Meyer, Minimalism: 134–8.
11 As suggested, the Flavin lights are in fact more complicated than “image-object”; key here, though, is that Flavin held the two terms together, even as other artists were prompted (in part by Flavin) to let them fly apart—the image to move outside the frame of a picture, the object to pass beyond the limit of a sculpture (on which more below).
12 On this irony see Alex Potts, “Dan Favin: ‘in … cool white’ and ‘infected with a blank magic,’ ” in Jeffrey Weiss, Dan Flavin: New Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Of course, irony is a central device of modernist authors, and Flavin was a keen reader of James Joyce, among others. A preliminary version of the present chapter appeared in the Weiss volume as well.
13 “They lack the look of history,” Flavin wrote of his early fluorescent works. “I sense no stylistic or structural development” (90). I say “undecideable” because this relation between illusionism and anti-illusion has the aporetic structure of allegory as defined by Paul de Man: “The two readings have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it. Nor can we in any way make a valid decision as to which of the readings can be given priority over the other (Allegories of Reading [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979]: 12).
14 Peter Bürger develops the notion of “the neo-avant-garde” in Theory of the Avant-Garde, published in German in 1974. The glider was not reproduced in Gray, but The Bottle, corner reliefs, and the Monument model were.
15 On such ideological antinomies see Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (1923), transl. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). Michel Foucault also writes of an “empirico-transcendental doublet” deep in modern thought in The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970 [1966]): 318–22.
16 See Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57: 6 (1958), and Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” Artforum (April 1969).
17 “I smiled when I recognized it”: this suggests that Flavin might have looked through the book before his visit, though the icon in the Gray is not the one in the Met (the one illustrated here is my best guess as to the specific icon Flavin saw there). It seems that, even before this visit to the Met, Flavin had begun to title his early series “icons” (the first one is dated 1961–62, and a note dated March 1962 refers to them as such). In the history of modern art, such museum visits are often staged as retrospective epiphanies; the most famous instance is the transformative visit of Picasso to the Trocadéro Museum in Paris, in June 1907, during the painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
18 As we will see momentarily, Tatlin was more interested in the material aspects of the icon. Flavin also did a drawing of an arrangement of his first four icons “with an overt reference to an iconostasis (the screen, adorned with icons, that separates the sanctuary from the nave in a Greek Orthodox church)”; see Michael Govan, “Irony and Light,” in Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 29.
19 Vladimir Markov (pseudonym of Waldemars Matvejs), Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh. Faktura (St Petersburg, 1914): 54, as translated by Christina Lodder in her Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983): 13. Markov is not mentioned by Gray, and it is highly unlikely Flavin knew of his work, yet he also highlights the facticity of his icons: “I use the word ‘icon’ as descriptive, not of a strictly religious object, but of one that is based on a hierarchical relationship of electric light over, under, against and with a square-fronted structure full of paint ‘light’ ” (88).
20 Markov in Lodder, Russian Constructivism: 13.
21 Vladimir Markov, Iskusstvo negrov (St Petersburg, 1919 [1913]): 36; transl. as “Negro Sculpture” in Jack Flam with Miriam Deutsch, ed., Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 63.
22 This lack of mediation was a scandal for Europeans, who placed fetishism at the bottom of all hierarchies of religion and society for this reason. Such was its place in the writings of Charles de Brosses, David Hume, Kant, Hegel, and others, and Marx and Freud assumed this pejorative connotation, too, only to turn it round on us moderns: sometimes in our commercial and sexual activity, they suggest, we are the fetishists. See William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish,” in Res 9, 13, and 16 (Spring 1985, Spring 1987, Autumn 1988), and my “The Art of Fetishism,” in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). The European projection of the “fetish” on to West African practice was a fetishization in its own right.
23 Flavin in “Dan Flavin Interviewed by Phyllis Tuchman” (1972) in Govan and Bell, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective: 194.
24 Ibid.
25 Mel Bochner, “Art in Process: Structures,” Arts Magazine (September/October, 1966): 39.
26 Michael Govan quotes Joyce on “the epiphany,” which is indeed pertinent to Flavin: “The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant” (Govan and Bell, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective: 32). Yet, in Flavin as in Joyce, epiphanic states are sometimes undercut by humorous humiliations. At his most Minimalist, Flavin separated and opposed the terms of his “ironies.” For example, the nominal three (to William of Ockham) (1963) commemorates the fourteenth-century English scholastic philosopher, who wrote: “Principles (entities) should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” Flavin glossed his nominalism in this way: “Reality exists solely in individual things and universals are merely abstract signs. This view led [Ockham] to exclude questions such as the existence of God from intellectual knowledge, referring them to faith alone” (83–4). Yet for the most part Flavin does not oppose “individual things” and “abstract signs.” Again, like the icon and the fetish, his lights work to hold such polarities together.
27 This shift in his work was remarked in the 2005 Flavin retrospective at its National Gallery venue when one moved from the first floor, where the work remained mostly on the walls, to the second floor, where it irradiated the rooms. In a sense Flavin was “graphic” from the start—long interested in drawing, especially Hudson School landscape studies (which he collected), he drew throughout his career—and the shift noted here is only in the nature of the ground to be marked—from the rectangle of a paper sheet, say, to the volume of a room, with the fluorescent tubes understood as graphic devices. With “expanded field” I allude to Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), in Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983). Her map has no place for painting; however, my suggestion here is that the expanded field is now shot through with the pictorial.
28 Dan Graham, “Art as Design/Design as Art,” in Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects 1965–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993): 211. In this respect Flavin might be affined less with the Constructivist project of Tatlin than with the color-plane decors of de Stijl.
29 Rosalind Krauss, untitled review, Artforum (January 1969): 53–4. Some spaces are set apart from the viewer by the fixtures in a way that marks them as pictorial in the sense suggested by Krauss.
30 Perhaps Smithson had this effect in mind when he wrote in 1966, “Flavin’s destruction of classical time and space is based on an entirely new notion of the structure of matter” (Collected Writings: 10).
31 Judd, Complete Writings: 184.
32 I trust it is clear that a related “catastrophe” is also at work in the architecture discussed in Chapter 7, especially the refashioning of space as illusion.
33 In the 1960s the distinctions between these practices were not always clear—though Flavin refused any association with painters like Olitski (cf. 109). In a sense Flavin split the difference between punctual “presentness” and durational “presence” (to borrow an opposition used by Michael Fried in “Art and Objecthood” [Artforum, June 1967]).
34 Flavin continues in his acerbic way: “No one should bother to pay to concede his perception to the pointless audio-visual ‘entertaining’ punishment haphazardly projected by some of the so-called self-determined multi-media techno-totalitarians, especially since, at home, on any evening, he is already compelled to absorb an ‘overload’ of much of the same seemingly arbitrary, jarring, messageless mistreatment from television commercials and programs” (93). Perhaps Flavin is sensitive here because his work was sometimes viewed as “passive” before its own technology: “It is a kind of ‘1984’ passivity,” Emily Wasserman wrote, “a lyricizing of basically uninventive, unprofound forms” (Artforum [December 1967]: 60). “Environment,” we might say today, was on the side of spectacle, as Flavin signaled in 1982: “I don’t want to make a cathedral. I really don’t. I think that’s the subject of business now” (197).
35 In the 1960s pictorial space was extruded into actual space in a number of ways. Think, for example, of the scatter pieces by Robert Morris and others. In a work such as Threadwaste (1968) Morris sought to move “beyond objects” altogether—but neither into pure idea (as in much Conceptual art) nor into sheer material (as in other process art). He sought the creation of a “field effect” in which the object was often fractured if not dissolved, and the vision of the viewer often disturbed if not deranged. In his own words, Morris wanted “to take the conditions of the visual field” as the “structural basis” of the work and not merely its physical limit. In so doing he attempted to shift the viewer from a focal gaze (as one looks at a painting or a sculpture or indeed a Minimalist object) to a “vacant stare” on a visual array; and it was to this end that he arranged materials in a way that could hardly be grasped, in profile or in plan, as an image at all. In works like Threadwaste it is as if vision were decentered from the subject, thrown out into the world. See Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4.” On a related derangement of vision in Flavin see Briony Fer, “Nocturama: Flavin’s Light Diagrams,” in Weiss, ed., Dan Flavin: New Light.
36 Already in this moment Harold Rosenberg wrote, “de-aestheticized art goes hand in hand with aestheticized events, with the increasing injection into actual situations of the ambiguity, illusoriness, and emotional detachment of art” (“De-aestheticization,” in The De-definition of Art [New York: Collier Books, 1972]: 37).
37 Robert Irwin, “The Hidden Structures of Art,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., Robert Irwin (Los Angeles: MOCA, 1993): 23.
38 Ibid., 33.
39 Ibid., 21, 23 (emphasis in the original). His move was thus less that from specific medium to general art, as often in Conceptualism, than from specific object to spatial environment, as often after Minimalism.
40 Irwin as quoted in Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982): 61; Irwin, “The Hidden Structures of Art”: 29.
41 Irwin, “The Hidden Structures of Art”: 25 (emphasis in the original). This stress on the viewer is more extreme than any Duchampian shift in “the creative act” forced by the readymade (see Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act” (1957), in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, ed., The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp [London: Thames & Hudson, 1975]).
42 Philip Leider, Robert Irwin, Kenneth Price (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1966): n.p.
43 Richard Andrews and Chris Bruce, “Interview with James Turrell,” in James Turrell (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 1992): 47.
44 Alexander Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Frankfurt, 1750/58), § I.
45 See Krauss, “Cultural Logic”: 12. Paradoxically, the overemphasis on the viewer can render him or her almost null and void, as Anne Wagner suggests vis-à-vis a Flavin note on a drawing for a 1972 installation, “to beset and to abuse the complete room”: “Whatever he is suggesting—for surely his phrase presents a set of specific intentions, however cryptically—the formula seems to leave the viewer out. An abused room evaporates the viewer; place yields to placelessness” (“Flavin’s Limited Light,” in Weiss, Dan Flavin: 127).
46 Julia Brown, “Interview with James Turrell,” in Occluded Front: James Turrell (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985): 22, 25. If Minimalism wanted to eject the work of art from the private space of consciousness, so to speak (see note 8), Turrell installations seek to inject that private space into space at large: “I want it to be like the light that illuminates the mind” (44).
47 Andrews and Bruce, “Interview with James Turrell”: 51, 47, 50. For more on these matters see Hal Foster, “Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space,” Journal of Visual Culture 3: 3 (December 2004). Turrell’s controlling of experience through his pieces extends to permission to publish images of them, which his studio has denied me.
48 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1940), in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 314.
49 During the time that Irwin and Turrell developed this work, such phenomenological immediacy was subject to critique not only in theory (for example, Jacques Derrida published his Speech and Phenomena in 1967) but also in art (for example, the early performances and videos of Dan Graham effectively question the phenomenological assumptions of Minimalism).
50 Samuel K. Wagstaff, Jr, “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum (December 1966), reprinted in Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: 58.
51 Ibid.
52 Other critics have made similar points about installation art; see especially Alex Potts, “Installation and Sculpture,” and Briony Fer, “The Somnambulist’s Story: Installation and the Tableau,” in Oxford Art Journal 24: 2 (2001). “It’s almost as if the thingness of the traditional sculptural object has been turned inside out,” Potts writes, “so it resides in the framing that encloses and focuses the viewer’s looking” (17). Johanna Burton has also suggested to me that, in much recent practice, the two art-historical moments that concerned Krauss in the middle 1970s—the expanded field of culture and the collapsed present of video—have merged.
53 We also saw this operation at work in Chapter 7. The concept of the sublime was prominent in the discourse of postwar American art, where it was deployed by Newman among others. Significantly, in “ ‘…daylight or in white.’ an autobiographical sketch,” Flavin cites Kant: “The Sublime is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or by occasion of it, boundlessness is represented” (Artforum [December 1965]: 24). However, as Wagner notes, Flavin cut this reference when the essay was reprinted in 1969 (“Flavin’s Limited Light”: 128). Perhaps he became leery of the effect. Not so Turrell: “I am working for pure visual delight and sensation. And when I say delight I mean in the sense of the sublime” (Andrews and Bruce, “Interview with James Turrell”: 51).
54 “What is most interesting,” the literary critic Herman Rappaport writes about such images as the cave in The Republic of Plato, “is the way a prop such as the cave wall can suddenly turn into a stage, how an image, itself framed, can suddenly stage itself as stage and in that way absent itself or disappear from the viewer’s consciousness as image, object, or prop” (“Staging: Mont Blanc,” in Mark Krupnick, ed., Displacement: Derrida and After [Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1983]: 59). As Victor Burgin notes, this operation is similar to that of fantasy, in which the subject seems to be within the scene of his or her own viewing, the frames of which tend to dissolve as a consequence (see “Diderot, Barthes, Vertigo,” in The End of Art Theory: Criticism & Postmodernity [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986]). Turrell often associates the space of his installations with that of the dream or daydream.
55 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, transl. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961): 20.
56 Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith”: 386. Ironically, the military base in Marfa, Texas adapted by Judd into an art complex once served as a POW camp for German soldiers. Not altogether ironically, Dan Graham has suggested that “Flavin tried to combine Tatlin and Speer” (“Interview with Dan Graham by Rodney Graham,” in Dan Graham: Beyond [Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009]: 92).
57 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 122. Also germane here is Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament, ed. and transl. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Antiaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992).
58 Flavin glimpsed this prospect, too, when he referred to “the so-called self-determined multi-media techno-totalitarians” with their “concoctions of theatrical ritual, of easy, mindless, indiscriminate sensorial abuse” (93).
59 Benjamin, “The Work of Art”: 115.
60 Ibid.; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999): 3–5. The “blue flower” is the prime figure for the object of desire in the work of the German Romantic Novalis. This description in Benjamin is also apposite here: “What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body. But now, in kitsch, the world of things advances on the human being; it yields to his uncertain grasp and ultimately fashions its figures in his interior” (4–5). The best commentary on the blue-flower trope in Benjamin remains Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’ ” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987).
61 Eliasson also privileges the spectator (“the gaze of the viewer in a complex way constitutes or creates the piece”) and does so again in phenomenological terms (the spectator “sees herself seeing”), but in the end a similar reversal occurs (this spectator is “a constructed third person”). See Eliasson in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, vol. 1 (Milan: Charta, 2003): 203, 205–6.
62 This techno-aesthetic sublime might be troped productively, even critically, but it is not so in such practices. For Benjamin and Kracauer the primary subject-effect of capitalist culture was a complex of attention and distraction, of shock and absorption, and they argued that some modernist practices—especially abstract architecture, Dadaist collage, and filmic montage—might turn this sensorial complex to critical advantage. At times, too, they suggested a “go-for-broke game” in which this complex might be exacerbated and somehow passed through: “The process,” Kracauer writes in “The Mass Ornament,” “leads directly through the center of the mass ornament, not away from it” (“The Mass Ornament”: 61, 86). It might be argued that this is what artists like Eliasson attempt to do again today—but to what other side?
1 The first two parts of this dialogue are extracted from Hal Foster, “A Conversation with Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra: The Matter of Time (Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum, 2005); the third part was done in summer 2010.
2 For more on these sections see Chapter 8, note 9.
3 This installation consists of eight sculptures—two ellipses, three spirals, two pieces with torus and/or spherical sections, and one ribbon piece (Snake, 1994–97), which was in situ in the Fish Gallery since the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao.