Outline 12/25/10

1. Introduction: Reconsidering Léger's machine period:
    * Survival of Cubism / Cubist space after 1919
    * Motif of the machine / topos of the factory
    * Marx and Hegel in the age of automated machines

To what extent, and in what ways, did Léger's Cubism pertain to the machines he claims inspired him? How do we reckon with the conspicuous absence of actual machines and machine parts in the paintings of his so-called "machine period"? What "knowledge of the machine" do his pictures ultimately provide?  To answer these questions will necessitate, as I hope to demonstrate, a revolution in our understanding of machines and paintings.

1. Léger and Cubist space. Transition from Contrastes de formes to post-1918 Cubist paintings. Several claims to make here: 1) Léger was never more Cubist than after WWI--in other words, after the moment of Cubism's apparent death. But his relationship to painting, though authentically Cubist, was diametrically opposed to that of Picasso and Braque; the world of his Cubism could not be further from theirs. 2) More so than any of the other Cubists, Léger begs comparison to traditions of pre-classical depiction, Egyptian art (wall painting/relief carving) in particular. Readings of Schafer and Groenewegen-Frankfort. 2) Importance of circular forms; multiple valences of the circle in Léger's paintings: as design motif, object-part (or part-object), as token of a post-Cubist "planetary" space. These possibilities are held in the balance, so to speak; all are suggested as directions for a post-Cubist spatiality, though it's not until the late 1920s that Léger arrives at a conclusive spatiality--though not necessarily a post-Cubist spatiality--appropriated from Kandinsky and El Lissitzky (to be discussed more fully in Chapter 3). 3) The machine object as a "center of energy" (Einstein), an absolute, an obsession. Though Léger insists on the importance of machines throughout the Cubist years (1918-1924), neither machines nor machine parts are visible in his paintings, not even in the "machine period" of 1918-20. To what, if not the machine--or some machinic imagination of the modern city--can we attribute his turn to Cubism?

2. Leger's "machine period" (1918-20) reconsidered. Argument turns on the unpaintability (resistance to depiction) of modern machinery, and in particular the factory. Machinery: "a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs" (Marx). History of painting of machines from Bonhommé to the 1920s. Chapter to be written in two sections: 1) The topos of the factory. Status of factories in his earliest "machine" paintings. Importance of factories as sites of radical uprisings: the Italian biennio rosso, Russian Revolution, Spartacist revolt. Urban sociology of Paris proletariat in aftermath of First World War. 2) Early theories of automatism; boosterists of automated factories; their critics. Influence of Cendrars, Pound. Machines as "absolute objects." Marx and the penseurs de la technique (Reuleux, Maurer, Lafitte, Mumford, Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem, Simondon). Several theoretical claims to pursue here: Hegelian status of the unpaintability of power-driven machines. Leroi-Gourhan's theory of the autonomous genesis of technical objects applied to painting: autonomous genesis of the "painting machine," and its technical inoperability in a world become the milieu of a global autonomous machine. Revision of the Hegelian argument about art and absolutification: does painting have access to a mode adequate to the material absolute? No, but cinema and architecture both do--again, Egyptianism.

3. Einstein's Léger, 1929-30: Equivalence and the apotheosis of objects.

4. Conclusion: Schmitt's machines. The earth, enemy of the proletariat? Machines, metal, etc.

Hegel, Jena lectures 1805-6:

ii. [Law and Property] This law [relating to] the individual’s immediate existence is, as law, the will of the parents, or sustains their will as such. In the disappearance of the contingent being (death of the parents), the law becomes positive, taking over the existence which they previously were: the state [takes charge]. Law is the actual validation of property, the element of actual existence through the will of all. The law protects the family, leaves it in its being – but like the family, the law is the substance and the necessity of the individual. It is the unconscious guardianship over the individual whose family has “died out” – i.e., insofar as he appears as individual. It is the substance and necessity – the rigid aspect in which the law presented itself.

Law is the universal right, property in general, protecting each one in his immediate possession, inheritance and exchange. But this is merely formal right, which remains quite free in regard to content (the element of chance in inheritance). The individual presents himself as earning by means of labor. Here, his law is only that whatever he works upon or exchanges belongs to him. But the universal is at the same time his necessity, a necessity which sacrifices him in his legal freedom (die ihn bey seiner Rechtsfreiheit aufopfert).

(a) The universal [i.e., the social substance] is pure necessity for the individual worker. He has his unconscious existence in the universal. Society is his “nature,” upon whose elementary, blind movement he depends, and which sustains him or negates him spiritually as well as physically. The individual exists through immediate property or inheritance, completely by chance. He works at an abstract labor; he wins much from nature. But this merely transforms itself into another form of contingency. He can produce more, but this reduces the value of his labor; and in this he does not emerge from universal [i.e., abstract] relations.

(b) Needs are thereby diversified; each individual need is subdivided into several; taste becomes refined, leading to further distinctions. [In the production of goods a degree of] preparation is demanded which makes the consumable thing ever easier to use. And so that all of the individual’s incongruous aspects are provided for (e.g., cork, corkscrew, candlesnuffer), he is cultivated as naturally enjoying [them] (er wird gebildet als naturlich geniessendes).

(c) By the same token, however, he becomes – through the abstractness of labor – more mechanical, duller, spiritless. The spiritual element, this fulfilled self-conscious life, becomes an empty doing (leeres Thun). The power of the Self consists in a rich [all-embracing] comprehension; this power is lost. He can leave some work to the machine, but his own activity thereby becomes more formalized. His dull work constricts him to a single point, and his work becomes more consummate the more one-sided it becomes.

Yet this multiplicity creates fashion, mutability, freedom in the use of forms. These things – the cut of clothing, style of furniture – are not permanent. Their change is essential and rational, far more rational than staying with one fashion and wanting to assert something as fixed in such individual forms. The beautiful is subject to no fashion; but here there is no free beauty, only a charming beauty (eine reitzende Schonheit) which is the adornment of another person and relates itself to [yet] another, a beauty aimed at arousing drive, desire, and which thus has a contingency to it.

Similarly incessant is the search for ways of simplifying labor, inventing other machines, etc. In the individual’s skill is the possibility of sustaining his existence. This is subject to all the tangled and complex contingency in the [social] whole. Thus a vast number of people are condemned to a labor that is totally stupefying, unhealthy and unsafe – in workshops, factories, mines, etc. – shrinking their skills. And entire branches of industry, which supported a large class of people, go dry all at once because of [changes in] fashion or a fall in prices due to inventions in other countries, etc – and this huge population is thrown into helpless poverty.

The contrast [between] great wealth and great poverty appears: the poverty for which it becomes impossible to do anything; [the] wealth [which], like any mass, makes itself into a force. The amassing of wealth [occurs] partly by chance, partly through universality, through distribution. [It is] a point of attraction, of a sort which casts its glance far over the universal, drawing [everything] around it to itself – just as a greater mass attracts the smaller ones to itself. To him who hath, to him is given.  Acquisition becomes a many-sided system, profiting by means or ways that a smaller business cannot employ. In other words, the highest abstraction of labor pervades that many more individual modes and thereby takes on an ever-widening scope. This inequality between wealth and poverty, this need and necessity, lead to the utmost dismemberment of the will, to inner indignation and hatred. This necessity, which is the complete contingency of individual existence, is at the same time its sustaining substance. State power enters and must see to it that each sphere is supported. It goes into [various] means and remedies, seeking new markets abroad, etc., [but] thereby making things all the more difficult for one sphere, to the extent that state power encroaches to the disadvantage of others.

Freedom of commerce: interference must be as inconspicuous as possible, since commerce is the field of arbitrariness. The appearance of force must be avoided; and one must not attempt to salvage what cannot be saved, but rather employ the suffering classes in other ways. [The state power] is the universal overseer; the individual is merely entrenched in individuality. Commerce is certainly left to its own devices – but with the sacrifice of this generation and the proliferation of poverty, poor-taxes and institutions.

Yet the [social] substance is not only this regulatory law, as the power that sustains individuals. Rather, it is itself productive [of a] general benefit, the benefit of the whole (Gut des Ganzen).

Taxes [are of two types:] direct taxes on fixed property, and indirect taxes. Only the former type is in accordance with the physiocratic system. Raw materials alone are the abstract base, but [this is] itself a distinct particular that appears too limited; it is abandoned. This branch is missing in the totality, and then incomes are lessened. The tax system must establish itself everywhere, make its appearance inconspicuously, taking a little from everyone, but everywhere. If it is disproportionate on one branch, it is abandoned. Less wine is consumed if heavy taxes are imposed on it. For everything there is a substitute that can be found, or one does without. But even so, this necessity turns against itself. The costs of detection become more considerable, the discontent ever greater, since the enjoyment of everything is spoiled and is entangled with complicated details. State wealth must be based as little as possible on the landed estates (Domänen), but rather on taxes. The former are private property and contingent, exposed to waste, since no one seems to lose thereby but either gains or hopes to gain. Taxes are felt by all, and everyone wants to see them used well.

Wittgenstein, Zettel:

711. There is a way of looking at electrical machines and installations (dynamos, radio stations, etc., etc.) which sees these objects as arrangements of copper, iron, rubber etc. in space, without any preliminary understanding. And this way of looking at them might lead to some interesting results. It is quite analogous to looking at a mathematical proposition as an ornament. --It is of course an absolutely strict and correct conception; and the characteristic and difficult thing about it is that it looks at the object without any preconceived idea (as it were from a Martian point of view), or perhaps more correctly: it upsets the normal preconceived idea (runs athwart it).

Carl Einstein, "Absolute," Encyclopedia Acephalica, 1929:

It is undeniable that man invented God so that his wretchedness might be forbidden by somebody greater than himself: God is the dialectical opposite of human imperfections. Ideal entities serve as compensations for wretchedness; that is why the qualities ascribed to the gods delineate by contradiction the failings and servilities of their creators.

The absolute is the sum of the compensations for human wretchedness. To create so perfect a notion, man has been obliged to renounce his peculiarity and miserable content. The absolute is powerful because perfectly empty: it is thanks to this characteristic that it represents the perfection of truth. Nothing can be demonstrated by the absolute: the absolute is precisely that supreme truth which remains indemonstrable. Only the details, the interludes can be demonstrated. Yet it is precisely this impossibility of proving the absolute which makes it irrefutable. It is impossible to shatter a lie which, having no object, cannot be related to anything: the lie, in effect, can be proven only if an object, which is readily and at first glance observed, does not seem consistent; which amounts to saying, in instances without importance. The lie limited by an object can be proven, but never the artifice of a construction, because that excludes the object. It is in this way that works of art are indemonstrable, on account of their being separate, like the absolute, from the object.

The absolute is the greatest expenditure of energy made by man; he then seeks to recoup the energy expended by means of prayer: from which it is evident that man is unable to endure his own energies, being obliged to separate himself from them in order to find equilibrium. It should be added that man, above all, is afraid of himself and of his own creations, imaginary entities he has separated from himself. It is thus that he has done everything to forget his dreams, because he fears his wandering soul. I believe that man has less to fear, faced with the Universe, than faced with himself, because he does not know the world, but only a little corner of it.

The absolute has been man's greatest exploit: it is thanks to that exploit that he outgrown the mythological state. But it was at the same time his greatest defeat, because he invented something greater than himself. Man has created his own servitude. That absolute is identical with the void and with that which has no object. It is thus that man dies by the absolute which is at the same time his means of freedom. Man dies, killed by his fetishes, whose existence is more or less situated in the absolute.

It would appear that philosophy is the degeneration of the mythological state: in fact, in the epoch of philosophy, the absolute is so enfeebled that it needs to be demonstrated. Things – whose frailty is such that, after having accepted them without due consideration, one must still demonstrate them – are called facts of science or of knowledge.

The absolute gods were, to begin with, the ancestors of governing classes, who deified themselves to enhance servitude and fear. Like money, the neutral absolute is a means of power; each may be changed into anything whatever, since they do not possess precise qualities. The absolute belongs to leaders, priests, madmen, to animals and to plants. On the one hand to the mighty and to kings, on the other to those without any power, entirely separate from objects and that very fact from their poverty.

The power of the absolute shows itself in its identity with the unconditional. The absolute has been identified with the essence and with being itself, and it is by means of the absolute that one is immortalised. What a fear of death! People must begin by seeing words through death, and it is thus that they become immortal spirits like the latter. Words, created by man, become his nightmares, and notions are the padded cells of the logicians; it is by means of notions that duration is conned.

The absolute belongs to the tectonic-ecstatics; the contemporary "contortionist" believes only in his own banal and obsequious "I": in this way he has discovered the most obnoxious form of the absolute and a freedom which, after one has forgotten death, has ceased to be limited by "taboos" and is no longer anything other than abject and ugly.

Ezra Pound on machines:

Machines are not really literary or poetic, an attempt to poetise machines is rubbish. There has been a great deal of literary fuss over this. The Kiplonians get as sentimental over machines as a Dickensian does over a starved and homeless orphan on a bleak cold winterrrr’s night.
Machines are musical. I doubt if they are even very pictorial or sculptural, they have form, but their distinction is not in form, it is in their movement and energy; reduced to sculptural stasis they lose raison d’être, as if their essence [sic].
Let me put it another way, they don’t confront man like the faits accomplish of nature; these latter he has to attack ab exteriore, by his observation, he can’t construct ‘em; he has to examine them. Machines are already an expression of his own desire for power and precision; one man can learn from them what some other man has put into them, just as he can learn from other artistic manifestations. A painting of a machine is like a painting of a painting.
The lessons of machines is precision, valuable to the plastic artist, and to literati. …
I take it that music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn’t deal with this new emotion. But to return to the vorticist demands:
‘Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form, it belongs to the art of that form.’
I am inclined to think that machines acting in time-space, and hardly existing save when in action, belong chiefly to an art acting in time-space; at any rate Antheil has used them, effectively. That is a fait accompli and the academicians can worry over it if they like.”

Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 1924/27

Outline 11/8/10

1. Introduction

2. Léger’s machine paintings: 1918-24 – space, objecthood and the commodity after Cubism

3. Valences of the sphere – problem of the absolute object [this chapter looks at the long history of the sphere in art and theory; also considers case studies of interwar avant-gardism, ubiquity of the sphere and circle, pictorial aporia]; planetary space of technology
[Consider Badiou’s Le Siecle; Heidegger and/or Hegel]

4. Léger and Le Corbusier/Ozenfant, 1924-30: Equivalence

5. Le Corbusier’s minimalism: circuitry, infrastructure, “poem of walls”; factory space/factory as object; [“why blast furnaces matter now more than ever”] – pursue analogy with ‘60s minimalism.

Car designer J.A. Gregoire in Best Wheel Forward (translation of French autobiography): "I consider a number of American engines, surrounded by forests of wires, accessories, and bits and pieces, without thought for line ... nearer to beauty than the elegant Bugatti engines." Quoted in Banham, "Machine Aesthetic," Architectural Review, no. 117 (1955): 226.

# ?

Victor Basch, in response to Behrens' presentation at the 1st Congress of Aesthetics and a General Science of Art, Berlin 1913:

"When we race through the streets of our metropolis at high speed, we can no longer see the details of buildings. Thus it seems to me that the most modern architecture should be adapted to the cinematographic character of our age. Now I ask Professor Behrens how it follows that the most modern architecture in Germany should scorn this desire? ... in Cologne I was truly dismayed when I saw department stores in the somber style of Egyptian mausoleums.... Department stores which should embody the speed of commerce and exchange ... and above all the rapid changes of fashion. ...

Does not Herr Behrens think that our department stores-the new Printemps, the Galeries Lafayette ... held together through only a few iron ribs, which look as if they could be taken down every day like houses of cards and erected elsewhere-[does he not think] that they better express the spirit of the time?"

burton: "monochromeness" [map: about aesthetic and salable void]

"decoy, urge to roll call, appropriative gesture" [awareness motion to
reference without meaning appropriation, mode, marketing, referencing
referencing]

"violent erasure, pining homage" [v. 80s read of problem of reference]

"resolve a monochrome" [resolve?: do all the artists she sites

"resolve" the monochrome? resolution v. claims for problems of
painting imaging lack of image (Wall) absence of picture after
photojournalism - this is a kind of referencing not actually
appropriation it references appropriation as a dominant strategy, you
can't appropriate a monochrome only reference its production something
that is so imitable its actually inimitable (as appropriated) -
conflation of imitation and mimesis with appropriation, stakes of
appropriation are question of property, what is proper to the artist's
task as work - if it is to be a user of culture then this work betrays
an exhaustion with that model v. Burton's "productive panic" (more a
function of her position as writer confronting the work) this panic
sounds almost ahistorical as she describes it, does not adequately
convey the contemporary reality of being an artist making art]

"institutional critique" for Burton tenets of institutional critique have
been accepted by institutions, has become a style (Buren) [map: has
become a style but the tenets have not been evacuated they remain (corresponding point)]

map: task of artist making things - "aboutness" is a accepted way of
making "good" things (impotence content context language), this goes
back to the legacy of conceptual art which automates the execution of
the artist's task, guyton's work signals an exhaustion with principles
of art as solemn task of artist make aesthetic works - question of the
commodity has fallen out of critique that conceptual art began)

Burton: "once Buren legible as painting, painting will have died"
[map: end of production of works once codes destroyed or forgotten,
Burton seems to sound a quasi-existential tone in her account of the
Guyton's persistence in making art, this is an Octoberist narrative in
that what matters to it is art historical discourse, the imminent
failure, the meet subversion, in that sense Burton's is an
anti-historical narrative that fails to consider the institutions of
art function and produce a specific historical situation now - the
paradigm of aboutness the task of making that makes making
transparent, is what aboutness is about, links to the history of
monochrome are superficial in that sense, "ostensible" (are we giving a fair
account of Burton's position here?)

what this means is the Guyton's work is not about anxiety about history (the history of painting) as much as it functions in a contemporary field, monochrome falls out of
the critical tradition, take up legacy of this discourse, Burton wants
this to be a certain kind of essay, a less interesting essay would do
a synchronic reading (are we saying out essay would not try so hard to
be "interesting" i.e. involved in seductive historical aboutness?)

here the diachronic is the decoy, Guyton accepts painting as a unit of
meaning, color is in play, its is a carrier of meaning. appropriation
as a cancellation in early inkjet works partakes of the easy charge of
the appropriative gesture (develop) his is a tragic practice, it
accepts as a given that task of the artist as appropriator (mechanism)
- he wants to produce something like a mediumness in his use of
printed ink, which is an abstraction of appropriation, a canceling
that is not negating, it refers to a discourse of medium specificity
as a something that could be appropriated wholesale as a discourse. -
why wrong to read works as "also" aesthetic, conceptual gesture takes
for granted that things look good, suspends that but doesn't cancel
it, that is actually its problem. gestures are not negative, what do
you do when even junk looks good, mobilize that desirability, these
works want to be seen as works that want to be high modernist, (how
can?) the artist produce an object that can be desired, when
aesthetics no longer a category, how to make a desirable monochrome,
the blips in Warhol screens - machine image that involves the erotica
of imperfection, showing not showing v. total image, its
attractiveness is indexed to the attitude of the producer, carelessly
executed bearing different signs of care, questionable lack of care,
referencing not simply the producer of image but the relationship
between producer and image, that is why there is an erotics? as a
viewer you are asked to be interested in his interest, erotics of
celebrity, and celebrity artists, not about caring about the thing
that the work is ostensibly about but that the artist cares about it
(readymade) connoisseurship - modality of interest not the thing
itself?

aboutness not about commitment, why it is linked to erotics of
celebrity position of consumer is fortified, return to specificity of
medium in recent sculpture is one way to counter the mandate of being
interested, after Judd if the criteria is merely interest (formulation
that obscures relations of social-capital) relief not to have to
desire "anything" and yet remain desirable - its taken for granted
that artists must participate in taste culture, convention of artist's
top ten, this is a reversal of conceptual art, which was to be the end
of taste, the radicality of Judd's rejection of taste as an organizing
principle for art, art henceforth community bound to interest in the
world, impossible counterclaim aestheticism cultivates elite taste

universality of the burden to continue to desire things unspoken problem
ostensibly desire in general, specific art world taste a taste regime,
institutionality of taste making, artforum
taste making no longer "i am critic and these are my criteria, what
people like pre-given, question of what is good obscures conditions of
social-capital
relations abstracted taste is arbitrary not a function of a critical
criteria, (arbitrariness secures the mechanisms of social capital)
art's inability to re-function object where taste is (dialectical?)
forlorn referentiality aesthetic contingency arise in art in the age
of reproduction, modern, stuck with its aesthetics (?) monochrome
doesn't carry meaning meanings, it is a style, idea evacuated
melancholy, loss tragic (distinguish from 80s post modernism?)
Burton: tragic persistence inutility (check quote) map: but for right reasons?
not a question of painting after painting not about painting, but
rather the general conditions for producing art work, makes visible
those condition of making art, everything predictable and yet you
still want it, you want coconut lamps that work.

#41

From Leger, Functions of Painting, "The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle" 1924:

"Everyone regretted the disappearance of the Great Wheel; it was a familiar silhouette. It was better than the Eiffel Tower because of its form. An entire object whose initial form is the circle is always much sought after for its value of attractiveness.
The wheel, lighted and colored, dominates the street carnivals.
The circle is satisfying to the human eye. It is a totality, a whole, there is no break in it.
The ball, the sphere, have enormous possibilities as plastic values.
Put a sphere or a ball--never mind what material it is made of--in your apartment. It is never unpleasant and always will fit in wherever it may be. It is the beautiful object with no other purpose than what it is.
We live surrounded by beautiful objects that are slowly being revealed and perceived by man; they are occupying an increasingly important place around us, in our interior and exterior life."

#40

#39

Excerpts from Walter Benjamin, "The Life of Students," written 1914-15:

The innocently hypocritical reservations people have about science include the expectation that academic study must lead to a profession for all and sundry. Yet scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it; in a way, it places the student under an obligation to become a teacher, but never to embrace the official professions of doctor, lawyer, or university professor.

The uncritical and spineless acquiescence in this situation is an essential feature of student life. It is true that the so-called independent-student organizations [Freie Studentenschaft], as well as others with one social tendency or another, have attempted to resolve this problem. Ultimately however, their answer lies in the complete assimilation of academic institutions into bourgeois conditions, and nothing has shown more clearly that the students of today as a community are incapable of even formulating the issue of the role of learning, or grasping its indissoluble protest against the vocational demands of the age. It is necessary to criticize the independent student organizations and the ideas of those close to them because it will throw light on their chaotic conception of academic life.

The symptomatic importance of these attempts on the part of the independent students, including Christian-Socialists and many others, is that in their desire to demonstrate their utility in the state and in life, they re-enact in the microcosm of the university that same conflict that we have noted in the relationship of the university to the state. They have conquered a sanctuary in the university for egoisms and altruisms of almost every kind, for every self-evident mode of being in the real world. Only radical doubt, fundamental critique, and the most important thing of all – the life that would be willing to dedicate itself to reconstruction – are excluded.

By directing students toward the professions, it must necessarily fail to understand direct creativity as a form of communal activity. In reality, the uncomprehending hostility of the academy toward the life that art requires can be interpreted as a rejection of every form of direct creativity that is unconnected with bureaucratic office.

The organization of the university has ceased to be grounded in the productivity of its students, as its founders had envisaged. They thought of students as teachers and learners at the same time; as teachers, because productivity implies complete autonomy, with their minds fixed on science instead of on their instructor's personality. But where office and profession are the ideas that govern student life, there can be no true learning. There can no longer be any question of a devotion to a form of knowledge that, it is feared, might lead them astray from the path of bourgeois security.

The community of creative human beings elevates every field of study to the universal through the form of philosophy. Such universality is not achieved by confronting lawyers with literary questions, or doctors with legal ones (as various student groups have attempted). It can be brought about only if the community ensures that specialized studies (which cannot exist without a profession in mind) and all the activities of the special disciplines are firmly subordinated to the community of the university as such, since it alone is the creator and guardian of philosophy as a form of community. This philosophy, in turn, should concern itself not with limited technical philosophical matters but with the great metaphysical questions of Plato and Spinoza, the Romantics, and Nietzsche. This, rather than conducted tours through welfare institutions, is what would create the closest links between life and the professions, albeit a life more deeply conceived. This is what would prevent the degeneration of study into the heaping up of information.

A deeper problem arises from the unconscious distortion of student life by the dominant erotic conventions. Just as the vocational ideology of the professions has become the accepted truth and has fully monopolized the intellectual conscience, so, too, does the concept of marriage, the idea of the family, weigh upon the notion of eros. The erotic seems to have vanished from a space that extends, empty and undefined, between childhood and founding a family of one's own. Whether unity might exist between creating and procreating, and whether this unity is to be found in the family – these questions could not be posed, so long as the tacit expectation of marriage went unquestioned, since this implied an illegitimate interlude in which the most that one could do was to erect barriers to temptation. The eros of creativity – if any group were in a position to understand it and strive to achieve it, it would have to be the student body. But even when external bourgeois conditions were absent and no prospect of founding a family existed; even where, as in many European cities, a hydra-headed mass of women based their entire economic existence on students (through prostitution) – even in such places students failed to ask questions about the eros appropriate to themselves.

That expansive friendship between creative minds, with its sense of infinity and its concern for humanity as a whole even when those minds are alone together or when they experience yearning in solitude, has no place in the lives of university students. In its place, there is only that fraternizing which is both unbridled and personally limited. It remains the same whether they are drinking in a bar or founding societies in cafés. All these institutions are nothing but a marketplace for the preliminary and provisional, like the bustling activity in lecture halls and cafés; they are simply there to fill the empty waiting time, diversions from the voice that summons them to build their lives with a unified spirit of creative action, eros, and youth. There is a chaste and abstemious form of youth that reveres those who are to succeed it, and that is echoed in Stefan George's lines:
Inventors of rolling verse and sparkling dialogues
by quick-witted orators: time and distance
allow me to engrave on my memory my former foe. Do likewise!
For on the scale of ecstasy and passion we are both in decline;
Nevermore will the praise and rejoicing of youth flatter me;
Never again will verses thunder thus in your ear.
Faintheartedness has alienated the lives of students from insights like this. But every way of life, with its own specific rhythm, follows from the commandments that determine the lives of the creative. So long as they shy away from these, their existence will punish them with ugliness, and hopeless despair will strike the hearts of even the dullest. At present it is this highly endangered necessity that is still the issue; it requires strict control. Everyone will discover his own imperatives, the commandments that will make the supreme demands on his life. Through understanding, everyone will succeed in liberating the future from its deformed existence in the womb of the present.

#38

Le Corbusier's Modernity: Problems and Contradictions

[Hegel - Marx - Heidegger]

PLASTICITY
Iron and glass after the fin de siecle
Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich --> Benjamin, Arcades Project
Corb's early critics/supporters

ENERGY
Corb at Behrens' studio --> electricity in the 20s villas
Leger and the "mechanical object"
Technical objects in the Salons and Expos

CIRCULATION
Development of the "Promenade architecturale"
Drawings of ville contemporaine, of interiors
The automobile in photographs
Matisse and the Villa at Garches

GLOBALIZATION
The global building: Villa Savoye to Pavilion Suisse
Corb's drawings -- "second-order nature"

#37

Notes on Brancusi



















Let's see if I can't get at the crux of Brancusi's work. What is distinctive about his practice? Here is a list of motifs, most of which I've culled from Anna Chave's book: Brancusi's aversion to "beefsteak," his term for the cadaverousness of the male body when re-presented sculpturally (rather than presenced in and as sculpted matter); his mania for photography; his orbs and phalluses, and the extremes to which he took Rodin's mantra that "a monument should be able to roll down a mountain and still remain intact, an organic block"; his obsessive working-over of the studio, hiding his phonograph speakers in stone casings, hiding his power tools, touring guests from room to room in accordance with a self-mythologizing script; his use of interchangeable bases, which (according to Chave) simultaneously debase and re-base the sculptural object (in the same way the automobile debases and re-bases the pedestrian subject); his monumental Birds and Cocks, which he hoped would "fill the vault of the sky" and "pervade the whole universe"; his interchangeable, de-gendered lovers (The Kiss), modern day sorb-apple creatures (Plato's Symposium by way of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents); his Endless Column, which he referred to as "time's reverse pendulum," and which could be installed (anti-monumentally) indoors or outdoors.

commodity-object --> commodity-image

Baudrillard in Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign: "What fascinates us is always that which radically excludes us in the name of its internal logic and perfection. ... a mathematical formula ... a useless object, or, again, a smooth body, without orifices, doubled and redoubled by a mirror, devoted to perverse autosatisfaction."

If Cubism is one response to the photographic penetration of "room-space," Brancusi's sculpture is another. His objects give the camera something a surface that is -- simultaneously and absolutely -- a body, and an architecture that is also sculpture. But only, or primarily, according to the eye of the camera, from which the actual matter of the sculpture shrinks, becoming a sort of black hole, or a cloaking device -- one whose atmospheric shimmer intimates something of the shape of the body beneath, though nothing of its identity or purpose.

Return to primordial space/objectivity -- but by way of the latest involution in the development of the commodity, which now splits itself between its invisible, absolute interiority and the photographic image of its surface, an absolute exteriority. Of course, this is the contradiction that Brancusi's art attempts to sustain, even to exaccerbate. The studio tour and the public monument are both weak points in Brancusi's oeuvre; they are his attempt at a resolution of his work's antinomies -- resolution in the form of praxis, in other words. With the Endless Column and the Tirgu Jiu project thought together with the studio tour and the quotations from Milarepa, we see what the terms of dialectical reconciliation must necessarily be for Brancusi: instead of the fetishism of the commodity, its worship -- the commodity as annihilating Absolute.

#36

Notes on Cubism and Léger



















To begin with Cubism: If the paradox -- the contradiction -- of Picasso and Braque's attempts at landscape painting 1909 was that the space functioned increasingly as still-life, and that although purportedly set outside, the outdoors as they conceive it is closed-off and increasingly surface-level. These Cubist landscapes demonstrate, pace Worringer, a "fear of space" -- fear of far distances, of atmosphere and regression towards the horizon -- accompanied by a will not to abstraction (nor to "empathy") but to something closer to what Riegl calls "tactile" or "haptic" values. Cubism wants to bring things close-up and near-to-hand, not in the sense Benjamin gives to the eradication of distance, but as a reassertion of the auratic presence of things. It wants to test the limits of aura, too, both in pictures (the minimum of distance as an effect of the near abandonment of the figure, of thingness, of coherent shape) and in life (the maximum of bohemian proximity to the objects of the Cubist nature-morte). For "aura," read tangibility, also self-possession. Objects are auratic in Picasso's world insofar as they make manifest their innerness as a site of tactile interest. One makes one's way through a Cubist painting in the manner of a rock-climber, by securing a foothold, a handhold, a hole for a finger or two. Totally unlike Matisse's paintings, which eradicate all footholds and handholds (his phobia of holes), opting instead to control the route of the viewer's optical freefall.

What is paradoxical, or contradictory, about early Cubist "landscapes" is, in other words, the "insideness" of the outside. Even in 1909, Cubism is gravitating quickly towards its true topos, the studio-apartment. In Léger's Cubism, developed around 1908-9, following Braque's summer at L'Estaque, Cubism's originary contradiction is elevated into the working principle of a career; Léger gives it the name "contrastes des formes," but the contrast is really between the verticality of the Cubist ground -- Cézanne's kitchen table tipped up flush with the canvas surface, and broken up, dematerializing into a field of facets and planes -- and what Léger called the "subject," i.e. the human figure or arrangement of objects positioned at the center of the picture. Léger's paintings show us what was dangerous about the Cubist world as it had emerged in Braque and Picasso's early canvases: Cubism's resources and procedures tended to obfuscate the distinction between earth and sky, between rock and house, between figure and ground (remember that Braque's canvases of 1908 did not include human figures). My sense of things is that Léger saw and understood that the human figure would not be compatible with the world of Cubist landscape; rather than retreat to the still-life, however, he decided to remain in an ambiguous inside-outside space, and to derive the maximum of energy, or "contrast," from this incompatibility.

When Cubism does go indoors, then, it is not only to reaffirm its allegiance to the still life and the portrait; it is also to clarify its architectural and phenomenal conditions, and to ensconse itself in a world and a space (the bohemian apartment) capable of accomodating Cubism's radical formal dis-integration of the ground plane without jettisoning the figure and the object in the process. If Picasso's paintings done at Cadaques in 1910 veer again towards the landscape format, his canvases of the following year augment the no-man's land of the faceted, fractured ground with, on the one hand, more surface-level scumbling and passage-esque pseudo-divisionism ("genre Signac"), and on the other, more tokens and signs of the tactile: eyes, moustaches, curtain ties, guitar strings, etc. The point is to insist on the irrelevance of architecture for Cubism: it should not need to evoke space directly (indeed, its resources are incapable of this), it can rather count on the unquestioned givenness of its milieu. In my view, Cubism's confidence in the givenness of its architectural surround -- its version of "room space" -- depended on the hermeticism of Picasso and Braque's practice in the "heroic years" of Cubist experimentation. The paintings were meant to be seen in and as a part of their milieu; they argue for the durability of Parisian bohemianism and fail or succeed depending on the viewer's ability to imagine this world in its material reality. Cubism proclaims that the one thing, the painting, can’t do without the other, the space in which it is painted, and out of which it occasionally emerged. It insists upon the real durability of the bohemian studio-apartment so as to annihilate it, or dematerialize it, pictorially. Cubism was a matter of demonstrating potlatch-style that it was capable of destroying what it possessed (not in reality, of course, but in -- and as -- the imagined space of the picture) -- that it was its own master.

The turn away from Cubism should thus be considered in terms of a loss of faith in the durability and self-enclosure of the bohemian world. The problem is stated well enough in a photograph taken in Picasso's studio in 1913: it shows a Cubist sketch hung from the wall (or perhaps from the ceiling), to which Picasso -- or someone else -- has affixed a pair of arms made of newspaper and a paper guitar. The mixed-media guitarist stands before a real cafe table, upon which sit archetypal Cubist objects: a bottle of wine and a briar-pipe. The message is, I would argue, that Cubism is in danger of becoming a caricature of itself, and of its bohemian stock of subjects and objects. Collage and papier collé are attempts at incorporating within the scene of the studio still life both the degradation of the bohemian world and the encroachment of the world outside; key tropes of this are the newspaper, strips of wallpaper, and the tabletop.

#35

Notes on Dan Flavin (reading Anne's essay "Flavin's Limited Light")
















"[T]o pose silent electric light ... in the box that is the room."

Re: some light, first solo ex: "They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light."

"I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition. For example, if you press an eight foot fluorescent lamp into the vertical climb of a corner, you can destroy that corner by glare and doubled shadow. A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance."

Destruction of the "actual space of the room" -- but of a "barren room," one that does not, and is not designed to, contain things in permanent, symbiotic fashion, as with the bourgeois interior. I sense that the acts of destruction Flavin sought to undertake -- destruction of an illusory, electrified sort -- are not in any way anathema to the rooms he has in mind (the gallery room). Destruction of these walls is what they were built for: immaterialization, the imagining-away of the room's corporeality. Electricity is itself an annihilating angel, since it proves that what simultaneously contains the space of the room, limning its walls and infrastructure, and what articulates the functionality of the otherwise "barren" space is of a categorically different order of materiality than the stuff the room is made of.

"to beset to abuse the complete room" -- rooms built to be abused, and which abuse in turn

Anne: no place for the viewer

Flavin's problem is that he wants simultaneously to destroy architecture, which had taken up the task of articulating figural space from painting, and to reassert the pictorial function of line and light (lines of light) affixed to the wall. He wants to do both things using the same gesture, in other words -- to abuse the room and the light fixtures at the same time, thereby returning the gallery space to a sort of zero degree of pictoriality (i.e. the gallery before Le Corbusier). But just as the objectness of the light fixture renders his work not fully pictorial, always residually literal in Fried's sense of the term, so too does the function of the wall as the light's frame and foil keep intact architecture's power of formal and spatial articulation. Maybe the real success of Flavin's work is simply its bringing-into-view of the poverty of 20th-century architecture, its functionlessness, even its hostility. Architecture in the 20th century is not for human inhabitants; it is for light. God help us if we need more than light to make do.

#34

Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red
1908

Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie
Winter 1911-12, Paris

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning
May 1912

Fernand Léger, Contrasts of Forms
Paris, 1913

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
1913

Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires
1915

Henri Matisse, Windshield (Road to Villacoubray)
Paris, 1917

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
1919

Fernand Léger, La Ville
Paris, 1919

Kurt Schwitters, Mai 191
1919

El Lissitzky, Story of Two Squares
1922

Le Corbusier, Contemporary City of 5 Million Inhabitants / Plan Voisin for Paris
1922 / 1927

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
1929

Ernst Cassirer, “Mythic, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space”
1931

Le Corbusier, Pavillon Suisse
1930-32

Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art
1935-7

Pablo Picasso, Guernica
1937

Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli
1950

Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
1956

Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless
1959

Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations
1962

Robert Morris
Exhibition at the Green Gallery, 1964

Donald Judd
Exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1966

Jean-Luc Godard, Week End
1967

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
1978-80

Agnes Varda, Vagabond
1985

#33

From Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia:

“Absorb that multiplicity, reconcile the improbable through the certainty of the plan, offset organic and disorganic qualities by accentuating their interrelationship, demonstrate that the maximum level of productivity coincides with the maximum level of the productivity of the spirit: these are the objectives delineated by Le Corbusier with a lucidity that has no comparison in progressive European culture.”

“If architecture is now synonymous with the organization of production, it is also true that, beyond production itself, distribution and consumption are the determining factors of the cycle. The architect is an organizer, not a designer of objects. This assertion of Le Corbusier’s is not a slogan but an obligatory directive that connects intellectual initiative and the civilisation machiniste. As a member of the vanguard of that civilization, in pointing the way and determining its plans (even if only in a partial area) the architect must proceed in several different ways. What he offers directly is the appel aux industriels and the building types. The search for an authority capable of mediating the planning of building production and urbanism with programs of civil reorganization is pursued on the political level with the institution of the CIAM. The maximum articulation of form is the means of rendering the public an active and participant consumer of the architectural product.”

“…for Le Corbusier it is the whole anthropogeographic landscape that becomes the subject on which the reorganization of the cycle of building production must insist.”

“At Algiers the old Casbah, the hills of Fort-l’Empereur, and the indentation of the coastline are taken up as material to be reutilized, actual ready-made objects on a gigantic scale. … The fact is that the industrial object does not presuppose any single given location in the space of the city. Serial production here basically implies a radical overcoming of any spatial hierarchy. The technological universe is impervious to the here and the there. Rather, the natural place for its operations is the entire human environment—a pure topological field, as Cubism, Futurism, and Elementarism well understood. Thus in the reorganization of the city it is the entire three-dimensional space that must become available.”

“… Le Corbusier even foresees the possibility of inserting eccentric and eclectic elements into the network of fixed structures [in the Obus plan]. The liberty allowed the public must be pushed to the point of permitting the public—the proletariat in the case of the serpentine that winds along the seaside, and the upper middle class on the hills of Fort-l’Empereur—to express its own bad taste. Architecture thus becomes a pedagogical act and a means of collective integration.”

#32

From Samuel Smiles, The Lives of the Engineers: Boulton and Watt (1904)














To the close of his life, Watt continued to take great pleasure in inventing. It had been the pursuit of his life, and in old age it became his hobby. "Without a hobby-horse," said he, "what is life?" He proceeded to verify his old experiments, and to live over again the history of his inventions. When Mr. Kennedy of Manchester asked him, at one of his last visits to Heathfield, if he had been able, since his retirement from business, to discover anything new in the steam-engine, he replied, "No; I am devoting the remainder of my life to perfect its details, and to ascertain whether in any respect I have been wrong."

But he did not merely confine himself to verifying his old inventions. He also contrived new ones. One of the machines that occupied his leisure hours for many years was his machine for copying statuary. We find him busy with it in 1810, and he was still working upon it in the year of his death, nearly ten years later. The principle of the machine was to make a cutting tool or drill travel over the work to be executed, in like ratio with the motion of a guide-point placed upon the bust to be copied. It worked, as it were, with two hands; the one feeling the pattern, the other cutting the material into the required form. The object could be copied either of the full size, or reduced with the most perfect accuracy to any less size that might be required. In preparing the necessary tools, Watt had the able assistance of his friend Murdock, who was always ready with his kindly suggestions and criticisms. In January, 1813, Watt wrote to him,—"I have done a little figure of a boy lying down and holding out one arm, very successfully; and another boy, about six inches high, naked, and holding out both his hands, his legs also being separate. But I have been principally employed in making drawings for a complete machine, all in iron, which has been a very serious job, as invention goes on very slowly with me now. When you come home, I shall thank you for your criticisms and assistance."

The material in which Watt executed his copies of statuary were various,—marble, jet, alabaster, ivory, plaster of Paris, and mahogany. Some of the specimens we have seen at Heathfield are of exquisite accuracy and finish, and show that he must have brought his copying-machine to a remarkable degree of perfection before he died. There are numerous copies of medallions of his friends,—of Dr. Black, De Luc, and Dr. Priestley; but the finest of all is a reduced bust of himself, being an exact copy of Chantrey's original plaster-cast. The head and neck are beautifully finished, but there the work has stopped, for the upper part of the chest is still in the rough. Another exquisite work, than which Watt never executed a finer, is a medallion of Locke in ivory, marked "January, 1812." There are numerous other busts, statuettes, medallions,—some finished, others half-executed, and apparently thrown aside, as if the workman had been dissatisfied with his work, and waited, perhaps, until he had introduced some new improvement in his machine.

Watt took out no patent for the invention, which he pursued, as he said, merely as "a mental and bodily exercise." Neither did he publish it, but went on working at it for several years before his intentions to construct such a machine had become known. When he had made considerable progress with it, he learned, to his surprise, that a Mr. Hawkins, an ingenious person in the neighbourhood, had been long occupied in the same pursuit. The proposal was then made to him that the two inventors should combine their talents and secure the invention by taking out a joint patent. But Watt had already been too much worried by patents to venture on taking out another at his advanced age. He preferred prosecuting the invention at his leisure merely as an amusement; and the project of taking out a patent for it was accordingly abandoned. It may not be generally known that this ingenious invention of Watt has since been revived, and applied, with sundry modifications, by our cousins across the Atlantic, in fashioning wood and iron in various forms; and powerful copying-machines are now in regular use in the Government works at Enfield, where they are employed in rapidly, accurately, and cheaply manufacturing gun-stocks!

#31

Egypt <--> America

Emergence of "world style":

"To-day we no longer see 'Europe' but 'the World.' And we see also what is called 'world style'; and begin to suspect that neither to-day nor in ancient times is a world style possible which does not contain a large share of what we with our limited European outlook have hitherto in our superior manner dismissed as Americanism." (x)

Egypt as oasis

Kultur vs. Zivilisation -- Egyptians had no Kultur, only hyper-refined Zivilisation: Kunstformung des Daseins (trans as "artificiality of existence")

No warrior spirit; no Eros, only sexuality (perversity)

Technicity required to channel destructive force of Nile floods: "The Egyptian converts the catastrophic phenomenon of the inundations into an element of the highest fertility in just the same manner as a modern motor-engineer utilizes his explosions so as to convert them by clever calculation into highly advantageous power-producers. In both instances the decisive fact is the control of natural forces which are in their origin destructive. [...] Hydrometers, canals, dykes, and dams had to be devised by an ant-like intelligence in order to transform the destructive power of the elements into a utilitarian process of civilization. Egyptian fertility is unthinkable apart from a high degree of technical development." (5)

Egyptians may have overseen great advances in technology, but they did not use machines technologically in the strict sense of the term since the purpose of mechanical experimentation was spelled out in advance. Interesting, then, that in the 20s the Esprit Nouveau group, Corbusier in particular, advocated for a return to problems-based technicity (the problem must be stated in advance), as opposed to the non-teleological mode of scientific experimentation characteristic of technē in the Heideggerian sense of the term.

timelessness, fatelessness, no internal history (no personalities), only exterior (history of events) -- Erman-Ranke, Ägypten

infinite time -- but what about Egyptian space? (Cassirer?)

unsynthesized heterogeneity of religious cults: "The spectator of the Egyptian pantheon finds himself set down in a religious museum in which numerous but heterogeneous religious treasures have been gathered together and are kept under the charge of priestly officials. The impression grows ever stronger that these officials are absolutely unwilling to take upon themselves the task of bringing these treasures into intelligent association with one another. They are satisfied with putting them in superficial proximity to one another, and find in this nothing whatever to take offence at..." (13)

American architecture: "Here again we may cite for comparison America, where, for example, in architecture (in so far as it has grown out of American actualities, as in industrial buildings, factories, and grain-elevators, and does not appear in the dress of imitation European styles as a cosmopolitan cultured language devoid of character), a greatness and decisiveness of practical construction has been developed which is artistically of the highest value, and has rightly become the standard for the architecture of the new Europe, that is, of Europe under limitations which are no longer historical but technical." (23)
Who does Worringer have in mind? Which architects -- FLW? Plate 10, Model for the Central Aerodrome in Berlin by H. Koshina

whitney reading

wed 3/3 Riegl -- in Vienna School reader, review notes etc. Begin Cassirer
thu 3/4 on strike
fri 3/5 Cassirer
sat 3/6 Heidegger -- Being and Time intro
sun 3/7 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Novotny on Cezanne
mon 3/8 Warburg review (read Phillipe-Alain Michaud's book)
tue 3/9 Worringer, Fry on Cezanne
wed 3/10 Heinrich Rickert, Sedlmayr (Quintessence and Rigorous Study)
thu 3/11 Schafer, Principles of Egyptian Art, Worringer Egyptian Art
fri 3/12 Panofsky, "Problem of Meaning in the Visual Arts" find 1932 version
sat 3/13 Husserl Cartesian Meditations
sun 3/14 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, mid '30s
mon 3/15 Lacan, Mirror Stage and Rome Discourse
tue 3/16 Meyer Schapiro
wed 3/17 Edgar Wind, Friedrich Matz
thur 3/18 Freud and Jung?
fri 3/19 Arnheim, Film as Art
sat 3/20 Damisch On Perspective
sun 3/21 Summers

#30

Meyer Schapiro, from "Nature of Abstract Art" 1937:

"In the Renaissance the development of linear perspective was intimately tied to the exploration of the world and the renewal of physical and geographical science. Just as for the aggressive members of the burgher class a realistic knowledge of the geographical world and communications entailed the ordering of spatial connections in a reliable system, so the artists strove to realize in their own imaginative field, even within the limits of a traditional religious content, the most appropriate and stimulating forms of spatial order, with the extensiveness, traversability and regulation valued by their class. And similarly, as this same burgher class, emerging from a Christian feudal society, began to assert the priority of sensual and natural to ascetic and supernatural goods, and idealized the human body as the real locus of values-enjoying images of the powerful or beautiful nude human being as the real man or woman, without sign of rank or submission to authority--so the artists derived from this valuation of the human being artistic ideals of energy and massiveness of form which they embodied in robust, active or potentially active, human figures. And even the canons of proportion, which seem to submit the human form to a mysticism of number, create purely secular standards of perfection; for through these canons the norms of humanity become physical and measurable, therefore at the same time sensual and intellectual, in contrast to the older medieval disjunction of
body and mind."

#29

David Harvey, in "The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture," presented at the Conference on Global and Local, held at the Tate Modern, Feb 2001:

"If claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents, then on what better terrain is it possible to make such claims than in the field of historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special environmental characteristics (including, of course, the built, social and cultural environments)? All such claims are, as in the wine trade, as much an outcome of discursive constructions and struggles as they are grounded in material fact. Many rest upon historical narratives, interpretations and meanings of collective memories, significations of cultural practices, and the like: there is always a strong social and discursive element at work in the construction of such claims. Once established, however, such claims can be pressed home hard in the cause of extracting monopoly rents since there will be, in many people's minds at least, no other place than London, Cairo, Barcelona, Milan, Istanbul, San Francisco or wherever, in which to gain access to whatever it is that is supposedly unique to such places.

The most obvious example is contemporary tourism, but I think it would be a mistake to let the matt er rest there. For what is at stake here is the power of collective symbolic capital, of special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power upon the flows of capital more generally. Bourdieu, to whom we owe the general usage of these terms, unfortunately restricts them to individuals (rather like atoms floating in a sea of structured aesthetic judgements) when it seems to me that the collective forms (and the relation of individuals to those collective forms) might be of even greater interest.14 The collective symbolic capital which attaches to names and places like Paris, Athens, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin and Rome is of great import and gives such places great economic advantages relative to, say, Baltimore, Liverpool, Essen, Lille and Glasgow. The problem for these latter places is to raise their quotient of symbolic capital and to increase their marks of distinction so as to better ground their claims to the uniqueness that yields monopoly rent. Given the general loss of other monopoly powers through easier transport and communications and the reduction of other barriers to trade, the struggle for collective symbolic capital becomes even more important as a basis for monopoly rents. How else can we explain the splash made by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao with its signature Gehry architecture? And how else can we explain the willingness of major financial institutions, with considerable international interests, to finance such a signature project?"

According to Harvey’s model, artists are like winemakers in that their livelihood is based on the production of “signature,” hence monopolizable, goods. Just as a patch of soil in the Bordeaux region of France is bound to yield Bordeaux wine rather than Burgundy or Syrah, an artist is expected to produce works of a unique style and sensibility. Although artists don’t usually think of it in these terms, one could say that the job of an artist, or of an aspiring artist, is to produce a steady supply of monopolizable products from out of thin air. And it is the job of the curator and the critic in turn to distinguish the monopolizable from the ubiquitous, i.e. the authentic from the derivative. (Curators and critics would seem, on the face of it, to represent a force of destabilization with regard to the monopoly prices of works of art, since their relatively free exercise of taste, even if patterned on predictable, repeatable criteria, can and does demote and promote unpredictably the value of art and the careers of artists – if only because it remains difficult to predict exactly who will be discovered by a curator at any given moment, and moreover because the tide of taste can (and very often does) turn quickly against “yesterday’s” artists once anything recognizably new comes into vogue. But this destabilization weighs against artists, not against the proprietors of cultural institutions.)

For the gallery world, Harvey’s analysis rings true, since galleries operate in much the same way as vineyard owners, by acquiring exclusive ownership of unique goods, which they then dispense at monopoly prices. Museums, on the other hand, along with “alternative” art spaces and other similar institutions, did not originally operate as monopoly firms, though they now do. It is this phenomenon rather than the gallery monopoly that demands investigation, since it cannot be theorized according to the terms of Harvey’s “gallery=vineyard” equation. In my view, the situation is this: museums have moved from possessing a monopoly on exhibition space—one that artists competed for access to, but which represented a qualitatively distinct arena and economy from that of the studio or atelier—to possessing a monopoly on the space of artistic production. Artists have become tenants in the present-day cultural economy; they have been dispossessed of their property without even realizing it. Museums, in turn, have become rentiers, though they too imagine otherwise.

Artists do not literally pay rent to galleries and museums in exchange for use of the exhibition space. They pay, though, with their time—with labor, in other words. In the art world today, artists are required to seek out spaces of exhibition, since most artists are trained to practice exhibition-specific forms of art-making, the work itself taking the form of a temporary installation produced either partly or wholly “on-site.” Of course, there remain artists who work solely in the studio, but for the past 20 years or so, curators and critics have tended to favor artists who think critically about the conditions of their work’s installation and exhibition, hence who are required to be on-hand for this part of the exhibition-making process. Thus, museums have succeeded in shifting the site of artistic production, formerly performed wherever the artist wished (in the studio, in plein air, etc.), to the exhibition space, a site over which the museum exercises exclusive control. As a result, artists are bound more than ever to organize their working lives around the exhibition spaces at which they do their work, and to acquire the requisite social skills for working closely with museum administrators (something that doesn’t come naturally, as all the artists I know will attest to!). Those who make it “in” are granted access not only to coveted exhibition space, but also to the social world of paid-for dinners and parties

Even as the art world expands, artists continue to compete for access to a relatively small patch of monopoly real estate in a handful of metropolitan areas. That they do this, rather than secure spaces of exhibition-making outside the circuits of the art institutions, is a mystery unless one considers the crucial interrelationship of museums and galleries. Now more than ever, galleries must depend on the taste of trusted curators to root through the growing pool of would-be artists, separating wheat and chaff on a global scale.

Museums also demand artists’ time: the schedule of production, installation, exhibition, and de-installation is very much the institution’s prerogative. Artists work on the museum’s clock, at a site the museum owns and operates, earning a predetermined sum of money for their efforts—aren’t these exactly the conditions of wage labor, minus the hourly wage? Indeed, were it not for the existence of the gallery system, artists would have no other option than to demand a wage from their museum employers. In the present day, the museum has become, in effect, a workshop that artists rent out to produce their wares, exhibitions, parts of which might be saleable on the commercial market. During the run of the exhibition, though, the museum is able to extract profits far exceeding what little the artist is able to make by selling the works on view, whether from admissions sales or from grants and donations.

#28

El Lissitzky, 1919 talk given at INKhUK:

“The painted picture has been smashed to bits.... In continuing to paint with brush on canvas, we have seen that we are now building and the picture is burning up. We have seen that the surface of the canvas has ceased to be a picture. It has become a construction and like a house, you have to walk round it, to look at it from above, to study it from beneath. The picture's one perpendicular axis (vis-a-vis the horizon) turns out to have been We have made the canvas rotate.”















Spengler in Decline of the West:

Impressionism signifies "the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense- images as [but] secondary and conditioned actualities "within it".... Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because the things are there but as though they "in themselves" are not there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke ... if there is one art that must exclude [Impressionism] on principle, it is Classical sculpture.... For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour.... Everything merges in bodiless infinity" (DWI, pp. 285-86, 292).

According to Spengler, the inception of the decline of Faustian culture into Impressionism begins with Leonardo and Giorgione:

"The technique of oils [became] the basis of an art that [meant] to conquer space and to dissolve things in that space.... While Michelangelo tried to force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the living body, Leonardo's studies show the exact opposite. His much-admired sfumato is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of space, and as such it is the starting- point of Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside ... and when he ends ... the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and indescribable. ... Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood.... Leonardo investigated the life in the body . . .and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did.... [Leonardo's] discovery... signif[ies] the victory of the infinite over the material limitedness of the tangibly present" (DWI, pp. 239, 277-78).

#27

From Arnheim, The Power of the Center:

"Spherical and circular objects are privileged foreigners in our midst. A ball, touching the ground at only one point, is less subject to friction than a cube, a product of the Cartesian grid. The wheel revolutionized transportation because it could roll freely. Since all diameters are equal, no one of them can be singled out. Knowing neither vertical nor horizontal, the sphere or wheel is unrelated to the Cartesian system and exempt from its constraints. It does not belong, and it does not have to obey. Having no angles and no edges, it points nowhere and has no weak spots. It is impregnable and unconcerned. Roundness is the suitable shape for objects that belong nowhere and everywhere. Coins, shields, mirrors, bowls, and plates are round because that makes them move smoothly through space. A round table has o corners to impede traffic. Look at the French miniature showing the Creator as he measures the world. The world is a closed universe, not attached to any particular place in its surroundings. It floats, and the Creator can move it around as he pleases. It has a center of its own, from which the measurement is made. It can turn or be turned without undergoing any change." (115)