Pythagorean symmetries, Euclidean architecture, marmorean glaciations of Apollonic ratios.
The Parthenon, for instance, or the fountain-square on Rhodes. But before the dust of ages had settled; before the Corinthians capitella were required to hold up the weight of civilization. When they were still new: polished marbles, untarnished in their adamantine lustre and opalescent twinklings. And because they were new, they could be eternal, rippled mirror-images of hyperouranian spaces.
It is enframed within these geometries that Pliny the Elder traces an anecdote about the legendary painter Apelles. While visiting the rival artist Protogenes in his home on Rhodes, Apelles walks up to the frescoed walls of the villa and paints a line so thin it can barely be seen by the human eye. Upon his return, Protogenes picks up the gauntlet and, in a different colour, places an even thinner line on top of the previous one. Thereupon, Apelles, with preternatural precision, plots a third line that cleaves the first two perfectly in half.
A Space of Difference
The Aegean sun dapples an inscription in the marble, percolating through the olive grove of Athena. The epigraph, etched into the congealed geometry of the Academy, reads: ”Let no one ungeometrical enter under my roof”.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Vessels”, 2020
The verbal adjective picked by Plato — ageômetrètos — denotes someone who is not ”geometrical”, one who has not yet actualized the possibility of thinking geometrically. Whether or not this tradition records an accurate historical inscription, or is just a hyperstitious mytheme of the later Platonic tradition, the sentiment finds plenty of support in Plato’s dialogues: one must first wrestle with geometry before the mind is fit to rise up to things divine. One would assume, as is commonly done, that this is because geometry is based on logic. So too is philosophy, which is what makes geometry into the perfect proemial activity to the love of wisdom.
But that assumption would be wrong. It is not geometry that is ”logical”; it is logic that is geometrical. Logic is principally a matter of drawing distinctions, of dividing, of dividing these distinctions into new divisions. It is, as much as we would want to resist it, a spatial matter, a geometrical matter. What Plato looks for in an aspiring lover of wisdom is the capacity to draw segments, trace circumferences, split lines.
Plotted along these coordinates, the fable of Apelles is about philosophy. Philosophy is a matter of finding differences, of splitting hairs. Apelles picks out a difference so subtle that no onlooker could have imagined it. At heart, it is a fable about spatial imagination: through a geometrical intuition Apelles gleans the difference nested within another difference. It is this same spatial imagination that Plato requires, the lack of which bars entrance to the Academy.
Spaces of difference
A female figure splashed on parchment, shimmering with cobalt paste and gold-leaf. Beautiful, yet asymmetrical: one side is lithe, dexterous; the other skeletal, spidery, almost sinister. On the one hand, she clutches a phial of the sweetest honey; on the other, a scorpion scuttles over her knuckles, while a viper enwreaths itself around her forearm.
The medieval personifications of Dialectica betray one fundamental point: the natural model of difference is a spatial one. Lady Dialectic collocates differences along a spatial axis, dividing left from right: poison from delicacy, punishment from dessert. The other images floating around ancient philosophical iconography belabour the same point: the groves of ”trees of Porphyry”, which bind together definitions in leafy crowns of differentiae. Or the ”columns” of syllogisms, which inscribe the diverging shapes of argument within architectural complexes.
And so on to this day, except that we seldom think much of it. We speak profusely of ”the logical space of reasons”, of modal-logical ”frames”, of ”grounds” and ”grounding”, of ”supervenience” — all spatial imagery, upon which we calque our philosophical concepts.
But — someone may object — we should not make mountains out of mole-hills: these are, after all, only metaphors! That, however, is precisely the point. These are indeed metaphors, but metaphors without which philosophy would not function. No philosophy to date, no matter its commitment to the deserted landscapes of analyticity, has eluded metaphor. And metaphors are, after all, images. And images are ineluctably spatial, which means philosophy, as much as we would like to burst free, is nested in a cocoon of two things it cannot moult: images and spaces.
Different Spaces
Among all the spatial imagery that defines ancient philosophy, the most central is Cicero’s picture of the art of argument as the exploration of the topoi — the ”places”, or ”spaces” — of thought.
Philosophy, according to this image, is really a kind of travel. The philosopher explores the landscapes of thought, foraging in the hinterlands, staking out the forest paths from the all-engulfing undergrowth. This topographical image, which veered the ancient philosophers onto their path, differs from our contemporary philosophical practices in one fundamental way. The space within which philosophy takes place is the locus of our spatial fantasy — the human imagination. It is precisely this faculty that Plato believes that geometry embodies.
It is due to an ever so slight misunderstanding about the nature of geometry that modern philosophy lost its spatial imagination. While modern philosophy was from its inception Euclidean (think of the ”geometrical” methods of Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes), it remained fundamentally ungeometrical in the proper, Platonic sense. In these modern methods geometry becomes a matter of proofs, rather than a matter of geometry proper — that is to say, of space, of lines, of shapes. Modern philosophy became the philosophy of ageômetrètos.
To escape this predicament philosophy must rediscover its dependence on spatial imagery. It must become a philosophy whose relation to images is neither pedagogical (that does not reduce then to didactic exemplifications of this or that doctrine) nor simply erudite flexing (through which the philosophist cashes in cultural capital through cultivated allusions to Cezanne or Vasari), nor, still, a specialized sub-culture of philosophy that just happens to adopt art as its subject, in the same way as one could apply philosophical tool-kits to snorkeling or bus-driving.
Which leads us to the final image:
A philosophy that is iconographic, that dwells among the images from which it was born. A philosophy that not only sustains itself on spatial imagery, but is also attentive to it, reflecting on it. It is both informed by its foundational images, and at the same time informs those very images through its reflection. Only when philosophy can do this will it shed its chrysalidal trappings, and become properly imaginal.
Amanda Winberg, 2021
“To me, the lamp became a window to an artificial exterior, and I hoped to challenge and redefine what we see, erasing a well-defined function in space, a liable object in the room. I have the impression that we usually do not look up at the ceiling when entering an exhibition space. Modernism neglected ceilings.”
In this issue of Differens Magazine, many of the displayed artworks are made by artist and master student of Fine Arts at KMD in Bergen, Eleni Ieremia. Ieremia’s works often touch upon topics of space, work and invisibility as they explore characteristic features of materials and objects by redefining their contexts. With an academic degree in Art History behind her and a dedicated interest in the broader field of art leading the way, Ieremia’s art practices often take their point of departure in reflections on the social and material orders of the art world that surrounds her.
She has previously been shown in group exhibitions at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Kode 4 and Galleri FI4E. We at Differens Magazine are happy to have been given the opportunity to present Eleni Ieremia’s works here for our readers and wish, through their implied notions of spatiality and spatial construction, to explore the theme of different spaces / spaces of difference in relation to some of Ieremia’s thoughts and visual reflections. The interview with the artist that follows here will hopefully kick off this exploration.
2nd – 14th of September 2021, Hotmail
Hi Eleni! First, I just wanted to say that we at Differens Magazine are very grateful for the opportunity to exhibit your works in our upcoming issue and to explore their themes together with you in this interview. Second, how are you today? And what are you working on right now?
Pleasure! I am good, feeling rested! Have been cooking a lot and chatting a lot with friends and family, which I am incredibly grateful for!
In this very moment, I am doing a lot of research for a short film about the glass house effect (GHE). I think my interest in GHE started at my former workplace where the office walls were made of transparent glass, which gave me and a few of my co-workers a feeling of unease when working in this environment. The glass house effect is the feeling that you are under constant watch or observation. Glass buildings are used more commonly as university facilities, and they are also more common in corporate environments. The transparency of the glass could be the result of good intentions, creating openness between workers or students. It is meant to minimize hierarchies between bodies in these buildings, but I am more of the belief that this can lead to feelings of nervousness or stress when there is less space for privacy or to hide. I think this type of architecture moderates your behaviour. It is as if the glass constructions become the surveillant itself. I find it interesting how our spatial environments can have so much agency after entering this world and how they are affecting the way we perceive each other and ourselves. It is obvious that architecture expresses who we want to be, but who do we become when entering these spaces?
The theme you are bringing up here, of the relations between architecture, space and behaviour, makes me think about a performance-based work you did about a year ago, that you called Queer Lines of Desire. From the poetic text that was a part of this work, I understood it as a discussion on how social behaviours – desires – of different social groups in society partake in the formation of the spatial landscape in our cities. “Queer” seemed to denote something that diverge from the institutionalized orders and perhaps mass-behaviours in both a sexual and spatial sense. I found this conjunction intriguing. Would you like to tell us a little bit more about this work and the thoughts you had on it?
I started writing a lot in the beginning of the corona pandemic about digital existence versus urban existence. I had questions about what happens with the urban collective and our bodies in public spaces when we are put in a position where we must place our social desires into digital platforms. What is left out there in the physical realm, outside the collective online? I thought a lot about ways of existing and about walking freely in public space. At this very moment in Athens, for example, you must text the government every time you leave the house.
I started writing a text that focuses on the bodily or physical imprint we make on nature and in our urban environments. These imprints can be seen as a kind of carving and drawing on our landscapes, the so-called desire lines that are created as we walk across the lawn in the park or beside a sidewalk. The text describes these pathways as queerlines of desire as the pedestrians are entering and creating a different structure in our cities, against the established sidewalks and normative design in public space. The queer movements of our bodies become a form of resistance against urban planners and designers, as the bodies are shaping the urban environments in their own way. It is a text about wanderers and dreamers that are behaving and moving against conventions, normative ways of operating, and standard directions in public space. It is also a text about sexual orientation, queer people orientating themselves in the landscape, existing independently, being out of line. The word “queer” itself comes from the Indo-European word “twist” which gives it a spatial meaning. Bodies moving in a “twisted” direction, not following straight lines or “objective” coordinates. I wanted to change the words, “lines of desires”, by adding “queer” to it, to stress that desire is not always straight.
This interest in thinking of other ways of moving in public space, led to a collaboration with my friend and artist Bianca Hisse. In our performance, titled, “Vessels”, we worked on a choreography and concept for a group of performers, presented at Folkeparken Friluftsmuseum in Tromsö. This piece was part of an outdoor exhibition organized by Failure, Understanding, Care (& Kunst). We wanted to question the vertical body and its dominance in public space. Crawling, rolling, and lying – which is often seen as improper for such places – became dominating in the choreography. We wanted to bring attention to unspoken collective rules and the “choreo-policing” of daily life.
”Vessels”, 2020
I understand the performance as an intervention – perhaps even a “spatial intervention” since it negotiates themes of city planning and architecture. The intervention seems to reoccur as a form and framework in your artistic practices, would you like to describe this tendency in your work and interest?
I am fascinated by the ways that architectural space and its liable objects have the potential to be constructed, redefined. In my installation, “Softly Glowing”, I covered one of the roof lamps in the exhibition space with a photo print. I thought it started “acting as a window”. The photo print depicted raindrops on glass with a blurry house facade in the background.
”Softly Glowing”, 2020
To me, the lamp became a window to an artificial exterior, and I hoped to challenge and redefine what we see, erasing a well-defined function in space, a liable object in the room. I have the impression that we usually do not look up at the ceiling when entering an exhibition space. Modernism neglected ceilings. I am not saying we should go back to the Renaissance, to the ceilings with painted figures in geometric cells, I am just fascinated in paying attention, in seeing art in the total room, altogether, and in how the room can shape the conditions for the artwork itself, in how the artwork takes its final shape and form. Another type of work I made, relating to your question, is the collection of drawings I made in collaboration with the museum building, Kode 4 in Bergen. During a weeks’ time I went to the museum to select different rooms to work with and made frottage drawings of several architectural elements, frottaging of door stops to an elevator and the exhibition floor carpet. I later presented the collection of frottage drawings in a group show at the same museum but was organized by the student gallery, Gallerifi4e, and you could not tell where the motives came from, really. The drawings became abstractions of the history of the building but at the same time they were referencing and revealing architectural elements in the building.
”Everyday Relics”, 2021
Would it be true to say that in your interventions, you often start with something invisible, forgotten or hidden in the spatial environment? If so, how would you describe the process of coming to these initially hidden starting points and in which way would you say that this perspective on the material surrounding influence your art in general?
Very good question! You could say that I have been working with the visible and invisible, that is correct. Marble dust is a material I have been coming back to for measuring invisible factors in different spaces, different rooms. A series of marble dust sculptures were presented and placed directly on the floor. I never blended the dust with anything more than water and with time when the sculptures started to dry out, they started reacting on the vibrations in the space. The sculptures slowly started to fall apart when becoming more unstable and vulnerable to the vibrations in the floor, usually caused by bodies moving around in the space.
”Everyday Relics”, 2021
In one of my latest projects, I finished a 20-minute sound piece called, Resonance from Before, in 2020. It consists of recordings from an abandoned beer factory in Tromsö in Northern Norway and field recordings and nature sounds from the harbour area outside the factory. I took up and recorded “invisible” vibrations with a geophone and electromagnetic sounds with the help of a priezor in the rooms of the factory building. The hearable and non-hearable frequencies were edited and fused together in a software. I was interested in minimising the distance that exists between what we see and hear in a space or room. The invisible sounds – vibrations and the electromagnetic sounds – are something our ears normally cannot perceive; humans can expect hearing between 20 to 20,000 Hz. So, I amplified the sound frequencies that are usually beyond our direct perception when we move around in space. I think you could say that every physical space consists of several realities that exist at the same time. I often wonder if hidden sounds in our physical environments can tell us about a common state of alienation. I think it is a common feeling of inadequacy in what our bodies can perceive and experience of the surrounding.
One of your works that most evidently touches upon the theme of this issue is An Invitation from 2019. In this work you encouraged museum visitors to take pictures of themselves together with coal pieces from a mine in Svalbard in front of images of free trade zones. Would you like to describe this work in closer details, and some of the thoughts that lay behind it?
Gruve 3 (Coal mine number 3) is a non-active coal mine owned by Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani, and it mainly functions as a tourist attraction today, with daily guided tours in the mine. The mine was operational between 1971 and 1996. During my trip to Longyearbyen, I got to join the guided tour in the same mine. We had a lot of questions along the tour and right after the tour, the guide gave me a bag full of carbon pieces to bring back home. I was grateful for the gift and thought I might make something out of it. In 2019, I decided on what I wanted to do with the pieces of carbon from the mine. A question was raised; can you be a tourist in a landscape without visiting there? And on a one-night event I invited gallery visitors to take a picture in front of a green screen and they got instructions to stage the carbon and themselves in front of the backdrop. In the next step they could decide to pick a background image from an archive I had collected for years. The collection consisted of images and sceneries from so called free trade city zones and romantical, historical landscape paintings (mainly with motives from the Arctic region) from the 19th century. I thought about if this kind of photobooth event was suggesting a distance experienced by the visitors from narratives in the collected images and the historical paintings. I wanted the audience to become participants, to perform; planning, exchanging ideas, staging images that led to the production of new images with new representations, new micro- and macro-narratives, or just tacky-funny images.
”An invitation”, 2019
Speaking of galleries and museums, what kind of place would you say that a museum is? I keep coming back to the duality of hidden and visible features and just came to think about your work Keep your Desires Inside from last year. What was the idea behind this work?
Museums are many things. I guess there is a tiny difference when it comes to who owns the museum, or if it is owned by a state, like a public museum, or if it is a private owned institution. And the function of a museum has changed throughout history until today. Museums aim to preserve the history of the past. Most of the institutions like to buy or take new artworks which offers the power and prestige related to having these pieces in their collection. So, yes, what kind of place is a museum? I heard somewhere that the architect Alvar Aalto has said that the door handle is the handshake of a building, which can be inviting and courteous, or forbidding and aggressive. In this artwork you are referring to, I used several non-accessible doors at Kode museum 4, Bergen. I thought the doors did not look very inviting, there are many locked doors in museums to non-accessible rooms. I decided to attach a yellow vinyl text on the doors saying, “Keep this door closed at all times Keep your desires inside”. I hoped that this gesture could bring consciousness to the everyday object – these mysterious doors in an institution. I was also very curious about all the hidden artworks behind these doors. I read somewhere that museums only show a few percent of their art collections to the public. This gave me a feeling and fear of missing out on something. I also started thinking about how much responsibility our institutions have when it comes to deciding on what art we can take part in as museum visitors.
”Keep your Desires Inside”, 2020
Kamilla Taraeva, 2021
Kan konsten spela på samma arena som filosofin när det kommer till de stora frågorna, eller är språkets precision en nödvändig förutsättning? Bland de röster i historien som hävdade filosofins prioritet över konsten lyder Platons och Hegels kanske klarast. Av motsatt åsikt tänker man möjligtvis på Nietzsche eller Schopenhauer. Men få var lika övertygade om konstens filosofiska värde som fenomenologerna. För tänkare såsom Heidegger, Sartre och Merleau-Ponty är det uppenbart att konsten kan redogöra fenomenens beskaffenhet bättre än den skrivna filosofin.[1] De menar att människan, som rör sig mellan olika rum och platser, erfar atmosfärer och stämningar, och upplever objekt i skiftande form beroende på ljus, rum och perspektiv, i konsten kan uppleva en förhöjd sinnlighet, ibland rentav tingens essens. I följande text ska jag utifrån några av fenomenologins –framförallt Merleau-Pontys– mest fundamentala insikter försöka närma mig konstnären James Turrells verkserie Skyspace. På så vis kanske vi kan se den antydda affiniteten mellan konst och filosofi.
Fenomenologernas upptagenhet vid konsten är knappast förvånande med tanke på deras ambition att lösa filosofiska problem genom varseblivning och konstens förmåga att få ting som annars är osynliga att uppenbara sig för ögat. Dessa tänkare, som bemödar sig med konstitutionen av ting och rum, har som sin huvudsakliga uppgift att förklara hur saker och ting framträder sig för oss i medvetandet.[2] Kort sagt studerar de strukturer av upplevelser i första person.[3] De är övertygade om att konsten kan förändra vårt förhållningssätt till världen, och att konstnären och filosofen jobbar mot ett och samma mål.
Fenomen av särskilt intresse är rumslighet och perception. I alla fall för Merleau-Ponty, vars bidrag till estetiken är omistligt. För honom är relationen mellan medvetandet och kroppen oupplöslig, vilket kan kontrasteras mot den dualism som genomsyrade den västerländska kulturen i sekler. Mot rationalisterna och den moderna vetenskapen hävdade han att den objektiva synen på verkligheten som förespråkades varken var autonom eller fullständig då den redan från början var beroende av mänsklig interaktion med världen. Denna värld är inte extern för oss, menade han, utan förnims genom oss. Det sätt vi existerar på är, i Heideggers termer, vara-i-världen, och utifrån det fördömde Merleay-Ponty det reduktionistiska sättet att abstrahera och söka förstå tillvaron kognitivt [4]. Istället såg han behovet av en deskriptiv perceptionsfilosofi som kan beskriva den förvetenskapliga, ‘levda’, tillvaron. [5] Han menade då inte att vi egentligen befinner oss i ett begreppslöst kaos, utan bara att vår kontakt med världen är skild från de strukturer som upprättas i abstrakt tänkande. [6] Det är därför viktigt att ha en ursprunglig uppfattning om våra kroppar och de rum som de intar. Om vi lyckas komma närmare dessa fenomen kan vi få en klarare uppfattning om grunderna till våra teoretiska koncept. Detta är filosofins utgångsläge och kan inte försummas utan konsekvenser.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2021
På konstens område får detta intressanta följder. I essän “Cézannes tvivel” beskriver Merleau-Ponty med hänförelse hur konstnären dokumenterar det han varseblir, “det exakta studiet av framträdelser”[7], och därav lyckas förmedla något viktigt om vad det innebär för människan att överhuvudtaget kunna se. Det är inget mindre än perceptionens födelse som Cézanne fångar på duken, med en blick som är så fokuserad på det synliga. Hans mål var att återskapa verkligheten utan att offra det sensibla eller för en sekund släppa taget om det omedelbara intrycket från naturen– en till synes omöjlig uppgift som inte lät honom följa konturer eller tillämpa perspektiv. Ändå resulterade detta i verk som, enligt Merleau-Ponty, skildrar ting så som de är i sin “rena” form och så som vi faktiskt upplever dem genom våra sinnen.[8]
Konstnären som ger bäst uttryck för detta i vår samtid är förmodligen James Turrell, som hyllas av både kritiker och kändisar (Drakes musikvideo “Hotline Bling” utspelar sig i en av Turrells installationer!)[9]. I hans ljuskonst handlar allt om seende för seendets skull och kroppslig medvetenhet framför rumslighet. Han är bland annat känd för sina så kallade Skyspaces: cirkelformade rum strödda på olika ställen i världen (bland annat Sverige), där besökaren kan betrakta himlen genom ett stort oculus under gryning och skymning medan rummets upplysta väggar långsamt skiftar i färg. I takt med att rummets väggar övergår i nya färger kontrasteras den öppna himlen mot nya nyanser och ger den en helt ny kulör. Den blir grön mot de rosa väggarna och kleinblå mot de gula. Turrell, som har sin bakgrund i perceptuell psykologi och dessutom är förtrogen med Merleau-Pontys verk, använder sig på så sätt av ljuset och rummet som verktyg för att uppmärksamma de processer genom vilka vi varseblir världen.[10] Skyspaces påminner därav om den mänskliga perceptionens betydelse, och vår egna kropps centralitet i relation till luminansen, rumsligheten och tiden.[11]
Merleau-Ponty skulle nog säga att Turrell faktiskt lyckas utföra det som fenomenologen endast kan drömma om att åstadkomma med ord. Turrells blick har formats av det medium som han har bemästrat, ljuset, vilket gör hans perception unik. Den är finstämd och kan berätta något nytt om världen då den ständigt har pressats av sitt hantverks krav.[12] Detta gör att Turrell kan sätta sin egen prägel på fenomenen och låta oss erfara det skildrade i nytt ljus. Medan vår vardagliga syn inte är uppmärksam på vad som skiljer de olika objekten från varandra, kan Turrell synliggöra denna process genom att få oss att se på nytt.
Att konsten tjänar mycket på fenomenologin är inte något nytt. Konst har varit av intresse för filosoferna sedan antiken. Men Merleau-Pontys tankar leder till slutsatsen att relationen minst sagt är ömsesidig, och att konsten själv kan stå till tjänst för filosofin, på sina egna premisser. Till skillnad från språket har den en sinnlig direkthet, vilket kan utnyttjas som en värdefull resurs. Således visar Merleau-Ponty och Turrell att konsten inte bara fungerar som ett sätt att belysa redan befintliga filosofiska problem, utan att den är fullt kapabel till att väcka egna, nya frågor, och kanske till och med ge några svar!
[1] Parry, Joseph D. , ‘Art and Phenomenology’, (London, Routledge, 2011). s. 232.
[2] Husserl, Edmund, Jan Bengtsson, ‘Fenomenologins Idé’ (Göteborg, Daidalos, 1989). s. 24.
[3] Smith, David Woodruff, ”Phenomenology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(2018), Zalta.
[4] Parry, Joseph D. , ‘Art and Phenomenology’, (London, Routledge, 2011). s. 144.
[5] Sepp, Hans Rainer, and Lester Embree, ‘Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics’, (New York, 2009). s. 10-12
[6] Parry, Joseph D. , ‘Art and Phenomenology’, (London, Routledge, 2011). s. 140
[7] Toadvine, Theodore A., Jr. ‘The Art of Doubting: Merleau-Ponty and Cezanne’, Philosophy Today (Celina), vol. 41/no. 1, (1997), s. 545.
[8] Smith, David Woodruff, ”Phenomenology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(2018), Zalta.
[9]’What does James Turrell Think of Drake?’, The Washington Post , (2016).
[10] Schuld, Dawna. , “Lost in Space: Consciousness and Experiment in the Work of Irwin and Turrell’, in Beyond Mimesis and Convention (Netherlands, 2010), ss. 221-244.
[11] Dawna Schuld, “Practically Nothing: Light, Space, and the Pragmatics of Phenomenology,” i Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), s. 108.
[12] Smith, David Woodruff, ”Phenomenology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(2018), Zalta.
Amanda Winberg, 2021
Som en del av reflektionen kring temat ”Different Spaces/Spaces of Difference” har frågor kring stad och land, centrum och periferi, ofta varit vägledande för den diskussion vi i redaktionen hoppats på att skapa. Däribland har jag ställt mig frågor kring kulturutbyten, resursfördelning och politisk segregation och sökt perspektiv på dessa utanför den gängse akademiska miljön. Med ett särskilt intresse för hur man försöker att kommentera dessa frågor inom konstvärlden kunde jag bara hoppas på att få till en intervju med curatorsduon Emily Fahlén och Asrin Haidari, som sedan 2019 arbetar med Mint Konsthall på ABF-huset i Stockholm.
Duon har en rad uppdrag och initiativ bakom sig där den både socialt och geografiskt perifera platsen ofta blir till förutsättning och tema för projekten. Samarbetet mellan Fahlén och Haidari började på Tensta Konsthall. Sedan dess har de verkat som konstnärliga ledare för Luleåbiennalen, ställt ut Gunilla Palmstierna Weiss på Moderna Museet för att nu driva det ”ambulerande konstprojektet”[1] Mint i det forna Sveagalleriets lokaler på ABF i Stockholm. Jag mailade duon och fick ett snabbt och vänskapligt ja till svar på min intervjuförfrågan. Lite slogs jag av denna vänskaplighet, av tillgängligheten som nästan verkade prioriterad just för ändamål som dessa, och det ska visa sig i intervjun att attityden är en grundläggande del av curatorsduons konstnärliga strategi.
Fotograf: Gethin Wyn Jones
1:a Juli 2021, Zoom
Ni har båda varit verksamma på Tensta Konsthall, varit konstnärliga ledare för Luleåbiennalen sedan 2018, ställt ut Gunilla Palmstierna Weiss på Moderna och driver nu konsthallen Mint.Skulle ni säga att det finns ett genomgående tema för de projekt som ni tar er an? För mig verkar det som att ni ofta tar er an utställningsrum som ligger lite utanför, både geografiskt och socialt, något man skulle kunna tolka som konstfältets centrum, är det fel att tolka det så?
Asrin: Nej jag tänker att det är en rimlig tolkning av våra intresseområden och av hur vi tar oss an och jobbar med utställningar. Tiden på Tensta har varit väldigt formerande för mig och Emily; att jobba mycket med förmedlingsverksamhet och tänka ett helt sammanhang, en hel plats, och däri upptäcka vad det gör för en utställning har betytt mycket. Det handlar om att förstå att man inte bara jobbar med en utställning men också med alla delarna runt om, som med programverksamheten, vilka grupper man söker och hur man kommunicerar den. Det hänger ihop. Eftersom vi jobbade på en ganska liten institution där vi var ett tight team flöt allting in i varandra där. Och det här med att vi är intresserade av att gräva där vi står, av platsens betydelse för konsten och för utställningen som praktik – det kommer också från den tiden där många projekt grundades i Tensta som plats. Intresset för historia, sammanhang och politik kommer helt enkelt därifrån.
Man kan se en del projekt i Sverige idag som handlar om att uppmuntra, etablera och uppmärksamma kultur- och framför allt konstproduktion på landsbygden, ibland ifrån ett Stockholmscentrerat perspektiv och med en Stockholmscentrerad konstproduktion i ryggen Jag tycker alltid att era projekt har känts väldigt fina och avstämda, som i resonans med platserna ni har verkat på. Vad har varit viktigt för er i frågor som dessa och hur har era praktiker sett ut?
Emliy: I stora drag skulle jag säga att det är ett positivt fenomen att konsten sprider sig ut från storstadsregionerna. Ibland kan man, som du säger, se att det sker från ett stockholmsperspektiv, alltså att man planterar projekt. Det kan vara problematiskt om de inte är förankrade ordentligt.
Ett intressant exempel att titta på kulturpolitiskt är projektet “Kreativa platser” som genomfördes under Alice Bah Kunhkes tid som kulturminister. Det var en stor satsning som byggde på att konsten skulle möta civilsamhället. Det genererade starten för många olika kulturprojekt runt om i landet. Å ena sidan kan man se det som en positiv satsning att konsten får ta plats i mer okonventionella miljöer och med större geografisk spridning, å andra sidan finns risken att inte uppnå förankring när initiativet har ett “up-side-down-perspektiv”.
När jag och Asrin arbetat i Norrbotten med Luleåbiennalen har det varit viktigt för oss att lägga väldigt mycket tid på att lära känna platsen, och med platsen menar jag egentligen människorna. Vi har inte velat uppfinna hjulet på nytt utan se till vilken kunskap som finns i regionen: vilka jobbar redan med konst här? Vilka är intresserade av det som vi är intresserade av? Det är ju inte så att man per automatik samarbetar med alla men med dem som man hittar en gemensam intressesfär med. För min och Asrins del handlar det ofta om att vi hittar personer vi ”klickar med”, som vi känner att vi delar ambitioner med. Det är också viktigt att vi känner att vi hittar en samstämmighet ideologiskt eftersom vi har politiken som bakgrund i allt vi gör. Även fast det inte alltid är uttalat så handlar det mycket om det som en gemensam plattform.
Några små formuleringar som jag fastnade vid i samband med presentationen av Luleåbiennalen både 2018 och 2020 tycker jag har lyckats bra med att rama in en kritisk förståelse för relationen mellan folk och land. Formuleringarna pekar ofta mot en förståelse av den geografiska platsen som en scen, en social spelplan, snarare än en historisk och kulturell identitet där ett bestämt folk har sitt ursprung. Hur har ni kommit fram till dessa formuleringar och ert tankesätt runt dem?
Asrin: Jag tänker att det hänger ihop med det att bygga relationer. Det sociala har varit så centralt då vi försökt att se: vad är relevant på den här platsen? Förankring är nyckelordet, och det innebär att spendera mycket tid och se mer än på ett snabbt ytligt plan. Det blir på så vis inte bara ett professionellt arbete utan det handlar mycket om att skapa nya vänner på de här platserna och på så sätt få större förståelse för vad som är problematiskt och inte. Det är viktigt att förstå vilka olika perspektiv och konflikter som redan finns på en plats. Då behöver man spendera mycket tid och involvera andra människor som är bosatta där och lever sina liv på den platsen man kommer till. Just Luleåbiennalen har haft många samarbeten med lokala aktörer som jobbar med kultur och konst, och de har varit delaktiga i flera olika steg i arbetet, antingen som konstnärer, eller som platser och institutioner där utställningar ägt rum.
Att landskapet blir något slags material eller en scen motsvarar på något sätt också viljan att förstå mer. Vi tänker aldrig kortsiktigt eller att det här är en plats vi bara besöker. Till exempel sa vi redan från början efter den första biennalen att vi vill göra andra utställningsprojekt där. Det fanns ingen idé från vår sida om att det bara handlar om ett eller två tillfällen, utan snarare en inställning att relationerna som byggdes byggdes för livet. Så har vi gått in i projektet.
Emily: Vad gäller landskapet var det allra mest framträdande i den första biennalen.
Det som var påtagligt för oss var det kompakta mörker som erövrar Norrbotten under perioden. Vi var väldigt fascinerade av landskapet och av vad vi såg. Det fanns helt klart en exotifierande aspekt i vår blick som vi försökte använda oss av på ett konstruktivt sätt genom att förankra våra frågeställningar i samarbete med dem som hade större insikt i platsen.
Vad som också är viktigt att framhäva i vårt kuratoriska arbetssätt är att konsten kommer in på en gång och vi låter tematiken växa fram parallellt med den; vi tänker tillsammans med konstnärerna och deras projekt. Det är inte så att vi kommer med en färdigpaketerad idé som vi bjuder in konstnärer till utan tematiken formuleras i allra högsta grad i dialog med konstprojekten. En sak som är viktigt för vårt arbete, inte bara i Norrbotten utan generellt, är att hitta mentorskap. Vi tycker om att prata mycket med äldre generationers kulturutövare och vi låter dem gärna upplysa och tipsa oss. Det blir också ofta personer som vi sen arbetar tillsammans med och bjuder in till våra projekt. I Luleåbiennalen, till exempel, är kulturjournalisten Kerstin Wixe en väldigt central person. Vi har arbetat med henne på olika sätt både genom textuppdrag, programpunkter och litteratursamtal.
Asrin: Precis, många av historierna vi har plockat upp har kommit från sådana nyckelpersoner och på så vis gått från människa till människa, genom vänskaper, relationer och mentorskap. Flera av platserna som vi har varit på eller historierna som plockats upp i Luleåbiennalen kommer från Kerstin Wixe.
Emily: Det finns alltså kvaliteter, om man använder dem på rätt sätt, i att komma med ett utifrånperspektiv. Till skillnad från hur man tittar på den hemvana platsen tittar man med en mer aktiv blick på en plats man inte helt och håller känner. Om man lyckas balansera den positionen kan det bli bra tillsammans med det som är mer förankrat. Till exempel jobbade vi i Luleåbiennalen med terroristdådet 1940 mot den kommunistiska tidningen Flamman, som överlag är en ganska okänd händelse i svensk historia. Inte ens i Norrbotten har den uppmärksammats särskilt mycket och detsamma gäller för stora delar av kulturen från det politiska 60- och 70-talet. Därför upplevde vi att det visades stor uppskattning av att vi kom och återaktiverade historien i och med vår blick, och kanske särskilt den historien, i Biennalen 2018.
Det är fint att du har med Tenstaperspektivet, Asrin, för det är väldigt viktigt för oss. Det är det vi alltid återkopplar till. Vi lärde oss så mycket av att jobba på en plats under många år och vi byggde upp en känslighet där. För Tensta är precis som landsbygden kan vara, ett område som exploateras i egenskap av att vara en typisk förort där man ser projekt komma in som inte är förankrade, som bara vill få en bra dokumentation på att man har landat på den platsen, eftersom de här platserna är så symbolladdade.
Vad vi ville åstadkomma när vi skapade Mint, med Tensta konsthall i ryggen, var att bygga en spännande utställningsverksamhet och samtidigt att bli en mötesplats. Som Asrin sa: vi tänker hela tiden i termer av kontinuitet. Vad som har varit fint med Mint är att vi haft en specifik grupp personer som har följt vår verksamhet. På så vis bygger vi relationer med dem som kommer till oss och det gör vår verksamhet mer meningsfull för oss, och det uppluckrar idén om separationen mellan publik och institution. Att vi gärna samarbetar med dem som också är vår publik, går igen i allt vi gör.
Verksamheten i ABF-huset är kanske inte helt perifer, socialt och geografiskt sett, men ändå lite då man inte är van att se konsten där. Vi ville gärna befinna oss i centrala Stockholm för vi ser att Stockholm utarmas på intellektuell och intressant konstnärlig aktivitet i innerstaden då den kommersialiseras alltmer. Det är svårt att bedriva konstnärlig verksamhet där om man inte är konkurrensstark.
Asrin: Det som vi har nämnt tidigare med att titta tillbaka historiskt och bjuda in mentorskap blir påtagligt i ABF-huset som befolkas av en äldre generation. Där finns många som har arrangerat och jobbat med projekt som är inspirerande för oss och som var med under en politisk tid där kulturen och politisk aktivitet flöt ihop, då kulturen hade en mer självklar plats. Av den anledningen landar intresset vi haft länge för generationsöverskridande möten väldigt bra i just ABF-huset. Om man också tänker på hur man aktiverar konst finns det väldigt intressanta format i folkrörelsen och arbetarrörelsens historia. Till exempel i ABF:s studiecirklar, seminarier och det självorganiserande; de är intressanta strukturer och strategier i hur man tänker kring att konst kan förmedlas.
Ja. Jag tänker på den första utställningen som ni inledde Mint med: Den folkliga självstyrelsens livsluft som just handlar mycket om fritid men också om att skapa ett fritt rum, ett rum som till stor del är obestämt där man både får vara meningslös och meningsfull. Ni har nämnt att organisering och åldersöverskridande möten är svåra att få till i kommersialiserade rum. Skulle ni kunna utveckla det lite mer? Vad är ett fritt rum, och vad betyder det för fritid, bildning och för att hitta gemenskap mellan olika grupper av människor?
Emily:. En sak jag tänker på, som redan fanns i ABF-huset från början och som vi har glatt oss åt, är att det är en så pass öppen yta att folk faktiskt sitter i entrén ofta och läser tidningen, kanske slumrar till, utan att bli bortkörda därifrån, vilket är extremt ovanligt i en stockholmskontext. Det signalerar någonting som jag tycker är sympatiskt – att man inte har massa vakter och övervakningskameror. En annan konkret grej är att inte ta inträde för verksamheten som bedrivs. Det skulle vi aldrig kunna tänka oss att göra om vi verkligen inte hade kniven på strupen. Sen tänker jag på det här med att ha låg tröskel: vilken konstplats som helst skulle säga att de eftersträvar det eller att de har det men det handlar ändå om vad olika rum signalerar för olika människor. Det som är roligt med att vara i ABF-huset är att människor råkar hamna i vår utställning utan att vara förberedda på det, att det är en miljö som kanske inte känns så hotfull, exponerande, eller…
Asrin: elitistisk!
Emily: Ja, elitistisk, som konstplatser ofta upplevs. Det var också viktigt på Tensta konsthall att själva entrén är ett café så att man inte kommer in i den här tomma miljön och känner sig uttittad det första av allt. Det finns sådana arkitektoniska och sociala parametrar. Men också rent konstnärligt, för när vi pratar om det här rummet, som relaterar mycket till vår första utställning, så handlar det om att skapa ett rum där misslyckanden och experiment kan ske, och om att inte alltid vara så kontrollerande i den konstnärliga processen. Vi jobbar ofta spontant kring våra utställningsprojekt på Mint och saker kan omformas i sista sekund. Det ger oss energi till det vi håller på med för det passar oss som personer, men det är såklart olika. Vi gillar att verkan mellan etablerade institutioner som har uppstyrda program, där man marknadsför sina saker lång tid i förväg. Det finns redan tillräckligt mycket sådana platser som har en sådan typ av struktur så vi behöver inte också vara en sådan plats. Vi är lite annorlunda där.
Asrin: Jag tänker också på den energin som du beskriver, Emily. Vi får energi i den här processen och jag hoppas att den energin också syns; att den här lusten, eller det att vi inte hinner tröttna på våra idéer utan att de fortfarande känns angelägna när utställningen öppnar, är en lycklig konsekvens av att vi vill vara flexibla, organiska, och jobba i ett annat tempo eller temperament. Jag tänker att utställningen eller projekten vi gör blir mera fria, att den friheten som vi har visar sig i det som publiken möter. Det kanske inte är så planerat i detalj; utställningen kanske har en öppenhet snarare än att den är färdig och följer en viss struktur eller svarar på särskilda frågor eller är helt färdigtänkt. Det experimenterande som finns, och den energin, skapar en frihet och rummet blir fritt.
Emily: Ja, jag tror vi eftersträvar ett visst mått av oförutsägbarhet, det blir roligare då. Och det är ju ett risktagande, det är inte säkert att det alltid blir bra. Vi tycker inte att allt det vi gör blir helt hundra men vi förstår varför vi gör det. Att inte riktigt veta vilken väg det ska ta är också roligt i relation till programmet. Snarare än att man från början bestämt det man ska förmedla kan man då själv låta sig underhållas av det man gör och följa med i nuet.
Sen tänkte jag även på utställningen Den fysiska världen fanns fortfarande där just utifrån temat på vårt nummer som ska komma ut. Om man tänker sig att er utställningspraktik ändå är präglad av utvalda rum som är konkreta, fysiska och geografiskt bestämda, vad tänker ni om underhållning, abstraktion och verklighetsflykt? Kan det imaginära eller det abstrakta bli progressivt och bildande eller måste vi försöka återupptäcka de materiella rummen där vi lever?
Emily: Det abstrakta uttrycket är något som går igenom många av utställningarna som vi gör. Vi är i allra högsta grad intresserade av abstraktionen som uttrycksmedel. Det är viktigt för oss att konsten är vår utgångspunkt och att vi inte blir för duktiga i relation till de här kontexterna som vi verkar i; vi vill inte bara ställa ut den typ av konst som är ett likhetstecken med arbetarrörelsen. Vissa av våra projekt är väldigt trogna den historien men andra kan tyckas vara lite mer långsökt kopplade. Den första utställningen är ett bra exempel på det där vi hade med många olika uttryck, däribland det abstrakta.
Just Den fysiska världen fanns fortfarande där tycker jag är ett av de roligaste utställningsprojekt vi har gjort. Det var skönt att lämna ABF en liten stund och vara i ett annat rum, och vår utgångspunkt handlade mycket om ett undandragande i relation till droger, rus, och andra sätt att lämna den konkreta världen på. Den viktigaste utgångspunkten där var David Wojnarowicz och Marion Scemamas film “When I put my hands on your body” (1989). För i den poetiska texten som Wojnarowicz läser så går han både upp i ruset, det erotiska ögonblicket, samtidigt som han är påmind om den fysiska världen och de ok som finns på hans axlar. Mer explicit handlar det om viruset som han bär på. Det gäller alla verk som har den dubbla rörelsen att försöka uppgå i abstraktionen och samtidigt vara påmind om världen som pågår runt omkring. Det är kopplat till att förlora kontroll där det inte finns en given tolkning och en given väg. Sen har vi inte alltid jobbat kring arbetarhistorien på ABF heller. Tittar man på konsten och arbetarhistorien så är det mycket realism och väldigt mycket bokstavlighet kring gestaltningarna. Åtminstone är det den gängse idén kring arbetarkonstens uttryck och jag tror vi har ett behov av att ta ett steg bort från det narrativet för att komma med förslag på annat som är relevant. Där handlar det om att komma in med andra perspektiv.
Om man rör sig in på frågor kring virtuella rum, och ser till att konst idag exponeras mycket via sociala medier: vilka konsekvenser får det för er? Oftast blir konsten på det sättet oberoende från platser och rum. Finns det inneboende problem eller kanske möjligheter i det?
Asrin: Ja, bara det senaste året har vi försökt att hitta vägar för att nå ut till en publik på andra sätt.
Emily: Ärligt talat är vi inte jätteintresserade av sociala medier.
Asrin: Nej, vi har inte hittat något sätt eller inspirerats av någon annan. Vi ser inget bra som funkar och är inte tillräckligt intresserade för att experimentera och hitta ett sätt som fungerar i rum som inte är fysiska.
Emily: Vi använder det fast mer som information och arkiv. På vår Instagram kan man svepa igenom och se vilka projekt vi har gjort de senaste åren.
Asrin: Men det är ju standard, det är det alla gör, men att tänka kring de frågorna har vi inte stannat upp i så mycket för vi är inte så intresserade av det själva. Vi förstår ju att de är relevanta frågeställningar och saker att tänka på ännu mer nu den senaste tiden men vi har kanske mest jobbat med radion i och med Luleåbiennalen. Men att nå ut med konstverk; vi har några exempel på det, Emily, visst?
Emily: Ja, de som byggde på ljud. Vi är lite medium-känsliga. Vi tycker att det finns mycket konst som inte gör sig så bra i det platta formatet. Det finns säkert, men jag har inte träffat på så mycket jätteintressanta projekt där jag känt ”wow kan man jobba så”. Det är fortfarande så begränsat.
Hur tänker ni kring den isolering man har sett under många år nu till följd av sociala medier? Inskränkningar av demonstrationsrätten under corona var för många föga uppretande eftersom ingen demonstrerade från början. Vad har konsten och konstfältet för potential i de här frågorna? Vi har pratat om det litet tidigare – att konsten kan erbjuda ett rum för organisering – men kanske kan den erbjuda mer än så hos er?
Emily: Vi har mest varit frustrerade under corona. Det är inte som att vi har tänkt eller kommit på nya tankar. Vi bara väntar på att vi ska kunna få göra saker på exakt det sättet som vi vill och, som vi har pratat om förut, det fysiska mötet är helt centralt för jättemycket av den verksamhet som vi bedriver. Jag känner att vi har varit rätt oinspirerade, eller?
Asrin: Precis, bara det att vi försöker vänta ut det känner jag är fel av oss, för någonstans har världen förändrats. Att gå emot det i stället för att omfamna de nya förutsättningarna är naivt på något sätt eller liksom lite tjockskalligt. Men angående det här med organisering: den utställningen som kommer nu och kureras av Michele Masucci, En omsorgsfull strejk, kommer verkligen ta sig an det politiska läget, rörelsens historia och vilka vägar man kan ta där kamp, strejk och motstånd tas upp mer explicit. Den utställningen kommer att generera möten, kollektivitet och organisering på liten skala i olika sammanhang under utställningsperioden.
Emily: Det är en evig aspekt som vi tänker kring och som är ganska svår att överbrygga men vi hoppas på att skapa fler broar mellan konstfältet och olika politiska rörelser. För det är inte helt självklart att de två möts och det är till och med väldigt separerat mellan olika konstarter; till exempel kanske litteraturfältet sällan ser utställningar och filmkonst kanske inte engagerar skådespelare och teaterfolk. Det känns också som en slags politisk ambition att försöka hitta fler beröringspunkter och för vår del också bredda idén om vad en rörelse och en arbetarrörelse kan vara idag. Den skulle kanske kunna innefatta kulturarbetare också. Det är på något vis kring de frågorna som vi tänker: vilka kan en rörelse innefatta och vad kan konsten ha för plats i den?
In the unceasingly relevant book Social formation and Symbolic Landscape from 1984, cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove writes: “[…] landscape constitutes a discourse through which identifiable social groups historically have framed themselves, and their relations with both the land and other human groups.” Additionally, he states that “this discourse is closely related epistemically and technically to ways of seeing.“ In these quotes, Cosgrove opens up for a proper reflection on the topic of this text, namely on the discursive construction of landscape as mediated through the highway. Let us start by looking at these quotes a little bit closer.
Eleni Ieremia, Ongoing project, 2021
On the one hand, Cosgrove suggests that the landscape, through its discourse – its representations and design – partakes in the construction of identities. By selecting what is part of the landscape and what is not, different spaces, or, perhaps, spaces of difference, form where cultural identities and values often come to expression and in return help to justify the spatial borders. The landscape constitutes a prime way of constructing identity in that it functions as a, in Cosgrove’s terms, frame inside which a culture defines itself in relation to the land and in opposition to something other, far away. The most obvious examples of how identities are constructed through landscape discourses are naturally regional and national identities. National and regional symbols like flags are for instance often designed to mirror qualities in the landscapes of the nation or region – “yellow stands for the golden corn fields” or “red is the desert”. Similarly, the postcard pictures of the Stockholm Archipelago in Sweden or the Alps in Germany often get to represent the entirety of the nation. They achieve as such the affinity between the culture of the nation as a whole and the culture connected to these places.
On the other hand, Cosgrove recognizes that the landscape itself is constructed and mediated by ways of seeing. To perceive and comprehend the landscape, I naturally require a certain kind of view that allows me to see wide horizontally. But what kind of situation does that imply and demand?
In The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, from 2000, Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes a special way of seeing that arises when traveling by train. He calls this panoramic perception.[1] Panoramic perception, he argues, emerges out of a separation between the subject and the particularity of objects in the surrounding of the subject. This comes about through the interplay of velocity and foreground: the foreground of the perception in its usual form, in which the concreteness of things is palpable, disintegrates at the hands of velocity, to emerge again as a bodiless barrier between the viewer and the scene that rushes by. According to Schievelbusch, the result is a form of perception that is not intense and auratic anymore but ephemeral, impressionistic and, as suggested, panoramic. Instead of the particularity of single objects, the focus of perception must, under the mentioned circumstances, move to ensembles of objects that force the vision to perceive them as a unity.
While Schivelbusch’s observation is concerned with the railway journey, it is easy to see how this also applies to traveling by car on the highway. It is hard though to imagine, from today’s perspective, how new and peculiar this way of seeing must have felt to people in the 19th and 20th century who traveled with these new means of transportation for the first time. A hint to that experience, to the strangeness of this kind of perception, could perhaps be found in Gerardo Dotorri’s painting Il Corsa, from 1927.[2] The picture shows the line of a highway stretching over the land. It clearly tries to capture the feeling and visual qualities of how it is to travel by car, and we can sense how it must have felt at that time. The landscape close to the car around the lower half of the painting is stretched out and warped around the traveler, transitioning into a continuous landscape in the background of the picture.
At this point, one might wonder where I am going with this. By introducing Schivelbusch’s notion of panoramic perception and how it is formed, I want to suggest that traveling by train, or by car on the highway, constitutes a rare possibility to attain and behold landscapes, since the activity itself produces landscapes. Taking this affinity between landscape and car travel into account, along with the fact that landscapes often represent national and regional identities (among others), it should come as no surprise that the highway has played a key role in mediating the values and discourses of culture. In the overview on the construction of highway landscapes, that will now follow, I am going to look in closer detail at some of the mediating missions of the highway in Germany during the past century, starting with the Nazi era.
The Nazi Era: Highways and aestheticization of national landscapes
While the National Socialists in Germany were neither the first to use highways as political propaganda, [3] nor the initiators of using the landscape around the highways in the process of constructing a national identity,[4] they most likely make the most striking example of these attempts.
To look at how a specific perception of landscape was formed through the highway during the Nazi-era, one could study the Nazis landscape paintings that were specifically focused on the romance of the highway, or depictions of the highway in the Nazis highway-planning-institute’s magazine, Die Strasse.[5] The most important point to look at, though, is the involvement of landscape architects in the planning process and its surrounding discourse after 1933. Initially, landscape can be seen to be of no special interest in the planning process. Though Hitler mentions that the construction of the highway will be a “Milestone […] for the building of a German ethnic community” in his 1933 speech at the construction start of the first route, the role of the landscape in this process was not yet considered. Similarly, Fritz Todt (1891-1942) – the head of the highway construction and a close associate of Hitler’s – decides, after being invited to talk about integration of highways and landscapes at the convention of the Heimatschutzbewegung[6] in 1933, to not attend.[7] Only three years in the future, this position was turned on its head. Not only is Todt now head of the society for friends of the Heimatschutz, each planning unit for the highway construction also includes a landscapearchitect, among which, many are members of the Heimatschutzbewegung. Similarly, the German unity, which was addressed in Hitler’s speech, was no longer described as a unity of the people, but of the land which the highway will force into unity.[8] Within a few years, the highway attained a strong cultural connotation, and the landscape around the highways was suddenly bound up with cultural values. The idea was that the highway should be constructed in line with ideal beauty and in harmony with the landscape; the supposed profound beauty of the Viking ships, for instance, often figured as aesthetical inspiration for the construction of the highway.[9] The aestheticization of the highway-landscape in relation to cultural identity was thereby initiated in the National Socialist Germany.
Though there are surely several influences playing into this shift, one of the main ones came from the landscape architects that were to be involved. Following the convention of the Heimatschutzbewegung that was mentioned earlier, the landscape architect Alwin Seifert writes a letter to Fritz Todt and describes the highway not as an alien element to the landscape but as a means of influencing and constructing landscape.[10] Following this exchange Seifert develops a close contact with Todt and subsequently gains the mentioned position and influence. Therefore, and since the landscape is our focus here, it is of good use to take a quick look at what the landscape architects around Seifert were all about. The main influence, that was already mentioned, was the Heimatschutzbewegung many landscape architects were involved in. While the landscape was in focus here, it was nothing to be planned at this scale, but to be protected. Landscape, among this group, mainly existed in an idealized and romanticized state of landscape perception. Its background dates to the romantic period and its prototype landscape of the English Landscape Garden, together with the landscape paintings that informed them. Hence gardens were the scale of planning, as a localized and limited entity, and the self-perception of the planners was still that of garden planners.[11] With the highway, the task of the garden planners became largely delimited and following the route through the land expands over the entire landscape as a thing to be planned, the self-perception and field of the landscape architect forms, still with the idealized and romantic appreciation of landscape unimpaired.
The two main elements for creating an idealized German landscape were focused on integrating the highway into the landscape on the one hand and constructing the landscape on the other. First there was a move away from trying to build the shortest connections in space mostly consisting of long straight lines. Instead, the aim was to create “the most noble connection between two points”.[12] Following the aesthetic principles of the English Landscape Garden, the route started to curve through the landscape. Similar to a river, it was to naturally follow according to the terrain and nature’s authority.[13] Seifert put it as: ”he who allows the landscape to determine the route and to specify every curve will build the best and most beautiful road”.[14] At the same time there were large deviations from this aspiration, for the desire to direct the highway through and along specific culturally important landscape scenes and elements like lakes and mountain vistas.[15] Through this purposeful planning, the route and the driver alike, get integrated into a specifically selected landscape with which they form a unity.
In addition, there were efforts to not just present and look at these landscapes, already shaping their perception profoundly, but to also directly alter the landscape by means of plantation. The main criteria for this plantation were that it had to be bodenständig, meaning rooted in the native soil, creating a connection to the ground in accordance with the blood and soil ideology. Foreign plants were ruled out for usage, constructing a pure and clean German vegetation and landscape.[16]
Post-war: The anti-aesthetics of a neutral landscape
In the post war era, the close link between the highway-landscape and the national socialist ideology gave rise to a general tendency of trying to distance the infrastructure from the land surrounding it. This undertaking aimed to redefine the relation of highway and landscape by both dealing with past and ongoing constructions.[17] This was mainly achieved through a new discourse – a new set of attitudes and concepts – established as a framework for the highway.
Considering the previously sketched view of the highway-landscape during the Nazi-era, the discourse of the post-war-era formed a reaction that promoted neutrality and safety, established through scientific and technical reasoning that was supposed to lead to a de-aesthetization of highways and landscapes.[18] The curving route was suddenly justified not due to its beauty, but through the argument that it was safer for the driver, since it is less monotonous. Mathematically constructed through the Klothoide,[19]the curvature no longer followed the “natural” route of the landscape but the route of abstract algorithm. The former connection to the landscape was reconstructed as a neutral connection, the specificity of place turned into the neutrality of space. Similarly, the plantation lost its connection to the specific landscape and the soil and was established as a safety measurement, though it would take until the 60’s before foreign plants would be allowed.[20] This shortly described neutrality of the post-war era, was mostly achieved through discursive changes and not in otherwise more substantial changes.
As the highway was established as neutral and disconnected from the landscape in theory, it was only a question of time and reason for this to turn into practice. This happened in the 70’s, when a broader consciousness of environmental and ecological concerns developed. While a new specific connection to the land arose, in the form of taking into consideration its specific needs for protection, the land starts to be seen less as a landscape and, through an environmental perspective, more as an ecological system. The view of the landscape from the highway diminishes accordingly by shielding it through acoustic barriers, thick shrubbery and the like.[21]
Today: Aestheticization of industrial landscapes along the highway
Since the 2000s, a noticeable countermovement to the post-war-era’s anti-aesthetical highway construction has developed, which tries, in many ways, to re-establishes the highway as a cultural and aesthetical object that should interact with the landscape.[22], [23], [24], [25]
The project of the Park-Highway (Parkautobahn) A 42 in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, will be assessed here in more detail. The project emerged in 2008 in the context of the Cultural Capitals of Europe RUHR.2010 development. Its goal is to help “open up the highlights of a unique Industrial-Cultural-Landscape”, along the 52 km route of the highway A 42 in the Ruhr area. For this it is proposed to integrate the highway into the Emscher Landscape Park, which is an already established project for the same purpose. The feasibility analysis for the Park-Highway first criticized the outcome of the environmental planning strategies of the previous decades as cutting off the highway from its surroundings, a seemingly common critique found at different places in the recent decades.[26],[27], [28] Instead, the analysis suggest to “make the relation of the users of the Park-Highway and the surrounding cityscape come to life”.[29] For this a “memorable landscape picture is to be composed”.[30] Like a piece of music, the landscape ought to be arranged, or rather composed, by elements such as landmarks and landscape features to form aesthetically appreciable scenes along the highway. These elements mostly consist of industrial ruins and industrial heritage sites which now often have an economic function, from culture – and art centers to educational and creative institutes and businesses, usually converted through renown architecture offices.[31] The landscape architects of the Park-Highway project compared these sites and other old industrial remains to the elements of the park and caste ensemble of Sanssouci.[32] The most striking examples of strategies that have been employed to achieve this are frames along the highway, that focus the view on one selected element along the route. Where this framing is not possible through the process of green space planning, the feasibility analysis advises to erect large frames along the route or cut frames out of the acoustic barriers.
Eleni Ieremia, Ongoing project, 2021
The combination of reframing of historical industrial sites as heritages and green space planning, that can be seen in the feasibility analysis of the Park-Highway A 42 in Nordrhein-Westfalen, follows precisely two of the three strategies for revitalizing old industrial sites, that culture theorist Susanne Hauser describes in her ambition to map out these efforts in Europe since the 60s. In the first strategy that Hauser identifies, where the integration of the highway plays an important role, she explains that the reframing of industrial sites entails first a detaching of the site from its former context and then a re-establishing phase, where the site is identified as an object worthy of preservation.[33] This corresponds with the general idea of the frames suggested in the analysis; the industrial sites are detached from its context as they are abstracted, limited and defined in the window of the frame and as such appreciated as a picturesque view that naturally motivates its preservation. In this process the highway becomes the place of the audience, a field where aesthetical appreciation takes place, where the landscape and cultural identities simultaneously are fixated and codified. In a larger international discourse, this tendency to use cultural institutions, that get designed by renown star architects, as iconic landmarks, to boost economical competitiveness goes by the name of “city branding” or, when it comes to regions, “regional branding”. In 2003’s issue of the “International Journal of Urban and Regional Research”, London-based professor of Cultural Economy, Graeme Evans, comment this tendency as follows: “not since the nineteenth century has architecture been used so consciously to promote civic or national pride. “[34]
The second strategy for how old industrial sites are being revitalized, that Hauser sketches out, is that of green space planning. This is more important, since Hauser, in this strategy, identifies a connection between industrial sites and nature. Here, Hauser writes that the strategy rest on an idealization of nature similar to that present in the ideas behind the English Landscape Garden, in which the industrial site ought to be viewed as embedded in nature rather than oppositional to it.[35] This goal is already obvious in the reference to Sanssouci; restored beauty for the industrial past through nature is the mission. In effect, the industrial ruin makes one of the last residuals of romanticism.[36]
From the panoramic perspective at the highway, and through the singled-out frames along the Park-Highway, the view of Germany surrounding me today forms a new and unified landscape, with reference to a neo-romantic industrial past. As nationalism and far-right movements across Europe are spreading, I think about this neo-romantic past at the current highways that articulates a new aesthetic for the landscape, still without any clear cultural designation, and I ask myself what the future might hold.
[1] Schivelbusch, Wolfgang: Spuren in der Stadt, in: Ders., Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert, FISCHER Taschenbuch, Frankfurt a.M. 2000.
[2] Strohkark, Ingrid: Die Wahrnehmung von ‚Landschaft‘ und der Bau von Autobahnen in Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien vor 1933. Dissertation Architektur (unveröffentlicht) Hochschule der Künste Berlin 2001.
[3] For instance the Autostrada dei Laghi in Italy. Zeller, Thomas: Driving Germany, The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1939-1970. Berghahn Books, New York 2010. S. 48.
[6] The Heimatzschutzbewegung organization formed at the end of the 19th century and was concerned with the preservation of an idealized German culture in close relation to nature and the countryside.
[11] Rollins, William H.: Whose Landscape? Technology, Fascism, and Environmentalism on the National Socialist Autobahn. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 85, No. 3, 1995. S. 504 ff.
[12] Emil Maier-Dorn: Die kulturelle Bedeutung der Reichsautobahn. In: Die Straße 5 (1938)
[18] Weimark, Torsten: Vardagstingens visuella brus: Mediala aspekter på teknologi- och designhistoria. In: Jüöich, Solveig; Lundell, Patrik; Snickars, Pelle: Mediernas kulturhistoria. Statens Ljud- och Bildarkiv, Stockholm 2008 S. 193.
[19] A specific constructed curve, actually invented by engineers during the Nazi era.
[20] Reitsam, Charlotte, Raumgestaltung im Autobahn- und Schnellstraßenbau, Leitbilder aus Sicht der Landschaftsarchitektur. in: Bayerische Akademie für Naturschutz und Landschaftspflege (ANL): Landschaftsökologie.Grundlagen, Methoden, Anwendungen. 2011. S. 154.
[23] Kunze, Rolf-Ulrich: Autobahn-Landschaftsbild: Die Niederlande als geschütztes Landschaftsartefakt. in: Journal of New Frontiers in Spatial Concepts, Volume 2009, Universitätsverlag Karlsruhe.
[25] Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: Kulturlandschaft Autobahn, Die Fotosammlung des Landesamts für Straßenwesen Baden-Württemberg, W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2011.
[26] Reitsam, Charlotte, Raumgestaltung im Autobahn- und Schnellstraßenbau, Leitbilder aus Sicht der Landschaftsarchitektur. in: Bayerische Akademie für Naturschutz und Landschaftspflege (ANL): Landschaftsökologie.Grundlagen, Methoden, Anwendungen. 2011. S. 154.
[27] Zeller, Thomas: Vom Landschaftsgenuss zur Schadensvermeidung: Straßen- und Autobahnlandschaften im historischen Wandel. in: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: Kulturlandschaft Autobahn 2011 S. 12.
[28] Jain, Angela: Das Bild von der Autobahn-Landschaft In: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: Kulturlandschaft Autobahn, Die Fotosammlung des Landesamts für Straßenwesen Baden-Württemberg, W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2011.1 S. 34.
[29] Planergruppe Oberhausen GmbH: Parkautobahn A 42 – Machbarkeitsstudie, Kassel / Oberhausen 2008., S. 1.
[32] Park Ensemble in Potsdam in the style of the English Landscape Garden.
[33] Hauser, Susanne: Ästhetik der Revitalisierung. In: Genske, Dieter; Hauser, Susanne: Hauser (Hg.): Die Brache als Chance. Ein transdisziplinärer Dialog über verbrauchte Flächen, Springer, Berlin 2003 S. 11.
[34] Evans, Graeme: Hard-Branding the Cultural City – from Prado to Prada. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 27.2 , June 2003, S. 420.
New York City’s Chinatown is a distinctly different neighborhood from other parts of Manhattan. However, it currently has no strict borders that delineate what exactly Chinatown is. It is a locale that, like much of Manhattan, offers a bombardment of sensory stimuli. In Chinatown, the visuality of the architecture, the signs in Cantonese
Anthony Öhnström, 2021
I
The question of whether or not a social function can be assigned to art has long been of interest to artists and scholars alike. This vast inquiry can, in a somewhat crude manner, be separated into two distinct questions. Firstly, there is the ‘prescriptive question’ which asks if art should to be used for expressing shared truths and experiences, or if it ought to be free of any such responsibility. Secondly, there is the ‘descriptive question’ concerned with the extent to which art possesses the means necessary to have such a role to begin with. The ‘descriptive question’ lies at the heart of Peter Bürger’s book Theory of The Avant Garde, which this text is responding to.
Following in the footsteps of Friedrich Hegel, Bürger describes a progressive decline in the usefulness of art, which he characterises by an inability to arrest meaning and, consequently, an inability to reflect on shared experiences. He argues that this decline has happened as a result of artists continuously neglecting the content of their work in favour of form. Bürger’s central thesis is that avant-garde artists sought to counter this decline by reintegrating art into people’s communal lives. Interestingly, he claims that this attempt was never successful. This is interesting because it frames contemporary avant-garde art (henceforth “post avant-garde art”) as being void of purpose or function. I think that such a conclusion is mistaken. In this text I shall therefore argue that post avant-garde art can be thought of as having a similar function to the movement that inspired it. Furthermore, I shall suggest that by reflecting on the nature of post avant-garde art, we can further develop our notion of what it means for art to be “useful”. In so doing I will draw upon Jenefer Robinson’s paper “Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music” and, for the sake of brevity, I too will focus my attention specifically on music.
II
Before one can begin to decipher the question of how form, content and use relate to one another, it is first necessary to define the terms themselves. Aesthetician James Shelley defines form as the perceptual properties of art. It is worth noting that, whilst perceptual properties are generally [1] understood as the things people see and hear, it can also apply to emotional responses like feelings of pleasure and displeasure. On the other side of the coin there is the concept of content, which is defined by Bürger himself as the “statement” of a work of art.[2] Take for example Edward Munch’s Scream.[3] Its ability to represent anxiety is its content, whereas its form denotes structural qualities like proportions, lines and shapes. That said, content is not exclusively associated with the communication of philosophical ideas, for it also manifests the cognitive-representational value of art. If one were to imagine a painting depicting a castle, then its content is “it being a castle” while its form is the manner in which being a castle is expressed. By viewing the distinction in this light it is easy to see why art’s ability to express anything is generally defined in terms of content. As we will see, however, a conceptualisation of form as being expressive is not impossible.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2021
III
As for usefulness, Bürger suggests that art has come apart from our praxis of life, by which he means that experiences of art are no longer contained within people’s engagement with the rest of the world. Rather, art is something which today is experienced in an autonomous manner, in what Bürger calls art’s special sphere of experience. This, he continues, makes art functionally non-representational, as it can no longer be used to communicate between people or give a critical cognition of reality (i.e. criticise society).[4] It is in relation to this development that Bürger conceptualises the Avant Garde movement of the 20th century: He suggests that this movement was upheld by a cluster of artists who reacted against content loosing its agency. Instead of being bound together by a specific style, Avant Garde artists – Bürger writes – were loosely grouped together by a shared dominant principle: defamiliarisation. Their work was often associated with experimental concept art, i.e. art created by artists seeking to represent or stimulate ideas,[5] thus emphasising the cognitive aspect of art rather than the immediate sensations that may be produced through form. In Bürger’s view, the movement should be thought of as an attempt to intervene in social reality. He summarises this project as follows:
“The avant-gardiste work neither creates a total impression that would permit an interpretation of its meaning nor can whatever impression may be created be accounted for by recourse to the individual parts, for they are no longer subordinated to a pervasive intent. This refusal to provide meaning is experienced as shock by the recipient. And this is the intention of the avant-gardiste artist, who hopes that such withdrawal of meaning will direct the reader’s attention to the fact that the conduct of one’s life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it. Shock is aimed for as a stimulus to change one’s conduct of life; it is the means to break through aesthetic immanence and to usher in (initiate) a change in the re cipient’s life praxis.”[6]
As mentioned above, Bürger maintains that the Avant Garde movement failed in reintegrating art into our praxis of life. This raises the question of whether or not art will forever be plagued by a fundamental ineffectiveness. I will now begin to reject this notion. In so doing I will make use of a spatial metaphor describing the “three-dimensional space” in which a work of art is experienced. This I will call its artistic space.
IV
The purpose of this metaphor is to examine how the conditions constituting experiences of art (referred to as “dimensions”), changes art’s ability to influence people in different ways (referred to as “volume”). The “dimensions” of an artistic space are the following: (i) the number of people taking part in a work of art’s reception, (ii) the function of the artwork, and (iii) the time-interval during which the artwork is experienced. The volume of such an artistic space determines its ability to exist as integrated into the practical struggles of everyday existence. This, broadly speaking, is how Bürger defines usefulness in relation to art. We can compare the usefulness of art from the middle ages with contemporary art by utilising this metaphor: Art of the middle ages involved (i) multiple people experiencing it together with one another by virtue of it (ii) having a sacral purpose, and thus it was (iii) experienced by people in a continual manner as part of their everyday life. Consequently (volume), such “sacral art” had a social role which was integrated into the collective struggles of the members of a community. In comparison to this, art is now experienced in a much more local and individual manner. For (i), the reception of contemporary art is made up by individual acts, because (ii) its function is to provide solitary aesthetic experiences, meaning (iii) its presence in our shared consciousness is only fleeting. As a result (volume), the influence of contemporary art in our practical lives is severely limited.
Now, whilst I too find art being attached to practical life contexts a sufficient condition in labelling it “useful”, I do not believe it to be a necessary one. Moreover, I reject the idea that art loses its ability to communicate universal experiences as a result of its content no longer existing within our praxis of life. Instead, I believe that universality can be thought of as a property of form as well, and that this function is sufficient in calling art useful to some degree. Because, whilst art may indeed be incapable of effectively commenting on shared external experiences, it can arouse internal emotions that are universally shared among different people. For it is certainly the case that all people experience the same emotions of sadness, nobility, aggressiveness, tenderness, etc. Of course, one could respond to this premise by stating that art, in arousing emotions, does not communicate something universal to us in the same way that content is able to do, the reason being that emotions are not found within the artworks themselves. However, turning now to Robinson’s text, we will see that form is indeed itself capable of expressing emotions to us and can thus be said to communicate universal experiences.
V
In her text, Robinson examines the relationship between music arousing emotions and music expressing those same emotions. In her theory, content is reduced to a kind of “guide”, giving the mind some idea of what complex emotions an artist is trying to evoke (such as angry despair, unrequited passion, etc). Consequently, it is not the content of a song that actually expresses emotions, but rather its large-scale formal structures.[7] She writes:
“Just as the formal structure of a piece of music can be understood in terms of the arousal of such feelings as uncertainty, uneasiness, relaxation, tension, relief, etc., so too can we understand the expressiveness of that piece of music in terms of the arousal of those and similar feeling. […] Emotional expressiveness in music frequently corresponds to or mirrors its formal structure”.[8]
Her theory stands out among representational theories of art, most of which argue that cognitive aspects grounded in content determine the expressiveness of all art. Unlike Peter Kivy, for example, who argues that music evokes emotions in so far as it has qualities that resemble something we already find emotional (meaning that the emotional qualities are projected through perception rather than discovered by feeling) , Robinson suggests that sounds express emotions directly onto us. As a result of Robinson’s emphasis on emotions being caused by form rather than content, art is able to express these universal experiences without its content having to be submerged in our praxis of life.[9] This view is therefore compatible with content’s subservient role in contemporary art.
VI
Returning now to my previous metaphor: I want to suggest that, by making the dimensions of an artistic space smaller, its “volume is concentrated”, not only metaphorically but also practically. What I mean is this: An artwork, being consumed individually in its special sphere of experience, is in a position to affect people emotionally in ways it cannot do when it has to adhere to determined social functions. The ways in which people engage with art today allows for experiences that – seeing as they are not guided by some overarching function or principle – speak only to the situations that perceiving subjects are in. This, in turn, allows for people to “invest” their personal dispositions in their experiences of art. Art’s ability to influence individual people is in this way concentrated specifically on them. For example, if a person listening to a sad song is hurting because of a breakup, then that person will find their emotional state intertwined with the music itself. This kind of intimate relationship to art is not possible when the dimensions of the work’s artistic space are broad and interpersonal. Therefore, it is inconceivable that sacral art, whose content is completely determined by its social function, could ever engage people in such highly personally charged, emotional ways.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2021
Now, I think that this concept of artistic space – which describes the opposing forces between that which allows art to be submerged in people’s communal lives (through content) and that which enables art to directly affect people’s emotional lives (through form) – can help us understand post avant-garde art. On the subject of such art, Bürger writes the following: “[A]rt has long since entered a post avant-gardiste phase. We characterize that phase by saying that it revived the category of work and that the procedures invented by the avant-garde with anti artistic intent are being used for artistic ends.” His proposition can be separated into two premises: First, that post avant-garde artists seek to make their work distinct from non-artistic objects (in comparison to much Avant Garde art which often blurred the line between a work of art and a mere object).[10] Second, post avant-garde artists create their work with the intent of providing aesthetic experiences in the Kantian sense, which is characterised by the experience of pleasure through form. From this it can be deduced that post avant-garde artists seek to weaponise form – very much unlike artists belonging to the original avant garde movement who had little interest in it.[11] I do not mean to say that they try to discover new ways of constructing form. Instead, I want to suggest that they seek to examine how far form can be taken with regards to creating art that, through disagreeable or foreign feelings, still generate’s something people find valuable. Thus, post avant-garde art is dependent on art in general existing within these smaller artistic spaces.
How can all this be used in understanding post avant-garde art? To take an example, there is the “music” of Masami Akita (a.k.a Merzbow), whose abrasive use of sound is almost painful to listen to. Having no content, his work cannot be thought of as having any determined social function. As a result, it could not have been created before art was decidedly moved into its special sphere of experience. Consequently, the reason for experiencing Akita’s art must be discovered by each and every person in a wholly individual manner. Yet – for reasons I soon will make clear – his music can still, through form-induced-shock, reflect on universal (internal) experiences – most notably on the sadomasochistic relationship people may have to pleasure. Just as with the original Avant Garde movement, then, shock and defamiliarisation is fundamental to post avant-garde art. As we will see, however, there are clear differences in how this plays out.
In showing these differences, I want to draw attention to one of the most distinguished examples of avant-garde “music” there is, that is to say John Cage’s 4´33. 4´33 is a composition which instructs performers not to play their instruments during the duration of the piece. Hence, 4´33 consists only of the sounds of the environment. However, although 4´33 is a near silent work, it still has content by virtue of it making a statement through that silence: That we should strive towards liberating ourselves from the ways in which we project restricting relationships and structures onto sound – and that we can come to elevate sounds that lack structure, meaning or formal qualities and thus appreciate them in ways generally reserved for music. However, whilst the work is indeed legitimately profound, 4´33 was initially met with much in the way of blind rage.[12][13] People were not only confused by it; they were shocked ways that forced them to reevaluate themselves in ways in line with Bürger’s account of avant-garde art.
Akita’s music, too, enrages people. However, in contrast to 4´33, people are shocked by the explosiveness of its sound rather than the ideas it represents. This explosiveness forces participating subjects to face their relationship to sound and pleasure. Can these abrasive sounds still arouse feelings of pleasure? With regards to the original avant-garde movement, then, artists sought to shock people by manifesting concepts in their art that were foreign to the spectators, challenging them on a cognitive level. post avant-garde art, on the other hand, creates shock-value through tension between that which is pleasurable and that which is oppressive in form. We can therefore see that – even though post avant-garde music is in many ways different from the work of Dada, John Cage, etc. – it is cut from the same cloth and adheres to the same end: To question the very people experiencing it.
Of course, there are other post avant-garde artists who still make use of content but give it a subservient role. For example, on the climax of her song “MAY FAILURE BE YOUR NOOSE”, the lyrics of musician Kirstin Hayter (a.k.a Lingua Ignota), repeatedly recite the same line: “Everything burns down around me, everything burns down”. The message is clear: Hayter is referencing the state of mental turmoil that she had previously gone through. Now, in line with Robinson’s theory, these words only serve as a loose guide regarding her wish to communicate crushing emotional distress to the listener. The emotions are, to a much greater extent, communicated by the form of the song – its harrowing distorted noise which is manically folding in on itself. Similarly, much of Hayter’s music contains themes of social issues like domestic violence. These themes are not only complemented by the songs sound or form, but are rather subordinate to them. The emotions induced by the form are so intense as to shock listeners into becoming personally affected by the subtext of the music. The lyrics thus provides a direction for the emotions, but the the overall impression left upon the subject owes its force and vivacity to the sound of the music. Hence, whilst the effectiveness of music to act as models of political action and social understanding is indeed limited today, post avant-garde music tells us that art can still be used to transfer feelings of experiences onto others. I believe that this example, together with the discussion on Akita’s work, has shown that post avant-garde art can be said to mediate between people, even as it is experienced in a special sphere of experience.
Conclusion
I have defended two claims in this text. The first one is that post avant-garde art, by utilising form, is able to communicate universally experienced emotions. The second and concurrent claim is that such art, similarly to the avant-garde movement of the 20th century, is able to shock people into engaging with their own lives. I conclude from this that post avant-garde art is not void of usefulness in the way that Bürger’s theory implies it must be. Moreover, by utilising the concept of artistic space I have argued that Bürger’s concept of usefulness is too narrow, as it is limited to the critiquing the social structures in which individuals operate, and consequently neglects the usefulness affiliated with emotion, passion and empathy.
[1] Shelley, James. The Default Theory of Aesthetic Value.
[2] Immanuel, Kant. Critique of Judgement.
[3] Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant Garde, p19
[4] Ibid, p23
[5] Ibid, p18
[6] Ibid, p80
[7] Robinson, Jenefer. The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music, pp19-20
[8] Ibid, p19
[9] Kivy, Peter. Emotions in Music
[10] Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant Garde, p57
[11] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement.
[12] Herwitz,Daniel A. The Security of the Obvious: On John Cage’s Musical Radicalism.
[13] Dodd, Julian. “What 4’33 ”Is”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Leni Charbonne, 2021
I am as heavy as cotton, as light as gold.
I am as white as ink, as black as yogurt.
I am as reasonable as a madman, as excited as someone meek.
Since I have no brain, they call me knowing.
Sayat Nova
For the universal sagacious class– whether poet or craftsman, philosopher or comic, laborer or revolutionary– the language of paradox has been the lingua franca of found knowledge. Bringing together opposing elements makes disorientation inherent to the form. For this reason, empty paradoxes employed to obfuscate and confuse have equally been the lingua franca of that other universal class– hucksters and hacks, swindlers and salesmen. The crucial difference concerning sincerity here lies in the intent behind the disorientating effect. When evoked to transmit insights and experience, the disorientation of paradox can generate an interpretive landscape– it can be an invitation to search for meaning in unlikely places amongst unlikely relations. Paradox of this nature beckons experience, and the geocached meanings within cannot be isolated, sold, nor plainly consumed. Paradox, instead, invites us to make sense outside of common sensibilities.
Paradoxically, these kinds of paradoxes are quite common: Socrates made the famous admission that he knows that he knows nothing. Abraham Maslow echoed the adage that the sacred must be found in the ordinary. Philip K. Dick identified the “trash stratum” of life as the place where the divine is manifest. “Nothing is sacred,” that lofty pedestrian phrase, means that everything truly is such.
And then there is yogurt.
Rarely has such a common, even profane substance been so consistently mired with allegories of the sacred. A concise history of yogurt presents this thick white sludge as a happy afterthought of spoiled milk. Fermented over time, yogurt has produced an utterly banal stench as a global market commodity. Yet past and present, yogurt has been attributed near mythological status and has been a constant fixture in various cults of vitality.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2019
Mentions of yogurt have been identified in some of the earliest found scripts in Eurasia and North Africa.[1] In antiquity, the magical transformation of aged milk into an airy delicacy was so highly celebrated that historians have suggested that the famed Biblical promised land would be more aptly named “the land of fermented milk and honey.”[2] This reverence stems from yogurt long being associated with longevity, an association naturally extended from its production process. The proof is in the (soured) pudding: allowing raw milk to ferment in warm environments has historically been one of the most reliable ways to store and extend the shelf life of this precious fluid. The now universally-recognized name yogurt is thought to have originated from the Turkic yoğurmak (meaning that which thickens or curdles). As these populations traveled across the Eurasian steppe lands, they transported milk in bags made from goat hide.[3] Herein, microbial cultures synthesized compounds in the milk resulting in a curdling effect and increased preservation for long journeys and conquest. Yogurt culture(s), then, are intimately entangled with human culture.
Today, yogurt is spread across the spectrum of virtue and vice. Lustful desire for idealized body forms make it a staple product in health and diet fads. Generous dollops of rich, creamy yogurt are in some contexts symbols of abundance, and elsewhere of glutton. Yet the cult of vitality long attached to yogurt has not disappeared. It has, however, intersected with the dominant cult of our times: commerce. In the marketplace-temple, health and longevity are often calculated on a basis of consumption, and the consumer label “probiotic”– attached to yogurt and other cultured foodstuffs– has a near spiritual potency. Both popular and scientific discourse posit that prospects for longevity could increase alongside increased consumption of probiotic products. In the marketplace, life-extension takes the form of a utilitarian project, with probiotic goods like yogurt categorized as “functional foods.” [4]
Modern rationalities in turn have increased awareness of the forces behind the probiotic function– the microbial cultures generating the sought-after probiotic properties. These cultures are far from excluded in the affairs of human commerce. On the contrary, their presence in products has exploded into a marketing trend. Labels and branding schemes have sought to make this microscopic labor force as visible as possible. Packaging of probiotic items often proudly discloses the presence of “billions of live active cultures!” In the tune of the contemporary zeitgeist, measures of health are meant to be accumulated to exorbitant figures and can even be ordered “supersized!” These billions of live active cultures have profitably compounded in the functional foods sector valued at over 85 billion USD with projected growth rates at 4 billion annually.[5] The main benefactor of this trade is with the genus Lactobacillus, annually accounting for over 60% of these sales.[6]
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2019
What the modern trends in probiotic and functional foods indicate is a very specific logic underpinning contemporary ways of knowing vitality. Congealed in the contemporary market profiles of ancient products like yogurt is a calculation of longevity with presumed divisions between the elements concerned. There is the subject of life-extension: the (human) self. There is the object employed towards longevity: the microbial Other to be consumed. And then there is the environment where the self and Other meet, made mostly irrelevant in marketed vitality.
The fact of human production and consumption of probiotic goods itself has had a long life historically. Yet rationalities concerning how and by what means longevity is achieved through probiotic things have been subject to rebirth in the wake of new cultural sensibilities. In other words, ways of thinking about vitality–who, what, and through what types of relations it is animated– have not remained constant over time. To trace these different sensibilities and perhaps imagine new ones, a little disorientation is useful. As the probiotic paradox par excellence– having its own life extended through spoilage– yogurt is the exemplary substance to attempt to make-sense of vitalistic philosophies. By sitting in the unlikely space of yogurt’s probiotic structures, unlikely relations become visible which cannot easily be segmented into the categories of self, Other, or environment. By disorienting these elements, we can begin to make-sense of how we come to demarcate between these vital categories in the first place.
The culturing process characteristic to yogurt production necessarily brings different elements together; like this first issue of Differens Magazine, yogurt is a space of . The first section of this article shares what is fatally lost when the Other is contrived as something to be consumed. To cultivate other ways of knowing the Other and our shared environmental context is an aesthetic charge, a point explored in the second section. Our aesthetic sensibilities– our ways of sensing and coming to know how we relate to those elements around us– are not fixed. Yet, our means and methods of sensing influence where and how we draw the lines between self, Other, and environment, as well as the effects of these demarcations.
I: CONSUMING OTHERNESS– WHAT (and who?) COUNTS IN LONGEVITY?
For Sayat Nova–a Georgian-born Armenian bard of the 18th century– yogurt was the ethereal substance to bring together the cosmic poles of black and white, light and darkness. Perhaps he made this choice from an awareness of the sublime union of spoilage and regeneration characteristic to yogurt, or perhaps it was simply a natural choice given the long-standing cultural significance of yogurt to the poet’s native Caucasus region. Whatever the case, Nova’s poetic churn of yogurt testifies to the ubiquity of the product in this part of the world.
Though once a niche food item limited to a handful of regions in the Eurasia, in the 20th century yogurt became ubiquitous in the global dairy market– a development epitomized by a now-infamous ad campaign produced by the multinational food corporation, Danone (known as Dannon to North American consumers). In 1977, yogurt was broadcast in the prose of commercial commodities in a 30-second television spot taking place in the Caucasian mountains. Spotlighted in the commercial was a handful of elderly inhabitants of the region’s rural, agricultural milieu which has long been rmored to harbor a remarkable number of centenarians and super-centenarians (those who live beyond the ages of 100 and 110, respectively). The ad depicted its subjects performing hard agricultural work, and with each vignette the individual’s name and age would appear at the bottom of the screen. The last feature was given to 89 year old Bagrat Tabghua, notably the youngest of the impromptu cast. Bagrat was shown spooning a mouthful of yogurt from a plastic Dannon cup, something to which the commercial’s hidden narrator proclaimed “pleased his mother very much.” The commercial then panned to his mother, claimed to be 114 years of age. Making ideological allegiances very clear, the commercial ended with a still frame of yogurt and the text “America’s No.1 Yogurt is Here.”
While the Danone campaign was the celebrated recipient of a number of advertising accolades, it also received wide criticism.[7] Commentators in both Eastern and Western blocs pointed to the overall context of the lives of the Georgian centenarians, and suggested the combination of steady farm labour, time outside, and rural living as critical factors in their longevity. However, the prevalence given to yogurt as a longevity elixir could be pursued in tandem with the obfuscating effects of exotification or Othering. The Georgians were presented as almost mystical in their near immortality, a depiction accentuated by the obscurity of their Near Eastern country– a place undoubtedly unfamiliar to the bulk of the advertisement’s projected audience. Still in the throes of the Cold War, the commercial was significant as the first commercial shot in the Soviet sphere and delivered to Americans.
Even within the Soviet sphere, Georgians were widely considered “familiar strangers.”[8] Though impossible to contest Georgia’s significance to Soviet history (being the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, after all), Georgians nonetheless joined other ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union to be coded as culturally exotic and internal “others.” Thus, enveloping Georgians into a western consumer branding scheme could be rendered ideologically suitable for the capitalist marketplaces, especially given that the advertisement’s targeted American population had overwhelmingly fallen to the habit of conflating Soviet-style communism with “Russia.” The commercial’s lack of geopolitical and historical context was carried out by the same logic which likewise severed the necessary context of active, rural lifestyles which more likely contribute to Georgian longevity than mere yogurt consumption. The Dannon spot thereby follows the larger probiotica mythos, wherein context is condensed into isolated signifiers– promoting practices of Other-consumption. Much like how “billions of live active cultures” are distilled into probiotic product labels, the exotic Otherness of the Georgian centenarians was consolidated into a brand signification in which longevity was made available for consumption– by way of containment in single-serving plastic Dannon cups.[9]
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2019
II: ORIENTEERING IN CULTURE MATRIX: FILMIC ENCOUNTERS WITH THE OTHER
Nearly a decade before Dannon’s exposition of Georgian longevity, Sayat Nova (an Armenian born in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi) was the subject of his own popular mythologization. In 1969, director Sergei Parajanov– himself something of a mythic Armenian-Georgian of the 20th century– released his seminal film The Color of Pomegranates. Though now a celebrated hallmark of bygone Soviet cinema, The Color of Pomegranates found contentious reception at the time of its release. The film is at first glance a biopic of Sayat Nova, though it is not a mere biographic account. Instead, Parajanov’s film was an attempt to depict Sayat Nova’s life through abstract “tableau vivantes,” inspired not by historic record but by the poetic register of Nova’s writings. Despite international acclaim for Parajanov’s idiosyncratic cinematic storytelling and rich aesthetic modalities, the film was subject to the hurdles of Soviet censorship given its deviation from the official doctrine of “socialist realism.”[10] The contention rested upon a crucial distinction known by Parajanov: to know Sayat Nova as a historic figure of the 18th century South Caucasian world is altogether different than knowing the man-as-poet, whose timbre has survived through the generations and different socio-historical contexts following Nova’s own time. It is surely the latter which is most relevant when the name “Sayat Nova” is evoked. Parajanov’s film, then, was problematic to the sensibilities of socialist realism, which preferred the unilateral, digestible conference of biographical fact. Instead, Parajanov created a film that sought to share poetic landscapes, one which demands that audiences enter and find their own orientation in the (often highly abstract) aesthetic milieu affiliated with Nova. Through this experiential space, audiences must engage their own senses to become acquainted with Sayat Nova and the interpretive landscape inspired by South Caucasia. Poetry cannot be consumed; it must be felt, integrated, and shared perennially.
This entanglement between viewer, filmic subject, and space was seemingly necessary for Parajanov to convey poetic affect through film and was characteristic of his cinematic style. That The Color of Pomegranates demands aesthetic interpretation on the part of the viewer, in other words, means that there is no clean division between audiences, film, and the spaces between (historical or contemporary, abstract or real). It is vital for both the effect and affect of poetic film to focus on the relation between these components. Treating these components of the viewing experience as discrete would, on the other hand, be more suitable for a conventional, realist biopic, wherein biographical facts are to be taken in (consumed) by the audience. Doing so, however, would be an infringement upon the vitality of Sayat Nova’s poetic spirit. For this reason, Parajanov’s biopic of Sayat Nova is evocative of biofilm– something which has little to do with cinema but everything to do with yogurt.
Biofilm is a substrate universally produced by bacteria.[11] With regards to yogurt in particular, the lactic acid bacterial species Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus metabolically produce secretions called exopolysaccharides which collect into a slimy exocellular matrix–a process responsible for yogurt’s recognizable thickness and creaminess.[12] To be sure, exopolysaccharides are not merely discard. They are simultaneously the by-products of metabolic synthesis for a given micro-organism and a highly protective environment for that organism and its neighbors.[13] Biofilm is precisely this coagulated matrix. Biofilmic structures are inherently syntrophic– the organisms gathered and clustered within these spaces live off of and find shelter within the synthesized metabolic products of others; in other terms, they are the collectively-produced, protective environments of the organisms which inhabit them.[14]
Furthermore, biofilm is responsible for granting yogurt its probiotic character. By way of its Greek etymology, probiotic means simply that which is “for life.” An evolutionary history of biofilm testifies to this primal vitalism. As a crucial adaptive practice of bacterial life, biofilm formation is evident in early fossil records dating back over 3.25 billion years.[15] Importantly, the formation of biofilm not only allows organisms to collectively protect themselves from hostile environmental conditions, but also facilitates the propagation of communities to new environments which in turn stimulates the development of new niches.[16] Today, the adaptive role of biofilm remains implicit if not clouded in the proliferation of probiotic-centric discourse and marketization. Both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have adopted the definition of probiotics to denote “live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host.”[17]
This modern definition of probiotic marks a small but critical discontinuity which has arisen in the term. Once unbounded in its simplicity, “for life” has been distilled to atomize distinct parts; in contemporary usage, probiotic confers a division between “live microorganisms” and a “host.” Stark lines have been drawn between the participating actors in a probiotic context. This is a move commensurate with the current probiotica mythos, in which a unilateral logic of consumption underpins the calculus of health and longevity. Simply, relational and contextual understandings of health have been supplanted by a logos of consumption. Rendering “probiotic” in this way obscures the fundamental relationality which is maintained not only by the linguistic roots of the term, but also in the biological structures which have long histories of resilience and adaptability. Biofilm and its probiotic character, then, refer not to discrete microorganisms, nor their environment, but the relational nature constitutively produced in a collective matrix.
Philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem sought to invigorate the concept of milieu on such a relational basis. For him, milieu referred to decentered space marked by relations between organisms and their surrounding environment.[18] Taken this way, yogurt can be thought as one such landscape wherein these relational dynamics are particularly evident; Canguilhem writes “the fluid is the intermediary between two bodies; it is their milieu; and to the extent that it penetrates these bodies, they are situated within it.”[19] The natures of cultured, probiotic foods like yogurt then provide terrain to ask how and why we come to draw vital boundaries in the midst of such collectively constituted spaces.
What is probiotic then intersects with that which is pro-poesis, or that which concerns creative activity. More crudely, poesis means making, and just as we can make material things, we are also engaged in activities of making-sense. Poesis, or its etymological descendent poetry, is about making sense, it is about orienteering. Senses, ever subject to new, creative makings, are not fixed faculties. Our sense-abilities are fluid. The ways in which we sense ourselves, Others, and environments, and moreover how we come to draw boundaries between these categories, can always be creatively re-contextualized. Vital boundaries are not given and static, rather they are constantly re-cultured through aesthetic experience.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2019
III: SENSING DIFFERENT BOUNDARY LOGICS or, THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF MAKING-SENSE
For many audiences, an appreciation of Parajanov’s cinematic style reflects an acquired taste. That taste can be acquired though, signals the dynamism inherent to all senses. Sense-abilities are always being extended, provoked, remolded, and encultured. The advent of the microbial sciences– wrought on by the development of new sensing devices and technologies– is but one testimony of the cultural pivot generated by new ways of sensing the microbial world. Conceptions of health in turn radically altered with microbes as a factor. New sensory technologies, however, do not necessarily produce new ways of making-sense, or sensibilities. In other words, encounter with the Other provoke an epistemic puzzle: how do we make-sense of Otherness without relying on pre-existent ways of knowing? If we sit with this paradox, we can find ethical merit in allowing ourselves to be sensorily disoriented so as to cultivate new sensibilities.
Modern renditions of human vitality factored at the intersection of institutional research and the development of the functional foods market tells something of a different story. One prominent figure in the 20th century probitica zeitgeist was Elie Metchnikoff, a Ukrainian-born zoologist who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his identification of the microbial process of phagocytosis. Also known as the “Father of Immunology,” Metchnikoff’s work was concerned with the mechanisms by which cells respond to external environmental materials. From the looking glass of his microscope, he watched as isolated cells integrated and synthesized foreign matter, a pathogen being one example. Metchnikoff, however, had sensibilities which led him not to describe this process as one of integration or synthesis, but rather one of defense.
The legacy of this construal has had immense implications for how human health has since been imagined. Indeed, Metchnikoff is precisely the Father of Immunology because it was another innovation of his to describe biological phenomena in the language of immunity. Prior to his time, immunity had existed solely as a juridico-legal term, describing members of a political community who made themselves exempt from obligations otherwise required of all citizens.[20] With this descriptive innovation, we can speculate Metchnikoff’s political sensibilities and how they were projected onto his observations of microscopic activities. It was not a given, though, that he chose to describe human health in terms of an exceptionality to be defended, set apart from Others and a shared environment. We need not venture far from Metchnikoff to imagine how alternative sensibilities would render different philosophies of human health and longevity. In fact, his own brother, Lev Metchnikoff, has certainly been made more obscure by history but was a prominent scholar in his own time. Through his collaborations with many prominent political theorists– such as the brothers Reclus and Pyotr Kropotkin– Lev extensively developed theories on how human social equality necessitated different boundary logics between the categories of the social world and the biological. Health for him– of individuals and of communities– was necessarily integrative and not based on the defense of bounded, isolated entities.
Incidentally, Elie Metchnikoff was an ardent promoter of yogurt. Indeed, the 20th century history of the expansion of a global yogurt market cannot be comprehensively told without the Father of Immunology. Much like the Dannon advertisers who would succeed him decades later, Elie Metchnikoff observed populations of centenarians and was convinced that it was primarily the consumption of their magic elixir– yogurt– which was responsible for their impressive lifespans.[21] His isolation of the strain Lactobacillus bulgaricus and promotion of its immunologizing and life-extending effects to popular audiences has played a key role in the denotative shift of probiotic– that which is “for life”– to be a consumable promise of vitality.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Everyday Relics”, 2019
To build a culture based not on boundary-defense but on encounter and entanglement inherently begins with how we sense the other; in other words it is a fundamentally aesthetic endeavor. In the words of artist Fran Illich “there is no other culture without an other aesthetics, that is, another way of seeing.”[22] We must ask what types of worlds are possible when we do not foment the Other, but ferment with the Other. If there is anything to be learned from yogurt, it is that this is vital.
New York City’s Chinatown is a distinctly different neighborhood from other parts of Manhattan. However, it currently has no strict borders that delineate what exactly Chinatown is. It is a locale that, like much of Manhattan, offers a bombardment of sensory stimuli. In Chinatown, the visuality of the architecture, the signs in Cantonese and Mandarin, the ambient noises from cars, shops, people, and restaurants, and the smells from a variety of foods come together to create a feeling of place. This feeling, the particularity of this place, is created in the coalescence of many small individual actions. Chinatown with its many elements coming together provides us with a totally immersive experience. As such, Chinatown could, in Joseph Beuys’ terms, be understood as a Gesamtkunstwerk.
The term Gesamtkunstwerk was used by Richard Wagner in 1849 to designate an idea that eventually led to the 1876 construction of the Bayreuth festival space. This was intended to be a place for the performance of the operas of the Ring cycle, which he envisioned as all-encompassing experiences. The exact meaning behind Wagner’s use of the term was never clear, but attempts have been made to establish an appropriate translation from German. Examples of possible translations include the total work of art, the communal work of art, or collective work of art.[1] Though a precise meaning of Wagner’s use of the term is unclear, the context of his use of it points to performance as a critical element for an immersive aesthetic experience.
Eleni Ieremia, Ongoing project, 2021
Conceptual artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) saw Gesamtkunstwerk as ‘social sculpture’, asserting that every person is an artist in that they constantly create the world around them through their social interactions.[2] Joseph Beuys is most famous for his ‘actions’; a kind of performance-oriented artworks that often challenged how space could be used as an artistic medium. As they posed new ways for ideas and objects to interact through space, they straddled the border between real and performance. Moreover, Beuys envisioned the actions to expand beyond the field of art. He recognized that every person had the ability to affect their environment and saw the possibility for every person to incorporate their political and social ideas into their everyday lives, making everyone an artist.[3] Much like Beuys’s actions is his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk to be understood as rooted in this all encompassing notion of art. Art denotes in this sense the expression of big social and political ideas in the intimate small gestures of our everyday lives, that significantly influence how the spaces around us are shaped. What would be the outcome if we accepted and embraced this perspective in our everyday lives?
Integrating the ideas of Beuys on social sculpture, I am especially interested in communal work of art as a possible translation for Gesamtkunstwerk and its ability to be applied to an actual community, where Gesamtkunstwerk exists in the everyday experience of place as multiple actors and elements act together in social performance to create art. In this interpretation, the empowerment to create can be placed on individuals from the bottom-up. Both David Roberts and Matthew Wilson Smith have extensively speculated on what the exact characteristics of a Gesamtkunstwerk are, and using their interpretations, places of everyday life can be understood as artworks. Roberts interprets Gesamtkunstwerk as something capable of breaking dichotomies, such as that between the everyday and the performative, while expressing a utopian vision of the future.[4] While Smith claims a blurring of boundaries and working towards a utopia is intrinsic to the term, he adds that the realization of the utopia must be impossible and that exclusion in pursuit of utopia always occurs.[5]
Manhattan’s Chinatown is a constructed community that straddles a line between a fantastical tourist attraction and an ordinary community that is the site for everyday activity. Chinatown as a constructed community shares some conceptual aspects with Disneyland, which Smith discusses as exemplary of Gesamtkunstwerk. Examining the similarities between the two can help us understand how Chinatown, a less stringently planned community, can also qualify as a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Whereas the French theorist Jean Baudrillard discusses the ‘hyperreality’ of Disneyland in its blurring of fiction with the world to eliminate the real, I am focusing on a different perspective on Disneyland.[6] I’m interested in Smith’s assessment of Disneyland as Gesamtkunstwerk in relation to the performative actions highlighted by Joseph Beuys’ interpretation of Gesamtkunstwerk. My aim is to observe the role of individual agency in the construction of place by comparing the top-down design of Disneyland with the bottom-up initiatives that shaped Chinatown. Therefore, when examining the agency of creators, Disneyland for Smith is a clear example of boundaries being blurred in an unrealized attempt at utopia by creating an all encompassing and exclusive infrastructure while challenging the notions of reality for the user through scripted performativity of mundane activity. After a brief dive into the design visions and plans present in the construction of Disneyworld, I am going to explore the emergence of Chinatown in relation to what a Gesamtkunstwerk could possibly be. Through this, I hope to spark questions about artistic agency within the framework of Joseph Beuys’s notion of art.
Disneyland opened in 1955 on a 160 acre plot of land with the intention to be a place where people could escape the impurities and imperfections of typical urban living in cities.[7] Walt Disney’s notion of impurities and imperfections has been noted as likely born out of a xenophobic and racialized worldview which configures into his utopian (dystopian) vision.[8] For instance, the racial stereotypes of Native Americans and ‘savages’ were prevalent in the features of the park, and the first publicly visible African American employee was not hired until the 1960s.[9] While the historical context of Disneyland and intentions of Walt Disney are not highlighted by Smith, his aesthetic analysis of Disneyland also implies that exclusion is inherent in its carefully controlled planning.
Eleni Ieremia, Ongoing project, 2021
In terms of aesthetics, Disney applied a militant-like level of rules and criteria for every detail of Disneyland, in that everything, from electric outlets to the external perimeter of the theme park, was considered in order to contribute towards a complete immersive total image.[10] Even employees with mundane jobs as well as actors were subjected to the same education at Disney University, which creates the bizarre condition where actors and janitors can alike be considered cast members in a performance.[11] The result of this is that Disneyland is like an immersive work of art in its aestheticization, careful creation, and performative aspects, but it also was very plainly a commodity. Admission is charged and once inside the total immersive world Disney created, opportunities abound to sell more things – food, souvenirs, photographs. Disneyland is simultaneously a corporate enterprise and someone’s carefully considered artwork. Just as Wagner saw Bayreuth as a place to make a pilgrimage to, so today do tourists make journeys to see a specific place in an overtly commodified version of a pilgrimage, as is the case with Disneyland.[12] Although Wagner perhaps did not see it as such, it seems that the draw of a place to gaze upon something that has been created with a vision at once incorporates aspects of both commodity and art, blurring the boundary between the two. In its dichotomy-challenging experience and obsessively meticulous design of utopia, Disneyland is clearly a Gesamtkunstwerk using Smith’s interpretation. But what about a lived community like Chinatown that is not so clearly directed?
As in the case of Disneyland, Chinatown was originally created through outside, top-down rules of exclusion. The difference is that one can observe how bottom-up agency in everyday action worked to create a new utopian vision within the original exclusionary framework. When Chinese immigrants came to the United States in the nineteenth century, they faced social exclusion and prejudice. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 lasted for 61 years where Chinese immigration became heavily restricted after large numbers of immigrants had already settled and the Chinese population of the United States were given no rights.[13] The result was that Chinatown was born out of oppression and was once restricted to eight blocks rather than having its current liminal borders.[14] The result of the restrictions perhaps enhanced the communal contribution to placemaking in Chinatown, as its residents worked to support each other and maintain Chinese cultural traditions.[15]
Now existing without easily defined physical borders, Chinatown and its stimuli carry over to other streets. For Chinatown, it is precisely the liminality of its position between multiple aesthetic categories that make it an interesting example to examine what is or is not a Gesamtkunstwerk. The polar categories of commodity/art, spectacle/festival, and the everyday/performative are those in which Chinatown exists within a flexible position, able to transition and often existing in a realm of two “extremes” simultaneously. For Beuys, the goal of art was to achieve a balance between two polar extremes.[16] This idea of blurring borders is a key element for considering Manhattan’s Chinatown as a communal work of art, and by extension, any lived place becomes an artwork as well.
Although Chinatown was not constructed in the same meticulous and individual-centered way as Disneyland, it also is a highly constructed environment. Manhattan’s Chinatown is covered in non-English signs. Chinese merchandise and food products are in every market and shop. Most restaurants sell Chinese foods. Each of these parts of the environment is carefully created with a certain aesthetic in mind, but also used as a commodity to be sold directly or to contribute towards an atmosphere that beckons tourists. Roberts considers a main feature of the Gesamtkunstwerk as being able to renew the public function of art.[17] More than in Disneyland or Wagner’s Bayreuth, which were created according to one individual’s creative vision, Chinatown functions as purely public art, in that each person who is a part of Chinatown in any way is contributing to its always ongoing expression and confirms the myth of what Chinatown is. In this way, each individual who in the past, present, or future is a part of Chinatown, and thus has any impact on its environment, is an artist contributing to the place we know as Chinatown. Profits are made, tourists are drawn, and the commodification of Chinatown and Chinese culture exists concurrently to and within the social sculpture of Chinatown.
The crossed divide between commodity and art coincides with another crossed divide within Chinatown, which is the divide between spectacle and festival. The question arises: who is a part of Chinatown and how much agency do they have? On special occasions such as the Chinese New Year, Chinatown is the site of celebration and festivals. Parades, dancing, special foods, larger crowds of people, and music are all central to the festival atmosphere. However, the atmosphere and decorative component of Chinatown on a typical day can also be seen as festive compared to other neighborhoods of the city. The buildings, shops, and streets themselves do not change for a festival. The sounds and crowds during a festival are more intense experiences of the everyday experience with higher noise levels and higher density of people. It can be said, then, that the physical area of Chinatown functions like a stage, where both festival and spectacle occur with no clear distinction between the type of performance taking place.
If a person visits Chinatown during a festival but is unaware of the festival, are they a part of it? If a non-Chinese person lives in Chinatown, are they a part of Chinatown even if it is distinguished as a Chinese neighborhood? If Beuys’ ideas about social sculpture are considered, the answer to this would have to be yes. If we are all artists, what we choose to put our time and presence into is part of our creation. A visitor could at once be a part of Chinatown and simply a witness to Chinatown in that their visit and participation in the experience is confirming and adding to its existence. At the same time, Chinatown could feel like an unfamiliar place in which exclusion also occurs. For instance, reading a Cantonese sign would be an exclusive activity reserved only for those knowing the language. In this way the spectacle/festival, spectator/actor role is also blurred by the different levels of active and passive participation possible. People can exist in varied levels of immersive participation in Chinatown while being to some degree excluded and playing the role of an observer.
This blurring of the festival/spectacle line also makes clear the blurred boundary between the everyday and the performative. Considering the janitors educated in performance at Disneyland, are other people with ordinary jobs such as bus drivers, waiters or cashiers also to be considered as artistic actors? Sociologist Erving Goffmann wrote about social interaction as performance in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.[18] He describes areas that can be seen as ‘backstage’ areas where people are able to relax and present a different version of the self than what a job might demand in the ‘front stage’ area.[19] His research concludes that every social interaction is a performance where one convinces the other actors (who are also the audience) of one’s version of one’s self, one’s character.[20] The Bauhaus idea of tearing down the fourth wall is about eliminating the separation between the audience from the performance and is what facilitates a totally immersive experience. Applying Goffman’s ideas on social interaction as always a performance means there is an ability to tear down the fourth wall in any common situation. This of course includes Chinatown, where a person doing an everyday activity such as shopping for vegetables and talking with the store owner can also be seen as a performer, acting out the role of their social self, the customer, as well as many other identity roles. Could not all communities be seen as a Gesamtkunstwerk if every interaction could be conceived as a performance and every community as a social sculpture? How are we performing our role in place and space to create the world around us?
Eleni Ieremia, Ongoing project, 2021
Chinatown demonstrates that community in general can be thought to mirror the criteria one might need to identify a communal work of art. According to Roberts, the Gesamtkunstwerk must be critical of current society, have a utopian vision of a future society, and also be able to create change.[21] That meant that an originally utopian/dystopian vision of exclusion, where Chinese immigrants were unwanted in America, grew into an exercise in social sculpture where bottom-up actions shaped Chinatown into a distinct cultural place with a new utopian vision. The actions of the individual everyday artists directed a place to a new future vision. Many scales of creation exist in space: individual nuances in difference of creative input work within a collective movement towards the future works within imposed infrastructural and physical limitations.
If the concepts of social sculpture and Gesamtkunstwerk mean that everyone uses space to shape the places around them through actions and aesthetic decisions, how can we apply this insight? If the world is interconnected and every interaction affects our surroundings on multiple layers, what kind of artwork are we creating every time we say hello to a neighbor or go into a shop? The difference between Disneyland and Chinatown is a difference between an infrastructural control of space and an organic and less controlled vision of a future that has the ability to be influenced by individual people in seemingly unextraordinary actions. If space is a medium for creating the kind of place we want to exist, we can orient ourselves to the future we would like to see as artists of the everyday, considering carefully the sculpture we are collaborating on in our everyday lives. Being conscious of our creative power is what enables bottom-up change. The small gestures of kindness, aesthetic appreciation, and micro-movements towards manifesting change are significant as they multiply. They are what eventually culminates into our world as sculpture.
[1] M. W. Smith, The Total Work Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York, Routledge, 2007, p.8.
[2] T. O’Leary, ‘Fat, Felt, and Fascism: The Case of Joseph Beuys’, Literature & Aesthetics, vol. 6, 1996, p. 93.
[3] O’Leary, ‘Fat, Felt, and Fascism’, 1996, p.96-97.
[4] D. Roberts, The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, New York, Cornell University Press, 2011 p. 2.
[5] Smith, The Total Work of Art, 2007, p. 8, 125.
[6] J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 12-13.
[7] Smith, The Total Work of Art, 2007, p. 121.
[8] E. Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, p. 132-139.
[9] Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 2004, p. 133, 135.
[10] Smith, The Total Work of Art, 2007, p. 122.
[11] Smith, The Total Work of Art, 2007, p. 126-7.
[12] Smith, The Total Work of Art, 2007, p.25.
[13] R. Sietsema, R., ‘The Making of Manhattan’s Chinatown’, Museum of Food and Drink.
[14] Sietsema, ‘The Making of Manhattan’s Chinatown’.
[15] R. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Boulder, University of Colorado Press, 1993.
[16] O’Leary, ‘Fat, Felt, and Fascism, 1996, p. 95
[17] Roberts, The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, 2011 p. 1
[18] E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 1956.
[19] Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 1956, p. 66-70.
[20] Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 1956, p. 161-162.
[21] Roberts, The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, 2011, p. 8.
Jeanne Degortes, 2021
Eleni Ieremia, ”Vessels”, 2020
The outer space, spatial exploration, needing some space for myself, finding a space to park my car, an advertising space, putting a space between two words when typing on a computer. A lot of our everyday expressions involve the concept of space. Yet what they refer to is not always clear: do they point to a particular place, maybe some empty expanse that one can fill, in the universe, or on a blank sheet of paper? It seems to depend on the context, on the expression, on what we are talking about. Furthermore, the way we interact with that space is even less clear: what relationship can we have with galaxies that are light years away? It certainly is no the same as the relationship we can have with a space in which we park our car. Our common use of the term space does not tell us what exactly we are talking about nor the kind of interaction we can have with space. But we still use it and understand it because, somehow, the concept of space is intuitive to us, as it seems inextricably bound up with living in a spatial world and having a body.
Yet, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a major figure in the occidental philosophy of space, has attempted to understand what is really at stake behind this concept of space which is so familiar to us. More specifically, he tries to understand the nature of space and the nature of our interaction with it in his Phenomenology of perception, published in 1945, by attributing a special role to our body.
But before exploring the role he attributes to the body, let me define what space is usually taken to mean, out of the context of our everyday expressions. Space refers to the expanse with which we physically interact. The concept of space is what allows us to think about places, bodies and material objects, distances, and more generally, to think about the environment in which we live, with which we interact and which we perceive. This means that I can understand the concept of space because I am in a spatial world and surrounded by spatial objects. Space is not tangible: I cannot touch, see nor perceive it in any way; it is rather the way the world seems to be structured. It is also commonly opposed to the concept of time, which refers to the changing aspect of the spatial environment, allowing us to think of evolution and movement.
I would like to highlight a peculiar point of this broad definition of space. Thanks to this spatial structure of the world, I can think the physicality of the objects and the bodies that I perceive. But here, a difficulty arises: I can only perceive physical objects with my body, which is itself a physical object. So, if I understand physical objects through the physical object that my body is, how do I understand and make sense of my body? Do I perceive my body like any other physical object, or do I perceive it differently? If so, does it mean that it has a special status, that I make sense of it differently?
It is precisely this tension around the status of the body that Merleau-Ponty uses to elaborate his philosophy of space. Before getting into the main aspect of his reflection, it is important to acknowledge the fact that he is part of the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Phenomenology is considered to have been founded in the 20th century by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who expressed the will to refound philosophy as a rigorous science. Phenomenology, according to Husserl’s perception, deals with the study of phenomena, that is to say things as they appear to us, as we experience them, without any concern for how these things are in themselves, essentially. For instance, the phenomenon of a chair is the experience I have of it, what I perceive of it according to the different angles from which I look at it, the feeling I get when touching it, etc. Thus, we only perceive and interact with phenomena, with the way objects appear to us, and not with what they truly are. We are, in a way, limited by our senses[1]. What Husserl suggested to do with phenomenology was to study phenomena in order to understand the structures that make our perception and experience of them possible. He starts from the concreteness of our experience of the world to study the structures of our thoughts that make us perceive the world the way we do. The phenomenological gesture initiated by Husserl is thus, to put it briefly, a rigorous refoundation of philosophy and a return to experience as the primary element in understanding the human representation and comprehension of the world.
Belonging to this philosophical tradition of thought, Merleau-Ponty tries to understand space through the perception we have of it. Where Husserl focused on the structures of thought that allowed us to make sense of the world, Merleau-Ponty focused on the structure of perception, hence the title of his major book, Phenomenology of Perception. In his attempt to understand the structure of our perception of space, he focuses especially on the role of the body and on its particular status in our experience of the world.
The core of this insight on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical account of the body will now follow three steps. The first one will explore in more depth the particular status that the body has according to him. I will then be able to focus specifically on the role Merleau-Ponty gives to our body in our apprehension of space, the most central aspect of his phenomenology of space. After these important considerations, I will be able to go into more detail about his major concept of corps propre, which will complete this insight.
Let us start with the specific status of the body for Merleau-Ponty. Firstly, to Merleau-Ponty, the spatial condition of human beings is an essential aspect in understanding the nature of their environment. The very fact that we are existing in the world implies that we are a part of it, i.e., that we are spatial. He is in fact opposed to the traditional Cartesian distinction between the body and the mind, as he claims that human beings are “not a spirit and a body but a spirit with a body[2]”: a person is her body. Therefore, for Merleau-Ponty, the spatial aspect of human beings provided by their body is essential to them, it is part of who they are. But the body is not only the physical aspect of the human subject. It is also what allows her to have access to the world: my body carries the organs that provide me with the capacity of perceiving some aspects of my environment. So it is that through which I perceive my surroundings, the interface between my consciousness and the world. Merleau-Ponty qualifies it as “my point of view upon the world[3]”, because it is exclusively from my body that I apprehend it.
In addition to that, my body is always with me. It is not a perspective upon the world that I can mobilise if I want to, but a point of view always accompanying me, everywhere and all the time. I cannot be separated from it. It has a special position of “permanence[4]” to me, not in the temporal sense that would suggest that my body would last forever, but rather that it is permanent to me, that relatively to my perception of the world, it is always there.
However, it is not a regular physical object. I do not perceive my body like I perceive external objects, because, as Merleau-Ponty holds, it “always appears to me from the same angle[5]”. External objects do not show all their sides at the same time either, but I can choose which one to see by moving around them, which is impossible with my body. It thus possesses a particular status: I constantly perceive it – and through it – yet it is unlike the objects it allows me to perceive.
Merleau-Ponty thus seems to answer our interrogations about the status of the body: it is a central element for the constitution of a human subject, with a different status than other physical objects. Now that this specificity has become clear, I will focus on the characterisation of the specific role of the body in the apprehension of space. Merleau-Ponty explains that:
“[it] is not just another external object [having] the peculiarity of always being there. If it is permanent, then this has to do with an absolute permanence that serves as the basis for the relative permanence of objects that can be eclipsed, that is, of true objects. The presence and the absence of external objects are only variations within a primordial field of presence, a perceptual domain over which my body has power.[6]”
I will attempt to explain what this quote implies. Merleau-Ponty firstly deals with the specificity of the body compared to the other physical objects, which we detailed before. He reminds us that this is the absoluteness of the permanence of the body that allows me to think the relativity of the rest of the world, and that it is the basis of my perception. Then, Merleau-Ponty develops an important idea when using the expression “primordial field of presence”. By this, he means that the body’s power to allow the subject to have representation of the varying world, is in fact a priori to the perception. This means that I do not need to perceive anything to have a sense of spatiality. I can have a feeling of being in space and of belonging to a physical world without any physical perception. Try it yourself: stand up, close your eyes, don’t move. If you are in a quiet place, not too warm nor too cold, you might approach a state where you do not physically perceive any feature of your environment, or at least not noticing any. And yet, you do not stop feeling that you are in a spatial environment. And not just because you know it. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is because your body provides you with this primordial spatiality. The other physical objects can only appear to you because your body has first deployed this primordial spatiality. In other words, it is the body that makes spatial perception possible, both through the ability to think spatiality that it provides us with, as well as through the ability to perceive this spatial environment. Its permanence makes it the foundation of the capacity of perception. It is the means by which other objects in space can spatially be thought of and perceived. Merleau-Ponty will use a mathematical metaphor to express this, saying that the body establishes the “first coordinates[7]”, meaning the basic elements to orient oneself in space. This is why he claims that the body is the first spatiality, prior to the constitution of objects. Once again, this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, which would mean that the physical objects would need the existence of the body to exist themselves. This is here a relative anteriority, relative to my perception of space: I can only perceive and think spatial objects because my body first frames spatiality, making possible the idea of other spatial objects for me.
All in all, this quote carries two major ideas. The first one deals with the absoluteness of the body. By its permanence and its particular status of being both perceiving and perceived by me, my body is a stable basis that allows me to make sense of the changing world I live in. The second important idea contained in this quote is that not only does the body allow me to perceive and make sense of the other objects and of my environment, it most importantly provides me with the possibility of thinking spatially, even before perceiving anything. It establishes the spatial frame through which I can think spatiality and spatial objects. The body is that by which space and objects can be.
With these elements, I believe we are equipped to understand the central concept of Merleau-Ponty’s book: the concept of corps propre [own body[8]]. The concept emerges from a simple reflection: my body is a spatial object, and yet it is through it that spatiality and spatial objects are possible. It seems a bit paradoxical, which is why Merleau-Ponty acknowledges a form of duality inherent to the very nature of the body. On the one hand, it is organic, abiding by the rules of biology and evolution, it has a weight and it is three-dimensional, in other words, it is a spatial object. On the other hand, it belongs to a human entity, whose will controls its actions (reflexes excepted), and frames the possibility of spatial perception. With this distinction in mind, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes the physical extension of my body from the own body. The own body is therefore nothing other than the body’s capacity of structuring spatiality. It is thus not what I see in a mirror nor when I stretch my arm before me, but rather what makes me think of myself as a spatial being and able to move without looking at my body. It provides me with the notion of my own spatiality and, therefore, of the world’s spatiality as well. The concept of own body is in fact the conceptualisation of all the characteristics developed earlier. It is a tool to distinguish the physical body that I can touch and see from the structuring aspect that my spatiality, provided by my body, has upon the world and my perception of it.
Eleni Ieremia, ”Vessels”, 2020
A way of formulating this distinction between the own body and the physical body would be to think of it as a distinction between the objective body and the subjective one. The objective body would thus be my body as it is biologically and physically. It is also the representation that we have of our body. This objective body is thus secondary, for Merleau-Ponty. The subjective body would indeed have the primacy over the objective one because the same way my subjective body allows me to perceive and to think the other physical objects, it allows me to elaborate the idea of my body as a physical object, that is of my objective body. The subjective body is here to be understood as a synonym of own body, that is my body in the way it makes me perceive physical objects and makes spatiality exist.
All in all, Merleau-Ponty attributes a specific status of the body among the other physical objects. It is the vector of the spatiality of human beings, and as such, a central element in their constitution as subjects. But moreover, it is people’s perspective upon the world, because it is through our body that we perceive our environment. It then has the particular property of being both perceiving and perceived by me. Therefore, it has a position of absoluteness: it is what provides me with the possibility to think spatiality and spatial objects. This particular aspect of the body is in fact conceptualised by Merleau-Ponty through his concept of corps propre [own body], referring to this spatially framing aspect of the body, opposed to its physicality and the representation I have of it. To sum it up, this insight has shown that for Merleau-Ponty, the body is central in the constitution of the human subject, in her perception of the world, and most importantly, to the latter’s very spatiality.
[1] It is important to note that there are other conceptions of phenomenology that reject the more idealist implications of Husserl’s theory in favour of different approaches with alternative ontological implications.
[8] Even if “corps propre” literally means “own body”, in French, the most common way of saying “own body” would be to say “propre corps”. The specificity of the expression “corps propre” therefore lies in the inversion between the noun and the adjective, which can be reflected through the similar inversion in the English expression “body of my own”. This being said, Landes’s translation to “own body” might be clearer for the understanding and the fluidity of the sentences.
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