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“Battle Fragments”: A dialogue between the Modernist and Postmodernist avant-garde.
It is through Hal Fosters nod towards the heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects in the corner of the room, at a time where there began a collapsing between the critical production of architecture and the so called ‘naming of things’, that a conversation around the disciplinarity of architecture can be found. The dialogue between the modernist avant-garde and the postmodern neo-avant-garde can be framed through a study of interdisciplinary spatial practice, and how it raises a question around an architectural medium specificity — this question being: what is architecture’s medium?
1. Framing a Historical Dialogue
Foster, in an interview reflecting on The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, suggests that the essence of the postmodern avant-garde holds roots in the modernist avant-garde. This evokes the theory of Tafuri, framing the neo-avant-garde, as ‘battle fragments’ of the early twentieth century avant-garde. An understanding of Tafuri’s commentary can conclude that the disruption of function, and consequent emergence of dysfunction, as a spatial strategy, was directly aligned with the avant-garde reality. In a similar sense, Foster’s postmodern neo-avant-garde, is a further disruption of reality, but in all, and every direction. Foster details a postmodern neo-avant-garde as being bookended by the late 1950's and "the readymades of Duchampian dada" and, with the return of "the contingent structures of Russian constructivism”. This provides a historical place for this discussion to operate within and around.
Own diagram detailing affiliation between each key critic/theorist mentioned.
One of Tafuri’s core arguments in the roots of the avant-garde argues, metahistorically, that through the language of the avant-garde, that twentieth century capitalist modernity weaves an ideological fabric of modernism into the structure of reality, through practices of architecture and urbanism. Foster’s characterisation of this same shift operates similarly in form, but his focus is more broadly on the interdisciplinary, due to the explosion of all forms of production. Hence, Foster conceptualises the neo-avant-garde as an extension of the institution of art against which it operates in a deconstructive capacity. To this effect, to study the avant-garde is to study how periods of historical reality were altered by and through the spatial production occurring at any given time. It is in a parity between the thinking of Tafuri and Forster that begins to call into question architectures relationship with the interdisciplinary, and within that, a questioning of how each of these mediums relate to architecture. Clement Greenberg outlined that “the unique and proper area of competence” for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are “unique to the nature” of a particular medium. On the avant-garde and medium Greenberg states that ‘..the history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium’. It is the rigidity of this theory that does not look past the cyclical, evolution of production, nor does it consider the interdisciplinary. Greenberg’s understanding of the medium of the avant-garde can be clarified when he states that the avant-garde operates as abstraction, it reveals material, and clarifies medium. To take this as fact, to track the medium and materiality of avant-garde production, can be seen as a route to integrate a architecture’s medium specificity. Rosalind Krauss in her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, laid out in a precise diagram, the structural parameters of sculpture, architecture, and landscape art. Her diagram acknowledges the complexities, and constraints of medium specificity, using linear relationships to detail interdisciplinary confusion. Greenberg’s detailing of medium specificity pertains more relevantly to the modernist avant-garde, while Krauss’s transposes it’s questions into the post-modern neo-avant-garde. Foster provides commentary at this point of tension in a 2004 review of the MoMa. In critiquing the curation of works from the 20th century into their categorical mediums; it is of his observation that medium specificity is under most pressure in the ‘complexity of the modernist practice’. It is in a dialogue between the modernist avant-garde and the postmodern neo-avant-garde that the question of medium speciality begins to unfold. Posing the question of medium specificity against the architectural and spatial production of the 70s, 80’s and 90’s could allow one to grip the space between the modernist avant-garde and postmodern neo-avant-garde with more certainty.
Sculpture in the Expanded Field - Rosalind Krauss Diagram.
2. The Interdisciplinary: questioning architectural medium through site and documentation.
Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson, an earthwork, can mark a point in production where one can both walk a route back to modernism, and also raise questions of medium in relation to how it can characterise and change the incentive of an architectural form. The jetty, in shape and scale, recalls shapes of the modernist avant-garde. The spiral iconography sits in tension with Kandinsky's cosmological abstractions, displacing matter to produce an awareness of ones surrounding space. In writings by Smithson, he positions the shape of the jetty next to Brancusi’s sketch of James Joyce’ as a “spiral ear” because it suggests both a visual and an aural scale, in other words it indicates a sense of scale that resonates in the eye and the ear at the same time. These direct lines between modernist practice and the work of Smithson can form an initial example of the postmodern neo-avant-garde in architecture. This line of thought is articulated by Foster when he states,
‘..In postwar art, to pose the question of repetition is to pose the question of the neo-avant-garde…’.
Here there is to be a distinction between repetition and reference, but it is clear that a repetition of thought and ideological placement is present. Continually, it is the boundaries between land, sculpture, architecture and art, that this work plays with and against, that begin to shape questions around what architectures medium really was. To use Krause’s diagram as the central point of analysis. Smithson’s jetty is ‘sculpture’ due to its interaction with a marked site and efforts towards site cultivation and construction; using indigenous material to alter the landscape. In this sense it is also architecture. This work begins to elaborate on the pervasive question around what architectures medium is, at this point in history, and enduringly in the present. It also demonstrates that work of the post-modern neo-avant-garde holds within it a question of medium specificity in the architectural discipline.
Working in the same year, was Gordon Matta Clark, positioning his practice as anarchitecture,can be understood diagrammatically in the same way as Smithson's jetty. His work in the seventies, consisted of him performing a series of building cuts; transformations of abandoned buildings, carved out, fragmented and sliced. This work, like Smithson, works around a cultivation or construction of a marked site, it is a sculptural architecture of the urban landscape, a specific type of interdisciplinary that Krauss wanted to pinpoint in her sculptural diagram. Matta Clarke’s anarchitecture and its allusion to an anarchy, harnesses the role and responsibility of the ‘architect’ in the definition of the architect. By looking at these examples through the lens of Krausse’s diagram, it become important to note that the diagram was derived with intention of noting that art had to be conceived in terms of structure, rather than medium, as a way of distinguishing and expanding upon what Krauss identified as the postmodern break. Hence, to look at these works through her diagram, is to recognise its medium as inherently structural; a ‘structural medium’.
It is indeed important to note that, these works are products of the anti-art thinking of modernist avant-garde, also critically present in works of modernist literature via metafiction. It is to be understood that the basis of these ideas come from places like Brecht’s dialectical theatre; holding within it, a critique of creative production at the time and pioneering for a new way forward. This auto-critical position is also noted in the dada anti-art movement, confronting the absurdity of culture through the self. Forster notes that is not obvious whether the postmodern neo avant-garde is a passive recreation or a revitalisation and further construction of the modernist avant-garde, but it is evident that auto-critical tendencies of postmodernism were already at play within modernism.
At the same point in time, there was a movement of radical anti capitalist thinking; the ‘Hippie-Dream’ and subsequent architectural subcultures that began to evolve out of San Fransisco’s Bay Area, critiquing the North American culture of mass media and consumerism. The architectural practice that evolved out of this reaffirms that a production of the neo-avant-garde was principally concerned with the interdisciplinary, and with understanding an architectural medium. Antfarm was established within the counter-cultural milieu of 1968 San Francisco by two architects, their work dealt with the intersection of architecture, design, print and protest. Their manifesto circumnavigated a viral ecology, social design and collective living. What evolved from Antfarm’s practice was a design module, a ‘building’ typology that formed around ‘life’; both in nature and within the community based system that they were trying to create. Their practice, positioned amongst the topography of its production, can be understood as a radical reaction to the gridded sprawl of the bay area, the architecture of nuclear living and the suburban regime.
The subcultural language of Antfarm can be seen as a foundation for further pull away from standard architectural production. In a historical sense, Antfarm draws on modernisms practicality in their production of anti-art, referencing dada directly and indirectly in its efforts to ‘protest’ a current political climate through a playful, almost irrational exploration of space. It is this modernist referentiality that allows us to construct Antfarm as a primary driver in the architecture of the postmodern neo-avant-garde. The question that Antfarm raises against medium specificity is one that is integral to their identity as practitioners; do they speak as artists, performers, architects or activists. If it is one, which one, and if it is all, then what does this mean for the architectural institution. To assume that Antfarm worked primarily as architects is to, at this point in history, expand the evolving definition of architectures medium, to hold their spatial experiments, of inflatable installations, to the line of theory being applied to a concrete monolith. Within their architecture they harnessed social justice and community as a central medium, they prioritised paper architecture and comic documentation, and the final built form came through, clearly, as an afterthought. To uphold Antfarm as architects of the neo-avant-garde is to pose a question whether built architecture was or has always been architectures primary medium and initiative.
Smithson, Matta Clark and Antfarm, through an interdisciplinary position, pose questions towards a medium specificity in architecture. Smithson and Matta Clark’s work when looked at through Kruasse’s diagram, uphold that built structure is the primary medium of architecture, despite how far it can be warped, or transposed. As an antithesis to this, both Antfarm and Matta Clark, through a medium of protest and anarchitecture, give resonance to both paper documentation and ‘space’ as resistance, as key mediums of the postmodern neo-avant-garde architects.
3. Region, Atmosphere and Memory: questioning an architectural medium through space.
At the beginning of his essay “Notes towards A Critical Regionalism,” Frampton quotes philosopher Ricour,
‘Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda…’
Written in 1955, the words of Ricour are reminiscent of Koolhause’s language of early 2000’s Junkspace, the repetition, the dizzying descriptions of consumer construction. In this we find a central critique towards the production of modernism. Critical Regionalism as a theory comes up first in the Anti-Aesthetic, where Foster aims to curate a vocabulary for the postmodern spacial practitioner, but though it arises at this point in history it seems to singularly affirm a line of modernist thinking. A mode of architectural production that opened up under the lens of critical regionalism, decades after it was first published, is an exploration of climate as architecture. Climate architecture follows the boundaries of critical regionalism as it produces a work through materials found and constructed at site.
Unrealised Diller Scofidio and Renfro project, Slow House, Long Island, (New York 1990), proposes a form of climate architecture reinforced through material, the edge conditions of the project produce a vapour like effect, almost a dreamscape, physically the project demands an answer to how structures react when subject to movement. Later, Diller Scofidio and Renfro realise Blur Building, an architectural atmosphere of fog; it asks the questions, what does it mean to stand in a cloud and say you are in a building? The buildings primary material is one completely indigenous to site: water. This structure and thinking is an understanding of critical regionalism and manipulation of landscape, it holds within it a resistance to permanence, a power in ephemerality, a demand for the material of place. The building, on a dramatic level, could evoke a building like Fallingwater, by Frank Lloyd Wright. What does it mean to build inside a waterfall? What does it mean to build inside a cloud? It is barely repetition here, but a step forwards, as the medium of the building is questioned. If this building is similarly to be taken as an example of critical regionalism in its design, then this building again realigns itself with modernism. If the blur building is architecture, then ‘medium’, as it relates to an architectural discipline, is now cloud, the very air around us.
To zoom out, slightly, this foundation of the postmodern neo-avant-garde practice, and its critical connection with land, ground, space; when placed in conversation with Rem Koolhause’s Junkspace (2002) and Mark Augé’s Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), opens up a discourse that can further probe architecture and medium specificity.
‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’ (p.77-78)
Augé hypothesises that these places are a product of super-modernity, they are characterised by the action of repetition.They are; to be driving down a motorway, browsing in a supermarket and sitting in an airport lounge. It is this identification that leads us to understand the reciprocal production that occurred as an antithesis to mass building of the non-place. It can be assumed that if something is a non-place, it can then not be held as being made of an identifiable architectural medium. A look into the architectural thought that came out of this set of boundaries on non-place, finds Mike Kelly. His work, spanning across the 80’s and 90’s, until his death in 2012, addresses the physical extraction of non-memory, of composing a repressed architectural memory (ie. his primary school), as a means of demonstrating the slippery nature of an architecture of super modernity. His work accesses a temporal space and then uses architectural tropes and forms as a means to track the failures of memory in a world that he perceives to lack memorable tactility. The production of these memories produced an architecture of isolation; Kelly’s model of his primary school; a sprawl of white corridors. This production, again, like landscape artists of the 70’s, shows a grasping for the physical, an effort to grip and gain control of the architectural. Kelly is an indication, that, come the creation of non-places, these memories were to be replaced by a psychic reality, because the stairs no longer had hand rails. As outlined by Rem Koolhaus, ‘…one room leads to another and then another, spilling into infinity…’, it is then possible to suggest that Mike Kelly’s inability to grasp onto any concrete structure, is an indication that the built forms of super-modernity were not in fact the central architectural medium. Instead of memory producing a material or a tactile vision, the memory is of space and blurred corridor, of the body in this space and corridor.
This analysis does evoke in it, its antithesis, that the only form of memory was the plasterboard walls. That was only the structure, the only built form. It is these memories of the non-place that pose a distinction or a friction between what architectures medium was. In similar construction of found fragments, finds Thom Mayne’s Sixth Street Residence (1987 - 1992), rather than found temporal projections, the structure is a contemporary archaeology of found objects and re used pieces. Disposed fragments of technology are used in an architectural collage; distorting the scale and use of the domestic structure. These fragments create a thread of continuity through the structure, but also provide a sense of unease. In an act of re-use, this structure understands a resistance to the forces of both super-modernity and the pastiche of post-modernity. The structural planning of the residence could come in to contact with Adolf Loo’s modernism, in reference to the raumplan, ‘.. architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces…’. The fragmented space here is not constructed by walls like in the modernist avant-garde, but by structures of the past. The reality of this building speaks to an architecture where the production does not validate itself, the medium sits in confusion, resisting tension from each side.
4. An Enduring Interdisciplinarity
Ultimately, these case studies of the postmodern neo-avant-garde piece together a line of thinking that reflects on the question of medium specificity, as it relates to the practice of architecture. These practitioners challenge a firm assumption that roots architecture in the belief that the built structure is the architecture. In doing this, they reposition that architectures medium interacts with the interdisciplinary. The theory of Rosalind Krauss in conversation with Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta Clark firmly establishes a place for the interdisciplinary within the practice of architecture. As an extension of this, Antfarm, as an ideological practice, further strays from a traditional method of production, and questions forms of activism and documentation as mediums that work in and around an architectural practice. Invoking a theory of non-place, provides a third post-critical lens to understand how architectural practitioners use space as their primary medium; atmospheric space in Blur Building, and temporal or psychological space in the work of Mike Kelly and Thom Mayne. It is indeed true that the question of architectures medium spans built structure, documentation and ‘space’, in all its forms. To recognise the enduring interdisciplinarity of architectures medium, through the dialogue of the modernist and postmodernist avant-garde’s, is to both affirm the relevance of historical conversation in a current architectural climate, and in turn, the persisting strength of architecture as a discipline that can traverse a medium specificity.
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