Humanist Tectonics
ABSTRACT
In his article New Fineness, Jesse Reiser announces that it is time to “throw off the last limiting vestiges of anthropocentrism in architecture”1. The honest investigations of Robert Le Ricolais — his searching for the indestructible idea within nature2 — have been robbed of their integrity, now appearing warped, twisted, and manipulated, all while presented under the guise of the manifold and the dynamic. True to his familiar canon Reiser is again advocating form and systematic dynamism within architecture as the best way forward. Architecture is now elemental, diminishing ontological concerns, allowing the complexity of the world to establish new parameters for architecture. Perhaps none of these provocations, however bold or immodest they may appear, should illicit effect. Considering the built work of Reiser and Umemoto, particularly the O-14 building (located in Dubai), a certain indulgence in the alien presents itself. Qualities of ‘otherness’ and ‘ubiquity’ are blithely engaged by Reiser and Umemoto, leaving one to wonder, where is the dynamism? When considering the situational realities of O-14, the fissures between Reiser and Umemoto’s theories (even those stated matter-of-factly as in Novel Tectonics) and execution present themselves readily.
The participatory works of Krzysztof Wodiczko, particularly his projection series (1981-86) as well as Alien Staff (1992), allow for the radical redefinition of spatial tectonics, one that is utterly devoid of traditional constructive elements. Wodiczko, along with artists such as Martha Rosler and Joseph Beuys, interrogate social problematics as the source for their works’ constructive material. These artists achieve a new realization of space, one passionately championed by Jacques Rancière, that is constructed from intangible elements, yet remains very much at the forefront of cultural and emotional reality. Because of this, these art works, objects, and performances fabricate space that enables the spectator to become a conscious agent — active in the constitution and subsequent reconstitution of the physical environment. The suggestion of space as interactive and socially constructed divulges the essence of a tectonics of humanism — a tectonics whose materiality is extracted directly from the social strata. In the not-so-distant past, although infinitely more recent than Reiser’s seemingly archaic Fineness (2001!), Mark Rakatansky and Sylvia Lavin address tectonics while accounting for both new cultural demands as well as demands upon the medium of architecture. Shockingly, they call for a return to subjectivity while dispelling the “fantasy of absolute autonomy and domination”3. Ultimately, through discussion of how unique tectonic realms are created via cultural associations as well reconstituting the manner in which architecture relates to itself, Rakatansky and Lavin grant light to the simmering of a new tectonics that is imbued with significance beyond simply being novel. It is through this modern lens that the claims of Reiser and Umemoto begin to be dismantled and the participatory works of Rosler, Wodiczko, and Beuys emerge, constructed of a humanist tectonics.
HUMANIST TECTONICS
Reiser and Umemoto say no more geometric rationality4! Rationality no longer holds precedent over matter as matter is now the new fuel for organization. But if matter is to subsume where does this leave the human? And, if architecture now exceeds that which is human, why is the architect still here — there must be a tectonic shift in the way the tectonics of architecture are considered. O-14, however, shifts in the wrong direction. It embraces the dominance of matter (as well as questionable political and economic forces), opting not to challenge its bizarre setting and instead luxuriates in the anti-human and the other-worldly.
The art of Martha Rosler, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Joseph Beuys challenges boldly the conditions to which Reiser and Umemoto willingly submit, causing space to once again engage with those who inhabit it. While O-14 exists as an icon and therefore and object that is perceived as precious, these art experiments aim to accessible, intrusive, and even shocking. These acts of confrontation, in parallel with the determination of Jacques Rancière that architecture become a social act, present a new method of spatial construction which is sourced not via abstract forces but through the energies of humanity.
THE OVERTURNING OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM
The humanist view of nature is being dismantled. It is a well established fact that the environments which are considered ‘natural’ today have not been so for a very long time. To fill this void, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto introduce the metaphor of the sea5. The sea provides an ideal point of reference for a new dynamic form of architecture.The sea’s constitution as an unpredictable yet navigable medium with a potential openness is the result of it being “neither inherently human or inhuman”6. The potential of the sea, as seen by Reiser and Umemoto, is its ability to create tensions trough the human/inhuman dialog. These tensions create potentials and these potentials are evidenced by R+U’s interest in Le Ricolais’ column deformation7 and their translation of these deformation studies into their strategy of augmentation. It is this juxtaposition, of the highly specific against the open and the general, and how these extremes operate together, that is essential to the idea of augmentation.
Reiser and Umemoto introduce the idea of augmentation in New Fineness, boldly stating that architecture must move beyond the body8. Reiser stresses the need to extend architecture beyond the mean as the mean is justified through anthropocentrism and the desire to rationalize the material world through easily categorized phenomena. Here too the relationship between the sea and augmentation presents itself as R+U aim to move not only beyond the body but beyond quantitative restraints as well. The continual overturning of the sea’s surface is echoed by what R+U term the ‘folly of the mean’ and the seeming delimitation that occurs when architecture moves beyond the average (acting as an augmenter), attempting to balance within these flows9. Ultimately, augmentation of the body via architecture aims to expand both the individual10 potential and tectonic potential to act within the territory of the extreme, the place where strangeness is conceived. Reiser and Umemoto attempt to exceed the definition of the body as organism11, as products of augmentation belong to “a larger class of singularities. They emerge out of the material world…they are not product of meaning”12.
THE SURFACING OF THE TECTONIC
“Neither the author nor the subject ever existed as coherent entities in the first place…at best they existed as temporal historical interventions whose time has passed”13.
This position assumed by Reiser and Umemoto announces the obsolescence of both the architect and the individual within the confines of the discipline. The author has never existed because the system itself is the author. Through its dynamism the system, and the system alone, is capable of producing individualities. Human projections as a generative strategy for architecture will inevitably fail as they are limiting14. Thus, “phenomenological architecture usually lapses into some form of modernism for the purpose of organizing space”15. Here, ideas of the augmentation ally with the system, creating an architectural strategy devoid of human concerns. The body has been transcended and is now subsumed by the system. It has slipped under the sea’s turbid and turbulent surface.
THE FAULT OF THE ARCHITECT The Arrival of the Icon
Just as the humanization of architecture is a myth, the reduction of architecture to base truths is unacceptable16, this is how Reiser and Umemoto come to accept the icon. Architecture should not simply accept base truths as this, according to R+U, would trigger its devolution into “mere building”17. And, if a building is truly to become an icon, the building itself should desire to be a signal, an indication of more than just constituent parts.
But does dehumanization do O-14 any favors? Does its otherness, its inhumanity, elevate its iconicity? And what is the strength of an icon when, within contemporary architecture, the icon18 itself has become ubiquitous? Perhaps this is where ideas of augmentation and poise begin to reach their limits — limits that may even be self-imposed (meaning that they are too self-involved to respond to external issues, presenting the challenge faced when attempting to step beside or à côte).
HERE AND THERE
If “architecture is to be more ethical then that can only mean it needs to be more articulate of its aesthetics, and so it needs more aesthetics to be more articulate — but an aesthetics that recognizes, articulates, enacts its own and our own entanglements”19.
Here and there and not nowhere. If architecture is to embrace a more humanist notion of tectonics, it can no longer exist, as O-14 does, in a state of nowhere-ness. Nowhere is a trap, almost like open the sea. It is nothing and everything at the same time. Its absolute freedom equates to total restriction. It is dangerous and irresponsible to flirt with nowhere. As Rakatansky writes, if architecture is to become more ethical, and resultantly more human, it needs an aesthetic that begins to reconnect with what it means to be human. When he describes “our own entanglements” he describes the beauty, the vices, and all the other qualities so inseparable from humanity and, by association, architecture. The return from nowhere is met by the condition of hybridity. Gone are notions of smooth, sinuous surfaces, now replaced by an aesthetic which makes visible “the rough edges, the complex negotiations of aesthetic values that find themselves ‘outside’ the artwork in the social problematics [and] inside the work as well both formally and affectively”20. It is by looking to the human that the search for strangeness and the extreme, ideals so sought after by R+U, may be satisfied21.
Regretfully, however, Reiser and Umemoto do not choose to search within the human or even within elements of the human scale. They devote their efforts to the pursuit of the icon. In a sense, iconicity is now mimicry, perhaps even servile mimicry22. O-14 is the result of capitalist forces pressuring R+U to produce a building that Rakatansky would describe as incomplete23. It this wishy-washy, non-committal attitude that distances O-14 from design that could be considered humanist leaving instead, ubiquity. Ubiquity does not express entanglements. It does not express humanity24!
THE KISS AND OTHER THINGS
Architecture must escape its own trap, moving beyond the mimicry of R+U and engaging the “ability to draw…ethical and cultural discourse forth in order to rearticulate it — so [it can be seen] in the act of its act”25. It is this self-awareness that allows architecture to become concerned once again with the human and create spaces that are both accommodating of and formed by cultural concerns. Stemming from Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage26, there is the idea of the self removed, re-presented outside the body. The space between this strange externality, with all of its foreign qualities, and the self is the space of humanist architecture. It is within this space that Rakatansky’s idea of sly doubling27 is emboldened, unleashing internal longings from the body, allowing them to help reformulate reality. This drawing from within aligns with Rakatansky’s suggestion that novelty comes from investigations at the scale of the tectonic, again threatening the claim that augmentation is essential.
The slight taste of the social potential the in-between space Rakatansky hints at is simmered, spiced, and transformed into a veritable explosion of flavor by Sylvia Lavin. According to Lavin, architecture can no longer exist reliant simply upon opposing ideals28. Yet perhaps Reiser and Umemoto are reluctant to abandon the idea of the opposition between general and specific. Theirs is an architecture of visualization, one that strives through its forms to convey information29. However, the information that O-14 gives is false. R+U had the opportunity to display an architecture beside itself by exposing the building as a result of the forces beyond their control30. Instead, they chose the more comfortable route, opting to create architecture as event, one that engages in the “crisis of spectatorship”31. And, with spectacle being the desire for “users — profit — profitability — consumption”32, it is clear how, by not stepping beside itself, the architecture of O-14 exists on dangerous ground33.
It is the idea of the kiss, with all its suppleness, that gives wealth and dimension to the space created by an architecture that is à côte. Just like the reflection within Lacan’s mirror, the kiss demands attention. The kiss is entirely reliant upon twoness, give-and-take, ebb-and-flow, and most importantly reciprocity. It is the reciprocity of the kiss, as Lavin describes, that “opens new epistemological and formal models for redefining architecture’s relationship to other mediums and hence to itself”34. The acceptance of new relationships can only result from the relinquishment of “absolute autonomy and domination”35. This thought may prove frightening to R+U because, while they claim their architecture to be poised, it does not participate. In the case of O-14, the architectural medium does not engage with social or cultural mediums. In this way, O-14 exists as an object unfettered and unbothered, shutting itself off from all opportunities for reciprocity. It is because of cases such as this that architecture must enter into the social problematics. By advocating an architecture that must detach from itself as well as one of reciprocity Lavin suggests the reinvestigation and reinhabitation of ideas and spaces explored by artists like Martha Rosler, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Joseph Beuys. This is an art where the viewer is no longer able to stand by idly, forced instead to become an active participant, confronting the work and themselves.
At this point it is clear that O-14 is not able to step beside itself. It is too deeply entrenched within the capitalist (post-capitalist even — now plutocratic) establishment to have a vision of its own form. Here is where Rancière’s third form of aesthetic enters the scene36. In this third form of aesthetic politics, art is placed à côte, like architecture as Sylvia Lavin describes. Architecture must detach from itself in order to become both aware of and disruptive37 of its own process.
BODY WAVES 38
The writing of Jacques Rancière is the pinnacle of advocacy for an engaged spectator. Rancière calls to action the architect, jolting them out of their zombie-like state, advocating an architecture of equality. An equality that knocks the haughty architect from his or her pedestal, forcing them to dirty their hands and wrestle with issues they consider themselves to be above39. This idea is radical in the sense that the architect, along with all his or her theoretical conceptions, is forced to be human, just another organism. The works of the following artists physically realize the activism of Rancière, subverting any allegiance to money or power that is respected Reiser and Umemoto. They are social artists who seek to engage the true nature of being beside. They do not seek total domination rather they engage actively the uncertainties inherent in both the urban and the human condition.
In the late 1960s, artist Martha Rosler recognizes the dire need to step beside, examining the hidden costs of war by way of artistic juxtaposition (Bringing The War, 1967-1972). While some may consider this collage series to be superficial, such an observation is cut out of historical context. It is the publishing of the works in House Beautiful magazine40 that propels them beyond a trite commentary on foreign war and detachment. Rosler disseminates her work, placing her superimposed images of war and american life (household products, home furnishings) literally at the core of the american home41. She removes any opportunity for avoidance (save ripping the images from the magazine which, in itself, would become and act of acknowledgment), forcing the viewer to confront the complexity of their collaged existence, forever tarnishing the purity of and sanctity of their american dream42.
Krzysztof Wodiczko expands upon themes present within the work of Rosler, applying them (physically) to the built world as well as engaging them at the intimate social level. Wodiczko challenges the meaning of the monument43 and its cultural associations through his projection series. By plastering images of the homeless directly onto public buildings of importance, he challenges the idea of ‘public space,’ causing the viewer to reconsider just how accessible these spaces may, attending to the distorted nature of the term ‘public’44.
Alien Staff (1992) evolves from ideas of detachment investigated by Wodiczko in the projection series. The idea of the alien is demonstrated by the actor (the individual in possession of the staff) becoming separated from his or her own history. The life of constant uncertainty, being prepared at all times to run, to uproot one’s life again, is expressed via this externality45. Emotional separation is also exhibited by the pre-recorded message contained within the staff. As a result of this separation, the actor is able to display emotion different from that expressed by the staff, allowing for an additional injection of meaning into the dialog. This ability granted to the actor engages the spectator, causing their transformation into an actor as well46. In contrast to the highly anesthetized world of O-14, Wodiczko excises both the issue of confrontation between human and space as well as confrontation between human and human (and, in the process, human and self). He uses the gravity of these interactions to create a charged space that is both infinite and minute, highly personal yet relatable. Wodiczko too (like Rancière, Lacan, and Lavin) is interested in the idea of displacement, and the oscillation47 within a space that is somehow in-between the self and its surroundings. It is his ability to pull the inhabitant from the space, exposing the physical environment as a mangle of political and social influences, that gives the power back to the individual. Altogether, wodiczko’s art is one of encounter48: the encounter between making and living, facilitated by social connections. The linkage of making and living that is essential to humanist tectonics.
The work of Joseph Beuys is arguably the ultimate investigation into a humanist tectonics even more progressive than that of Wodiczko. Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) is a tour de force in socio-spatial construction. Combatting the contemporary phenomenon of nowhere-ness through his use of carefully chosen objects Beuys draws connections between these objects49 and both the historic and contemporary human condition. The coyote serves powerfully as a symbol50 of continental history and the failures of the New-Western man to create a society of integrity, instead founding history on theft, deceit, and murder. But, all theory aside, the physicality of the work holds its true power . Its drama and its raw, gritty , combative nature slice into the psyche of its observer.
The unpredictability of relationship between man and beast, the cyclical nature of their physical and social interaction, and the territorial negotiations which take place within their caged environment, all serve to choreograph a volatile dance between artist and spectator. Blasts of sound from the turbines and the piercing tones of the triangle reset the space, clearing the mind molding it to become again a receiving agent for sensory simulation. Shaping the space with sound, Beuys amplifies the motions of the coyote, quickening the pulse of the spectator with every lunge of the animal, every wave of Beuys’ staff. The coyote, tugging at Beuys’ felted cloak, tugs both symbolically at his insulator but also tears at the sense of elevation above the animal world that spectator may possess. This is the power of the felt, a natural material, both protecting from and connecting with the animalistic. And it is here, winded by the blow of their own vulnerability, that the viewer is injected with both humanity and an awareness of their environment to which they are blinded. Creating a scene so rich with feelings that are commonly, often desperately repressed51, Beuys is able to engage a new type of architecture; one that is socially constructed52, engaging the spectators themselves as organisms53.
Ultimately as participants they are engaged in a reciprocal communication through which flows the most instinctual of emotions and the essence of the human spirit. A space capable of such effects could only be composed humanist elements.
After exposing the strength of these socially attuned art works, it is difficult to see how the architecture of Reiser and Umemoto could be humanist, let alone spiritual. It is now clear that architecture cannot survive without the human. The pair exists in a symbiotic relationship, with the human providing the social stimulus that feeds the built world, allowing it to morph and readjust. The dialog between architecture and inhabitant must be two-way, making use not of the shaping forces described by R+U but those described by Beuys. Ultimately it is the act of stepping beside as described by Lavin, expressed powerfully within the works of Wodiczko, that provides space for the establishment of humanist tectonics. Engaging the social diversity and difficulty of contemporary society, rather than accepting forces which try to quell or destroy such vivid truths of life, is the responsible way to practice an architecture that warrants its own existence.
NOTES
1 Reiser, J. (2001). ‘The New Fineness’, ASSEMBLAGE, VOL. 41: MIT Press. pg. 65.
2 McCleary, P. (1998). ‘Robert Le Ricolais’ Search for the Indestructible Idea’, Lotus 99. pg.107
For Le Ricolais, the desire to discover the ‘nature of things’ was his transcendental aspiration. He favored biological analogies and sought to integrate opposing elements to create systems of hybridity that, when composed, could achieve equilibrium.
3 Lavin, S. (2014). Flash in the Pan. Architectural Association, London. pg. 166.
4 Reiser, J. and Umemoto, N. (2006). Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pg. 72.
5 Reiser, J. (2001). ‘The New Fineness’, ASSEMBLAGE, VOL. 41: MIT Press. pg. 65.
“Anthropocentrism is…most limiting when applied at the scale of the body. We prefer to engage what the body can actually do”.
6 Ibid..
7 Reiser, J. and Umemoto, N. (2006). Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pg. 110-112.
Reiser and Umemoto attribute significance to Le Ricolais’ idea of structural and systemic continuity, noting that he suggests “matter, material constructional systems, space, and place comprise a continuous spectrum rather than isolated domains”. This makes sense, as Le Ricolais was highly invested in the rapport betweens structure and skin and the three dimensional distribution of these elements. R+U press on, stating that Le Ricolais is interested in “new geometries that arise as a consequence of the column’s deformation on the way to failure” when one of Le Ricolais’ key concern is, in fact, equilibrium. R+U distance themselves further, departing almost completely when stating “the potentials that flow off this tension inevitably find their expression within multiple levels, form the non-human stuff of construction to the character of a building’s occupation”. It is here where Reiser and Umemoto take liberty with Le Ricolais’ ideas of deformation and transform them into an encapsulating strategy that is applicable to all aspects of a building. Here the link between potential and augmentation presents itself.
8 Ibid. pg. 85.
9 Ibid. pg. 78-81.
R+U quote Deleuze and Guittari as saying “royal science only tolerates and appropriates perspective if it is static, subjected to a central black hole divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities”. The adoption of poise is also the rejection of stasis and the average. The disdain for stasis and quantification leads Reiser and Umemoto to note that Buckminster Fuller’s fascination with lightness was more of an obsession with an architecture that could be seen quantitatively.
10 Reiser terms the individual as the organism — ridiculous?
11 Ibid. pg. 85.
This excessing is not limited only to physical capability. The beauty of the sea as a metaphor and medium is its ability to “have manifold meanings projected” onto it, without assuming, or subsuming to, a particular meaning.
12 Ibid..
13 Reiser, J. (2001). ‘The New Fineness’, ASSEMBLAGE, VOL. 41: MIT Press. pg. 65.
14 Reiser, J. and Umemoto, N. (2006). Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pg. 82.
The system may in fact be better suited to authorship as the individual architect tends to become ”fixated on the idea…blinded to the thing itself”. The system does not have to face such distractions.
15 Reiser, J. (2001). ‘The New Fineness’, ASSEMBLAGE, VOL. 41: MIT Press. pg. 65.
16 Steele, B. and Kipnis, J. (2012). O-14: Projection and Reception. London: Architectural Association. pg. 7.
Reiser and Umemoto claim, quite boldly, that “in a perfect storm of stupidity, a segment of the architectural profession, lacking a firm historical and cultural understanding of the discipline, has found common cause in the need to quantify” and that quantifying “within the ethics of architecture…would merely remain a ‘base truth’ — signifying very little at all”.
17 Ibid..
Reiser and Umemoto argue again for poise and the dynamic, saying that “while a precise art, architecture must nevertheless preserve its uncertainty lest it devolve into mere building”.
18 Accepting the icon as ubiquitous, Reiser and umemoto embrace Dubai and all of its excess (and emptiness) as well as larger capitally contrived systems. O-14’s appearance as a seeming mirage upon a windswept and garbage-strewn dune is truly non-human in every sense, and somehow falls back again to modernist space planning methods (there is even a podium).
19 Rakatansky, M. (2012). Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt. Architectural Association, London. pg. 274.
20 Ibid. pg. 265.
21 Ibid. pg. 267.
One cannot help but wonder how Jesse Reiser would respond to Rakatansky’s remark that “the architectural question is not answered merely by choosing whether forms have either the appearance of mobility or stasis, nor whether they have the appearance of being specifically localized or generalized”. These words fall in immediate contradiction to Reiser and Umemoto’s beloved augmentation. In fact, Rakatansky suggests even more outrageously, or sensibly depending upon one’s point of view, that “one just has to operate…at the scale of tectonic elements — to find the unfamiliar within familiarity”.
22 Steele, B. and Kipnis, J. (2012). O-14: Projection and Reception. London: Architectural Association. pg. 19.
Ubiquity, after all, is considered as “difference through similarity”.
23 Rakatansky, M. (2012). Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt. Architectural Association, London. pg. 266.
Mimicry, says Rakatansky, renders architecture “both incomplete and virtual” giving it a “partial presence”.
24 Steele, B. and Kipnis, J. (2012). O-14: Projection and Reception. London: Architectural Association. pg. 15.
According to Reiser and Umemoto, “ubiquitous difference is truly non-human in every sense”. However, R+U admit to lying! Stating that “sometimes forces have to be fictionalized in order to look truthful”. Perhaps even they cannot resist every human impulse.
25 Rakatansky, M. (2012). Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt. Architectural Association, London. pg. 274.
26 Ibid. pg. 269.
Lacan’s mirror stage is extremely important to the idea of a self aware, humanist tectonics. When Lacan describes how the individual looks in the mirror and finally “becomes aware of one’s self as there, as a whole image rather than all those disjunctive fragments of bodily sensations…but [the] image is not located [within], it is located elsewhere, in front of”, he describes a “spatial captation manifested in the mirror stage”. These new interstices created are the new inhabitable spaces of architecture.
27 Ibid. pg. 274-276.
Sly doubling is like a pair of eyes viewing the world through a set of binoculars. It “results in the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist: one takes reality into account while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats rearticulates, ‘reality’ as ‘mimicry’”. So, through doubling, there is a mimesis not of the self or the icon, as in the case of R+U, but of reality. This engagement in the reformulation of the real is what makes architecture social and allows for the enactment of “the social within its condition, within its architecture not just its circumstance”.
28 Lavin, S. (2014). Flash in the Pan. Architectural Association, London. pg. 190.
Lavin describes new terms for architecture which is beside itself, positing that “if modernist definitions of medium relied on singular absolutes, while postmodernist definitions of what came to be called disciplines relied on the opposition between two terms, the thing beside itself relies on both”.
29 Ibid. pg. 195.
But exactly what information do R+U intend to display? What do they want the observer or the user or the critic to believe? Lavin discusses the early images of computer modeling in programs such as Softimage or Maya as “deliberately unrendered, left in a state of exaggerated visual primitivism…staged such that they would be received as aligned with information…as if operating within a scientistic rather than representational paradigm”. It is this sort of visual trickery to which Reiser and Umemoto resort.
30 Ibid. pg. 196.
Lavin determines that today “movements of money and flows of social desire…show architecture as forces behind its control” and that these forces overcome architecture and “so produce architecture beside itself”. If R+U had chosen to divulge the flows of capital and political power that made O-14 possible the building would have inhabited an entirely different territory, one of social problematics. Its tectonics would have been those of humanism.
31 Ibid. pg. 197.
Although exactly just who these spectators would be is unclear. Is there an audience to be had on the blistering hot streets of Dubai? Or are the locals and tourists desensitized to architectural acts similar to O-14?
32 Ibid. pg. 199.
Lavin divulges that the commonplace nature of the architectural event “may indicate the triumph of the media and spectacle over all else…it has certainly enticed many professional practitioners to…fall victim to technologically reinvigorated positivism”.
33 Ibid. pg. 200.
It is here, ultimately, where architecture can no longer attempt to avoid or even escape its responsibilities and must instead focus on “exploring the many possibilities of becoming an architecture à côte”.
34 Ibid. pg. 164.
35 Ibid. pg. 166.
36 Bishop, C. (2006). Participation. London: Whitechapel. pg. 84.
Rancière’s third form of aesthetic politics is the aesthetic of the encounter. It is here where aesthetics must mediate between art and life, mixing “the strangeness of the aesthetic experience with the becoming life art and the becoming-art of ordinary life”.
37 Lavin, S. (2014). Flash in the Pan. Architectural Association, London. pg. 167.
Lavin states directly that “since architecture has the unique privilege and responsibility of housing the one and representing the many, reaclibrating how architecture extends itself to create a provisional pressure between the two, rather than a utopian collapse into unity is to redesign how architecture exercises power and diagrams politics”. Here is architecture’s entry into the social problematic. Here is where it must employ tectonics of humanism. Gone is the opportunity for any type of self-indulgent architecture.
38 Body waves are seismic waves capable of traveling through the interior of the earth.
39 Bishop, C. (2006). Participation. London: Whitechapel. pg. 16.
Rancière describes that an environment of equality assumes the inhabitants to be intelligent and capable of response, motivated by their own desires. He writes that “spectatorship is [one’s] normal situation…one act[s]…with what [one] has seen and told, done and dreamt. There is no privileged medium as there is no privileged starting point”.
40 MoMA.org, (2015). Martha Rosler. Balloons from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c. 1967-72). [online] Available at: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A6832&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1 [Accessed 16 Mar. 2015].
41 Bishop, C. (2006). Participation. London: Whitechapel. pg. 83.
This displacement is indicative of Rancière’s observation that “understanding alone can do little to transform consciousness and situations…the work of art that ‘makes you understand’ and that breaks up appearances, there kills the strangeness of an appearance of resistance that bears witness to the non-necessary or intolerable character of the world”.
42 Ibid. pg. 84
Rancière states, after all, that it is not the heterogeneity of the collage that “should nourish a sense of the intolerable but, on the contrary, he making evident of the causal connection that links one to the other”. It is here, also, where the new banality of high art, through “declaring its own end” is challenged. Because of this banality, Rancière believes that non-art objects must cross the border into the art sphere (Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes for example) as high contemporary art has “exhausted all its forms”. But if contemporary art, now victim to streams of global and political capital, has exhausted its forms, what about contemporary architecture? With the dubiousness of the icon, one cannot help but feel this is true.
43 Wodiczko challenges the monument’s validity which Reiser and Umemoto choose to perpetuate.
44 This is an issue today perhaps more relevant than ever before. R+U, through their engagement with the nowhere, are able to avoid confronting this problem as well.
45 Bishop, C. (2006). Participation. London: Whitechapel. pg. 87-89.
Rancière considers the potential of this removal and the subsequent subversion of typical social encounters. He demands that art is to “repopulate the world with things, to re-seize their collective historical potential”. The expression of such personal history through an immediate physical object eliminates any separation between the “arts of doing and the arts of living that constitute a shared world”.
46 Rakatansky, M. (2012). Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt. Architectural Association, London. pg. 158.
47 Bishop, C. (2006). Participation. London: Whitechapel. pg. 89.
It is within this space that Wodiczko suspends the “accelerated consumption of signs” that Rancière identifies as a problem plaguing the image obsessed society.
48 Ibid. pg. 90.
When speaking of the encounter between doing and living, Rancière reveals “critical art’s political/polemical vocation” as tending to become a “social/communitarian vocation”. Within the social and the communitarian lies the encounter.
49 Tisdall, C. and Beuys, J. (1980). Joseph Beuys: Coyote. München: Schirmer-Mosel. pg. 14-15.
Beuys employs a multitude of objects within the work, each one with its own symbolic and functional intention. Felt insulates Beuys from America while he is transported from the airport to the gallery yet, within the gallery it acts as a transmitter to the coyote. The flashlight within the bed of straw was not a technical object but a conveyor of “spiritual powers”, its batteries fading throughout the day. Dimming in the evening, following a reverse cycle of the sun, its glow is replaced by the reflectivity of the coyote’s eyes. Lastly the Eurasian Staff and the postures associated with, acts of reverence or acts of boastfulness, create what Beuys considers a “spiritual clock…dependent upon the actions of the coyote”.
50 Ibid. pg. 10
The coyote embodies the essence of a spiritual being, believed to have the both power of regeneration and the power of transformation from mortal to deity, that has been hunted, skinned, and desecrated by man to the point of eradication. Beuys theorized that the Native American man travelled across the arctic passage with the coyote, thereby reinforcing the creature’s link to ideas associated with the Eurasian Staff.
51 Bishop, C. (2006). Participation. London: Whitechapel. pg. 125.
Beuys rebels against overbearing social systems and with his spaces aims to abolish these systems opting instead to build “a social organism as a work of art”. In I Like America and America Likes Me, this abolition is achieved by renewed awareness as the observer becomes the participant. Confronting the ills of contemporary society and reestablishing a link with an intuitive way of thought, he slashes through power structures and engages the social organism’s potential. The instinctual power of the human mind becomes a generative force. This force which Beuys describes as flowing, is a violent opponent to the non human generative forces of Reiser and Umemoto. Beuys enacts the literal opposite of R+U’s detachment, claiming that the human-spirital element serves as the generative material of space.
52 Unlike R+U, Beuys pledges no to allegiance to the system. In fact, he views the system as a controlling, often corrupt authority. He chooses to engage the individual not through augmentation but through investigation, an excision of unrecognized internal powers as opposed to the application of extra-human modification.
53 Ibid. pg. 126.
But note that here, rather than the impersonality of Reiser and Umemoto’s ‘organism’, the word meant to express symbiosis. It is only through this relationship, one that does not exist in hierarchy, that the individual will be able to oscillate within the space of the social problematic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bishop, C. (2006). Participation. London: Whitechapel.
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MoMA.org, (2015). Martha Rosler. Balloons from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c. 1967-72). [online] Available at: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A6832&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1 [Accessed 16 Mar. 2015].
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Tisdall, C. and Beuys, J. (1980). Joseph Beuys: Coyote. München: Schirmer-Mosel.
