WRITING ART

AND ARCHITECTURE
Andrew Benjamin
WRITING ART AND ARCHITECTURE
 TRANSMISSION
Transmission denotes the
transfer of information,
objects or forces from one
place to another, from
one person to another.
Transmission implies
urgency, even emergency:
a line humming, an alarm
sounding, a messenger
bearing news. Through
Transmission interven-
tions are supported, and
opinions overturned.
Transmission republishes
classic works in philoso-
phy, as it publishes works
that re-examine classical
philosophical thought.
Transmission is the name
for what takes place.
WRITING ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Andrew Benjamin

re.press Melbourne 2010

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© Andrew Benjamin 2010
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Benjamin, Andrew E
Writing art and architecture / Andrew E. Benjamin.

9780980668360 (pbk. with colour images)

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9780980668377 (ebook)

Series: Transmission.
Subjects: Aesthetics.
Architecture.
Art.
Writing.

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CONTENTS

List of Plates vii

Acknowledgements ix
INTRODUCTION
Writing, Criticism 3
ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN
Architecture and Culture 11
On the Library 18
Learning from the House 22
Plus ça change, Plus ça change 26
On the Image of Diferent lines 30
Visual Memory 37
Performing, Efecting Surfaces 41
A Secular Temenos 46
Resisting the Design of Empire 51
EXHIBITING ARCHITECTURE
Architecture as Practice 65
Displaying Architecture 68
Researching Architecture 74
The Standards of the Non Standard 78
PAINTING
Myth and History 93
Art that Matters 97
Traces of Anonymity 104
The Work of Figures 108
SCULPTURE
Vandalizing Objects, Destroying Art 123
Serra and the Space of Sculpture 127

v
vi Writing Art and Architecture

Fraying Lines 130

There in the Vanishing 143
WRITING
Seeing Florence 155
Place 159
On/Within 163
LIST OF PLATES

01. Terroir, Prague Library competition entry, exterior 55

02. Terroir, Prague Library competition entry, interior 55
03. Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 56
04. Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 56
05. Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial 57
06. Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial 57
07. Dagmar Richter, The Domesti-City Project 58
08. Dagmar Richter, The Domesti-City Project 58
09. Dagmar Richter, The Domi-in(f)o House 59
10. Dagmar Richter, The Domi-in(f)o House 59
11. Dagmar Richter, Stockholm Library competition entry 60
12. Dagmar Richter, The Domi-in(f)o House 60
13. Herzog and De Meuron, Exhibition at the Tate Modern 84
14. Peter Eisenman, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts 84
15. Peter Eisenman, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts 84
16-19. Diller and Scofidio, Blur Building 88
20-22. Diller and Scofidio, Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology. 87
23-25. Peter Eisenman, Barefoot on White-Hot Walls (Exhibition at the MAK) 85
26. David Hawley, Accumulation 115
27. Peter Neilson, Mirror, mirror on the world (seven random targets) 116
28. Peter Neilson, Title, The two-way mirror: Cinderella as spy (never suspected, she
lived happily ever after the overthrow of the Prince’s brutal junta) 117
29. Jess MacNeil, Opera House Steps 118
30. Jess MacNeil, Wake: Coniston water 118
31. Jess MacNeil, Wake: Windermere 118
32. Terri Bird, Recycling Fictions of Being 147
33. Terri Bird, Recycling Fictions of Being 147

vii
viii Writing Art and Architecture

34. Richard Goodwin, Parasite Actions: Monkey Model 06 148

35. Richard Goodwin, Bond Street Parasite 148
36. Richard Goodwin, Parasite Façade in Cope St Alexandria 149
37. Richard Goodwin, Pyrmont Parasite 149
38-39. Elizabeth Presa, Moon Water 150
40. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 1 169
41. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 2 170
43. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 4 170
42. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 3 170
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

These essays were written with the support of editors, colleagues,

students and friends. The practice of criticism necessitates com-
mitted publishers. While these essays stem from a number of
publications a signiicant number were written for Architectural
Review Australia. As such I would like to acknowledge my editors
there—Mat Ward and Andrew Mackenzie—who were and remain
enormously supportive. I would like to thank the artists who invit-
ed me to write on their work. While rewritten these texts irst ap-
peared, for the most part, as catalogue essays.

‘Performing, Efecting Surfaces’ irst appeared in Dagmar

Richter, Armed Surfaces, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2004;
‘Vandalizing Objects’ in Art Monthly (no. 163, september 2003);
‘Architecture and Culture’ in Architecture Australia (vol. 92. no.
3 May/June 2003); ‘Fraying Lines’ in Richard Goodwin’s Richard
Goodwin: Performance to Porosity (2006). The following all ap-
peared in Architectural Review Australia: ‘The Standards of the Non
Standard’ (no. 87), ‘Displaying Architecture’ (no. 92), ‘Architecture
as Practice’ (no. 94), ‘On the Library’ (no. 100), ‘Learning From
the House’ (no. 101), ‘Myth and History’ (no. 102), ‘Serra and the
Space of Sculpture’ (no. 103), ‘Relections on Architectural Theory’
(no. 106) and ‘Seeing Florence’ (no. 108).

ix
INTRODUCTION
WRITING, CRITICISM
Art, Architecture

Writing about art and architecture occurs in many guises. While

there will always be a connection between historical and critical
understandings the writings presented here are for the most part
acts of criticism. Criticism, however, cannot be reduced to the lo-
cation or even the attribution of value. Criticism has a diferent
register. It works in a diferent way.
At its most straightforward criticism involves the identiica-
tion of art and architecture. However, identiication is not just the
naming of works. On the contrary, identiication concerns a more
nuanced sense of identity. Allowing for a form of identiication
that cannot be equated either with the mere naming of a work or
its description repositions criticism. As a result criticism is delim-
ited by questions concerning how speciic works work as either art
or architecture. This doubling of ‘work’ is important. Too often
art works and works of architecture are attributed a static quality.
As if they were no more than documents, evidence or examples. If
such a conception of work were allowed to predominate then what
would be precluded, almost by deinition, would have been any
direct interest in the work’s material presence or in the complex
process of how works acquired material presence. The presence of
materials and the process by which works are materialized—i.e.
how they acquire material presence—is central precisely because
the meaning of a work is always an after efect of the way materi-
als operate. This will difer in regards to art and architecture, and
within art between painting, sculpture and video—nonetheless,
as a generalization, meaning cannot be (perhaps should not be) di-
vorced from the work of materials. If this were to occur then allow-
ing interpretive concerns to predominate as though the works in
3
4 Writing Art and Architecture

questions did not have an original relation to the broad question of

materiality would be to idealize work. It would be as though mean-
ings were just there, as though they had an evanescent relation to
the materiality of the object. Integral to these writings is the sup-
position that criticism has a necessary relation to what could be de-
scribed as a materialist aesthetics.
Once matter is attributed centrality then not only will this
have an efect of how works are construed, it will also necessitates
both the invention of a vocabulary as well as the transformation
of pre-existing terms. However, neither inventions nor transfor-
mation are real if they are understood as the mere positing of a
new set of terms. Such a move would restrict the new by equat-
ing it, even if only implicitly, with novelty. Transformation has a
link to how materials are set to work. This sense of transforma-
tion occurs in two diferent though interrelated ways. In the irst
instance transformations are already present within works, or they
are generated by the contemporary nature of work in a way that
has retrospective force. If there is a sense of transformation whose
location is brought out in the majority of these writings, then it
stems from the consequences of the incorporation of the comput-
er into the design process. This has given rise to a radical shift in
how works—in the broadest sense of the term—are produced and
therefore there is the concomitant need to reconsider how they are
to be interpreted. Works occur today within an era of digital repro-
ducibility. This speciic site of production demands the production
of concepts and categories that contemporary work necessitates.
The second sense of transformation can be linked to the
performative dimension of particular works. Here this involves
the relationship to traditions. Be it a relation to the tradition of
housing or memorialization or modes of production within the
visual arts transformation involves a repositioning of the tra-
dition. Repositioning rather than abandoning of the given.
Transformation, in this sense, occurs within works that dis-order.
Equally, it can be traced in what has been described as the fraying of
pre-established borders and divisions. Both these terms tie trans-
formation and production together. Precisely, because of the reten-
tion of a sense of production—production as a generative process
rather than an instrumental one—one of the additional key opera-
tive terms at work within these writings is potentiality. Diagrams,
lines and surfaces within contemporary architecture are to be un-
derstood in terms of their potentiality. Their potentiality stems
 Writing, Criticism 5

from what deines their presence as contemporary. They are the

result of the transformation of the line and the surface within the
era of digital reproducibility.
The writings presented had their initial publication with-
in magazines, books and catalogues. Some were excised from a
journal. All are experiments. They should be understood there-
fore as attempts within a deined and delimited space to engage
with works. At times it is the work itself that is important. Either
a work of architecture or particular paintings or sculptures. In
every instance what is central is particularity and therefore the
question of the way a given work works. There is however a two-
fold risk that attends any insistence on particularity. The irst el-
ement is the equation of criticism with description. The second
is the supposition that any writing on art or architecture is auto-
matically criticism. Avoiding these two possibilities necessitates
developing a speciic understanding of particularity. The particu-
lar work is a material event. However, it is also incorporated with-
in a network of relations. Material events—paintings, sculptures,
buildings, etc.—recall, of necessity, the genre of which they form
a part. Events acknowledge that relation even though they are
not determined by it. Criticism, precisely because it is concerned
with the way a work works—for example, the way in which a work
works as sculpture or painting or an act of memorialization—lo-
cates the material event within that act of recall. What matters is
the work. The work’s mattering—matter as an active principle—
is the interplay between material speciicity and the network rela-
tions that become a given works own speciic act of recall. Neither
that network nor the work’s mattering can be excluded. Their in-
terplay is the object of criticism. However, that object is always
particular. Neither a particular that stands alone, nor a particular
that is determined by a form of universality. Rather the particular
as a material event.
An important component of these writings is the exhibition,
speciically the exhibition of architecture. Exhibitions are never
neutral. What they always involve is the display of a conception
of what architecture is taken to be. To that extent an exhibition is
always a response to the question of criticism. That question con-
cerns how works work as architecture and therefore the way ma-
terials and programme interconnect in the creation of the work
as a material event. Consequently, the decision of what to display
and how to display it has to be understood as a response to the
6 Writing Art and Architecture

question of how, in a given instance, the material event is being

understood. Responding to the exhibition of architecture is a criti-
cal response to that understanding. There is, however, an addi-
tional element. The architectural exhibition recalls the fact that
the history of architecture is inextricably bound up with practice
of representation. Architecture cannot be divorced from the tech-
nical means of representation. Drawings, models and now com-
puter generated diagrams form an essential part of that history.
Understanding hat history and therefore working with the dis-
play of architecture has to acknowledge that history. What that
acknowledgment means is working with the recognition that the
digital now plays an essential role within the practice of design
and therefore will also igure in the critical response to architec-
ture’s own self-presentation. The ubiquity of the digital gives rise
to another way of understanding questions concerning represen-
tation in general, the relationship between the digital and the ma-
terial and thus the display of architecture in general. Accepting
this as the setting for the exhibition forms an important part of
any critical response to speciic exhibitions.
To suggest that these writings are experiments is to say that
they are continual attempts to deine and enact the project of criti-
cism. They are therefore a form of practice. Criticism as a practice
is of course distinct from the practices around which its own proj-
ect is orientated. In fact it is a connection that is also disjunctive.
This complex sense of location marks out the particularity of criti-
cism while at the same time positioning this mode of writing as
experimental. Criticism cannot close the opening between writ-
ing and its object. However, the fact that closure is impossible and
that it cannot complete the object generates a form of responsibil-
ity. The responsibility is to maintain the object as a material event.
If it is conceded that this is the only way to maintain particularity
then any other approach—description, mere historicization, sub-
jective response, etc.—will in the end eface what is speciic to a
particular work. Particularity does not just emerge within the ac-
tivity of criticism, criticism as a practice sustains it.
ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN
ARCHITECTURE AND CULTURE

Opening

Perhaps the most well known line from Adolf Loos’s famous es-
say: ‘Ornament and Crime’ is the claim that, ‘[a]s ornament is no
longer organically related to our culture, it is also no longer the
expression of our culture’. This move, which separates ornament
and culture, links modernist architecture to the culture of moder-
nity. As with any link it can be as much championed as disavowed.
Nonetheless, two things emerge. The irst is a statement of intent.
The second is a question. In the irst instance, and unavoidably,
modernist architecture deines itself in relation to culture. The
deinition is clear. And yet, despite this deinition, the question of
how today that relation is to be understood has a persistent quality
that is usually noticed in its occlusion. In other words, to the extent
that the link is denied, and that architecture is seen as no more
than building and thus thought in terms of a diferentiation of the
economic from the cultural, the possible presence of architecture’s
relation to culture emerges as a question whose acuity cannot be
readily escaped. What then is architecture’s relation to culture?
In purely strategic terms the question has relevance since poli-
cy—usually in terms of Government policy and even architectural
criticism—often uses straightforwardly economic criteria to make
decisions or draw conclusions. Approaching architecture as an in-
dustry, while apposite in certain instances, fails to allow for the
presence of the architectural to form part of a nation’s, or a com-
munity’s, culture. And yet, it is clear that the presence of architec-
ture in the daily lives of citizens only underscores its ineliminable
cultural presence. The task here is to address that presence and
then draw conclusions that could have relevance as much for pol-
icy directed decisions, as it would for evaluative ones. Prompting
11
12 Writing Art and Architecture

this essay was not just the refusal of public money to the Australian
pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale, but the need to engage with
the issues to which such a refusal gives rise.1 For the most part,
the issues do not pertain to the relative strength or weakness of
Australian architecture but to the way in which it deined itself.
While there is no one self-deinition there is a prevailing percep-
tion. Countering that perception and therefore reopening the need
to link architecture to the wider world of policy—policy other than
simple planning regulations—involves reopening the question of
architecture’s relation to culture.
Within the range of this essay there are two senses in which
the word ‘culture’ will be used. The irst relates to the activities
that are often taken as speciic to architecture. The other is inex-
tricably connected to the realm of human existence. In respect to
the latter what it demarcates are the ways in which human life
relates itself to ‘nature’. While there may be two diferent senses
of the word culture what matters is the way concerns of one can
be—perhaps should be—intruded into the other. There is little
point holding to the exclusivity of the culture of architecture as
this denies its presence as part of human society. Equally, archi-
tecture cannot be thought as nothing other than merely cultural
as this would preclude any consideration being given, for exam-
ple, to the way diferent materials realize diferent efects within
architectural practice.
The way through this complex set of considerations will result
from recognizing that these two diferent senses of culture are in-
terrelated. Insisting on that interrelation introduces another dein-
ing element into the equation. Indeed, it marks the point of rela-
tion: namely, the public. Architecture is essentially public. While
this is hardly a surprising claim since it seems to be true by deini-
tion. As with many truths the acceptance of what it asserts is con-
terminous with the refusal of its consequences. A choice emerges:
Architecture can take the construction of objects that are posi-
tioned as only ever private and thus which only open up the al-
ready circumscribed worlds of individual activity—e.g. the domes-
tic house—as that which deines its sphere of operation. Or, there

1. In response to this exclusion a Virtual Australian Pavilion was created and

exhibited on line for the 2004 Biennale. The exhibition was designed by John
Gollings, Tom Kovac and David Pidgeon. The exhibition was curated by me. I
have discussed some of the issues raised by the 2002 Biennale in ‘What Next?
Notes on the Venice Biennale’, Architecture Australia, January/February 2003.
 Architecture and Culture 13

can be an insistence on its inherently public nature. Emphasizing

the public does not mean that the construction of the house is in
some sense a denial of that self-deined location. Rather, the ar-
gument would be that architecture’s continual opening onto the
world—an opening which can have an important role in the con-
struction of that world—is one of the main ways for there to be a
possible nexus between the culture of architecture and the inher-
ently public nature of human sociality. What have to be explained
therefore are the diferences between these two positions.
This distinction is not between architecture as an academic
activity on the one hand and as a worldly activity on the other. At
work here are diferent conceptions of practice. The diference is
crucial since in both instances there can be a championing of ma-
terials over programme; in both, a concern with the environmen-
tal consequences of building can be paramount; equally, issues
pertaining to sustainability can drive them both. The distinction
involves the extent to which there is an airmation—with all the
diiculties and complexities that this term brings with it—of the
inherently public nature of architecture.

Opening In
Architecture can be described as opening in, when it deines itself
in terms of an activity of construction for individuals to suit indi-
vidual needs. In working from the outside in, space is created that
reproduces the desires of clients. In so doing, that world takes on
the veneer of the private. The privacy in question has a public reg-
ister. However, that registration is of a conception of the private as
the world in which the individual—either singularly or as a unit—
has primacy. Moreover, it generates a conception of the public, as a
collection of individuals all of whom aspire to the creation of their
own ‘private’ world, which in being created would then be the lo-
cus where their own unique desires would be satisied.
Architecture begins to deine itself in these terms when this
conception of practice—and world creation—becomes the basis
for future discussions and evaluations. Once the object is under-
stood as created for the individual, bringing with it a conception
of the public as the totality of individuals, it follows that architec-
ture is both the expression of personalities, and that the built ob-
ject expresses the personality of the client. (Or at least that this
would be the desired intent on both sides.) Equally, because con-
struction, once understood in this light is always deined by a
14 Writing Art and Architecture

conception of individual taste, there cannot be a link to a concep-

tion of culture other than one arising from a generalization of the
individual. It is not diicult to imagine that once this is accepted
as the deinition of architecture—and it will be a self-deinition
that will work at a range of diferent scales—architecture will be
inevitably understood as a series of produced (built, construct-
ed, etc.) objects that are created by individuals to serve individual
ends. Since the public is always counter posed to the individual,
and this will be true even when the public is understood as the
abstract presence of the totality of individuals, architecture will be
deined in terms of singular relations. The relation is always be-
tween architect and client. Architecture remains enclosed within
that relation. What is important is the extent to which that rela-
tion is taken to deine the practice.
Once there is a turning towards the interior then there is no
need to think in terms of the registration of the exterior. Those ele-
ments—minimally the exterior to which architecture opens out—
will pertain to culture understood as part of the public domain.
The limit of the self-deinition does not have to do with a spe-
ciic program—though it should be added that the preconceived
preoccupation of Australian architecture with domestic housing
only exacerbates the situation. The insistence of the interior, and
a self-deinition that deines architecture in terms of individual
concerns—and reciprocally as only of concern for individuals—
means that it is a simple matter to locate architecture as no more
than an economic activity. The construction of a house would
have a bespoke suit as its correlate. The refusal of the public is, of
course, a positioned relation to the inherently public nature of ar-
chitecture. Not only does this establish the limit of architecture’s
self deinition in terms of what has been described as opening in; it
also indicates that the culture of architecture is from the start tra-
versed by the complex matter of culture.
The already present place of culture needs to be noted. Here,
it concerns the capacity for an object to stage a relation. While this
may seem an overly complex point it is not. Staging is not just the
presence of program nor is it just the use of one combination of
materials rather than another. Staging becomes the way the in-
terarticulation of a program and materials work to present a spe-
ciic conception of the program in question. Within these terms
architecture becomes a material event. The diferences, for exam-
ple, between two museums are to be found in terms of what they
 Architecture and Culture 15

stage. That is, the way the understanding or self-conception of the

programme, the geometry proper to its realization, and the mate-
rials, once combined yield the object as a material event. However,
it is an object as a site of activity. The activity is the way the build-
ing stages its presence. Two things need to be noted here. The irst
is that staging is integral to the way in which an object works as
architecture. The second is that programme, geometry, and the
use of materials have both a historical and cultural dimension.
What this means is that staging necessarily inscribes boarder cul-
tural considerations into the integrity of the architectural object.
Opening in, therefore, becomes the attempt to avoid deining archi-
tecture in terms of that inscription. The counter—opening out—
becomes the way of acknowledging the insistent presence of stag-
ing and of allowing that acknowledgment to play a pivotal role in
establishing architecture’s self-deinition

Opening Out
Emphasizing, both that architecture is from the start a staging,
and that part of such a self-deinition is an explicit acknowledge-
ment of architecture’s public nature, does not mean that hence-
forth architecture has to be either utilitarian—i.e. merely func-
tional—or instrumental—i.e. driven by some large social goal.
Moreover, there will not just be one way in that such an acknowl-
edgment need be present. The complex surfaces of the Online
Multimedia Centre, at the St Albans campus of Victoria University
by Lyons, for example, opens up a potential urban ield. This does
not occur by locating the architecture on the surface, but by al-
lowing the surface to aid in creating a visual urbanism. What
emerges, as much as a potential than as that which is actually re-
alized, are urban surfaces. The interest in the surface as evinced
by Lyons—and here there is an important ainity with some re-
cent work by Herzog and de Meuron, in particular their library
for the Eberswalde Polytechnic—should be understood as locating
the object’s architecture as much in a sustained engagement with
programmatic concerns, as it is in the construction of urban sur-
faces. The importance of the latter is that they take the creation of
surfaces beyond any concern with the decorative.
While a great deal has been written about ARM’s National
Museum in Canberra, it remains the case that its singular impor-
tance lies in the speciic way it stages a conception of the public
and thus of community. While it enhances the site, to argue that a
16 Writing Art and Architecture

building compliments Walter Burly Grifen’s master plan runs the

risk of condemning it in advance. At the National Museum iden-
tity becomes a site of endless negotiation and the symbols carry
that positioning. Both work together to deine the site. Rather than
concentrate on the symbols per se, what is actually fundamental
to their presence is that they introduce a conception of time that
is not determined by immediacy. The symbols stage a more com-
plex and always to-be-determined conception of identity. There
is still a connection between symbols and symbolized, however,
what needs to be noted is that the link is hard to establish as de-
initive. Indeed that is the point. The public nature of the architec-
ture, and in addition its democratic impulse, are to be found in the
symbolism because the work attests to the complex and cosmo-
politan nature of the public. While a fundamentally diferent proj-
ect LAB’s Federation Square demands, amongst other things, that
reconsideration be given to how, within the urban context igure/
ground relations have to be recast in terms of igure/igure rela-
tions. The inscription of an implicit urbanism into The Ian Potter
Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria, the construction of the
Squares themselves as having an explicit urbanism, the complex
relation that both have to the urbanism created by the intersec-
tions of the grid and the lanes, fed by public transport hubs means
that each element becomes an important igure constructing the
urban terrain.2 While it does not occur literally, Federation Square
develops—both externally and internally (i.e. within the Ian Potter
Centre itself)—the urbanism of its setting, while demanding a re-
thinking of how interventions of this scale within a pre-existing
fabric are to be understood.
The signiicance of these projects cannot be understood in
terms of the image they project. In other words, it is not as though
subsequent work—be it large scale or the domestic house—has to
have a Lyons’ surface, or deploy complex symbolism, or enact frac-
tal geometries. The fact of their signiicance does not mean that
they set the measure for what architecture has to look like. It is not
a question of appearance. Rather, what has to occur is a process
of abstraction where what characterizes them—and it will always
be the interplay of the strictly architectural and the cultural, one
iguring in the other—is allowed to set the framework in which
2. I have discussed the aspect of Federation Square in my Style and Time: Essays
on the Politics of Appearance, Northwestern University Press, Chicago, 2006, pp.
99-105.
 Architecture and Culture 17

architecture’s self-deinition can continue to be developed. Such a

move by airming the presence of the cultural—by noting the ine-
liminability of the public, while allowing both to have a complex
and contested status—continues to allow for architecture to be
opened up beyond any reduction. Be that reduction one to the sim-
ply economic or to the merely cultural, it goes without saying that
such a position is necessarily contestable. Moreover, this inherent
contestability may result in the refusal of the interplay of cultures
and therefore in the championing of the interdependence of the
private and the economic. The victory of one over the other reveals
an essential truth. Namely, that the presence of the conlict—the
inescapable hold of contestability—is the irst step in any argu-
ment for the inherently cultural nature of the architectural.
ON THE LIBRARY
Reading and Writing in Public

The library houses. To think, however, that the problematic of the

house provides a way into the library—as though all that is really
at stake is the provision of public lounge rooms—is to fail grasp
the increasing complex relation between public and private space
in which the library needs to be located. Equally, libraries are at
the forefront of any concern with the archive and thus the process
of archivization. The relationship between, for example, a national
historical collection of documents and books and their subsequent
digital storage and use necessitates that this aspect of the library
be reconsidered. This reconsideration will be as much curatorial
as architectural.
Approaching the library therefore demands that what predom-
inates are questions of public space on the one hand and the na-
ture of the archive on the other. These two domains should over-
lap productively within the process of design. Making this claim
is not to assert that the design process takes them into consid-
eration. The argument is simply that noting their centrality con-
structs what might be described as a ield in which judgment be-
come possible.
The public used to be identiied with the national. In that con-
text public space became the domain in which the national was
staged. Pelçnik’s National University Library in Ljubljana (1941),
for example, was an attempt to integrate a conception of Slovenian
identity with a speciic conception of modernity.3 After Pleçnik
the relationship between national identity or even local identity
and the architectural no longer has a determining role in the how
the library is designed, let alone in how it appears. Indeed, it is
3. I have taken up this aspect of Pelçnik’s library in Style and Time, pp. 84-89.
18
 On the Library 19

possible to conjecture that while there is a recidivist conception

of nationhood that continues to show itself in populist political
discourses, any real engagement with the politics of public space
knows from the start that neither the public let alone public archi-
tecture can be deined in ways that conlate or identify the pub-
lic with an essentialist sense of national identity. In the context of
Pleçnik’s project, the public is conlated with the national. If this
move is no longer possible, how is public space to be understood?
Any response to this question and thus any attempt to create
public space have to take a diverse sense of the public into consid-
eration. That diversity has an efect on how space is conceptual-
ized. Equally, however, public space is a locus of control. Security
guards and CCTV deine public space in terms of monitoring.
Public space cannot be conceived outside its assumed relation to
question of policing. That there may be a tension between policing
and the diversity that deines the public, a diversity that reworks
the public in terms of the cosmopolitan, has to be acknowledged
as a given. Design cannot resolve the conditions that generate it,
nonetheless, the practice of design has to register its presence.
What then of public concerns?
Another way in is needed. Indeed, the answer to this ques-
tion resides in a reconsideration of the archive. The library’s rela-
tion to storage is ubiquitous. Libraries are repositories. They are
sites in which material is deployed and used, creating and recre-
ating national and international narrative constructions, recon-
structing lives, projecting possibilities and undoing already de-
termined histories. Archives hold possibilities. They are sites of
potentiality. Traditionally, access to the archive works through a
hierarchy. Such a structure has its inevitable set of protocols. With
the assumed centrality of material objects the hierarchy will have
a structure that is determined by the materiality of the object and
the role of the objects within already existing historical, nation-
al and regional narratives. A clear example is SOM’s Beinecke
Library at Yale University which was built for the maintenance
and celebration of rare books and manuscripts.
With the material object, access will always need to be policed
in a number of diferent ways such that ilters begin to limit ap-
proaches to the books and manuscripts. At each level there will be
further forms of restriction. At work is a gradation of access. It is
not too diicult to envisage that such a programmatic imperative
will have a direct impact on design.
20 Writing Art and Architecture

While the digitalization of the archive does not resolve the

question of storage, nor does it eliminate a hierarchy of access,
what it does achieve is a radical reconiguration of that process.
Digitalization operates in a number of diferent ways. Collections
of documents and manuscripts can be stored digitally. Books and
journals can be accessed digitally. Databases allow for search-
es that extend beyond the material conines of the building. The
corpus of entire literatures can be stored digitally. (This has al-
ready occurred with the body of work in Ancient Greek and Latin.)
Images, representing the majority holding of museums, are in-
creasingly at hand. The screen therefore becomes a site in which
material can be employed that reaches within the building whilst
reaching outside.
It should not be thought that the impact of the digital on the
library involves the move from material presence to digital pres-
ence. Such a description is too simplistic. What is reconigured
in the process is the reading, the writing that stems from it, and
more signiicantly the status of the reader. This reconsideration is
enacted within the library. However, it no longer has to be a rela-
tionship between the reader and the process of reading and writ-
ing that was structured by the same hieratical process that deined
the relation when centrality had to be attributed to the materiality
of the book or the document. Or, where the materials (the read)
were deined exclusively by their location in the library.
Through the process of digitization the assumed diference
between the archive and the open collection is more nuanced.
While the archive necessitates storage, and while there is always
the need for originals to be consulted, the nature of that need is
subject to change. Moreover, the readers accessing rare and pre-
cious documents and books no longer occupy an already deined
category. As a result the question of the reader—of who is able to
read and thus who has the right to access—will have been posed
in an importantly diferent way. If there is a parallel situation then
this opening has its correlate in the potentiality that the archive—
in the broadest sense of the term—will have always contained.
In this regard it is signiicant that Terroir’s competition entry
for the New National Library of the Czech Republic (2007) uses
the presence of the actual archive as a structuring device within
their design. Refusing to conlate the archive with mere storage
they conceive a diferent relation. The archive is deined by its po-
tentiality. The archive therefore is neither literal presence nor is it
 On the Library 21

mere metaphor. The archive which would be located within the

terrain’s folds is envisaged to work up through the building in-
terrupting predetermined spatial arrangements. Part of the work
would be the construction of public spaces. In so doing, the ar-
chive as a reality as well as an architectural concept has a material
and thus a tectonic efect.
Once the archive is deined by potentiality then it accords with
a conception of the public in which the latter is no longer equated
with a forced homogeneity in which hierarchies are naturalized.
The public becomes a locus of diversity and the cosmopolitan. It
is therefore a collectivity whose actions cannot be regulated in ad-
vance. Hence, public space is its own archive. If there is a way of
negotiating the presence of policing then it has to do with the rec-
ognition that the policing that hinders experimentation operates
within structures which contain and limit the given. What cannot
be policed is potentiality. The digitalization of the archive and thus
its emergence as an open structure deined by ininite use coupled
to a conception of the public and public space deined in terms of
a potentially unmasterable diversity should reposition the library.
A repositioning that will demand a diferent response to the ques-
tion of what it means to read and write in public.
LEARNING FROM THE HOUSE

Architecture learns. Indeed there may be an imperative that it so

do. Perhaps the most signiicant moment announcing this need
occurs in the opening of Venturi and Scott Brown’s Leaning from
Las Vegas. ‘Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being
revolutionary in architecture’. Learning becomes for them a way
of looking. Leaning and looking are interconnected. That intercon-
nection gives centrality to the given. In their project learning and
looking involved speciic building types. Nonetheless, it took the
urban as its point of departure. More signiicantly looking was de-
ined by a body that moved. No longer static or positioned within
the conventions of the perspectival sketch, Learning from Las Vegas
linked movement and looking and thus introduced a connection
between sight and speed. Any attempt to answer the questioning
whether architecture can still learn can only ever be speciic. Here
the point of departure is the more localized question: What would
it mean for architecture to learn from the house?
Answering this question necessitates a type of return.
Returning to the house must occur in ways that are stripped of
any innocence. Houses house. The question to be addressed is
what deines the activity, Housing, understood as an activity, con-
tinues to take place. Precisely because of that continuity the ques-
tion of deinition cannot be given by a simple recourse to detail.
Deinition demands the recognition that the house is from the
start a structuring of domestic space and as such an enacting of
the porous divide between the public and private. The terms ‘do-
mestic’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ are all central.
While the meaning of each term is thought to be obvious the
situation is inherently more complex. To the extent that the domes-
tic is deined by its equation with the private, then the domestic is
22
 Learning from the House 23

always positioned by acts of separation. If however the domestic is

deined by its relation to public space, then a diferent situation oc-
curs. Rather than modes of separation the lines demarcating and
structuring urban space can be drawn through the domestic de-
ining and therefore redeining both site and programmatic orga-
nization. While this deinition, thus measure, is inevitable, what
matters is what provides it.
The history of the house would seem to correspond to the
move from a concern with the public to the private such that the
urban nature of the domestic architecture cedes its place to the
disclosure of an internal world. However, the interruption of this
development cannot occur by simply insisting that the continuity
of the equation of the domestic with private ought not occur and
that all architecture should engage with its inherently public na-
ture. (And this no matter how much that nature may have been
muted or even efaced.) There needs to be a diferent argument.
Architecture can learn little from the reduction of the house to de-
tail. All that could be gained from such an equation is the presence
of certain houses as exemplary. Were they to instruct it would be
in relation to images of their actual presence. Learning would have
become ediication. Holding back this possibility means that the
house should have a diferent inlection.
Learning from what is at hand cannot involve the mere repeti-
tion of what is already there. Learning involves abstraction. More
emphatically it necessitates abstraction. The way in which it is pos-
sible learn from the house therefore involves a transformation. As
has already been noted the house is caught between forms of def-
inition. Allowing for the urban to set the measure means mov-
ing the emphasis away from seeing the house as an exemplary in-
stance of the domestic. If there is another way of looking then the
literal cedes its place to a version abstraction. Abstractions have
potentiality.
Abstraction opens in a number of diferent directions. In
the case of Adolf Loos’ Haus Müller or Rem Koolhaas’ Bordeaux
House an insistence on historical particularity, while important in
certain instances, limits the house. The limit is the hold of histo-
ry. However, to insist on their exemplarity status also limits them.
They become single instances of a general type; instances from
which little could be learned. However, once there is a process
of transformation—a transformation in which abstraction pre-
dominates—then they become speciic ways in which circulation
24 Writing Art and Architecture

deines bodily presence and materials cannot be thought other

than in their relation to programme. Moreover, in the case of both
these houses, even though the modes of circulation are impor-
tantly diferent, there is the interrelationship between movement,
(and therefore the body) materials and programme. One cannot be
thought without the other. In Haus Müller cladding is fundamen-
tal. In the Bordeaux House it is the use of an elementary palette of
materials. In both instances the interconnection with circulation
allows programme.
Rather than use a form of citation in which elements of pre-
exiting architectural possibilities are noted—learning is not quo-
tation—the possibilities inherent in these houses can only emerge
when their description becomes abstract. Learning from Haus
Müller would not involve the mere repetition of Loos. Learning oc-
curs when there is a repetition that is given a form that has not oc-
curred before. The repetition would not have been of the house’s
literal presence but of its presence as an abstraction. Learning
therefore needs to be distinguished from imitation. Imitation
is structured by representation. Learning however demands the
move from abstraction to production; a move that depends upon
abstraction’s potentiality.
Abstraction becomes therefore a site open to inlection. The
given is retained within the process of its transformation. Not only
does the question of production remain open only if the house
is positioned in these terms, both the literal reiteration of given
building types as well as utopian speculation are efectively dis-
tanced. The given is looked at in way that allows for production.
The presence of abstraction can also be present purely on the level
of drawing. A number of Eisenman’s early house projects are in-
vestigations of models of spatial transformation. As such they are
indiferent to the question of materials. (Hence their diference
from the concerns of Loos and Koolhaas.) Nonetheless, Eisenman’s
drawings have the potentiality to be viewed beyond any immediate
reduction to representation and therefore as projective.
There are of course diferent modalities of inlection.
Amounting to difering ways of account for forms of production,
(thus diferent construals of design.) The inlection that merely
picks up detail stills the potentiality of abstraction by turning the
founding relations into a literal image. If the inlection maintains
abstraction the question is always going to be how to avoid turning
the abstract into the literal. In other words, how is the potential of
 Learning from the House 25

abstraction to be maintained? One clear response is to move the

concerns of the urban through the founding site of abstract re-
lations. This is not a visual question. On the contrary it involves
the interconnection between the public, the semi-public and what
could be called the becoming-private of programmes within apart-
ments blocks. Urban infrastructure, especially when it concerns
forms of movement—from walking to public transport—should
also inlect the site. Difering lines would intersect beginning to
deine the site while opening up a range of design strategies. The
site need not become an image of the urban. The site would itself
be inlected by elements of the urban’s own abstract presence.
The house, of course, can be equally inlected. The limitations
of that inlection are no more that the limits of the house itself.
Nonetheless, each house has to negotiate its relation to the street.
Equally it must enact the moment of becoming-private. In every
instance the negotiation and the enactment can allow the urban to
deine the sites. Lines will work though the site rather than being
closed of at the entrance. To the extent that the house can contin-
ue to be positioned in this way it eschews an identiication of ar-
chitecture with detail, thus learning from the house will be a real
possibility.
PLUS ÇA CHANGE, PLUS ÇA CHANGE
Reflections on Architectural Theory

1.
One of the most exacting lessons that comes from any attempt
to present a materialist account of the operation of a discipline
within design is that the process, no matter how construed, can-
not escape from the need to account both for the ways its prac-
tice is instantiated and the historical moment in which that prac-
tice is located. 4 In regard to practice the claim is not that a design
practice results in actual designs. That would be a simple tautol-
ogy. The claim is that the process of design necessitates the tools
and implements that allow design to occur. The mechanisms of
design cannot serve as predictors. However, were it not for their
presence design could not occur at all. What occurs, what drives
the difering modes of that occurrence, are both the techniques
of its practice and the setting—both institutional and historical—
that maintain it.
The role of theory with design education, speciically architec-
tural theory within schools of architecture, has until quite recently
lourished. Over the last thirty years the works of philosophers, an-
thropologists, and literary critics amongst others were deployed in
order to animate the design process. In retrospect the lourishing
of theory accompanied one of the most pervasive changes in archi-
tectural education. With advent of what was once called the ‘paper-
less studio’ architectural education changed irrevocably. Prior to
pursuing the impact of the computer on architectural education
it is worth recognizing that changes in the educational practice of
4. The ideas within this paper are developed in a more detailed way in my
‘Repositioning Architectural Theory: Towards an Ontology of Techniques’,
Architectural Theory Review, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, pp. 173-180.
26
 Plus ça change, Plus ça change 27

any discipline do not occur in isolation. They are not untouched by

political and cultural changes occurring at the same time.
Architectural theory, at the time at which it lourished in the
1980s and 1990s, was part of a general trend within the humani-
ties in which the incorporation of French and German thought
transformed disciplines. That transformation was strenuously re-
sisted especially at the institutional level. Sometimes this resis-
tance was successful, as remains the case in philosophy, sometimes
it was not. Nonetheless, the self-conception of certain disciplines
in the humanities changed dramatically. The impact of what is
now called ‘post-structuralism’ redeined intellectual practice. At
the same time as there was an ascendency in theory—a theory
that was taken to be inherently progressive—there was a profound
disconnect with political developments. Post-structuralism lour-
ished in the period in which Thatcher was the Prime Minister of
the United Kingdom and Regan the President of the United States.
Their conservative heirs, from Bush to Blair and now in Australia
to Rudd, established a lineage of cultural and economic conserva-
tism. The endurance of conservatism remains a continual chal-
lenge. The impact of economic rationalism on the structure and
practice of the university is overwhelming. Universities as plac-
es of critical thought have been muted by continual restructur-
ing and the location of research money outside the university such
that a disproportionate amount of time has to be devoted to the
attempt to secure research funding. Time that would have been
more productively spent doing the research itself.
While it would always have been naïve to imagine that pro-
gressive thought could be instrumentalized such that theory on
its own could efect social change, nonetheless the move away
from theory, a move occurring with an emphatic ubiquity, often
in the name of practice, is to concede victory both to the forc-
es of conservatism and to the anti-intellectualism that underpins
it. Where the failure of imagination occurs is in the reluctance
to concede that there is a relationship to theory that need not be
thought within the framework of instrumentality. In the case of
the practice of design it is not simply that the move away from the-
ory is part of a more generalized process that could be described
as the naturalization of conservatism, a move in which conserva-
tism comes to be equated with the real, it is one that runs the risk
of remaining oblivious to the genuine transformations within ar-
chitectural design.
28 Writing Art and Architecture

2.
If there is a genuine point of connection between painting and
architecture then it can be located in the presence of techniques.
Techniques account not just for the presence of images; they are
implicated from the start in the way images are produced. If it is
possible to generalize, then what marks techniques today is that
the relationship that photography used to have to painting has
been replaced by the relation that the digital has to all the forms
of image production that preceded it. The history of the image as
a consequence demands to be rethought. To reformulate Walter
Benjamin’s argument, design today takes place in the era of digi-
tal reproducibility. Again, it would be too hasty to view the move to
the digital as an event that is isolated within the practice of design.
Such a development occurs as ‘globalization’, a term that has re-
placed both imperialism and internationalism, thereby acquiring,
if only initially, a form of neutrality, and is taken as all encompass-
ing. Globalization has also been naturalized such that the only
mode of resistance would appear to be forms of atavistic national-
ism that have an inherently discordant relation to any conception
of modernity. What is opened up thereby is the question concern-
ing what type of resistance might there be to the process of global-
ization. This is not a question that concerns where architecture is
built. Nor is it one that denies that architecture as a practice—as
well as architectural practices—work globally.
Globalization has a twofold efect on design. Either it levels de-
sign such that what appears is a proliferation of the same, or it re-
duces speciic buildings to aberrant dislocated events whose archi-
tectural interest has nothing to do with their actual location. They
appear as diamonds in a sea of mud. Countering both these ten-
dencies can only occur efectively with the reintroduction of the re-
gion as a domain of architectural thought and practice.
This ‘reintroduction’ has to be coterminous, however, with the
recognition and airmation of the era of digital reproducibility.
Their co-presence announces both the site and the project of ar-
chitectural theory. The way for the interconnection to be estab-
lished and thus worked through continually cannot be described
as though it only had one form. Digital reproducibility within de-
sign opens an importunately new domain of activity. Design now
has a relationship to the potentially within software programmes.
Design now has modelling abilities—abilities that encompass
everything from urban topology to the structural capacity and
 Plus ça change, Plus ça change 29

possibility of space frames—which it had not had hitherto. Theory

therefore is given another location. What makes this setting more
insistent is that it occurs within and as part of the change of what
counts as the design process. And yet, as with all such processes
there is the ineliminable risk of formalism. Within the realm of
digital reproducibility formalism will have taken on anther guise.
If there is a counter to formalism here it necessitates a return to the
regional. That return will incorporate the digital however it will al-
low architecture’s implicit urbanism an instructive presence.
What has changed, therefore, with the advent of digital repro-
ducibility is not the need for architectural theory. The contrary is
the case. The change is that architectural theory now has a new
object. The institutions neglect this new location of intellectual ac-
tivity at their peril. Neglect will simply allow for a proliferation of
formalisms and thus architecture will become a complacent dis-
cipline. While able to produce diamonds it will have neglected the
mud. While practice may be profered as a panacea, without the
recognition that such a move is simply a game in which profes-
sionalism (so-called) will have taken the place of research and as
such conservatism will have been rebranded as the real, architec-
ture will have lost its promise. That promise as Adorno once sug-
gested was to think better of people than they think of themselves.5

5. For a discussion of the strengths and limits of Adorno’s writings on architec-

ture see my ‘Allowing Function Complexity: Notes on Adorno’s “Functionalism
Today”’, AA Files, no. 41. 2001.
ON THE IMAGE OF DIFFERENT LINES

OPENING IMAGES

As part of any history of lines—a history in which a concern with

architecture and the coniguration of the urban, come to be pulled
through the interplay of geometry and philosophy that predomi-
nates in any discussion of the line—the question of appearance can
be added. What appears with the line is a question that pertains as
much to geometry as it does to the image. Here, however, it is es-
sential to be precise. The question of the architectural image needs
to allow for a divide. Though, as with all divisions, there will be im-
portant points of overlap, if not imbrication. (And yet, the divide
has a necessary insistence one on which it will be possible to insist.)
The divide is, on the one hand, between the image as that
which seeks to represent the building—represent it either in the
stages of planning or after its having been completed. These repre-
sentations are as much the photograph as they are the publication
of plans and sections. Both form part of the construction of the
image. Moreover, both have a complex continuity with the built ob-
ject. It will be important to return to the question of this complex
continuity. On the other hand however, the second element of the
divide is a radically diferent conception of the image. Here, the
image is not a representation and yet it is not pure simulacrum. In
the place of a simply negative description what has to be argued is
that image has become the diagram.6 What is essential to the dia-
gram is that it is an image, which, while not representational, car-
ries the capacity to generate representations. What will be explored
in these notes are the complex consequences and implications of
these two diferent conceptions of the architectural image.
6. For a sustained treatment of the diagram see my Architectural Philosophy,
Continuum Books, London, 2001.
30
 On the Image of Diferent lines 31

However, the divide, as has already been intimated, is not strict.

Movement across the divide however involves question of consti-
tution and reconstitution. In sense movement involves forms of
repetition. Images can be redeployed and repeated. Images have
a quality that allows them to be reworked. In the end, it is this ca-
pacity of the image to have an afterlife that reveals as much about
the ontological status of the architectural image as it does the dis-
tinction between representation and diagram. Both moments can
themselves be seen as part of a process of allowing for forms of in-
dividuation. It would be a mistake therefore to see the diference
in question, and the diferences enacted by the divide, as lending
themselves to a smooth connection, one that would eliminate, in
the name of appearance, the real diferences in question.

Image as Representation.
The dominant history of the image concerns its relation to an ex-
teriority. What is outside allows for the content of the image to be
judged and the quality of the image to be evaluated. The ground
of both possibilities is that the image is articulated within a re-
lation between interiority and exteriority. (The exterior oscillates
between a transcendental object—Plato, Goethe, etc.—and an
empirical designation—e.g. this landscape, that face etc.) The in-
teriority of the image is its own mode of construction, and the ex-
terior is that which either igures within the image or is involved
in any account of how the image is present and what it presents
(therefore what it re-presents). The movement does not only go in
one direction. There is an important reciprocity here. If the con-
tent of a computer screen is taken to be a 2D image that can be
realized three dimensionally, or if the image developed by an ani-
mation program is already, on the level of appearance, a volume—
and therefore can be understood volumetrically—since it involves
an ‘image’ created by the X, Y and Z axes both possibilities can
be articulated within a structure of representation. This articula-
tion is possible, as the movement in question has to be understood
as occurring between the interior and the exterior. Once this oc-
curs then the image in question is structured by representation.
Moreover, it is to be understood in terms of representation.
While the role of the photographic image is a fundamental
concern within any account of either the representation of archi-
tecture, or architecture’s self-representation, what is of central con-
cern is the role of the line. Pursuing the line will allow the problem
32 Writing Art and Architecture

of the image to be addressed from within a position in which the

question of the line’s status—the nature of its presence as a spe-
ciic type of image—is tied to the practice of design.
Operating at an elementary level, the line can be understood
as dividing space—it divides it by, in a sense, creating it. Once a
line is drawn there are relations of exteriority and interiority. If a
line can be extruded such that it becomes a plane then the act of
division is signiicant since what is realized is an extended sense of
division. What occurs now with the plane as the extrusion of a line
is that a certain potential within a line has been realized. However,
because the line is initially deined by a relation between points,
the extrusion of the line into the plane, precisely because it can run
until ininity, has to be limited by the utilisation of other co-ordi-
nates. Once given, the plane deines a particular space and con-
tains implicit spatial relations. Again, these are relations deined
by potential interiors and exteriors. Therefore, while abstract, what
is at work here is a division. Two terms dominate even this elemen-
tary description. The irst is potential and the second is abstract.
Both these terms indicate that even operating in two dimen-
sions there will always be the possibility to see in the singular a
conception of extension. The singular, thus construed, contains a
potential. (This indicates something about the nature of singular-
ity, though equally, it also indicates, why potentiality should not
be generalized as a descriptive term as though there not diferent
senses of potentiality.) That which has three dimensions can be
allowed the potential of a reduction to two dimensions. Moving
backward and forward between three dimensions and two dimen-
sions is to realize the way ‘potential’ operates within this concep-
tion of the line. The point at issue is that a two dimensional image
can generate a three-dimensional image—whether on the screen
or as a projection—and that a three-dimensional image either ex-
terior to the screen or within it can be given a two dimensional
expression. Both are possibilities that are inherent in the concep-
tion of the line at work within such arguments. The line difers
only on the level of quantity between these two possibilities. It
should not be thought that potential and abstraction are absent
from such a formulation. Rather, the argument is that both poten-
tial and abstraction operate within a clearly deined boundary. The
line would be deined by the points that initially created it.
Abstraction and potentiality, in this context, are interrelated.
What is abstract is that which is prior, priority is held in place
 On the Image of Diferent lines 33

by potential. Potential is realized by the abstract line becoming

more precise. The movement between dimensions or the move-
ment, more generally the oscillation, between the interior and the
exterior—a movement allowing for multidirectionality—indicates
in what way a representational conception of the line is articulated
within an already constructed discursive ield. The interruption of
the ield involves repeating the line beyond the hold of that ield.
This repetition ‘beyond’ may involve forms of sameness on the lev-
el of appearance, where this sameness is not repeated, and this de-
spite appearances, is in terms of how the line’s efective presence
is understood. Again, this is part of the argument against a gen-
eralized sense of potential. Once this other possibility is allowed,
and that the line can be attributed a productive quality that is not
thought in terms of either extrusion or extension, then while it
carries potential, that potential has to be understood in an impor-
tantly diferent way. Not only will the line be diferent and have
to be thought diferently—even taking appearance into consider-
ation—the presence of potential both in terms of its quality and
in how it is to be realized, would necessitate a diferent theoreti-
cal elaboration and as such would have a diferent set of iliations
within the history of philosophy.

THE OTHER IMAGE—THE PRODUCED LINE

Allowing production to become central brings another conception
of the line into play. (All lines are produced. The point at issue
here is the nature and thus the diference between diferent sens-
es of production and more signiicantly the way lines are taken to
be productive. This latter element involves, of necessity a consid-
eration of what they produce.) While there is an important addi-
tional story in terms of the history of line which moves the line
away from a geometry that works by oscillating between two and
three dimensions in a relatively unproblematic way, to one that
incorporates a repositioning of lines in terms of a spline based
geometry, and therefore in terms of complex surfaces, this is not
the point at issue here. At this stage what is of signiicance is the
presence of this conception of the line as an image. And thus the
use of complex lines to generate images which, while looking as
though they are connected to lines that have a readily identiiable
directionality, this is a connection that may only take place on the
level of appearance. They have to be approached therefore not in
terms of the way they appear. Produced lines—produced in the
34 Writing Art and Architecture

sense of being produced and being productive—complicate the

role of appearance.
The appearance of volume, for example, generated by pro-
grammes such as Rhino or Maya should not be read automatically
volumetrically,—and this has to be case despite the possibility of
such an approach. Were this to take place—i.e. the appearance of
volume read volumetrically—then the initial diagram would have
turned into a series of lines articulated with a structure of rep-
resentation and thus the initial presentation would have lost its
diagrammatic quality. What is at work in the formulation is the
necessity of a discontinuity between a diagram and forms of repre-
sentation. This discontinuity is of fundamental importance. In or-
der to understand some of the issue involved in the produced line, a
number of the implications of this discontinuity need to be noted.
The central issue is in what way working through this discontinu-
ity can open up a concern with the image.
There are several issues that need to be taken up. The irst is
that what establishes the diagrammatic quality of the diagram is
this discontinuity. If the lines were merely diferent instances giv-
en with a general structure of representation, then a smooth con-
nection could be established. The premise however for that rela-
tion is that the lines were from the start representational: volume
and form were then mere extensions. Once the discontinuity is
maintained then the important question that arises concerns the
possibility of moving from the diagram to that which sustains rep-
resentation. The question concerns the move from diagram to ar-
chitectural form. The strategic issue is that form generation con-
cerns that which will interrupt the discontinuity in order to release
the representational potential in the diagram.
Before pursuing this point there is a related point of funda-
mental importance that needs to be noted. It concerns the reverse
procedure. In this instance what were initially straightforward-
ly representational lines would be read diagrammatically. Once
read in this way—and this is the possibility alluded to earlier in
regards to constituting and reconstituting lines beyond shifts un-
derstood quantitatively by allowing repetitions to introduce real
diferences—then the question of how to move to representation
and therefore how to generate real architectural form becomes a
matter of negotiating the discontinuity that would have been (re-)
established by reworking the representation as a diagram. What
is central once again is the discontinuity. Indeed, what cannot be
 On the Image of Diferent lines 35

avoided is the need to maintain the discontinuity by having to work

through. One of the consequences of the inevitability of this move-
ment through the discontinuity is that form is the consequence of
the line’s potential and as such could never be the direct iteration
of the original diagram’s appearance. Once a set-up of this nature
can be maintained then what has to be worked with is the realiza-
tion that there is not a necessary formal implication inherent in a
given diagram. Hence the move from diagram to form cannot be
a simple extension, let alone a formal repetition.
If what is of fundamental importance in both instances—
the irst being the move from diagram to representation and the
second the reworking of an original representational model as a
diagram—is that a discontinuity is established, then the ques-
tion is always going to be the interruption of that discontinuity.
Interruption will be simultaneous with form generation. A way
of understanding the complexity of this situation is by beginning
with the position that the diagram can allow for at least two difer-
ent forms of research. The irst can be linked to the production of
programmatic diagrams and the second to diagrams investigating
volume. The same project therefore generates diferent sets of dia-
grammatic analyses. Each set brings with it the general problem
of the production of form. (Lines have to be productive.) Whether
one set of diagrams is used to interrupt another is not, in this in-
stance, the point. What is of real signiicance is the possibility of
diferent domains of diagrammatic research. The initial diagrams
identify the founding site of research. However, while founding it
generates another. The second occurs from the necessity of hav-
ing to work through the discontinuity. However, this will involve
an important shift in how research is undertaken. Fundamental
to what is meant by ‘working through’ is freeing the diagrammatic
from any necessary entailment in regard to form. What this means
is that the locus of the discontinuity becomes the site of architec-
tural experimentation.
Without the discontinuity and therefore working with the as-
sumption that the question of form—if only on the level of appear-
ance—had already been resolved, then all experimentation would
be is the conirming of what is already known. Once the disconti-
nuity is allowed to hold sway then rather than experimentation be-
ing constrained by prediction and formal expectation, it becomes
inextricably tied to invention. Precisely because inventions need
not be successful, and more signiicantly since there will be many
36 Writing Art and Architecture

ways of allowing for the release of a potential within an initial

diagram, what also emerges is that the discontinuity—its being
worked through—is the initial site of judgement.
What occurs therefore with the produced line understood as
the diagram, is a fundamentally diferent sense of the image.
While architecture as a design practice and as an object of histori-
cal and theoretical study works with, and through, images, what
has to be argued is that there are fundamentally diferent sens-
es of image at work in, and within, each instance. Allowing for
a discontinuity to deine the way of moving between the various
images of architecture, is to allow for the particularity of the dif-
ferent domains of practice. In every instance diference will in-
volve the centrality of techniques since the move from image to
image—diagram to representation, for example,—involves work-
ing through sites of discontinuity. The impossibility of a purely
formal or theoretical extension—impossible if the discontinuity is
to endure as the site engendering work—means that the diferent
ways through are bound up with the techniques that allow them to
be realized. Judgement therefore has to take the nature of the ex-
perimentation, its formal resolution and the techniques enabling
it to occur as its object.
Finally, what emerges from these working notes is that the ca-
pacity for images to be positioned and repositioned; for lines to al-
low for discontinuity; for a discontinuity to be the ground of form,
means that the history of lines has to allow for more than the in-
clusion of lines into discursive ields. Images and lines—the im-
age of lines—will have had a founding plurality that allows them
to be reworked and repositioned. The capacity for the line eventu-
ally to fold and yet for the fold to be held back from any immedi-
ate move to form, means that form and particularity are inite mo-
ments within a ield of a potential ininite. In sum, initude is both
the result of the interruption and of what interrupts. The question
will always be how, in any one instance, is initude to igure. What
will its appearance be?
VISUAL MEMORY
Whiteread and Eisenman

Haunting every public act of memory—be it the action of archi-

tecture or sculpture—is the threat of a forgetting occasioned by
the act having vanished. Vanishing, of course, need not be literal.
Once the memorial has been absorbed or assimilated, then what
is intended to have been recalled will remain on the edge of be-
ing forgotten. Mere physical presence cannot stem the possible in-
terplay of vanishing and forgetting. There is, however, a counter
move. It begins with the recognition that absorption is as much an
aesthetic concern as it is an urban one. Another aesthetic dimen-
sion needs to be brought into play. If the memorial is to be linked
to remembering then it must refuse decorum. Refusing by not al-
lowing the memorial’s surrounds to order either its position or its
appearance. The memorial therefore needs a strong sense of dis-
order. Disorder becomes an activity. The work—the act of mem-
ory—needs to dis-order. As though through acts of dis-ordering,
acts that are inherently creative and not simply destructive, dis-or-
der will have become a verb, whose imperative form—dis-order—
will aid in orchestrating the creation of public acts of memory.
Equally, it must guide the interpretation of such acts.
What is demanded therefore—demanded by the necessity to
resist the moment in which vanishing and forgetting coalesce in
the memorial’s inal assimilation—are strategies that allow a con-
tinual resistance to order. Opening up as a result, a creative ap-
proach that works within what could be described as logic of dis-
ordering. Such logic is neither an anti-aesthetic, nor equally does
it signal the end of a concern with design. If fact, in both instanc-
es, the opposite is the case. Dis-order is not nihilism, it is the rec-
ognition that public acts of memory bring with them difering
37
38 Writing Art and Architecture

conceptions of historical time, difering practices of design and

alternative conceptions of particularity. Public acts of memory
are only ever speciic. What is recalled—memorialized and there-
fore retained through a work of memory articulated within pub-
lic space by difering design strategies—will always have its own
unique history. While forming part of a general history, the pub-
lic memorial must address not just the particularity of a given
event, or a given set of circumstances; the nature of the particu-
lar—and therefore how that particular instance is understood and
interpreted—will have determining efect on the appearance of
the inal design. (As though there could be only one design prop-
er to each act of public memory.) It will not structure the design
in advance. Rather, it will construct the parameters within which
the design occurs. To the extent that disordering is maintained
particularity becomes the site of complex and unpredictable de-
sign practice. Memory opens up within design as the realization
of potentiality.
What then is a logic of disordering? Prior to answering this
question the alternative needs to be noted. It would involve main-
taining public order. Such a move would be unproblematic if pub-
lic order were not itself the site of contestation. In the Australian
context for example, reconciliation is a site—a public site—of po-
litical conlict. A contestation whose difering forms of resolution
will give rise to diferent design considerations. In other words,
the order of public space is an already determined one. An order
resulting from the way a certain political play of forces is conig-
ured at a given moment. Interrupting that order is to disorder.
Disordering however will only ever be efective if the design strat-
egy—strategy in the broadest sense of the term—has a holding ef-
fect within the public realm. To be beheld by a memorial is to re-
spond. In the place of simple distraction, intervention within, and
as part of, the public realms must have an afective quality. The
creation of afect holds out against the threat of forgetting.
Afect however is not mere sensation. Within the public realm
a memorial is efective to the extent that it is inextricably bound up
with particularity. Two instances will indicate how such a possibil-
ity may be realized. Both concern Holocaust memorials. That both
have a determined content is precisely what allows them to have
an exemplary force. Generality is without utility. Since the project
of the public memorial does not have only one form, addressing
speciic instances can be instructive.
 Visual Memory 39

Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

is situated in Berlin. It was oicially opened in May 2008. While
always contestable, the need for such memorials continues.
Eisenman’s memorial consists of a series of pillars emerging from
the ground. The area of more than 2 hectares is an undulating
surface from which the pillars arise. The site contains over 3500
pillars varying in size from .5m and 2.5m. The distance between
them is such than no matter how the body is positioned there is
always a sense of a refusal of place. The logic of disordering works
by providing a sense of location that dislocates. While the site will
contain educational material, the Memorial’s power—power as af-
fect—occurs through a sense of productive abstraction. The ab-
straction of the pillars is efective. The pillars recall gravestones
and yet they are not just gravestones. What they stand for is a
sense of loss and therefore they insist as forms of remembrance.
However, it is their abstract quality, in other words their refusal to
provide an image, which determines their power. How and what
they represent remains open. Part of that openness is a question-
ing of the very possibility of there being an appropriate image.
Once posed, the question of the appropriate image deines the me-
morial’s operative quality. That quality is not there as a meaning to
be attached to matter. It is a consequence of the way matter works
in and through scale. Over the site there are thousands of pillars.
Afect here is the result of materiality and scale.
While radically diferent, Rachel Whiteread’s memorial in
Judenplatz in Vienna, built almost ten years ago, uses scale to
achieve its efect. In appearance the cast presence of a book lined
room has moved from the interior to the exterior. Moving the in-
terior to the exterior gives the work an enigmatic quality. While
debatable, the centrality given to the book deines—in a number
of diferent senses—the obvious connection between Judaism
and the book. The power of the project does not lie in its content
as though afect had a direct relation to meaning. Afect in this
instance can only be accounted for properly by reference to scale
and materiality. In terms of both building material and colour the
memorial’s location in the square becomes the identiication of a
form of residence—the object is as much a house as it is a form
of box—detached from the buildings themselves and yet forming
part of the square. The nature of belonging is complicated by the
memorial’s ‘fact’ of belonging and yet its clear sense of not be-
longing. What allows this meditation on belonging to continue is
40 Writing Art and Architecture

the interplay of scale and matter. The size of this house made of
books, in relation to the rest of Judenplatz, is such that it works to
dis-order the order demanded by both the geometry, materiality
and scale of the square itself.
Visual memory is possible to the extent that matter retains an
insistence quality. Insistence is not spectacle. The spectacle can al-
ways occasion its own forgetting. Insistence necessitates that par-
ticularity is maintained within the pervasive hold of dis-order. The
presence of dis-order demands a critical defence that will always
assume that public opinion has the same quality as public order;
i.e. both are sites of conlict and disputation. Real visual memory
demands nothing less.
PERFORMING, EFFECTING SURFACES

Art in its highest exaltation hates exegesis; it there-

fore immediately shuns the emphasis on meaning.
Gottfried Semper

As lines knot intensities emerge that begin to take on the possi-

bility of form. These lines are as much the marks of movement
as they are the conveyors of information. To be precise, of course,
the lines neither mark nor convey—they are movement and infor-
mation. Understanding this shift—a shift in which a structure
of representation is displaced by another conception of the line—
forms an integral part of what is necessary to the work of Dagmar
Richter. Once lines are given the extension they need such that
they come to deine a ield of activity, then rather than a line which
can do no more than mark the distance between two points, they
acquire the quality of a surface.
Richter’s work forms a fundamental part of a speciic trajec-
tory within contemporary architectural practice. As opposed to
the production of computer generated surfaces that are then given
volumetric expression, there is the use of what will be described
as the surface efect—what Richter refers to as ‘performing sur-
faces’.7 As is made clear in the texts accompanying the project de-
scriptions, the lineage of this approach runs from at least Semper,
through Loos, up to the present. But, while having certain accura-
cy, such a formulation would misconstrue the history involved and
thus fail to grasp the signiicance of this work. Rather than the
passage of time leading to the current situation, something else is
at stake. With the development of computer software that allows
7. This text irst appeared as the introduction to a volume presenting Richter’s
recent work in which she develops the idea of the ‘performing surfaces.’ See
Dagmar Richer, Armed Surfaces, Black Dog Press, London, 2003.
41
42 Writing Art and Architecture

for the construction of surfaces that work to distribute elements

of architecture as much as programme and programmable space,
there is a diferent exigency. What these developments demand is
a recasting of the history, such that a history of the surface can be
written from the position of the present.
Semper’s insistence on a distinction between the wall as that
which brings about spatial enclosure and the wall as load bearing
redeines the wall’s presence. Once the wall’s presence is no lon-
ger reducible to the literal wall, it attains a freedom such that it is
possible to talk of ‘the wall efect’.8 And once this position is con-
nected to his writings on textiles and materials, what emerges is
an undertaking that links the project of architecture and its real-
ization to the work of materials.9 What is important, however, is
that those materials have the capacity to deine the particularity
of a given project by positioning the surface as distributing pro-
gramme. To the extent that the wall efect can be realized by the
work of the surface, it is also possible that the surface can distrib-
ute other foundational architectural elements. There is no a prio-
ri reason, for example, to think that furniture cannot be an efect
of the surface. Once the surface becomes productive, and this is
the potential that is there in Semper, though equally in Loos for
whom the intersection of the ‘Raumplan’ and cladding opens up
the work of the surface efect, another history of architecture be-
comes possible.10
Architects, of whom Richter is one, who begin with the sur-
face—the surface as productive and thus deined in terms of be-
coming—can move between an interest in the surface, the com-
puter generated surface as a diagram, and the way materials can
combine to create literal surfaces that efect. The surface involves
therefore two dimensions, the surface as diagram and the sur-
face as material enactment. They combine in particular ways in
given projects.
The presence of the surface as a diagram allows for speciic
modes of investigation. In DomestiCity the rigid distinction be-
tween public and private, where the presence of walls deines the
8. I have taken up this question in my ‘Notes on the Surfacing of Walls. Semper,
Kiesler, NOX’, In Machining Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004.
9. See my ‘Plans to Matter: Towards a History of Material Possibility’, in Katie
Lloyd-Thomas (ed.) Material Matters, Routledge.
10. I have addressed the question of a history of the surface—albeit a history
written from the position of the present in my—‘The Surface Efect: Borromini,
Semper, Loos’, Journal of Architecture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-36.
 Performing, Efecting Surfaces 43

limits of the possible, is overcome by acts of architectural exten-

sion. By distributing functions and thus reprogramming spaces as
at once private and public, the dispersed subject has a home. While
the house retains its particularity, the spread of personal activities
through apparently ‘public’ space and the inscription of the activi-
ties of the complex subjectivity of modernity into the house is en-
acted through the drawing of lines of dispersal through and across
urban ields. At this level there is generality and yet it is precisely
because there is an abstract form of the general that there can be
particularization. If this is prototyping then it has taken a unique
form. Rather than the model of the trainer or the automobile, here
there is actual singularity. Prototyping has to break with a concep-
tion of production that is delimited by the reiteration, no matter
how intricate, of Sameness. The real strength of this project lies,
in part, in Richter’s insistence on the co-presence of the ‘unique’—
it is after all my house—and the recognition that permanence has
become impermanence. The latter need not be literal. There is no
need for what she calls the ‘nomadic generation’ to be without any
sense of place. Rather the relationship between the domestic and
the urban—beautifully captured in the term DomestiCity—is re-
deined by performing surfaces that weave together what were ini-
tially understood as mutually exclusive terms. These weaves create
diagrams. The move to form—the diagram’s architectural resolu-
tion—is not to construe the diagram volumetrically. Performing
surfaces are as much an analysis as suggestive of a resolution that
will necessitate realizing abstraction’s inherent potential.
The Waterford Crystal project once again deploys the interplay
of surface and diagram. In this instance instead of starting with a
surface that carried information in any straightforward sense, the
material surface of crystals became the point of departure. There
are two elements of this approach that need to be noted, both at-
test to the power of Richter’s work. The irst concerns what will be
described as the necessity for interruption and the second, archi-
tectural experimentation. Experimentation, as will be suggested,
deploys the relationship between the abstract and the particular.
However, it should be noted that it is not the relationship between
the universal and the particular, since such a mode of thinking is
antithetical to the work of diagrams and surfaces that characterise
Richter’s recent projects.
One of the problems inherent in constructing surfaces through
the use of animation software is deining the point at which the
44 Writing Art and Architecture

animation should be brought to an end. The risk of formalism lies

in the absence of a constraint that is external to the logic of the ani-
mation itself. While one way of interrupting such a procedure can
occur by the use of a programmatic diagram that intersects the vol-
umetric one, Richter intersects the immateriality of the computer
generated surface via an engagement with physical surfaces and
their inherent constraints. Hair and crystals provided sites of inves-
tigation in order to identify properties that would allow for points of
intersection between the material and the immaterial to be noted.
While the use of crystals bears an important connection to the his-
tory of Waterford, the property of the crystals themselves was just
as indispensable in allowing for the creation of productive surfaces.
Once constraints can be established, then instead of this re-
sulting in inished products, it needs to be understood as creating
sites in which both models and ideas can be tested. The re-pre-
sentation of Waterford as a complex object of mirrored surfac-
es results from the interplay of the immaterial and the material.
Instead of there having been the rush to inality—as though ei-
ther a simple analysis or an elementary animation are generative
of built form—Waterford re-emerged as a diagram that was able to
incorporate architectural interventions. The surface did not func-
tion as an image guiding the project. Richter deployed diferent
senses of the surface to recreate, for architecture, Waterford as a
diagram. This level of abstraction was the condition allowing for
a speciic intervention. Once again, the prototype attains particu-
larity and thus can address the concerns of a given town or region
only on the precondition of abstraction.
A similar strategy can also be found in the Dom-in(f)o House.
Prior to noting—albeit briely—the particularity of that research
project, it is essential to reiterate the signiicance of this under-
taking. As has already been intimated, contemporary research in
architecture can be driven by form creation to the point where it
circles back upon itself to meet work occurring under the rubric
of ‘form follows function’. In both instances the dominance of
form creation make programmatic concerns devoid of speciicity.
At no point could these concerns be allowed to have any impact
on form creation.
Richter’s move is from Le Corbusier’s Domino House, which
she views as restricting architectural intervention to no more than
the cladding or aestheticizing of an ‘engineered architecture’, to
the Dom-in(f)o House in which the surface is present as structure.
 Performing, Efecting Surfaces 45

While this is a move that is occasioned by initially rendering

the skeleton through the application of animation software, the
smooth relations that are then constructed cannot be viewed as
ends in themselves. Indeed, the contrary is the case. The transfor-
mation means that the House is now a site in which diferent mo-
dalities of habitation—polis dwelling—can be tested. While the
tests are formal in nature, each formal transformation is intended
to open up for evaluation other possibilities for housing and living.
Here, Richter emerges as an architect of the political, rather than
as a merely political architect.
Part of what is demonstrated here is the limitation of the ap-
parent freedom of the Domino frame. Only the transformations
resulting from the smoothing of the elements allows it to be ‘bom-
barded with contemporary performance criteria’. As such, new do-
mestic and social conditions can be investigated from within the
activity of design itself.
Dagmar Richter’s work opens up a way beyond the formalism
in which the appearance of the architecture of animation software
is simply the realization of the diagram and thus is the efacing of
the diagrammatic. Equally, it allows for programme to be central
to production. It is not surprising that she always connects—per-
haps inter-articulates—experimentations with surfaces and po-
litical, cultural and theoretical concerns. Surfaces perform, when
they allow. Surfaces efect, when they realize. Allowing and real-
izing are modes of freedom that have to be marked by actuality.
They are not the idealized freedoms that the oscillation between
utopianism and formalism enacts. Rather, they involve the cre-
ation of openings that create diferent possibilities by giving them
a place. How they are then lived with, is the question that makes
the future, even if unpredictable, a concern of the present.
A SECULAR TEMENOS
Notes on the addition to the Shrine of Remembrance

With ARM’s addition to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne

and Rush/Wright’s Masterplan for the Shrine Reserve—an 11 ha
site incorporating the actual Shrine—two architectural concerns
can be said to predominate. The irst involves the insertion of pro-
gram into a pre-existing building, one that already has both icon-
ic and programmatic importance within Melbourne. The second
is allowing for a diferentiation of the Shrine Reserve within the
Domain Parklands. The deining factor of this second concern is
that the diferentiation must occur as an efect of the landscape
rather than the insertion of simple boundaries. These concerns
overlap at a number of important points. Detailing these concerns
becomes the articulation, and evaluation, of architectural resolu-
tions to what could always be described as problems having great-
er generality.
What characterizes War Memorials in general in both Australia
and New Zealand is that they commemorate service in the Forces
rather than simply honouring those who died. Memorials, in this
context therefore, have a diferent sense of occasion. While func-
tioning as important locations of memorialization, they are also
imbued with the need to house a more complex program. The ne-
cessity to allow both for the memory of the dead and the continu-
ity of recognition for those who served, and who continue to serve,
creates therefore a diferent project. Moreover, the highly contest-
ed nature of war, the impossibility of simple gloriication and yet
the necessity for forms acknowledgment, introduces another set
of constraints.
This is the context in which it is essential to locate ARM’s
Shrine of Remembrance project. Responding to the need to create
46
 A Secular Temenos 47

sites for administration, display and educational activity, the prob-

lems were always going to be the visual quality of the addition and
the efect on the already present structure. The intrusion of most
of the program beneath the existing structure has a number of
important consequences. The irst is that the visual registration
of the addition is given by the geometry of the exterior walls that
lank either side of the front. Their symmetry comes not from the
plan but their relation to the geometry of the original shrine. The
use of entasis in the original Hudson & Wardrop building—com-
pleted in 1933 as the result of a public subscription—means that
the symmetry of the original is created by angles of projection as
much as a simple relation between the horizontal and the vertical.
The layering of the elements comprising the new exterior wall—
producing a faceted wall—has to be understood as a contempo-
rary architectural response to the original form. The question is,
of course, what makes it contemporary? Part of the answer is to be
found in the way that contemporary design processes and materi-
als do not mime the original but to pick up both its organizing ge-
ometry and then to reiterate the work of a geometry that has both
an immediate efect and a projected one. The question of symme-
try therefore is especially interesting in this context. Looking at
the overall plan, the Entry Courtyard and the Garden Court are
symmetrical in terms of location. The symmetry of the elevation
however is given by the geometry of the initial building. What this
means is that there is no need to deine the symmetry of these el-
ements internally—e.g. by the use of circular walls. The conse-
quence of this rethinking of their position is that both the Entry
Courtyard and the Garden Court can take on an individual quality
while the overall order of the addition and its relation to the exist-
ing building is maintained.
The addition will mean that entry to the shine will take place
through the added courtyard. Entry will occur through a display
area in which all the medals marking military activity will be
mounted on a wall running almost the entire length of the ad-
dition. Set into the ground beneath the wall is a display of pop-
pies. (Cunningham Martyn Design created this aspect of the inte-
rior design.) While for the most part relatively straightforward in
terms of its operation, there are two programmatic elements of the
addition that demand further consideration; in the irst place the
courtyard and the garden, and in the second the way the addition
has opened up the Shrine by establishing a new connection to the
48 Writing Art and Architecture

Crypt. What is signiicant about the connection is that it opens up

the Shrine in a way that the original plan did not envisage but yet
does not preclude. Movement from the arcade to the Crypt takes
place through an area in which the original columns are revealed.
The height of the roof taken in conjunction with the columns cre-
ates a sanctuary; one imbued with a certain sanctity coming as
much from its positioning in relation to the Crypt as the way the
light of the Crypt illuminates it. The addition releases this poten-
tial. The newly created volume is programmed by its location be-
tween the addition and the Crypt. Here is an instance where it
could be said that it is the architecture that does the work.
The Entry Courtyard, not only provides a new visual relation-
ship with the Shrine, a state of afairs that is repeated in its own
way in the Garden Court, the faceted walls deals with the question
of monumentality in original ways. While the wall’s organization-
al geometry works to disclose a space that is more than a simple
forecourt, other elements are of real signiicance. Their project-
ed colour, perhaps recalling the colour of the original edition of
Bean’s History of The First World War, raises interesting questions.
Not only does it allow for the problem of colour in architecture to
be posed, the question of the colour appropriate to the process of
memorialization is raised and, in part, resolved. The reason why
it is possible to suggest that there is a partial resolution has to do
with the inherently secular nature of the site. What is signiicant
about the Shrine is that rather than being religious in character
is has to do with the relations between community and memo-
ry. Colour is deployed in order to give this relation—a relation es-
chewing the directly religious—a more contemporary presenta-
tion. ARM’s use of colour, as with the use of hand writing almost
as a contemporary plaque—the words ‘lest we forget’ are written
across the walls—can be understood as their attempt to give ar-
chitectural resolutions to these speciic issues of memorialization.
The speciic colour in not having a determined point of reference
creates a site whose meaning is not given in advance. ARM’s re-
fusal of the symbol marks an important departure.
The Garden Court has allowed the landscape architects Rush/
Wright a place to work within ARM’s overall project. The Garden
takes up the theme of the creation of a setting that involves rev-
erence and a sense of sobriety while articulating both within an
architectural language that is inherently secular in nature. The
garden is designed to pick up the organizational lead given by the
 A Secular Temenos 49

walls. The introduction of a circulation path, yielding places of re-

pose, establishes a place of relection. The presence of an olive tree
in the middle works to recall the interplay of war and peace while
resisting any immediate form of gloriication. The sobriety is rein-
forced by the view of the Shrine aforded by the garden. The visual
efect heightens the function of the garden as a site of relection.
The addition to the Shrine occurs in the context of a new
Masterplan by Rush/Wright for the Shrine Reserve. The plan
envisages the creation of an area for the Shrine that will have a
distinct location in the overall reserve. Boundaries will be estab-
lished by a reworking of the contours, a tree removal and plant-
ing plan and the construction of a new grassland policy. If there
is a guiding motif for the plan it has to do with the problem of
continuity and renewal as raised by this site. Of the many ele-
ments that could be taken from Hudson & Wardrop’s commit-
ment to a form of Classicism is the possibility of reusing the re-
lationship between Temple and site that had such an important
efect on Greek architecture. As archaeological evidence bears out
the Temple can never be divorced from the site. What exists is a
temenos. (This is the term that Rush/Wright also use in the doc-
umentation.) If this is the point of departure, then the question
is how is this relationship between temple and site to be under-
stood now? What is a modern temenos? While part of the answer
to that question involves shifts in the landscape, it is only be rec-
ognizing that the landscaping is an architectural response to the
creation of a site that while having aspects of the sacred is not
counter posed to the profane. Such opposition is simply unaccept-
able to any modern sensibility. And yet, if the modern cannot al-
low for any sense of sanctuary, then the possibility of a real site
of memory—architectural acts of memorialization—would have
become impossible. The resolution here in terms of landscaping
is to address the question of the diferentiation of the Shrine re-
serve and the internal operation of that reserve in terms of access
and movement. In general the relationship between contours and
movement will work to identify the site. What will deine the area
as a modern temenos is that the movement into the site will in-
volve crossing a threshold—one created as an efect of the land-
scaping and hence one that has to be understood as architectural.
As a result there will be a shift in the quality of public space. The
modern temenos depends both on the public nature of architec-
ture—and thus the public as both modern and secular—and yet
50 Writing Art and Architecture

for a complex sense of the public and thus public space to emerge
as a consequence.
There is therefore a real ainity between the two projects. It is
not just that they are intended to work together, they can both be
understood as architectural responses to the question of how today
does it become possible to deal with the reality of war and service
without falling into the trap created by ‘God and Country’.
RESISTING THE DESIGN OF EMPIRE
Notes on Bruce Mau’s Massive Change

Design brings with it a series of pretensions. While within design

there may be an implicit politics, perhaps the greatest pretension
that design can have is the suggestion that it can supplant the po-
litical. And yet, it is not diicult to understand how such an even-
tuality might emerge, even if only as a possibility within thought.
One of the frustrating though nonetheless insistent aspects of
contemporary political life is not just the inability to see an oppo-
sitional politics articulated within the divisions constructing the
political, in the Australian context between the Labor and Liberal
parties, but the absence of a clearly identiied locus for the expres-
sion of any oppositional position at all. There are a number of im-
portant consequences of such a description of the political. One
is to continue to work through the operation of a counter culture.
Activities that are parasitic upon both pre-existing institutions and
infrastructures but which resist—or attempt to resist—complete
incorporation. Maintaining counter sites of cultural, intellectual
and political activity does not involve the naivety of utopianism.
It demands strategies of insertion and activity, which, by resist-
ing the immediate demands of instrumentality, can be more ad-
equately described as resulting in a politics of the event. Politics
in which the event has an inherent plurality. As a result of this
plurality such a positioning works within both partiality and in-
completeness. What is at stake is the development of a politics of
productive resistance. A politics that assumes the necessity of the
event’s plurality.
Another response, antithetical to the one outlined above and
in which it is possible to locate the work of Bruce Mau, involves
the acceptance of the formulations and determination of existing
51
52 Writing Art and Architecture

orders. Within it political agency cannot be deined in terms of

a locus of activity delimited by the event. Rather it occurs by a
muting of the political as a result of the political having been ab-
sorbed within the practice of design. The political as a site of con-
lict would have been efaced within the project possibility of end-
less forms of relationality. The relations in question would only
ever be conjunctive. Having to negotiate the inevitability of dis-
junction is precisely the possibility against which design would
have been marshalled.
These opening relections, ones which will always need to be
spelled out in much greater detail, provide the locus for anoth-
er assessment of the project of Bruce Mau’s recent book Massive
Change and the body from which it arose The Institute Without
Boundaries.11
Within the book and superimposed on a photo of the contain-
er port at Hong Kong—a photograph it should be added that de-
mands both in terms of its aesthetic quality and the conception
of density it displays a diferent analysis—are the words ‘We will
seamlessly integrate all supply and demand around the world’.
Slogans of this nature are interposed with analysis and interviews
with members of the Institute. What characterizes them is what
could be described as generalized strategies of smoothing. What is
wanted is not just a more eicient version of what is; rather, it is to
design the avoidance of the catastrophic. (This will occur because
‘We will build a global mind’.) Eiciency would necessitate ironing
out the wrinkles and with their elimination the creation of lows
and the seamless. Attributing centrality to movement would no
longer necessitate local agreement. Agreement would have been
generalized. This can only be achieved—or at least this is the con-
tention of the Institute—through the practice of design. It is as
though the political understood as involving conlicts and the dis-
equilibrium of power will have been efaced in the name of de-
sign. However, the question that needs to be asked must concern
the implicit politics of such a strategy.
Flows of capital necessitate the absence of boundaries. And
yet, such a desire is complicated, for example, by the refusal by
certain nation states to accept agreements regulating the world en-
vironment. That refusal is, of course, the reimposition of bound-
aries. Both Australia’s and America’s initial refusal of the Kyoto
Accord is a clear instance of this reimposition. The case for the
11. Bruce Mau, Massive Change, Phaidon, London, 2004.
 Resisting the Design of Empire 53

rejection of this speciic agreement is that it will interfere with the

more general one concerning the low of capital. Any subsequent
adoption would always have to involve giving priority to the com-
plex lows of capital rather than to any measure stemming them.
However, it is not as though there is simply the movement of mon-
ey and resources that mark the operation of the world economy.
There is an inherent operation of power within it. Resisting he op-
erative presence of power—power in its inevitable multiplicity—
cannot just be done in the name of the boundless, even if it is giv-
en within an idealized conception of boundless universality. The
proposition that design, working on the level of a general economy,
can overcome the aporias of contemporary political and economic
life is not lawed because it is naive. It may be. The law lies in the
failure to understand the way in which the strategies of smooth-
ing are already integrated into the operation of the world economy.
An economy structured by a hierarchy of concerns. As such Mau’s
project and the philosophical thought underpinning it give rise to
design’s adoption and incorporation of the logic of capital
If countering its operation is a priority, then not only will this
necessitate rethinking the nature of resistance, it will also involve
giving related consideration to terms such as place, region and the
cosmopolitan. Rather than a politics of total design, what becomes
essential is the articulation of design within a regionalized politi-
cization of geography. A strategy whose operative dimension will
eschew the national and the vernacular in the name of diversi-
ty and density within the local. The latter gives a priority to re-
sistance. Such a prioritization is compatible with a politics of the
plural event. Precisely because change—massive or not—will not
be instituted other than within boundaries, the practice of de-
sign and politics is to reimagine the productive intersection of the
boundless and the boundary. Perhaps this will necessitate intro-
ducing catastrophic wrinkles rather than smoothing them out in
the name of a version of eiciency. After all, for whom is the seam-
less a necessity?
01. Terroir, Prague Library competition entry, exterior, 2007.

02. Terroir, Prague Library competition entry, interior, 2007.

03. Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2004.

04. Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2004.

05. Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, 2000.

06. Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, 2000.

07. Dagmar Richter, The Domesti-City Project (Rendering of interior).

08. Dagmar Richter, The Domesti-City Project (Rendering of non-building exterior from street).
09. Dagmar Richter, The Domi-in(f )o House (model), 2002-04.

10. Dagmar Richter, The Domi-in(f )o House (model), 2002-04.

11. Dagmar Richter, Proposal for the extension of the Stockholm Library competition entry, 2007.

12. Dagmar Richter, The Domi-in(f )o House: The skyscraper with a ‘living’ façade for bird, 2002-04.
EXHIBITING ARCHITECTURE
ARCHITECTURE AS PRACTICE
Exhibiting Herzog and de Meuron

Herzog and De Meuron’s exhibition at the Tate Modern—Herzog

& de Meuron: An Exhibition 1 June – 29 August 2005—presents
twenty-ive years of work. The exhibition resists the presentation
of heroic photos and perfect models. What is exhibited could be
described as the practice of architecture, perhaps more accurately
as the exhibition of architecture as a practice. Representation and
practice work together.
Jacques Herzog has already responded to the problem posed
by architectural representations.
A building is a building. It cannot be read like a book; it does
not have any credits, subtitles or labels like pictures in a gal-
lery. In that sense we are absolutely anti-representational. The
strength of our buildings is the immediate visceral impact
they have on a visitor.
Expressed in this way Herzog and de Meuron become, on one lev-
el, the architects of afect. Once such a positioning is allowed then
a speciic question emerges; what is it that can be displayed or ex-
hibited in order that afect—Herzog’s ‘visceral impact’—become
the subject of the exhibition? Answering this question necessitates
a more general relection of the image of architecture. After all,
what is at stake here is the relationship between architecture and
its presentation within and as images.
As images of architecture continue to proliferate, the question
of what constitutes the image of architecture prevails. On one lev-
el this is a theoretical question generated by the problem of rep-
resentation. On the other, it is pragmatic and practical. In regards
to the latter both magazines and museums engage continually
with the presence—thus status—of architecture’s image. That
65
66 Writing Art and Architecture

engagement in the case of the museum has to resolve itself in a

display. Architecture has to be present. While the need is obvious,
the question of architecture’s image still prevails. Moreover, any
answer, while it may appear pragmatic is inescapably bound up
with theoretical concerns. The image is, after all, the presentation
of architecture; present therefore as architecture’s representation.
There is a point at which the theoretical and the pragmat-
ic coincide. The coincidence occurs because the image is always
more than mere presence. Any image, be it a photograph, a plan, a
model etc., brings with it its own conception of the architectural.
Moreover, it is the conception of architecture implicit in the repre-
sentation that allows for a critical engagement with a given image.
Indeed, what structures an exhibition is the coincidence between
the theoretical and the pragmatic since exhibitions are not just of
images but are also of a given understanding of the architectural.
The reciprocity here needs to be noted since that understanding is
given within and sustained by the image.
At the same time as it is possible to locate the way this move-
ment operates in the formulation of the architectural exhibition, it
is also at work in the difering possibilities within the presentation
of architecture’s history. For example, to the extent that the histo-
ry of architecture is understood as the history of the plan then the
exhibition of plans is taken to be the presentation of that which is
essential to architecture. The same argument will work by exten-
sion in terms of an exhibition of materials. The latter is deined by
a conception of architecture as deined by the possibilities inher-
ent in materials. Other possibilities exist. In every instance archi-
tecture is not a neutral entity that allows itself diferent forms of
presentation. What changes is the conception of the architectural.
Any argument against an idealization of architecture—and thus
architectural idealism—begins with the recognition not just of a
conluence between architecture and image, but that difering im-
ages bring diferent conceptions of the architectural into play.
When Herzog argues that their architecture is concerned with
‘visceral impact’, what then has to be addressed is what would be
involved in an exhibition of architecture as the locus of afect? The
immediate answer is that what is deined by such a question is an
impossible state of afairs. This is why Herzog deines their work
as ‘anti-representational’. Precisely because it does not ‘represent’
then there cannot be a subsequent image of it that would repre-
sent it. In other words, what cannot be displayed is that afective
 Architecture as Practice 67

quality. It can only be there within the experience of the archi-

tecture. This is the problem with which the exhibition at the Tate
Modern is constrained to engage. What then of the engagement?
From the now complete Prada Shop and Oices in Tokyo to
the earlier and rightly celebrated Ricola-Europe Production and
Storage Building in Mulhouse-Brunstatt (France) as well as the
Library at the Technical University in Eberswalde (Germany), in-
cluding London based projects such at the Tate Modern itself, it
is diicult to ind a project that is not included. How projects are
included is the point at issue. Rather than giving priority to any
one image—images having a formal presence in relation to mod-
els—there is a diverse range of presentation. (As will emerge it
is this diversity that becomes the central point.) For any one proj-
ect there are early models, perhaps even failed models, (or if not
failed then certainly abandoned) models of details, models that are
experimentation with materials and structural systems drawings
and photos are also present. In addition, there are material mod-
els ranging in scale and including a 1:1 model. Each project is pre-
sented through such a range of diferent materials and forms—in
all there are over 1000 objects—that it is impossible to privilege
any one instance.
What emerges as architecture—understood as the locus of ar-
chitectural experience—arises as a result of the divergent and dif-
ferent practices for which these objects stand. However, it must
be emphasized that the architecture is the result. And precisely
because it is for Herzog and de Meuron a result there cannot be,
experientially, any encounter with it within what is displayed. On
display therefore are the diverse sets of practices that will always
have a discontinuous relation to a form of inality. If there is any-
thing about the exhibition that may not be completely satisfying it
is because the objects have not been aestheticized nor are they il-
lustrative of a continuous process. They are all part of a practice
that has its own end game. That end however is not the completing
image but the site of afect.
DISPLAYING ARCHITECTURE
Eisenman’s Exhibition

Architecture’s relation to the museum runs along at least two dif-

ferent axes. In the irst instance the relation is deined by acts of
construction. Architects design and build museums. The other
axis concerns display. Here it is not a question of the design of a
given display in any straightforward sense. What is at issue is the
display of architecture itself. Hence there will be diferent ques-
tions: how can the museum display architecture? What is an ar-
chitectural exhibition? On one level the questions are straightfor-
ward. The museum for the most part will displays aspects of a
given work’s construction. Drawings and models are assumed to
present architecture. However, they only present it because they
are taken to be architecture’s representation. The drawing and the
model deployed in this way, and with this intent, work with a con-
ception of architecture that has two deining characteristics. The
irst is that they aim to represent part of the process or envisaged
outcome. The outcome and the process are determined by a con-
ception of architecture that is structured by the image. The second
is that to the extent that representation and the image are dom-
inant then the architectural efect becomes the relationship be-
tween representation and meaning.
The architectural efect is the registration of architecture’s
presence. In other words, it is the way that presence is registered.
The insistence on representation and meaning will structure dis-
play in one direction. Architecture’s materiality will always be a
secondary consideration in relation to representations and mean-
ings. Can a model present materials? Photographs, no matter how
they are presented are images of matter rather than the work of
matter. And yet, the matter of architecture can never be excluded.
68
 Displaying Architecture 69

Allowing for matter opens up another way in which there can be

the exhibition of architecture. There are, therefore, diferent ques-
tions. How is matter’s presence to be exhibited if the centrality
of the image—the reduction of matter to its image—is to be dis-
tanced and matter reinscribed both as the production of the ar-
chitectural efect and therefore as the subject to be displayed?
How is the exhibition of matter as the display of architecture to
be understood?
Matter is, of course, never just present; matter becomes the
locus through which techniques come to be articulated. If a start
is made with architecture’s material presence then there will be a
diferent sense of the architectural efect and therefore a diferent
sense of display. Rather than subordinating matter to its image,
and in lieu of a disdaining of matter in the name of meaning, mat-
ter, thus material presence, could be taken as the object of display
and therefore as the basis of an architectural exhibition. Meaning
would be repositioned. It would be the after-efect of the work of
matter. There would have been a fundamental shift in the locus of
the architectural efect. Meaning would be based on architecture’s
materiality. However, this should not be seen as arguing for the re-
duction of architecture to tectonics. The championing of tectonics
as an end in itself involves a diferent form of naïveté. Matter is not
just material presence. Matter is the site of techniques. Techniques
force matter. They give matter its dynamic quality. Furthermore to
the extent that techniques involve a relationship between software
and the computer then techniques need to be understood as the
complex relation between architecture’s material presence and the
immaterial, though operative quality, of software.
The image and meaning cannot be occluded, however, they
need not provide the basis of the architectural efect. Allowing for
matter and technique to have primacy orientates that efect in a
diferent direction The display of architecture within the context
of a museum dramatizes architecture’s complex relation not just
to representation—understood as drawing techniques—but also
to the way in which architecture comes to be represented as archi-
tecture; i.e. the presentation of architectural images. The question
that has to be asked therefore concerns the conception of architec-
ture that is present within a given display. The exhibition of the
work of Peter Eisenman in the MAK in Vienna gives this question
an exacting exigency.12 Not only is Eisenman’s work on display, the
12. The exhibition Barfuss auf weiß glühenden Mauern (Barefoot on White-Hot
70 Writing Art and Architecture

question of what counts as that work plays a structuring role in the

exhibition. As a consequence, the exhibition is also a detailed in-
vestigation of the exhibition of architecture itself.
In general terms architecture’s relation to representation ig-
ures in a number of diferent ways. Two of the most predominant
concern the image and the model. Images are usually illustra-
tive. Whether it be a book, journal or magazine the image is in-
tended to illustrate. At one extreme it illustrates an argument and
therefore grounds it. At the other it is simply illustrates. In such
a context illustration is no more than the photograph of a build-
ing. While architecture cannot escape a direct engagement with
the way it is represented, the question of the extent to which the
image of architecture has to be no more than an illustration is an
important one. Is it possible to move from an illustrative image
to a generative one? The same question will pertain to the model.
Models are conventionally used to represent the architectural proj-
ect. This particular conception of representation however is not to
be understood in terms of material possibility. Nor moreover does
the project’s presentation enact the relationship between geome-
try and materiality. The model stands for the building. It becomes
its image. While working to scale it does no more than illustrate
the project. The presence of this limitation means that this restric-
tion—a reduction of the model to illustration—can be questioned.
With that questioning another possibility will emerge. In sum,
could the model be other than illustrative? Inherent in this ques-
tion is the possibility that the representation—here the model—
could be productive rather than a passive illustration.
These questions acknowledge the inter-articulation of archi-
tecture and representation. They do so, however, in a way that al-
lows for an opening, one where the status of the representation can
be interrogated. While that interrogation could take a discursive
form, within the context of the MAK it is present as an architec-
tural exhibition. In terms of the structure of the display, Eisenman
has introduced a ‘grid’ into the Exhibition Hall at the MAK.
A series of white boxes (or cubes) mark the presence of the
‘grid’. The boxes gesture as much to the column as they do to the
tradition of the museum as ‘white cube’. In regards to the former
what is recalled is the structural relationship between column and
grid. Metonymically, architecture is staged. In regard to the latter,
as the columns are only 2.65 metres in diameter the assumptions
Walls) was on show at the MAK in Vienna December 15 2004 until May 2005.
 Displaying Architecture 71

inherent in the equation of museum with the white cube are pro-
ductively explored. The exploration is architectural. Scale ruins
the pretensions of the white cube. In so doing, what is demonstrat-
ed is the way in which the white cube sanctioned a display of art
that had a determining efect not just on what counted as art but
on the way such an identiication was inextricably bound up with
the question of display. There is an implicit levelling efect that the
equation of white cube and museum enacts. The simple destruc-
tion of that equation would have amounted to no more than the
nihilism of its refusal. The work of scale, if only as a beginning,
signals the presence of a diferent quality. Destruction and a type
of dis-ordering work together with and as strategies of creation.13
That quality is however neither merely discursive (accompanying
the exhibition as an argument that would be irrelevant to the ex-
hibition’s material presence.) Nor is it decorative. It is present as a
simple addition. What could be understood as the deconstruction
of the assumptions at work in the equation of white cube and mu-
seum—a deconstruction staged initially by scale—is the operative
quality within these column boxes.
What then of the display? Any answer to this question has
to begin with the recognition that the exhibition has as its inten-
tion an overview of Eisenman’s work from the early House proj-
ects to the most recent competition entries and works under con-
structions. In total, almost 35 years of projects are displayed. The
question returns: what is displayed? While an example won’t re-
ally suice, it will work to stage the exhibition’s concerns. One of
the works that remains pivotal within Eisenman’s overall develop-
ment is the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus Ohio.
The usual documentation of this building consists of photographs
of the rebuilt tower present on the south façade. And yet, funda-
mental to the overall conception and execution of the building
was the way two diferent grid systems began to redeine the site.
Integral to that redeinition is the way the relationship between
the grid systems works to locate both circulation and volume. If
there was an element of the building that enacted this redeini-
tion it was the scafolding that is projected across and through
the building. While a photograph of the now extant building will
present the scafolding’s image—a presentation held by the con-
straints of illustration—the registration of that which endures as
13. See the discussion of ‘dis-ordering’ in ‘Visual Memory: Whiteread and
Eisenman’.
72 Writing Art and Architecture

essential to the project’s generation is only ever present as an ele-

ment in a photograph. The problematic element within the display
of the Wexner Center is twofold. On the hand there has to be a
form of presentation that resists the assimilating efect—and thus
the banalizing inevitability—of the photograph, while at the same
time moving what is to be displayed from a logic of illustration to
one in which abstraction predominates. Such a move allows for
the introduction both of that which had a generative efect, though
in a way that would allow it to retain that possibility for a future
project. In other words, the move is from a presentation bound by
illustration to one structured by what could be described as the
logic of the diagram. While the choice may appear stark—and as
with all seemingly stark opposition it admits of points of overlap—
what is at work here is a distinction between the passivity of an il-
lustration—one which remains passive precisely because it is at
the same time precise and yet empty—and the dynamic quality
of the diagram. The latter, in resisting the logic of representation
stages the building in a complex way. The complexity is at work in
the image’s abstraction. Abstraction in such a context is deined as
what carries potential. Consequently, it is what allows for the gen-
eration of future representations.
The display of the Wexner Center, almost inevitably, is an el-
ement of the scafolding. However, the question that has to be
asked of the element’s exhibition has to concern the question
of what architecturally is there to be seen in such a display. In
sum, how does an element of the scafolding display the Wexner
Center? Posed the other way, the question concerns the reluctance
(perhaps refusal) to equate the building with the illustrative im-
age. What then? The answer to the question of display hinges on
what counts as architecture. While an illustration is clearly illus-
trative of architecture, what the illustration cannot make present is
a project’s operative dimension. The operative cannot be conlated
with the tectonic—such a move is no more than naïve material-
ism that in the end becomes a shambling form of empiricism. On
the contrary, the operative is inherent in any account of the genera-
tive logic allowing for the building. Precisely because the operative
has a diagrammatic quality it will always have an extension that is
greater than any one instance of its enactment.
What is on display makes demands. Eisenman’s exhibi-
tion has a compelling quality precisely because of the intellectu-
al demands it makes. The thirty column boxes—each of which
 Displaying Architecture 73

presents a project or building—continue to pose the question of

architecture’s display. This does not occur in a way that resists par-
ticularity. The contrary is the case. Each column box can be iden-
tiied with a particular project. The question of architecture is al-
ways articulated through the particular and not posed in terms of
mere generality. Architecture, therefore, has never been more em-
phatically on display. The move from the illustrative image to the
image as diagram—a move from a concern with representation
to one governed by the operative and therefore potentiality—over-
comes the reduction of architecture to its illustration by displaying
the demands of the question of architecture.
RESEARCHING ARCHITECTURE
Recent Projects by Diller + Scofidio

As a world in which research is only thought to be viable if it is le-

gitimated by grant applications exercises a greater hold on academ-
ic and intellectual life, the possibility of another form of research
becomes a more insistent question. That question is one that can
only be posed once there is an efective separation of experimenta-
tion and conirmation. In addition, this has to be coupled to over-
coming the cynicism that would deny the reality of real discovery.
What these possibilities allude to is a space where research and
experimentation will have a diferent type of presence. And yet,
the question of research is far from simple. In addition, the ques-
tion of what counts as research in architecture is highly contest-
ed. There is no doubt that architecture can engage productively
with conceptual art. However, conceptual art is not architectural
research. There is therefore the real need to distinguish between
signiicant architectural moments within conceptual art—Gordon
Matta Clark’s House Projects are a clear instance– and research
that takes the centrality of form making, for example, as its object.
The questions return. What is research in architecture? Within ar-
chitecture what counts as experimentation?
If these questions were addressed to poetry then the answer
would be straightforward. It would be to use the elements of po-
etry—its own extended vocabulary—in ways that caused these el-
ements to be rethought, or even to be given a life that had not pre-
viously been envisaged. In other words, the elements of poetry
would be both added to and transformed in the process. What hap-
pens when such demands are made of architecture? Such a ques-
tion is, of course, the one that deines the ambit of experimen-
tation and research. Moreover, it locates the place where recent
74
 Researching Architecture 75

work by Diller and Scoidio can be located. However, that work is

not just experimental. As their recent exhibition at the Whitney
Museum in New York (which took place between March 1 – May
25 2003) indicates, there are projects in the process of being built
as opposed to ones which, even when realized, remain at the ex-
perimental level. The question is how is the relationship between
the two to be understood? Rather than try and do justice to such
an extensive body of material, two projects will be taken. Of their
recent works the two which have attracted the most attention are
the Blur Building (2002) and the Eyebeam Museum of Art and
Technology. The latter, an ostensibly architectural project was in-
tended to be located in Manhattan. The former, an experiment,
was completed and used as part of Swiss Expo2002.
The Blur Building, which was located on Lake Neuchatel in
Switzerland, utilized a tensegrity structural form irst developed
by Buckminster Fuller. The structure incorporated a complex
computer controlled weather station linked to a pump system. The
activation of the system operating through 31,5000 nozzles could
create a fog atmosphere. The detail of the project would seem to
militate any description of it as experimental. However the rea-
son why, in this context, that it become possible to describe it is
as experimental is not because it is yet to be built. There was a
construction. Nor, because it fell outside any functional concerns.
There were clear functional constraints all of which worked ef-
fectively. Indeed, what allows them to work was an integrated sys-
tem involving, computers, a pumping systems and a complex built
environment. Its experimental nature is to be found elsewhere.
While a great deal of interest lay in its apparent refusal of the spec-
tacle and therefore in the capacity of the work to evoke ‘nothing’,
there is an additional element that needs to be noted. The addition
is the way, within the work, the divide between the material and
the immaterial is slowly eroded. The efect of the fog, the bodily
sense of an enclosure whose materiality is both present yet evanes-
cent, does more than open up the question of materials. It shows
in what way a concern with materials and their relation to bodies
and the body’s expectations—especially those whose materiality
is more nuanced and here it would not matter whether it was fog
or surface deined by porosity rather than solidity—can be inves-
tigated within architecture. The scripting of material/body rela-
tions is not meant to have direct entailments. The Blur Building
is not meant to proliferate. It is not a prototype. If anything it is a
76 Writing Art and Architecture

diagram. It opens possibilities deined by the potentialities that

the object contains. Its presence as a site of experimentation,
therefore, is inextricably bound up with this diagrammatic status.
Straightforwardly, what this means is that it has a generative qual-
ity. That quality is there as a potential; in the futural possibilities
that this investigation of the relationship between the immaterial
and the material may have on form, generation and the position-
ing of bodies in space.
On one level The Eyebeam Museum is a diferent entity alto-
gether. What is projected here is the realization of a complex pro-
gram that is brought about by what the building’s geometry makes
possible. The brief necessitate that the Museum function as much
as an exhibition centre as a workshop or atelier for new technology.
While integrated, there needs to be two buildings. More than that,
the actual building must allow for the technological innovations oc-
curring within it to then be incorporated as part of the building’s
infrastructure. As a number of a commentators have pointed out
this introduces a stark shift in priorities. Instead of privileging a vol-
ume that permits reprogramming, it is the actual architecture that
will make this possible. The continual slide and intersection of the
buildings within the overall structure yields openings for the in-
sertion, this incorporation, of technological developments. Loading
bearing operates on the vertical as well as on the horizontal axis.
The double programming demands of the brief are met by the op-
eration of the architecture. Not only are exhibitions spaces opened
up. It is also the case that the atelier areas have surfaces allowing for
the continual redeployment of the technical innovations that will
arise within them. In addition, the co-presence of two buildings
within a building means that points of intersection occur such that
a shift in program or a blurring of programs results. This is brought
about in the irst instance by the overall geometry of the structure.
Secondly, it occurs because of the speciic nature of the materials
used. Instead of the univocity of form follows function, or its mir-
ror opposite where form—as blob—can accommodate any func-
tion, a movement that never really took material into consideration,
here complex form allows for a complexity of function. Both types
of complexity are occasioned by the nature of the materials used.
The materials in question are as much concerned with load bearing
as they are with what the atelier surfaces will allow.
What distinguishes this project from the Blur Building is
its singularity. Singularity in contemporary architecture can be
 Researching Architecture 77

deined by the tight relationship between, geometry, materials and

function. As what materials will allow becomes more nuanced and
hence more intricate, as speciic buildings can realize complex
programs because of the particular way materials and geometry
can be related, buildings understood either as generic types or as
prototypes for future buildings vanishes. Singularity emerges be-
cause buildings contain a potential that is internal to their con-
struction. Their future lies within the way their construction al-
lows for adaptation and transformation. (The latter then become
part of the ‘function’. This deines the way the relationship be-
tween exhibition spaces and the workshops is envisaged in the
Eyebeam Museum.) The potential of such buildings is not exter-
nal. In other words, they are not prototypes, let alone diagrams.
The construction of singularity is one of the most signiicant ways
in which modern architecture appears. Finally, if it is possible to
deine the locus of experimentation and research in architecture,
a start can be made by concentrating on the opening, perhaps the
space, created by the relationship between the diagrammatic and
the singular.
THE STANDARDS OF THE NON STANDARD

Exhibitions of architecture can be signiicant occasions. Rather

than the predictable display of images and models they can at-
tempt to stage architecture’s current concerns. This is especially
the case when the rationale behind the display aims at situating in-
novation rather than presenting either simple historical continu-
ities or celebrating mere novelty. Such has to be the point of depar-
ture for any analysis of the exhibition, Architecture Non Standard,
curated by Frédéric Migayrou, and held at the Centre Pompidou in
Paris between 10 December, 2003 and 1 March, 2004. Included
in the exhibition is work by some of the most innovative studios
and practitioners working today. Of those in the exhibition notable
inclusions are Asymptote, dECOI Architects, DR_D, Greg Lynn
FORM, KOL/MAC Studio, NOX, Objectile, Odsterhuis.nl, Servo
and UN Studio.
Unlike other important exhibitions that aimed to capture a
fundamental shift in how architectural practice and theory has
occurred, this exhibition attempts to provide real historical and
theoretical unity. Rather than simply assuming that recent devel-
opments in animation software have generated speciic forms of
architectural practice, the project is to provide those developments
with a historical and theoretical context. However, the context is
not given by arguing that these developments are part of a sim-
ple, linear progression within architectural history. On the con-
trary, the curatorial strategy is that the context occurs and can be
created precisely because recent architectural innovations allow it.
In other words, the strategy is one that seeks to construct a his-
tory of the present, rather than construing the present moment
as no more than a simple occurrence within a movement of his-
torical time understood as inherently sequential. In addition, the
78
 The Standards of the Non Standard 79

curatorial strategy—and it has to be acknowledged that it is an

artfully conceived one aided by Philippe Morel’s development of
a scheme for situating the projects with the Galerie Sud of the
Centre Pompidou—involves more than the simple presentation of
pictures and models.
Positioned within the exhibition are large warping pan-
els of images organized under the following headings: Figures,
Mathematical Objects, Lines, Impressions (Empreintes), Inlexions,
Ribbons. Each large panel of images works in two ways. On the
one hand they orientate the viewer and play a role in directing
movement within the exhibition. The encounter with an actual
given display of a speciic architect’s work is mediated. Secondly,
what really matters is what is doing this mediating. The imag-
es displayed on large panels are visually coherent. It is that very
coherence that does the work. For example, the images grouped
under the heading ‘Inlections’ allow similarities to be noted be-
tween Gaudi, Freyssionet, Scharoun, Breuer, Jacobsen and Lundy
amongst others. Images of individual works create networks of as-
sociations. Rather than resolving questions, the presence of these
networks allows a type of contextualism to be created, one that un-
does the easy compartmentalization of architectural history, there-
by demanding a revision of such terms as modernism. This way
of creating a context—one deined by the present—has the im-
portant efect of robbing the present of its novelty. Reciprocally,
of course, it thereby raises as a question how relation and lineage
are to be understood. This mode of display needs to be situated in
relation to Migayrou’s own theorization of the ‘non standard’ in
his closely argued catalogue essay.14 (A catalogue which also con-
tains an important article by Mark Burry, whose inal questioning
of what image is adequate to present the non standard touches on
the problematic status of the image today. A status that should not
lead towards iconoclasm, but to a renewal of methods of interpre-
tation and thus the development of another theory of the architec-
tural image.)
The origin of the term ‘non standard’ is the work of the math-
ematician Abraham Robinson. Fundamental to the overall ar-
gument is overcoming the separation of a mathematical realm
and a realm of matter. Replacing that opposition is an approach
14. Frédéric Migayrou, ‘Les ordres non standard’, in Architectures non standard,
Editions de Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2003, pp. 26-33. (All translations are my
own.)
80 Writing Art and Architecture

delimited by morphogenesis, which in Migayrou’s reformulation

of aspects of René Thom’s work involves ‘a formalization, a priori,
of the mutations of matter’.15 Once there is a continuity or a conlu-
ence between mathematics and matter, then rather than a geom-
etry that is always exterior to production, geometry and produc-
tion need to be thought of as occurring together. (This point, to
which it will be essential to return, will allow for a diferentiation
to be made between the projects. Since each of the projects dif-
fer in terms of how this intrinsic relation is both understood and
enacted.) The strategy of the exhibition is to show the ways that
mathematics and architecture, both reconceived in terms of the
‘non standard’, coincide in the present conjuncture. Once a set-up
of this nature is accepted as a point of departure, diferent issues
of importance arise. For example, the question is not the move to
form as such, but an understanding of form—architecture’s for-
mal, hence material instantiation—as a singularity. Rather than
form being the end result of a process, once morphogenesis de-
ines movement then, in Migayrou’s formulation: ‘Form becomes
a morphogenetic, a priori, the forms chosen in order to instantiate
(incarner) architecture only being the deinition of a state of sin-
gularity in a continuum of perpetual evolution’.16 In fact, this is a
straightforward issue. To the extent that animation software is in-
tegral to the process of design then the question is always going to
be how a given moment will be understood as no longer simply di-
agrammatic, but as architectural form. Singularity provides a way
into the diferent projects. All of them raise the issue of the nature
of their formal presence. In its simplest form, the question will al-
ways concern the nature of what, seen either on the screen or as a
model, is architecture.
The setting of these works, by providing a coherent context,
brings with it an attendant risk; the risk is simply that by the pro-
vision of a form of coherence, in particular one established on the
level of the image, then all of these works could be viewed as no
more than diferent versions of the ‘same’ approach. While it is
clear that there is a similar point of departure, it is also true that
between the projects important diferences can be located. Two
need to be noted. The irst concerns the relationship between di-
agrams and materials. In general terms, one of the most exact-
ing questions raised by these projects concerns their material
15. Migayrou, ‘Les ordres non standard’, p. 26.
16. Migayrou, ‘Les ordres non standard’, p. 32.
 The Standards of the Non Standard 81

realization. The evaluation of any architecture that originates in

the diagram is the envisaged relation it has to the question of ma-
terial presence. The second involves the use of the non standard to
begin to explore questions of program.
Real distinctions can be drawn, for example, between the work
of Greg Lynn Form and Asymptote on the one hand and NOX (Lars
Spuybroek) on the other. In regards to the former, the geometry of
the diagrams is realized without any form of mediation. Lynn’s
Embryological Houses become a clear case in point. The geometry
is always internal to the software and never a quality of the mat-
ter (the materials) in which it would come to be realized. It is as
though a new type of ideality enters precisely because questions of
materiality do not igure as a site of architectural investigation and
thus experimentation. The work of NOX has to be distinguished
radically from such procedures. Lars Spuybroek’s formal investi-
gation of the potentiality of materials opens up a fundamentally
diferent path. His construction of material investigations—based
in part on the work of Frei Otto—as analogue-computer model
which, through a process of digitalization means that the process
starts from materials and ends with them. Lynn, and he is not
alone here, evinces within the context of this exhibition no real in-
terest in the potential of materials. Materiality does not emerge as
a site of investigation in its own right.
Some of the most important projects that are driven by pro-
grammatic concerns involve strategic operations that work to undo
the strict opposition between the public and the private. Secondly,
there are those whose work is not undertaken on the level of the
building but on the urban scale. While there are important aini-
ties between this latter form of work and the emergent discipline of
landscape urbanism, in this context the interplay between the non
standard as mode of analysis and representation takes precedence.
If it is fundamental to the project of the non standard is to allow
diferences and discontinuities to be bound up with forms of conti-
nuity—in other words, it will involve a line that distributes discon-
tinuous elements—then such a procedure will be fundamental to
a rethinking of actual architectural and social oppositions.
The two architectural practices that exemplify both a concern
with the urban, as well as an investigation of the public and the pri-
vate are UN Studio. (Ben van Berkel) and DR_D (Dagmar Richter).
Two projects that are directly concerned with the urban are UN
Studio’s Las Palmas Bridge project in which the continuities of
82 Writing Art and Architecture

lows allows the individual elements to emerge and DR_D’s in-

vestigation of Waterford. In regards to issues pertaining to the
public and the private of particular note are SERVO’s Lobby Ports
Hotel and DR_D’s Maison Dom-In(f)o. The force of the latter is
that, what was an originally literally discontinuous structure—Le
Corbusier’s Maison Domino—through its digitalization becomes
a continuity that is then able to generate diferent discontinuous
elements. The freedom that was thought to be there in the domi-
no frame is investigated and more fully realized by establishing a
generative continuity that is not restricted formally. The absence
of formal restriction is the mark of the efective presence of the
non standard.
Overall the exhibition demands a response. The challenge re-
sides in the proposition that the conventions of history and theory
are no longer adequate to the task. Rethinking contemporary ar-
chitecture in terms of the non standard is not mere speculation.
It has to be construed as a response to the needs created by what
forms and informs architectural practice today.
 13. Herzog and De Meuron, Exhibition at the
Tate Modern, 2005 (previous page).
14. Peter Eisenman, Wexner Center for the
Visual Arts, Ohio State University, 1989.

15. Peter Eisenman, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Ohio State University, 1989.
23-25. Peter Eisenman, Barefoot on White-Hot Walls (Exhibition at the MAK), 2004-5.
20-22. Diller and Scofidio, Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology.
16-19. Diller and Scofidio, Blur Building, 2002.
PAINTING
MYTH AND HISTORY
Anselm Kiefer’s Aperiatur Terra

Both architecture and art can be sites of memory. Modes of remem-

bering, and therefore, the way the work of memory occurs will in
each case be diferent. Nonetheless, in certain instances works sit-
uated in the present remember. Remembering need be neither
complacent nor nostalgic. Daniel Libeskind’s The Jewish Museum
Berlin (1999) is a perfect instance of a project that maintains its
architectural integrity and yet which also allows for what can be
called present remembrance.15 The latter being the form of memory
demanded by the concerns of the present. While architecture’s rela-
tion to memory and the complex process of memorialization endure
as a constant prompt, art’s relation to memory is a more complex
question. The work of the German painter Anselm Kiefer allows
the question of art’s relation to present remembrance to be posed.
Precisely because what is at play here is the relationship between
history, memory and the image it is essential to begin with time.
Paul Klee’s well-known riposte to Lessing’s separation of time and
space, was to insist that space was always temporal. If that temporality
is enlarged to include history, then it will incorporate one of the prob-
lems that has confronted continually the project of painting; namely,
how can history igure within a practice constrained by the single
image. It is vital to be precise here. The question does not concern
the presence of historical subjects. Rather, history in this instance is
linked to a conception of place, perhaps even of geography. Once place
is understood as the site of history then landscape will have ceded its
usual determination to another conception of the ground.
15. I have ofered a sustained account of this term both generally and in rela-
tion to Libeskind’s museum in my Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism,
Routledge, London, 1997.
93
94 Writing Art and Architecture

One possible way to allow time into painting is the attempt

to capture a moment. Manet’s Woman Reading (1878/9) or Tom
Roberts’ The Summer Morning Tif (1886) convey an instant.
Meaning is drawn into the image consequently the image will al-
ways hold more than the instant conveyed. Nonetheless time is
linked to moments. Manet’s painting is of a woman in the pub-
lic sphere absorbed by the changing record of public events, the
newspaper. Roberts’ use of perspective captures the moment af-
ter the lovers have separated. Her stance is forlorn, and he is pro-
ceeding into the background. The painting is deined by distance
and immediacy. Both paintings hold the viewer through the pre-
sentation of the moment. Moments register history on the level of
meaning. However, history is not a sequence of moments.
Once the separation of history and moments (the latter be-
ing the register of time deined by chronology) is allowed then the
question of the presentation of history within painting becomes
more exacting. Not only is there the historical situation within
which the paintings are situated, there is also the way that situ-
ation becomes art work. For German painting in the wake of the
Second World War, and especially after the Holocaust the situa-
tion, while stark, was clear. However, what was equally as appar-
ent was the necessity for art to work within this opening. Art and
history would coincide within paintings. Their coincidence would
be the paintings.
It is not diicult to see Kiefer’s work of the 70s and through-
out the 80s as deined by this project. Works such as Nero Paints
(1974), Iconoclastic Controversy, (1980) and Icarus—March Sands
(1981) all concern art’s relation to the ground of history. Indeed, in
all these works the landscape is present as a marked ground. The
marking of the ground by human activity is history’s visible in-
scription onto the land. While the inscribed presence of either the
simple palette, or more provocatively a winged palette into these
works gives art a presence that hovers above the ground, what is of
equal concern is art’s relation to that ground. The essential point
here is that hovering is not transcendence. The ground as the site
of history is marked in advance as art’s concern. What always mat-
ters, therefore, is a relation. The question of relationality is given
its most emphatic expression in Kiefer’s work in his painting Your
Golden hair Margarete (1981).
This painting—and it is one of a number on this ‘theme’—
evokes both in title and detail Paul Celan’s 1954 poem Todesfuge
 Myth and History 95

(Death Fugue). Celan’s poem is perhaps the most famous literary

relection on the Holocaust and speciically on the complex inter-
play between the land, mythology and history. Celan’s concerns are
German. When Kiefer evokes the poem in his painting he does so
initially by placing straw on the canvas as though it were strands of
golden hair. Written on to the canvas are the words from the poem
that are also the work’s title, ‘Dein Goldenes Haar, Margarethe’. As
these words are repeated throughout the poem the precise refer-
ence is left open. That openness is not the question. What matters
is the way the interplay of words, the ‘hair’ and the ploughed ield,
i.e. the earth (recalling for a moment that one of the most harrow-
ing words in Celan’s poem is ‘Erde’ [‘earth’]) work together. Within
these works history igures.
As he progressed Kiefer become more concerned with myth.
While his work had always deployed mythic igures; that use was
continually mediated by a concern with the place of history. Myth
and history worked together. The materiality of the surface, an al-
most literal manifestation of the earth’s materiality, was traversed
as much by the mythic as by the historical. Myth worked in the
service of history. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had used the
mythic igure of Dionysus to upset Germany’s complacent rela-
tion to Greece. For Nietzsche, certain mythic igures contained
the power to demythologize. Nonetheless, myth brings with it a
fundamental instability. In sum, the problem with the recourse to
myth is that it can become just that. As myth begins to predomi-
nate a concern with history as a placed occurrence is efaced. The
only way history could be written back in would be in terms of its
reconstruction as myth.
The exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales Aperiatur Terra can be interpreted in exactly these terms.16
While many of the stylistic motifs that have characterized his proj-
ects since the 70s are there—strong material presence, the carv-
ing of the earth either by plough or the creation of roads, writing
on the painting’s surface, etc.—they are being deployed for a dif-
ferent end. In many of the works that make up the exhibition, ig-
ures from Greek mythology have interconnected with deining as-
pects of Christianity. While this may have the efect of equating
Christianity with mythology, what it does in addition is remove the
work from a relation to the present. Mythology has become truly
16. The exhibition took place at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney
from May 19, 2007 until July 29, 2007.
96 Writing Art and Architecture

transcendent. It is as though the paintings stage two orders. There

is, however, more involved.
The work from which the exhibition takes its title—Aperiatur
Terra et Germinet Salvatorem (2005-6)—comes from a line in
Isaiah. The English translation of the line is as follows: ‘Let the
earth be opened and bring forth a saviour….drop down dew, ye
heavens from above and let the clouds rain down the just’. Again
the title is written across the top of this massive painting (2800 x
7600 mm). Moreover, scale, the use of heavy material to present
the ground and the marking of the ground recall earlier works.
That recall is reinforced by the addition of lowers. Now the low-
ers have a diferent presence. The Book of Isaiah to which refer-
ence is made is from the Old Testament rather than the Hebrew
Bible. The line in Latin occurs within the service on Palm Sunday.
However, Palm Sunday is already connected to an array of lowers
in its German presence as ‘Blumensonntag’.
The move in this painting—and it is repeated in others mak-
ing up the exhibition—is not to religion or mythology in any
straightforward sense. In fact these are demanding paintings that
refuse a simple explanation. They stage the movement away from
the interplay of art and the ground of history to art’s complex ap-
propriation of the temporality of mythology. No longer is there a
concern with the present and thus an attempt to use art to work
through German history. Within these paintings what hope there
is lives on in the repetitive ritual of myth. Redemption has lost
the political measure that Walter Benjamin would have given it. If
there is a genuine politics of hope then it is linked to the possibil-
ity of an opening that is a restaging that falls beyond the hold of
prediction. The changing seasons in which lowers bloom, then
wither and die only to be born again is the temporal structure in
which nothing changes. This is the temporality of myth. A tempo-
rality that stands opposed to history.
Within architecture Libeskind’s Jewish Museum allowed for
a link between architecture and hope—more accurately present
hope—because it allowed the concerns of the present to set the
measure. In so doing there is a formal presence that refused the
demands of either continuity or cyclical repetition. As history gives
way to myth Kiefer’s paintings lose their sense of engagement.
Rather than sites of engagement they become sites of reverence. As
such art work becomes contemplative and its hold merely aesthetic.
ART THAT MATTERS
Hawley’s Work

1.
With any work of art there is an inescapable and insistent ques-
tion: What is being seen? If the question is answered such that
the response attributes to the work its own power of production
then what is seen is what the work evidences, i.e. the complex re-
lation between materiality and production. However, what often
predominates is another form of response one in which all that
seems to matter are forms of identiication. As such, the answer
to the opening question would be the identiication and contex-
tualization of the work’s title. The presupposition would be that
naming and contextualizing the work, the title being the name,
accounted for what is seen. Such an approach does not just fail to
respond to the work, as signiicantly it refuses the potential with-
in the complex relationship between art and writing. While titles
will always igure, to the extent that there is a shift in orienta-
tion such that identiication is incorporated within the position in
which art is deined in terms of work and thus one where produc-
tion is central, any response to the question of the work’s presen-
tation becomes radically diferent. Once that move is made and
even though writing will still be constrained by the necessity to
describe, writing will have become linked to a fundamentally dif-
ferent project. Writing becomes criticism because its concern is
with the way a given work works as art.
By focusing on production, art’s material presence is given
centrality. Emphasizing materials, however, should not be under-
stood merely in terms of the technical dimension of art works.
There is a diferent sense of work involved. (Hence, a difer-
ent philosophical approach to the question—what is art?) If the
97
98 Writing Art and Architecture

interplay between title, description and the technical were taken

as ends in themselves this would then mean that the term ‘work’
entailed an already present form of completion. As though the
work is over once the actual work—painting, sculpture, etc.—is
named (titled) and thus the task of writing became description
or contextualization. Within such a frame of reference work is no
more than a substantive. Eschewing this form of nominalism, one
in which the object is equated with its already completed form,
necessitates as indicated, another way of construing the relation
between art and writing. The basis of this diference does not in-
volve abandoning the object in the name of an extra material di-
mension. Equally, it does not necessitate the introduction of either
the subjective or the gesturally historical into a concern with art.
This other relation opens up to the extent that the connection be-
tween work and completion is distanced such that it no longer de-
termines the project of writing.
What emerges with this distancing is a diferent sense of work.
In lieu of other determinations work is then allowed an active or
productive quality. While the formulation appears tautological it
is, nonetheless, essential to recognize that intrinsic to art works
is their capacity to work. In place of the static and the substantive
centrality is given to what can be described as the object’s workful
nature and thus to its active or dynamic quality. As a consequence
what insists is the question of the way the work works. What needs
to be noted in this context is threefold. In the irst instance, it is the
move from the substantive to the dynamic. In the second, there
is the necessity to replace completion with a productive sense of
work and inally the necessity to rethink art’s material presence as
itself involving process. Occasioned by the last element is the need
to reposition a concern with materiality. Instead of the simple evo-
cation of matter, once it is rethought in terms of the continuity of
process—production and materiality as always connected—mat-
ter will become ‘mattering’. (A term to be clariied below.)17 All of
these elements pertain to art work. Moreover, they are all demand-
ed by the claims made on writing, and thus the project of interpre-
tation, by the work of David Hawley. This is not to argue that he is
unique among contemporary artists. Rather, it is to argue that his

17. I have discussed this aspect of painting in ‘The Matter of a Materialist

Philosophy of Art: Bataille’s Manet’ in my Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of
Appearance, Northwestern University Press, Chicago, 2006, pp. 124-138. See in
addition my Disclosing Spaces: On Painting, Clinamen Press, Manchester 2004.
 Art that Matters 99

work does not just take place in a speciic location, namely paint-
ing in the era of digital reproducibility, it does so in an exempla-
ry and airmative way. Any encounter with that work necessities
clariication both of the manner in which his practice makes such
demands and also with the way these conceptual repositionings
are themselves to be understood. One does not precede the other.
They work together.
Painting continues. What counts however is way that conti-
nuity is understood. Were it to be mere continuity then painting
would have been given an idealized presence as though it were ei-
ther the ‘idea’ of painting that was being continued, or that form
had become the expression or revelation of that which had a qual-
ity that was diferent from the work’s material presence. Escaping
from the hold of idealism can only occur by insisting on the ma-
teriality of art work. That insistence brings with it its own history.
Production, once understood as a series of techniques, has a his-
tory. Painting continues with the recognition that it takes place af-
ter photography. While the ‘after’ could have been simply ignored,
there are paintings—art works—for which the ‘after’ provided the
point of departure. If the digital has replaced the photographic (re-
placed it by incorporating it) then this marks an interruption with-
in the history of the image. More signiicantly, it is one that con-
tinues to register within painting. Henceforth, painting occurs in
the era of ‘digital reproducibility’. This is of course a general claim
that allows for the interpretation of certain forms of contemporary
practice as well as providing the means to allow for another repeti-
tion—repetition as a form of productive reworking—of art’s his-
tory. What is opened at the same time is the way to Hawley’s work.

2.
Hawley’s work has long concerned the relationship between
forms of visual repetition and question of production. Works that
seemed to be patterns that had been interrupted to allow for fram-
ing—framing being no more than the work acquiring singular-
ity—were juxtaposed with others that while evincing similar pro-
duction techniques relied on a visual force other than patterning.
This strategic use of the diptych characterized the body of work
produced in 2004 under the general title Zoom. The series of
works produced in 2006, Timing, introduced a further complica-
tion into the process. While the techniques had a similar register,
they incorporated disruption and manipulation into the process.
100 Writing Art and Architecture

Interrupting the technical—an interruption integral to produc-

tion—did not demand the presence of the calculating hand of the
artist. On the contrary, it became a way of linking production to
chance.
Hawley’s most recent body of work: Something Else, brings im-
portant new elements into a continually developing project. These
introductions however are not mere additions. They have a two in-
terrelated components. In the irst instance they need to be under-
stood as new engagements with the relation between production
and materiality. The second element is that in this body of work
there is a continual reinement of the individual works’ relation to
the history of painting. In regard to the second, though these two
elements are from the start connected, that relation is not staged
in terms of either symbolism or the layout of the work itself as
though there were an internal diagram deployed within speciic
paintings. The connection in Hawley’s work is evident in the way
the works engage the wall. If it is true that sculpture eschews the
planar then while the latter receives its airmation within paint-
ing, the planar has more than one formal determination. In this
series, the engagement with the wall is one of the central ways in
which the components deining the works are related.
Rather than each individual work being presented on lat wood
boards as occurred in earlier projects the paintings now appear on
thick transparent plastic. (This material’s transparency is central
to the project of Something Else.) As a consequence, the latness
that was taken to deine the project of modernist abstract paint-
ing is distanced. However, this is not the result of the addition
of igures recalling and allowing for the possible introduction of
perspectival space into abstraction. The distancing occurs because
the surface now has a radically diferent quality. While they cannot
be distanced absolutely there are three aspects of these works that
begin to deine the singularity of the overall project. The irst con-
cerns their relation to the wall. The second is the process of pro-
duction and the third comprises the curatorial demands made by
the works as a whole.
Prior to taking them up it is important to note in advance what
these aspects identify. In each instance they locate work. They al-
low for the incorporation of titles and the placing of work within
both a literal as well as a historical context. The three do not just
provide the constitutive elements of the work. Rather, they delim-
it the way matter and production are combined. The combination
 Art that Matters 101

comes to igure within writing once writing becomes criticism.

The latter’s concern is with the question of the way a work works
as art. The continual attempt to respond to this question is the un-
dertaking of a philosophically informed criticism. Even if there
cannot be a deinitive answer to that question, criticism takes art’s
material presence as the site of work. Its point of departure is the
work of matter. Meaning is always an after efect of that work. If
there is a way of capturing that material presence as ‘at work’—a
work that is always a staging and a presenting—then it is in terms
of mattering: i.e. matter and materiality as activities.

3.
The irst aspect noted above that needs to be taken up concerns
the relationship between the works and the wall. In this instance
the works’ material presence cannot be readily assimilated to a
setting in which art positions the wall as a neutral element in its
own self-presentation. With this project—Something Else—trans-
parency coupled to the actual or potential curl of the plastic taken
in conjunction with the use of metal clasps to secure the works to
the wall combine to give the wall a presence that can no longer be
equated with a ground whose relation to art work could then be de-
scribed in terms of indiference. In addition, the wall also emerges
through the transparent plastic. This occurs because the applica-
tion of paint is no longer co-terminous with the support. It is not
as though there has been the creation of blank spaces. Rather, the
showing of the wall through the plastic establishes what can be
called spaces of neutrality within the work itself. Here examples
are pertinent as they make mattering speciic.
In Constellation these zones are both internal to the ield of
paint as well as marking the limit of that ield. In regard to the lat-
ter while there is a point at which the literal application of paint
ends, the transparency of the plastic allows the work of painting
to continue. What is maintained is painting’s engagement with
colour and therefore more generally with presentation. The work
operates as much through its projection of the internal as it does
through the presence of the external internally. Within the paint-
ed ield the incorporation of the wall is always there within (and as)
zones of neutrality. The diference is that the wall intersects with
the layers of paint. Varying forms of depth are present. However,
they are forms in which there is the continual interplay of the lit-
eral layers of paint with the zones of neutrality. The literality in
102 Writing Art and Architecture

question involves modes of repetition allowing for the presenta-

tion of a patterning that recalls the work’s engagement with the
technical.
While the second aspect to be taken up pertains to the process
of the works’ production and therefore is an engagement with the
technical, what is central is the content of the actual presentation.
The works Accumulation, Irregularity and Streaking contain inter-
related elements. The combination of layered paint in diferent co-
lours—the mode of combination is again integral to the process
of creation—is coupled to the way the repetitive pattering is inter-
rupted from within, as though the work has to stage and incorpo-
rate a form of internal divergence. When taken together they work
to produce a blur. (Blurring takes place in a number of works.)
While these individual aspects may demand consideration in their
own right, the blur provides a point of departure. The blur ges-
tures in at least two directions. Firstly, it stages a relation to paint-
ing’s engagement with photography and other forms of technical
reproduction. This sense of the blur however stages the question
of sequence. Is the blur an ‘after efect’? This is clear as much
from Gerhard Richter’s paintings of photographs which are then
presented as blurred as it is from his blurred abstract paintings.
The question of the blur as ‘after efect’ in which the process of
production invariably intersects with the philosophical problem of
representation. In the case of Hawley’s work the blur resists the
question of sequence as it is both the result of the way the paint is
layered (layering and colouring working together) and equally be-
cause it results from the interruption and continuity of repetition.
Serial continuity incorporating its own form of interruption—as
already indicated, divergence as interruption—inscribes the blur
both within the work and beyond the hold of the elementary struc-
tures of representation.
The other direction to which the blur gestures is more literal.
The blur is inherently visual. The blur is seen by a body positioned
in front of the work. Painting’s relation to its own visuality is more
often noted than taken up. While perspective organizes the visu-
al ield, these works which involve the interplay of the layering of
paint and zones of neutrality, resist any incorporation of perspec-
tival space. Part of their mattering is blurring. The blur however is
the moment at which the body’s relation to the work is no longer
circumscribed by spatial organization but by the continuity of the
work’s projection into space. Precisely because it is the continuity
 Art that Matters 103

of that projection that is integral to the work’s work, time takes

precedence over the work’s internal spatial organization. Time, in
this instance, is fundamental to mattering. Moreover, it is time
that deines the relationship between the blur and the body.
The third aspect pertains to the curatorial imperatives that
arise once mattering begins to deine work. Unlike other works
that make up this project, and which then have a direct relation
to the wall, Spiralling has a mediated presence. The transparen-
cy of the plastic is itself laid over a coloured background. The co-
lour shows through the work whilst becoming part of it. There is
a complex procedure of layering at work here. In a sense this work
announces what all the other works already know. The presence of
the wall within the work, the interplay between wall and the paint-
ing’s actual material presence, which becomes less determinate at
the edge, means that the installation of these works forms part of
the process of their creation as art. This is not the usual argument
concerning the centrality of the curator. The argument has to do
with their speciic material presence. The curatorial project would
no longer concern the position of works on the wall but would have
to incorporate the diferent ways in which the wall was itself incor-
porated within the works. Precisely because there is a necessity to
incorporate these demands into any account of the object—they
are not contingent aspects of the work—the speciicity of the work,
its own mattering, continues to make demands on curatorial strat-
egies. Those demands once taken in conjunction with the other
aspects that begin to deine this body of work also yield exigencies
for the project of writing.
While these elements mark out Hawley’s work they open a
space in which it becomes possible to deine the ways in which art
matters. Art’s mattering, however, is not singular. Matter as the
precondition for meaning creates the setting in which a confronta-
tion with art and thus the dissesenus that art necessitates, needs
to be understood as a result of work. Meaning on its own can nev-
er be the pure space in which art is present. Art presents itself
through its mattering. Arts matters.
TRACES OF ANONYMITY

Art will always continue to exert a hold. However, that hold—a

ixing in which the eye is encountered and thus within which the
work becomes what it is—cannot be efectively separated from the
means creating the image. Videos, video images that become pho-
tographs, paintings that acknowledge and airm their relation to
their own digital inception, deine some of the means for image
creation within the work of Jess MacNeil. And yet, what is at work
within this particular project is as much indebted to the history
of the image as it is to the mark of art’s continual reworking of its
own means of production. (A reworking that is part of transforma-
tion of the art object.) MacNeil’s extraordinary Opera House Steps
is a case in point. The work is present as a video, as a potential
video still and then is repositioned within paintings. Prior to any
comment on this work it is essential to recognize that what it re-
calls—an act of recall within an almost irresistible inevitability—
is Alexander Rodchenko’s 1929 photograph ‘Steps’. Rodchenko’s
image of a woman holding a child while carrying a shopping bas-
ket and walking up stars (public stairs) inscribes the human sub-
ject as central. The medium allowed for little else. Nonetheless,
her presence cannot be reduced to the sentimental humanism
that marks depiction within both painting and photography. The
captured moment stages the complex interplay between anonym-
ity and public presence that marks contemporary urban life and
which photography continues to enact. This is a setting in which it
is essential to locate MacNeil’s Opera House Steps. The video holds
these steps in place. Movement is the passing shadows. Their pres-
ence, the shadows playing over the already ixed steps, does not
represent absent igures. Rather than the movement of the shad-
ows which demand that the steps as the location of the public are
104
 Traces of Anonymity 105

held in place, there is the continual creation and recreation of what

can be described as particularized anonymity. The diference is
fundamental. As the paintings emerge from the video—the video
having become a static image which in turn has become the site
of painting—not only is there the obvious connection between dif-
ferent genres of image there is a more profound recognition con-
cerning the relationship between abstraction and anonymity.18
Once abstraction is moved beyond its simple and simplistic
identiication with the negation of igure, it can be redeined as
much in relation to the history of abstraction as to the presence
of anonymity. Questions that seek to establish meaning or iden-
tity can begin with an original site that is neither confused nor
ambiguous. The prompt for such a question would be the anony-
mous. The problem of identity within a prevailing sense of both
anonymity and dislocation is a continual refrain within moder-
nity. The public as a location does not answer such questions it
merely relocates them within that further deinition of modern
subjectivity in which being-in-place can be identiied with the ur-
ban. What diferentiates MacNeil’s investigation and presentation
of this condition from Rodchenko’s can be located in the efect of
diferent forms of image creation. It is not just MacNeil’s video,
and the editing techniques it allows, that are important, the in-
scription of the continuity within the loop creates the efect of a
continuity of passage. As the shadows move the question—Who
moves?—has an insistent quality. The ‘who’ will always be the po-
tentially particular within the anonymous. Such questions are in-
ternal to the efect of the image. In the case of Rodchenko’s gelan-
tin-silver print any concern with the next step—her next step and
thus question of who she may be—takes place beyond the image.
That such questions are always external in the sense that they de-
mand that the image continue is an efect of the way the image is
created. Moreover, abstracting from her presence necessitates ef-
facing the image. MacNeil’s image is already an abstraction as it is
from the start the presentation of the anonymity, always particu-
larized, of place.
Particularized anonymity is concerned with traces and thus
with the interplay of continuity and discontinuity. The traces,

18. I have taken up the relationship between abstraction and anonymity in my

‘On Abstraction: Notes on Mondrian and Hegel’, in Michael Asgaard Andersen
and Henrik Oxvig (eds.), Paradoxes of Appearing: Essays on Art, Architecture and
Philosophy, Baden, Lars Müller Publishers, 2009.
106 Writing Art and Architecture

however, are only there as moments that are absorbed or which

vanish. Within the medium of video there is the possibility to dwell
of the continuity of tracing; a continuity that is deined by the in-
herent presence of the discontinuous. Of signiicance, however,
is the twofold dimension that tracing involves. Marks, present as
both modifying and disappearing, are only one aspect. The oth-
er pertains to that which is being traced. In the case of the Opera
House Steps the trace of an anonymous other—anonymous while
always particular—endures. As the video loops the inseparability
of place and movement is enacted continually. Other recent video
works by MacNeil are also concerned with this form of insepara-
bility. However, rather than inscribe the mark of an anonymous
other—there in the leeting shadows of Opera House Steps—in the
works Wake (Coniston Water) and Wake (Windermere) the complex
process of passage itself is being staged.
These works both involve a split screen presentation of move-
ment across water. ‘Water’ named and identiied in advance. The
movement leaves its mark while the water is itself marked. The lat-
ter form of marking involves, in the irst instance, water’s capac-
ity to relect. In addition, water is already the registration of wind,
currents, etc. (Water is, in part, this registration. What are regis-
tered are not there as additions.) In other words, the inherent sta-
bility of a body of water is marked by its inherent instability. Both
pertain. Hence there is a reiteration of the interplay of continuity
and discontinuity. What allows for that interplay to be presented
in this instance—and the instance is that which deines the im-
age’s speciicity—is the relationship between water understood as
a complex surface that is videoed and the presentation of that sur-
face by two diferentiated yet related screens. The screens pres-
ent the water at diferent speeds and having a quality that difers.
What difers is, of course, the same. What is the same, however, is
that which can never be the same as itself namely water as a com-
plex surface. Indeed, it is possible to go further and argue that the
truth of water as a surface can only ever be staged within a set
up that in refusing the literal—namely in refusing what is always
thought to be the province of the photographic image—the truth
of water, perhaps another ‘literal’ truth, can be staged. While it
cannot be taken up here it is worth relecting on art’s struggles to
capture and present the truth of water. Not to represent water but
to present it as the site of that which is always working. Even still
water is never still since it relects.
 Traces of Anonymity 107

There is a further aspect of both these video works that needs

to be noted. What matters in both is the presence of a surface as
that which stages. This is not to suggest that the surface can be
thought independently of the process of staging. Rather what is
revealed is that which opens up the connection between these vid-
eo works and the practice of painting. Not painting tout court but
the practice that MacNeil has been developing.) From the early
series Tenuous Ground (2003) until the more recent Videographic
Paintings (2007) MacNeil’s concern is with what to paint. Part of
the answer can be found in the way the digital or photographic
image can be reworked to create the scene of and for painting. As
such the surface no longer refers back to a setting there prior to its
own creation. Nor, moreover, is the painted—the object encoun-
tering the eye—the site of a simple registration. The surface has
become a palimpsest of images that while being one cannot be at-
tributed a singular presence. If the water within Wake (Coniston
Water) and Wake (Windermere) can only attain its truth through
the refusal of literal presence, then the way the paintings appear to
fragment, the way line and colour interplay with igure rather than
being the means for its creation, provide a complex surface that
enacts a similar refusal. The complexity in question is that which
is proper to presentation. What is presented, not represented but
presented as such, are the elements that only cohere within a set-
ting in which coherence is the interplay of continuity and disconti-
nuity. The igures and places with her work are neither individuals
nor universals. They resist despair and utopianism. They demand
a speciic response. Her creation of images, a creation that can-
not be thought outside the relation of the image to the digital, is
the presentation of difering modes of particularized anonymity.
As such she has become a presenter of modern life.
THE WORK OF FIGURES
Notes on the Art of Peter Neilson

If there were a deinite perhaps deiant gesture made in the di-

rection of photography—a gesture on behalf of painting occur-
ring in the early years of photography’s registration—then it is the
unresolved left hand in Manet’s 1878 Self-Portrait. Painting is not
simply airmed through the presence of palette and brush, the
hand’s presentation, taken in conjunction with the rest of his body,
could only have ever been the work of painting. And yet, this af-
irmation, while real, harbours a more complex and dramatic de-
velopment that is at work in a number of Manet’s most signiicant
paintings.
The supposition concerning this other development is straight-
forward. In part, it is there both in response to the presence of pho-
tography and to developments within painting. The claim is that
central works by Manet can be understood in terms of the use of
igure to trouble and remake the space of the igure within paint-
ing. (A remaking in which a singular space becomes the plurality
of spaces.)
If the space created by perspective is the space created for and
by the subject, and then even though that space will be undone
by the process in which the art of the early twentieth century will
become abstract, it is also the case that igures can have a similar
efect. In other words, igure breaks its relation to the singularity
of the subject by undoing, through its mode of presentation, the
actual space of the igure. There is therefore a resulting transfor-
mation of the igure. Moreover, other forms of iguration are al-
lowed as a consequence. What this means is that once the hold of
perspective on the subject, a hold in which the subject is only pos-
sible because of perspective—a hold in which subject and igure
108
 The Work of Figures 109

are conlated—is no longer in strict control then there is a resul-

tant undoing of the singularity of the subject positions inside the
frame and the singularity of the one outside. (Both of these set-
tings are given by the unanimity of position demanded by the sin-
gularity of perspective.) There is only one position from which to
see. What is seen is given by the position created for the subject
that is then seen. To the extent that the igure is retained, the un-
doing of the expectation of the relationship between subject and
perception is the remaking of the igure.
While this position can be argued for in relation to many of
Manet’s works, a clear instance of what is involved is evident in
Mlle V … in the Costume of an Espada (1862). There are three group-
ings that involve the igure. There is Mlle V herself. She is turned
towards the viewer: looking out whilst looking past the viewing
subject. A matador on a horse in the process of spearing a bull is
between Mlle V and a group of individuals standing by a back wall.
There are other igures within the frame. While the frame con-
tains depth insofar as there is the interplay of light and dark with-
in the frame (included in the latter are cast shadows) the igures
are not held within that depth. In other words, the igures have a
disjunctive relation with the singularity of the igure that would
be demanded by the relationship between narrative and presence
provided by the work of perspective. At work here are diferent
economies. One cannot be reduced to the other. Coherence is de-
ined in terms of this original event of plurality.
What has been identiied as ‘undoing’ needs to be understood
as eschewing the nihilism of simple destruction in favour of re-
making: destruction as creation, though equally created works as
forms of destruction. However, the way Manet opens the frame to
other modes of iguration should not be understood in terms of a
mere proliferation of possibilities for the igure. That opening is
the move from a form of singularity—the interplay of perspective
and depth—to the incorporation of a complex plurality in which
igures will igure henceforth. What this means is that while per-
spective will be retained, though only in terms of its incorpora-
tion within a plurality of sites, the frame will contain difering
forms of iguration; each moment bringing with it its own opera-
tive sense of perspective and depth. Each one has therefore its own
economy. In lieu of the singularity of relation that the tradition of
perspective demands there will be a complex of relations without
synthesis. As such, what is distanced continually is the possible
110 Writing Art and Architecture

identiication of the site of painting’s work in terms of the singu-

larity of perspective and depth. It is as though the possibility that
is there in Manet’s Mlle V … in the Costume of an Espada is taken to
the extreme; i.e. a repositioning in which each element is allowed
a space of its own. Singular spaces overlap or double: recreating
the place of painting as a palimpsest of possibilities.
This recreation of a complex plurality provides the position
in which to locate the work of igures in the paintings of Peter
Neilson. Narrative in painting cannot work other than in relation
to the operation of perspective. In Neilson’s recent work there are a
signiicant number of narrative paintings. What, however, do they
narrate? Narrative in literature cannot be divorced from modes of
temporal sequence. Narrative is always timed. The same is true in
painting. In the case of classical perspective, in most instances,
the eye is drawn into a focal point and then moves to incorporate
other elements that comprise the structured and intended uniied
order that is depicted. In the case of singular perspective, narrative
and time work together to reinforce the work’s overall sense of sin-
gularity. Within the unfolding of the singular a uniied structure
can be seen. Neilson’s narrative paintings work otherwise. The
sense of alterity that these diferent works introduce lies within
the impossibility of unity. The eye cannot hold the work together
because there are openings, perspectives, folds of representation,
diferent frame of activity, all of which work together to create and
sustain the work.
Neilson’s individual narrative paintings frame and reframe
their complex content. Mirrors contain images that are project-
ed back to the viewer who then must incorporate this distancing
within the frame as forming part of a series of framed moments.
The moments are not part of a synthetic whole. The works keep
opening up diferent spaces. Each one is consistent. The spaces
overlap. One opens onto and then within another. The overlapping
in question, however, is not the overlapping of the same, it is the
encounter of spaces in which diferences can only be explained in
terms of the creation of diferent relations within the frame. The
literal frame therefore exerts both an arbitrary yet necessary hold.
Spaces and framing devices work with and through igures. In
Through Dreams, Seen there is an inside and outside within the lit-
eral frame. Part of what is framed includes a loor that opens and
which in opening reveals another world in which igures are pres-
ent. That opening is itself framed and thus is as much present as
 The Work of Figures 111

a frame as it is an opening in a loor. Each space has an indetermi-

nate quality. And yet it has an actual quality. What is actual, how-
ever, is at the very least a doubled presence. In the top right hand
of this painting a female igures gazes into a mirror. Mirrors play
a signiicant role in Neilson’s work. Mirrors, and thus the work
of relection, already igure within the history of painting. If they
can be attributed a generalized status then it can be argued that
the mirror is that which evokes both the ease and the immediacy
of relection. As such the mirror becomes the inscribed presence
within painting of painting’s attempt to project a uniied whole. As
in the mirror, so in the painting would become the rubric accounting
for the presence of the mirror. The envisaged relation would re-
inforce the sense of expectation that was already there within the
work of perspective. It would be as though the relation between
the mirror and the one viewing literally mirrored the relation be-
tween the viewer (the subject) and the painting itself. Immediacy
and unity would be the elements whose presence structured the
relationship between the viewer and the viewed. That relation
structures the subject positions.
This is the setting in which the mirror in Mirror Mirror on
the World as well as mirrors in other works needs to be under-
stood. That mirror is only ever the opening of a speciic site. It is
the staging of a mode of relection that neither determines oth-
er sites of viewing—thus they are not present in terms of either
ease or immediacy—nor provides the structure of viewer/viewed
(subject/object) relation. Where those relations are taken to per-
tain for the entire work. However, there is more at work here than
a distancing of certain modes of relection and thus of immedia-
cy. If works such as Mirror Mirror on the World can be understood
in terms of the co-presence of difering sites, each structured by
shifting loci each with their own sense of depth, then the works
become an opening up and thus an allowing. ‘Allowing’ needs to
be understood formally. To allow is not to create a particular al-
ready determined event. It is not to determine in advance the qual-
ity of an event. To allow involves the creation of a space. Rather
than art having as its constraint the depiction of an event, to po-
sition ‘allowing’ in the place of depiction necessitates not simply
the creation of places of activity but occasions and thus to present
activity’s inherent and ineliminable complexity. This is not per-
spectivism, as though there were just diferent views of the same
and singular phenomenon. On the contrary, allowing for the
112 Writing Art and Architecture

event—an allowing structured by the abeyance of the singularity

of perspective—is to open up the possibility of difering igures in-
teracting within and through a range of spaces. The event is orig-
inally plural. These spaces are only held together. Once this con-
dition is taken to be the order of things Neilson’s work becomes a
form of realism.
In the painting The Two Way Mirror (Cinderella as Spy) while
Cinderella chats over a bar, another women stands with one leg
within a frame. She has either backed into the frame, or she is
stepping from it. The frame, however, is not a mere frame. It is
clearly a photograph. Within the frame there are other photo-
graphic images. Tracing a line from the bottom left of the frame
there is a movement across photographs that are present within an
open draw. Photographs that were hidden have been revealed as
the draw opened. On the desk is another photographic frame from
which a man walks. Not simply has another space been opened
the radical shift in scale is now involved in the creation of another
space within the overall frame. Propped against the bar at which
Cinderella sits is another photograph. Its size is discontinuous, of
necessity, with other modes of photographic presence. That lat-
ter photograph is the one from which the woman walks (or backs
into). Here is the production of a complex event; a pluralized site
of possibilities. Scale, difering yet interacting framing devices,
forms of layering, etc. working to allow the organizational logic of
a range of works. Indeed the detail of works such as Strangers in
Our House, Thought Dreams and Mythmaking: Vile Gossip amongst
others would need to be taken up in these terms.
Having reworked the igure, the igure held within moderni-
ty in a position that recalls both the portrait and the cartoon, that
igure is now able to gesture, to evoke, to stage in ways that open.
Those openings have as their point of departure a severance be-
tween igure and character. Character had set the measure in rela-
tion to which the individual igure was to be judged. The interplay
of character and igure was dependent upon an enforced singu-
larity that was given as much by the work of perspective as it was
by an overriding sense of decorum. Both are recalled though in
their abeyance. As a result individual works such as Clown, The
Scoundrel, Hero Journalist etc. become ways of presenting that take
the reworking of the igure as their condition of possibility. No
longer held by already given senses of propriety the igure is able
to work again. The igure brings with it therefore another set of
 The Work of Figures 113

questions and thus demands diferent modes of evaluation. It is

thus possible to return. Mythmaking: Vile Gossip inscribes a view-
er. A igure within the frame looks at a setting that is already dou-
bled. Each component of that doubling is itself a site working with
its own sense of depth and thus its own perspectival demands.
With the frame—framed—she stands and she looks. What does
she see? What is she allowed to see? The answer is clear. What
is allowed is the work of igures and thus the play of an insistent
more than one: in sum, work as the plural event.
26. David Hawley, Accumulation, Screen-print on UV-resistant PVC, 225 x 180 cm, 2007.
27. Peter Neilson, Mirror, mirror on the world (seven random targets), oil on linen, 100 x 100 cm, 2008.
28. Peter Neilson, Title, The two-way mirror: Cinderella as spy (never suspected, she lived happily ever after the overthrow of the
Prince’s brutal junta), oil on linen, 185 x 200 cm (two panels), 2007.
29. Jess MacNeil, Opera House Steps: December, digital video with sound, 2 min. 22 sec. infinite loop, 2006.

30. Jess MacNeil, Wake: Coniston water, dual channel digital video, 15 minutes 16 seconds, 2007.

31. Jess MacNeil, Wake: Windermere, dual channel digital video, 13 minutes 43 seconds., 2009.
SCULPTURE
VANDALIZING OBJECTS, DESTROYING ART
Notes on Terri Bird’s Recycling Fictions of Being

The destruction of a work of art, whether complete or partial, is

part of the risk that art always brings with it. The vandalization of
Terri Bird’s recently installed sculpture Recycling Fictions of Being,
which had been sited in the Alistair Knox Park in Eltham, makes
its documentation an urgent concern.19 Equally, however it allows
for relection to be given to art’s almost necessary relation to icon-
oclasm. There is almost something remarkable about the capacity
of humans to create objects or images, ones that are not instru-
mental in any direct sense, and yet which invite the destruction
unleashed by vandals, fundamentalists, censors, etc. There are,
perhaps, certain images, even art objects, whose destruction could
be defended. And yet, even that defence would have to concede
that what was being repeated is the iconoclasm that accompanies
the history of the creation of images and works of art. Here, icono-
clasm has a more contemporary feel. It can no longer be separated
from the problem of the object.
Terri Bird’s sculpture was situated in a suburban park. The
important aspect of the location was that the work was placed on
path created by pedestrians and walkers. The park itself is bound-
ed by a street and the Diamond Creek. The created path functions
as a short cut between the street and the creek, or the oicial path
next to the creek. It generates an ‘unoicial’ line which Bird de-
scribes as ‘a desire line’. The location of her sculpture to the side
of this line, plus the nature of its presence—the latter being no
more than how it worked as art—built upon and reinforced this
19. The work was commissioned by the Nillumbik Shire Council who bian-
nually award the Nillumbik Art in Public Places Award. The Award was given in
2002. Her work was installed in March 2003 and destroyed by ire 8 weeks later.
123
124 Writing Art and Architecture

unoicial positioning. And yet, the conventions of public art exist

in relation to the oicial. Either a work commemorates and there-
fore its task is direct, or it complements an established terrain.
Once a work complements what is given, then it can be justiied
as decorative. Such works can be defended because they have an
inherently ornamental status. The ornament however is always at-
tached. The site or place where they are assumed to belong, usual-
ly form part of an overall masterplan. It is the presence of this plan
that deines the public. What this means is, of course, that whatev-
er is intended by the term public art needs a conception of the pub-
lic that is suiciently complex to allow for a distinction between
the oicial and the unoicial. There will be inevitable overlaps, a
fact that locates, almost literally, the activity of graiti artists.
The art of commemoration—of a monumentality that is al-
ways thought to be justiied in advance—depends upon the efec-
tive and regulated presence of oicial public space. Bird’s sculpture
had an unoicial site. Its presence was the result of a negotiation
with this conception of site. Works retaining the imprimatur of
the oicial have diiculty referring to a site. They stand within it.
The eschewing of monumentality, refusing a work evincing com-
memoration, means that a relation to site has to be more than sim-
ple location. Site needs to have a generative quality. This is clear
with Recycling Fictions of Being. The nature of the relationship to
site had a determining efect on the presence of her work. Given
that it was a work of sculpture that presence had to do with its spa-
tiality. Rather than address the site in terms of appearance, the
sculpture was developed as a result of measuring the contours.
The inlection of the contours—in positive terms and in terms of
the generation of negative spaces—gave rise to a contour model.
The model rather that simply mapping the site, took up its difer-
ing inlections. The geometry of the site was taken up in the work.
The combination of the positive and the negative meant, that the
actual work when inished gave the impression of both sitting on
while also hovering over the ground. The question of relation—
almost the brute physical question of the relation of the work to
the ground—was there in the work’s genesis and inally there in
its completion.
The sculpture itself was constructed from recycled plastic pan-
els. The recycling was not the repackaging that would be found in
either the display of the objet trouvé, or the assemblages of Jessica
Stockholder. Here, there is something diferent. The recycling
 Vandalizing Objects, Destroying Art 125

involves an act of fabrication. Recycling in this context refers to

the materials and not to their appearance. As the site is an arti-
icial construct—the park and its contours have been created—
since the ‘desire line’ is itself an addition, a fabrication after the
event, then addressing the site means taking these elements into
consideration as much as using the site’s geometry as a generator.
The overall dimensions of the inal object (300 x 1750 x 3650
mm), once taken in conjunction both with the way the work was
positioned, and its relation to the ground, begins to account for its
particular spatial presence. While always possible to describe such
a project in negative terms, i.e. as the production of an anti-monu-
ment, this would be to miss the point. As a work it was not an an-
ti-monument. Rather, and far more importantly, it was a work of
public sculpture that could not be deined in terms of either mon-
umentality or the decorative. (And this would be the case whether
these terms were used to provide a positive description, or nega-
tive one such as the anti-monument.) What was important was
twofold. In the irst instance it was the nature of the relationship
to site. Site was deined both by its geometry and its artiiciality.
(While not art, construing site in this way is to imbue it with qual-
ity of art.) The second was the way it complicated what is meant by
term ‘public’, within the designation public art. This complication
occurred because of the work’s deining relation to the unoicial.
In other words, its presence in the landscape, present as resting,
touching, hovering, on and over the ground, raised the question of
art in part because of its distancing the given conceptions of what
art in the public realm is intended to do, and therefore what pre-
cisely the public is intended to be.
The language of paths and short cuts is bound up with ques-
tions of safety. Once stripped of any moral overtones then to wan-
der from the path is to invite danger. Moreover, taking a short cut
is to use a route devoid of propriety. Improper and dangerous be-
haviour invites destruction. Did the location of Recycling Fictions
of Being in such a setting solicit vandalism? This is the perplex-
ing question. Oicial art, in all its diferent guises, will always be
the subject of a calculated response. Oicialdom elicits it. The re-
sponse therefore is as much to the art as it is to its symbolic con-
tent; a response that may have no relation at all to the particularity
of the given work.
What happened here took place in relation to unoicial art.
The argument therefore has to be that the destruction occurred
126 Writing Art and Architecture

because the work’s presence as art was refused. Art becomes art
when it is oicially deined as art. A deinition that is conferred as
much by the market as it is by the art institutions. Once a work of
art is sited outside that realm—as this one was—then it runs the
risk of becoming an object. While it will always be true that art
objects are objects, Duchamp’s great invention was to dramatize
this point, an additional element has been introduced. The risk art
now takes—especially art that bears a diicult relation to the insti-
tutions—is for it to be destroyed, not as art, but as an object. Once
this risk is recognized, moreover, once it is deined as a problem
that arises because of the power of institutions—sites that are tru-
ly oicial—then the question of criticism is reopened. Given the
inevitable presence of markets and institutions, accepting their
power to delimit and deine art, criticism will have to do more
than debate such identiications. Beyond the hold of the oicial in-
stitutions, it can only be criticism that establishes the object’s work
as the work of art. There are no guarantees; in addition criticism
will always be the locus of contestation. Nonetheless, once criti-
cism takes on the task of securing the object’s presence as art—
then its destruction as an object becomes less likely. (It could, of
course, still be destroyed as art.)
Only once a more nuanced sense of the public is developed
will the risk of destruction begin to dissipate. It has to be a sense
recognizing complexity, a recognition that was already there in the
work Recycling Fictions of Being, part of its work as art. This possi-
bility deines part of the task of contemporary criticism. Criticism
cannot stem the literalization of the destructive impulse. It can
however clarify its object.
SERRA AND THE SPACE OF SCULPTURE

Sculpture eschews the planar. In so doing, it becomes the site in

which space and force begin to deine each other. And yet, it is not
as though this play of deinition sustains an indiferent relation
to site. What can be described as sculpture’s mattering—name-
ly, its material presence having an operative quality generative of
meaning—allows sculpture to have a speciic site. The latter is
not a comment on either the museum or public space in any di-
rect sense. Rather, it underscores the necessity that the space that
sculpture creates is always within pregiven spaces. While painting
can remain more or less indiferent to this sense of place, sculp-
ture cannot. If there is a genuine relation between architecture
and sculpture then it does not belong to a realm of resemblances
or visible connection in which scale would be the only moment of
distinction. The accord between them pertains to space making.
While it is naïve to equate architecture with detail, it is equally as
remiss to make the same equation with sculpture. Their accord,
as well as the points of diferentiation, are given by the way they
maintain speciic forms of space creation.
In sum, space creation discloses the point of connection.
Equally, the diferent sense of the space created and the means by
which it occurs closes it of. Sculpture ‘matters’ diferently. The
speciicity of the interconnection between space, materials and the
body deines the mattering of sculpture. The ways they are inter-
connected marks out the particularity of a given work.
Richard Serra’s work which was on display at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York in an exhibition that brings together
forty years of projects is an important moment within the devel-
opment of sculpture’s capacity to create spaces.20 Sculpture has
20. The exhibition took place June 3, 2007—September 24, 2007.
127
128 Writing Art and Architecture

always produced spaces and as such implicates the body of the

viewer in a manner that is fundamentally diferent to the way the
body of the viewer regards painting or the way the body within ar-
chitecture is situated. The inscription of the body, its having been
positioned by work, is not just central to Serra’s project; more sig-
niicant is that the development of that project makes difering de-
mands on the body.
More generally in regard to sculpture’s material presence,
it is diicult to separate force and space. If all sculpture creates
space—space creation and bodily implication are related from the
start—then there is an already present connection between the
elements that delimit the mattering of sculpture. However, force
needs to be given a more exact formulation. The relationship be-
tween a solid object and gravity is already a play of forces. While
sculpture’s attempt at monumentality simply assumes the posi-
tioning of the object, Serra’s work, and this includes work from the
1960s as much as it does the most recent projects, operates in an
importantly diferent way.
The series undertaken in 1969 and know as the ‘prop pieces’
explore the sense of tension that can inhere in a sculpture’s pres-
ence. One Ton Prop (House of Cards) consists of slabs of lead that
when placed together support each other. Rather than self-stand-
ing stability, weight and force are distributed within the work.
Despite the solidity—a solidity reinforced by the natural colour of
the lead and a scale that is almost equivalent to the body—the work
seems tenuous. Tension and a form of fragility undermine any
straightforward gesture towards the monumental. Other works in
the series also exploit forms of instability that move the viewer
away from any reverential approach to the work and towards the
way that force and material are involved. It is as though the works’
actual material presence only emerges as itself within the type of
tenuousness that this particular form of mattering allows.
As Serra’s work developed projects become larger in size. Scale
however was not given by the perpendicular. Indeed with works
such as Intersection II (1992-3) and Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) an im-
portantly diferent relation to scale emerges. While the steel plates
are tall—approaching 3 metres in height—what is signiicant is
that they create spaces in which the viewer enters. The works tilt
such that their quality of being inside or outside is importantly
diferent. There is no uniform experience. The height allows the
reality of the steel to impinge as it can become the object of direct
 Serra and the Space of Sculpture 129

focus. Equally, the efect of the volume on the body difers with-
in the process of viewing. Material force has become afect. The
viewer is continually positioned and repositioned insofar as both
walking and resting are the two modes necessary to view these
works. Indeed it is essential to note that while these works create
space the experience of that space is deined by time. Experience
is no longer delimited by the single view or the sedentary subject.
Viewing involves moving and resting. Here is sculpture that de-
mands process; time and movement marked by the interplay of
sequence and pause.
The project set in motion by these works is continued by
three later projects. Sequence, Band and Torqued Torus Inversion
(2006). While it takes time to see them, they are importantly dif-
ferent. Sequence creates both internal an external spaces while
Band involves a continuous encounter with an object that is over
20 metres in length. In both instances the body encounters that
which should overpower it. However, the sensation that emerg-
es is an acute awareness of the body’s inherent spatial presence.
Again, that awareness and thus the body’s place in space are given
through time. There can be no mastery of these objects and yet
these works do not seek to master. They continue to stage encoun-
ters with work—a staging allowed by matter’s creation of place—
that can be as much idiosyncratic as collective.
With all of these works what cannot be forgotten is the Museum
of Modern Art. The work of these sculptures occurs within a set-
ting that seeks, in ways that are far from unproblematic, to deine
an encounter with the modern. What Serra’s work opens up—and
it is opened by the mattering of sculpture—is the question of the
experience of art work. The question of that experience, and it is a
question that should have genuine acuity precisely because it is of-
ten overlooked, concerns not just art’s relation to the body but the
role of the body in the viewing of art. As such Serra’s exhibition
makes demands that are internal to the exhibition itself, while at
the same time allowing exhibition to emerge as an insistent ques-
tion in its own right. This is the point at which sculpture touches
the concerns of architecture.
FRAYING LINES
Richard Goodwin’s City

What is at stake, if art is to truly iniltrate public

space, is the skin of architecture.
Richard Goodwin.

OPENING

If there is a need to continue to return to the city as a site where

the interplay of thought and activity, and forms of innovation are
located, it is, in part, because subjectivity—and here it is tempting
to add ‘modern’ subjectivity—knows nothing else. And yet, the re-
lationship between city and subject cannot be explained in terms
of cause and efect. As though afect were no more than an efect.
Allowing subjectivity to emerge as a question—one that is always
placed—requires the narrative of the city to move beyond mere
description. While cinema and the novel may already know this,
architectural conigurations of the city often remain unmoved.
What has to be allowed therefore is that place and the process of
placing are locations of work. Being is, after all, an activity.
As the city is a site of movement in which interventions and ad-
aptations undo the rigid distinctions deining modern urbanism,
there is a corollary with the subject. The urban body is positioned
and positions. With the body caught in lows that are deined by
the relationship between movement and place, the conventions of
an urbanism that works, not just in terms of deined oppositions
(e.g. public/private, inside/outside, wall/pavement), but does so
prescriptively are undone. (To which it should be added that this
undoing locates the particular place of ‘other’ architectural proj-
ects. Hence the contention always has to be that the conventions of
130
 Fraying Lines 131

urbanism as generally practised, systematically fail to conceive of

the locus of activity—the city—as a site that is inherently dynamic
and afective.) As city spaces are taken over and positioned against
the use envisioned for them; as market places occupy sites (though
only ever on a temporary basis); as the ephemeral and the perma-
nent work together, the borders and lines that deine the city fray.
Lines open. Spaces emerge.
Fraying within the city will work to re-deine public and pri-
vate spaces no longer as a binary opposition or as a matter of de-
gree. The fraying of lines, the loosening of borders mark the im-
plicit porosity of the urban.21 There should, however, be no naïveté
here. The fraying of city—its being rethought in terms of poros-
ity—takes place under the silent though watchful eye of CCTV.
Any attempt to think through the mapping of the city—the latter
is a process that has an inherent plurality due to the difering pos-
sible prompts for such a project—must negotiate the presence of
this eye. If, within the urban, ‘I’ see, there is, in addition, anoth-
er eye that also continues to see. Physical sight will interact with
a virtual one. Site and sight are imbricated. The presence of this
other eye will in the end necessitate a link be established between
fraying and forms of evasion. The continual overlapping of site
and sight, while already a form of mapping dictated as much by
questions of safety as a desire to control, must itself be subjected
to its own form of fraying.

FOUR IMPLICATIONS
Neither given nor merely approached, the city as it igures within
Richard Goodwin’s projects, is a site in which ‘other’ projects be-
come possible. An-other ield is opened up. An urban terrain is
positioned as a site of continual transformation. The principle and
the process of transformation are internal to the site in question.
Invention and intervention—their interconnection—occasioning

21. The term ‘porosity’ is central to Goodwin’s own theorization of many of his
projects. It is term he has used on a number of occasions to deine the conception
of the city at work in a number of his projects. Clearly what follows is indebted
both to that theorization and its related practice. In addition Goodwin has run a
continuous Design Studio on the theme of porosity at the College of Fine Art at-
tached to the University of New South Wales from 2004. Equally, the use of ‘po-
rosity’ is indebted to Walter Benjamin’s text on Naples, one in which ‘porosity’ is
the organizing motif. I have discussed Benjamin’s Naples in detail in my ‘Porosity
at the Edge: Working Through Walter Benjamin’s “Naples”’, Architectural Theory
Review, vol. 10, no. 1, 2005, pp. 33-44.
132 Writing Art and Architecture

transformations occur within an already given place. They are not

imagined as coming from without and projected onto a place yet
to be named. Reconiguring, as opposed to reform, operates by
charging and changing the given. These considerations already
indicate the theoretical dimension implicit in Goodwin’s city proj-
ects. Central to them is that they depend upon the city of Sydney.
And yet, the necessity inherent in the work’s relation to Sydney has
nothing to do with parochialism. The projects implicate Sydney.
Theory and place double the sense of implication. Taken together
they disclose—though only ever as a site of continual interconnec-
tion—four sites of implication.

No Longed for Utopia

In the irst instance what is at work is a stance taken in relation
to the preoccupation art and architecture have to the utopian. If
a city project is utopian, then it posits another place. This posit-
ing cannot, as a consequence, have a transformative efect on the
given. That would only occur, i.e. transformation is only possible,
if the site in question is one in which the future projection, in
being laced in, or threaded through the present, works to trans-
form a site that is itself to be understood as inherently transform-
able. This creates the criteria for judging utopian responses to the
city. To the extent that a project is radically diferentiated from the
present such that it is indiferent to the given, then what is prob-
lematic is not the presentation of the future within an already de-
termined image. On the contrary, such a project is problematic
because it positions the given as both static and thus unable to
generate a place of radical transformation. Within the strictures
of the utopian what cannot be allowed is a conception of the pres-
ent that allows for its own transformation. The limit of utopian
projections therefore—responses on the level of the image—re-
sides in its conception of the given. Contrary to that which is im-
plicit in the project of utopianism, the urban fabric is not static
and is thus always open to interventions. Utopianism obviates the
need to consider this as a possibility. (This state of afairs will
re-emerge in terms of a relationship between Goodwin’s projects
and porosity.)

Sydney
Forced back to the particular, though not to particularity as op-
posed to universality but to the particular as the always determined
 Fraying Lines 133

demand of speciicity, opens the way to Sydney. Sydney is therefore

a particular instance. Recognizing Sydney’s necessity, understood
as the necessity to work though an already given site of transfor-
mation’s continuity, means that a theory of the urban (once theory
is understood, not as descriptive but allowing for the generative)
necessitates a return to concepts such as the regional and the local.
Rather than a generalized conception of place, what has to occur
is the interplay of particularity and the identiication of a given lo-
cality. What this means is that if there is an element in Goodwin’s
work that can be usefully abstracted—and useful abstraction can
be deined as that which in opening up other sites, does so by al-
lowing for the question of application to emerge as one that has to
be resolved rather than as already positioned by a direct connec-
tion between the so-called ‘pure and applied’ let alone inhering in
an already made image. This can only occur if those sites are also
conceived as having been positioned by the relationship between
the particular and the regional.

Modelling Cities
The third implication—allowing for the necessity of points inter-
connection—involves another path through the relationship be-
tween the urban and questions of transformation. The history of
architecture contains forms of mapping that oscillate between
simple descriptions and the creation of utopian visions. Not only
does this occur on the level of mapping, it is also endures in col-
lage and model making. From the incorporation of models of the
City of God into paintings, to the creation of models that posit
nothing less than the possible enactment of a secular utopian vi-
sion, models are an inextricable part of the utopian. While all of
these instances bring with them important diferences—and they
are diferences to which it is essential to be attentive—what each
positions is a completed totality.
The completed future is always other. Even if every detail is
not illed in what deines the vision/model is the intended radi-
cal diferentiation from the city or urban coniguration that is at
hand. While it may seem that the counter position to the utopi-
an vision of the city—a vision and accompanying image that may
harbour the critical—is the acceptance of what is already at hand,
this need not be the case. Were the present to be accepted—taken
as the given with which urbanism is constrained to work, work
and not transform—then such a position would stem from the
134 Writing Art and Architecture

premise that the given can never occasion its own transformation,
or at the very least it would only allow for adaptation and develop-
ment. What characterizes all such positions is that they are ver-
sions of an already present identiication of the urban fabric with
the complet(ed).
The instrumental relationship between the model and com-
pletion opens up at this precise point. (What is true of the model
will also pertain to the drawing.) Completion emerges either as
the image of the future that is given as complete and therefore
the project, the move from model to construction, is to complete
it. Or, it involves the acceptance of the given as already completed.
To the extent that completion, in either sense, is distanced, then
working with a speciic site cannot have a predictable outcome.
Drawing and models are part of a process in which an image is be-
ing worked out rather than having already been given. Such recog-
nition should have an efect not just on planning but on the crite-
ria of judgement that accompanies it.
In sum, Goodwin’s projects are not to be understood as im-
ages of the future which, in virtue of this futurity, could be gen-
eralized and applied without any consideration being given to the
place (and time) of their occurrence to other settings. They are
‘workfull’ interventions into a site—Sydney as an ininite plurality
of sites—that is itself already a locus of continual transformation
and therefore of potentiality. Openings emerge. They do so how-
ever, not because of projections—forcing the future onto the pres-
ent—but through the process of fraying.

Fray
Wool and string fray when the tight line that they create begins
to come undone. Within that line other spaces emerge. Material
frays when its edges begin to open, allowing for the intrusion of
difering elements. If the other possibility within this process can
be deployed—a possibility in which fraying can be held back from
the afray that it might become—then a fray not only introduc-
es movement and dynamism thought as forms of excitement, it
also gestures to the ineliminability of forms of conlict that are
inherent in the urban. Precision is essential here. Conlict is not
war. Fraying need not become the afray. Nonetheless, speed,
power, subjectivity, etc. work within and through sites, construct-
ing them as inherently diferential and complex from the start.
Fraying is an original condition.
 Fraying Lines 135

The question of safety should not involve the homogenization

of sites of fray. Rather, fraying as a condition needs to be made
productive. There is an important critical dimension here. The
intrusion of a wall that is intended to mark a complete division
and thus an absolute separation—whether this be the green line
across Nicosia in Cyprus or the wall attempting to divide Israel
and Palestine—is one that in attempting to eliminate an afray,
does so on the condition of continual policing. A continuity that
invites afray as a possible, though perhaps in the long run as an
inevitable, response. Allowing for fraying therefore does not result
in the destruction of lines, or their passive acceptance. Fraying
marks the introduction—an introduction building on an already
present possibility—of complex spaces. Fraying undoes the hold
of projected singular divisions.
These four implications—implications in the sense that they
are already implied within Goodwin’s projects, implicating the ur-
ban thereby implicating Sydney—create a point of departure. One
that leads to the projects, though it is also one to which the projects
lead. As a beginning therefore there is an already present recon-
ceptualization of the city. The city is positioned henceforth as the
site of movement and is thus able to incorporate other speeds and
difering projects. As has already been indicated the nature of the
incorporation depends upon particularity. Hence it matters that
with Goodwin’s work what is at play is Sydney, or at the very least
a certain version of Sydney. Equally, transformations once under-
stood as experimental and thus are not the imposition of an exter-
nal other—the utopian fantasy—but involve the introduction of
alterity into the given. What matters with this point of departure
(and return) are the projects.

PROJECTS
a) Pyrmont and Cope Street Parasites
Prepositions deine a sense of place. ‘In’, ‘on’, ‘within’, ‘with’ etc.,
all bring relations of place into consideration.22 In addition, they
22. The aim here has been to link a number of diferent projects in order to
identify a theme in Goodwin’s work that involves porosity: the parasite and the
exoskeleton. Having located them it becomes possible to approach them as much
in these terms as it is by reference to fraying, transformation and original plural-
ity. Goodwin’s work forms an important part of an urbanism that maintains crit-
icality while eschewing the utopian. (Where the latter is understood as the cre-
ation of of an already determined image.)
136 Writing Art and Architecture

have aspects of inclusion and exclusion. What deines a number of

them, within the urban, is a connection to a literal surface.23 The
surface may be an exterior wall. It could be an entrance foyer that
divides and separates. It could be the ground ‘outside’ as opposed
to ‘inside’ a building. The latter being a distinction re-enforced,
thus maintained, by the exterior wall (also a surface). Were the
surface no longer to be accepted as a dividing line, then not only
would there be the need to employ a diferent set of prepositions—
e.g. ‘through’ would have joined ‘in’ in order that a more complex
set of spatial relations can be positioned—it would also be the case
that the inherent stasis demanded by the initial coniguration of
the relationship between surface on the one hand and the opposi-
tion interior/exterior on the other hand would need to be reconsid-
ered. The mediating presence of other prepositions indicates a dif-
ferent sense of spacing.
If a line is drawn through a site such that the interior/exte-
rior and thus external and internal surfaces are only maintained
within a system in which they lose their primacy, then fraying
is at work. On a building in Pyrmont, running from the exteri-
or of the building through the glass door and into the entrance
foyer is a ifteen metre long steel sculpture (Pyrmont Parasite).
Running from the inside to the outside and disregarding both
the setting for an external sculptural presence and therefore fray-
ing the absolutization of the distinction between inside and out-
side, the sculpture refuses the building’s surface. The refusal be-
comes the process that the sculpture ‘is’. The sculpture—now as
a line—stages a form of fraying. Drawn through founding op-
positions (e.g. inside/outside) it holds them in place. Nihilism is
not a productive option in this context. However, it does so by es-
chewing the problematic of negation. Here there is another strat-
egy. Alterity is produced and thus has the potential to be produc-
tive. That potential, however, does not lie in the possibility of the
transference of the image. Rather, it inheres in the capacity to ab-
stract the parasite’s dynamic quality and thereby allow the ques-
tion of what parasitism in another context—thus another place—
would entail.

23. Here, I would want to insist on a distinction between literal surfaces and
what I have called elsewhere the ‘surface efect’. The latter deines a surface as
that which delimits spatial enclosure. However, it is not automatically reducible
to the literal surface. See Andrew Benjamin, ‘Surface Efects: Borromini, Semper
Loos’, Journal of Architecture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2006.
 Fraying Lines 137

The Parasite Façade in Cope St Alexandria draws elements of

the Pyrmont Parasite into play while opening up a path leading
to one of Goodwin’s recent and most signiicant works, i.e. the
Parasite Project at 345-363 George St. Even though a small scale
project, what the Cope St Parasite Façade envisages is an architec-
tural intervention that is not deined by the traditional logics of
addition. The intervention, thus the project, will allow for an ad-
dition. And yet, what the parasite stages is an occurrence that is
neither added on, thereby not repeating the original logic of con-
struction, nor is it not present merely as a form of ornamentation.
Given that there is neither a traditional logic of addition nor
one of ornamentation, the parasite works within while at the
same time creating the space opened by the abeyance of these two
modes of organization. The logic of addition necessitates that an
extra element—the addition—is always determined by the organi-
zational system to which it is added. There would need to be both
a formal as well as a visual repetition. The question that arises in
this context—the question situating Goodwin’s project—concerns
the possibility of an addition that is not determined by the orga-
nizational system of the original. To the extent that this is possi-
ble, there is a transformed conception of the original. Instead of
the original having a quality that always dictates the presence of
additions, it can be transformed by that act. Hence, the original
becomes that which was itself transformable from the start. It is
important to note that with this shift in how the original is un-
derstood the quality of the urban—the quality of its already be-
ing a site of transformation—deines the single building. In other
words, the domestic is deined by the urban condition rather than
in opposition to it.
The same question arises with ornamentation. In general, if
there is a logic of ornamentation, then in functional terms it is in-
diferent to that which it ornaments. While such a position is more
complex, for example when it concerns the use of colour in ar-
chitecture, indiference pertains for the most part when function-
al considerations demand spatial presence. Ornamentation and
adornment are inherently indiferent to function’s spatial pres-
ence. While the work of these two logics—addition and ornamen-
tation—will always need to be clariied further, what is evident in
any of Goodwin’s projects is not the negation of these logics, but
their having come undone. Undoing is bound up with fraying. At
Cope St there will be an addition. It will have ornamented and
138 Writing Art and Architecture

yet neither of these processes is explicable in terms of the logic in

which they are traditionally situated. On the other side of nihil-
ism, fraying creates.
In regards to the Cope St Parasite, what is initially undone is
the external wall as that which deines and delimits space within
the overall organization of the building. Again, ornamentation will
not be deined by indiference. Within the project’s own logic the
external wall as a line is not broken. The parasite works through
it. Living on it by contributing to it. Being positioned on it, the par-
asite works by repositioning what counts as the surface, the line
is held and dispersed—frayed—such that while there is a form
of repetition the system that produced the line no longer deines
its presence. Its frayed presence is the result. Neither addition nor
ornamentation, what could have mere refusal and thus destruc-
tive negation becomes other. The other in question is not the pos-
ited alterity of a discursive system but the presence of a spacing—
a transformation of the given—occurring by having released the
potential that was always there in the initial line. The link between
transformation and potential is of central importance.
Lines cannot preclude fraying. What that means in this con-
text is that the ‘parasite’works on, in and through a system whose
very structure and organizational logic is pitted against parasit-
ism, and yet, its actual presence—straight lines, exterior wall,
space conceived in terms of binary oppositions—cannot achieve
this end.

b) Charles St Bridge / The Bond (Hickson Rd)

Even though they are importantly diferent Goodwin’s Charles St
Bridge and his sculptural intervention at The Bond (40 Hickson
Rd Sydney) have an important ainity. If the former is architec-
ture’s relation to sculpture the latter reverses the position. At work
in both however is a relationship between the work of passage and
the work of the body. In both instances bodies move by travers-
ing bridges and walking in and through an urban square. In re-
gards to the latter it becomes urban, not by its literal presence in
the city, but by a sculptural intervention one whose concerns with
balance and spatiality, created through an interplay of materials
as well as the levels and the difering height of the project’s con-
stituent parts, releases the urban’s potential for transformation.
Again there is the distancing of the logic of ornamentation. It is a
distancing that is productive. It produces by transforming place as
 Fraying Lines 139

that which occasions. A space of encounter is disclosed. An open-

ing in the city becomes public and thus other civic spaces emege
in the process. One of the genuine strengths of Goodwin’s projects
is its insistence that public and private are neither given as a sim-
ple opposition nor is space public merely in virtue of its location.
Space has the potential to become public. This works work by ac-
tualizing that potential.
Within the history of philosophy’s engagement with architec-
ture the bridge plays a central role. For Heidegger in ‘Building,
Dwelling, Thinking’, the bridge becomes ‘an example’ of build-
ing.24 Heidegger is uninterested in the bridge’s material presence.
His concern is with what it allows. As an object it ‘initiates the
lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro’ (354). And yet,
for Heidegger these are not mere ‘men’. Rather they are ‘mortals’.
Those who stand before what he terms the ‘divinities’ and are po-
sitioned in relation to ‘earth’ and ‘sky’. The bridge ‘gathers’ (355) all
this together. Moreover, it allows them a ‘site’. This combination—
what Heidegger refers to as the ‘four fold’—deines the original re-
lation that human being has to place. The strength of Heidegger’s
position is that it rids the question of being human of any residual
humanism by allowing whatever it is that is proper to being hu-
man to be always placed. However, the strength of Heidegger’s po-
sition is also its weakness. If human beings encounter place, this
does not occur under the heading of either ‘men’ or ‘mortals’. It oc-
curs in relation to originally complex modes of urban being.
While place is fundamental, the urban understood as a site of
continual transformation in which movement and possibility are
essential, unfolds in relation to embodied beings. Only by assum-
ing the primordiality of embodiment does it then become possi-
ble to allow both for potentiality and transformation—on the level
of subjectivity—to be the site of diferences. These diferences do
not just play themselves out in relation to questions of race, eth-
nicity and gender; they also concern the abled and disabled bod-
ies, the child’s body, the ageing body, etc. Urban bodies are there-
fore never just one.
The complexity of the body or its opposite—the unity of hu-
man being demanding the body’s excision—has its corollary with
the bridge. (The compatibility of structure between the urban
24. In Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. by David Farrell Krell.
Harper, San Francisco, 1993, pp. 343-365. Page references given in the body of
text.
140 Writing Art and Architecture

and the body—complexity on the one hand and Heidegger on the

other—involves the difering ontological conigurations within
which they are positioned. Corollary is not analogy.) Given this
setting, it matters that Heidegger will not discriminate between
bridges. Each will play its part in regard to the relation between
human being and place. What, however, if the bridge’s material
presence were to matter? Not just its materiality in terms of the re-
lationship between suspension and passage as the work of materi-
als, but the more demanding relation between materiality, func-
tionality and afectivity.
Goodwin’s Charles St Bridge demands attention. That de-
mand occurs explicitly in relation to its presence as a bridge. The
twist of bars that construct it hover at a point that allows sculpture
and architecture a point of address. And yet, the project’s pow-
er resides in its being a bridge. Moreover, the appearance of the
bridge refuses the symmetry that deines traversal. Symmetry al-
ready evokes a form of afective neutrality. Here the form demands
a diferent response. What has to be considered with this bridge is
that its afective quality, and thus its presence as a bridge—bridge
as opposed to sculpture—,cannot be separated from its particular-
ity. Once the detail is given the attention it warrants then were it to
become a bridge within the philosophical then it could not be as-
similated to Heidegger’s project. It is not just that its presence mat-
ters—in relation to which it should be noted that its material pres-
ence is its particularity—particularity and materiality in refusing
both generality and the logic of exemplarity such that this bridge
could, qua example, not be substituted for any other, becomes a
repetition of the capacity of place to be transformed. If that is the
case then the capacity for the original relation between human be-
ing and place is also reconigured in the process.
The ground of transformation is the original plurality of place.
In sum, that ground is a fraying that was already there. Hence a
set-up whose potentiality can always be released. A possible occur-
rence that endures precisely because the line cannot eliminate the
interplay of potentiality and fraying. Equally, therefore, on the lev-
el of afectivity and urban being the capacity for transformation—
a position deined, once again, in terms of potentiality—assumed
an original complexity in relation to human being. An ontology of
original complexity is at work. (Neither place nor subjectivity are
settled—let alone settled once and for all.) As such neither ‘mor-
tals’ nor ‘men’ are involved in forms of traversal. Bridges have the
 Fraying Lines 141

capacity to allow for original sites of diference to be present. In

this instance, matter makes such a demand.

c) 345-363 George St. Parasite

Rather than working through the opposition between the inside
and the outside—working through it by fraying the line that held
the division in place—the parasite in this instance begins to occu-
py spaces within buildings that allow for fraying as much as inven-
tion. Working its way through at least two existing buildings—a
working through that attests to porosity as an original condition—
and the streets and lane ways running between them, the para-
site colonizes spaces and in so doing transforms them. Here is in-
vention post facto. This project will deploy created walkways and
thus manufactured architectural interventions as much as it will
use the already manufactured (the ready made/found objects etc.)
to create spaces. The combination of the two senses of manufac-
ture brings together difering elements of Goodwin’s work. The
use and reworking of the ready-made recalls the sculptural and
urban projects linked by the term ‘Exoskeleton’. (A term central
to Goodwin’s own critical vocabulary.) The entry into pre-exiting
buildings is a theme that has already been noted.
What is signiicant in this project is not just the projected
scale—though scale cannot simply pass unnoticed—but the fact
that as the parasite intrudes into the building, spaces that were
hidden are opened up. Spaces that were private begin to take on
a public quality. Layers and depths within existing spaces are ei-
ther grouped or individuated. A new logic of construction operates
with and against—and it is important to note that it is both—the
prevailing ones. However, Goodwin is not ofering a simple draw-
ing project, as though the benign act of redrawing in order to dis-
cover what had not been noted before carried with it a potential to
transform. Such projects often do no more than maintain existing
lines and then draw through and around them. Discovery within
such a practice remains oblivious to fraying’s original potential-
ity and the possibility of its release. Goodwin’s project will not be
content with drawing. Nonetheless, with this project the parasite’s
materiality, its combination of the created and the found opens
this project up beyond the conines of drawing and representation.
The parasite works through buildings. What were initially sep-
arated, are joined. The connected allow for forms of separation.
This does not work on only one level. It carries up through the
142 Writing Art and Architecture

buildings. The parasite works its way up, through and across ive
loors. What is taking place can only be understood if it is posi-
tioned in relation to the assumption that the location of borders
has already been established and the edges—e.g. the points of dif-
ferentiation between buildings or between roads and buildings—
are given. This parasite refuses that sense of the given. This re-
fusal occurs as a result of the recreation of another urban terrain.
However, it is not just the recreation of the given. More signii-
cantly it is the creation from the given of connections, divisions,
spaces, etc., that could only have come into existence because of
the parasite’s productive presence. (It should be remembered that
the parasite frays; it neither adds nor ornaments.) The parasite cre-
ates. It does so by undoing and transforming—thus fraying—the
edges, lines, borders of an original setting. A procedure which, as
has already been argued, is itself only possible because the urban
has been reconigured, within Goodwin’s detailed study and cre-
ation of projects, as that which occasions and allows for transfor-
mation. Fraying cannot have a limit because what frays are limits.
THERE IN THE VANISHING
Notes on Elizabeth Presa’s Moon Water

There in the vanishing. Not there however, as a trace of a mark left

once, as though it were a mere imprint. What is left once may an-
nounce no more than a simple passage. The mark of an immedi-
ate moment. Left once. Imprints that mark the singular moment
will start to gather other elements to them. They come to be illed
such that what is there is not the vanishing but an absence hav-
ing been replaced. Filled in, literally. Vanishing however, is some-
thing else. What is there, there in the vanishing, has a diferent
status, a diferent quality and as such its relationship to presenta-
tion is signiicantly altered. Any approach to this diferent qual-
ity has to begin with vanishing. (As a beginning the ostensible
concern of this sculptural work—Moon Water—is vanishing.) Not
with absence as though a melancholic hold takes over the question
of presentation. In addition, any concern with vanishing cannot
be restricted by a posited return to forms of plenitude, as though
vanishing gestures at its being overcome. An overcoming linked
as much to a philosophy of art as to a conception of the work of
art. The possibilities—absence and presence—are unable to de-
ine vanishing. It was of course this very supposition that has al-
ready been registered by holding to the possibility that what there
is, is there in the vanishing.
If there is a way into this possibility then it does not lie in re-
working the interplay of absence and presence. Rather, the pos-
sibility lies in the formulation itself. As a beginning there is the
following question—how is the relationship between ‘there’ and
‘vanishing’ to be understood? (The question for art is if course how
is that relation to be presented?) Answering both—the irst a dis-
cursive claim while the second brings the ineliminable presence
143
144 Writing Art and Architecture

of material into play—starts with the recognition that ‘vanishing’

marks process. Once centrality is given to process this allows the
question of vanishing to take on diferent forms. What needs to be
taken up is what it would mean not just for there to be that which
is there in the vanishing—even if the process is understood as re-
sulting in the state of ‘having vanished’—the signiicant question,
now, is how does the process—the process of vanishing, one hold-
ing in play a ‘there is’ quality—allow for presentation and thus
art’s work?
Questions should not summon the work of art. Were this to be
the case then any philosophical concern with art’s work would be
reduced to the latter’s inclusion as mere example. If there is a de-
mand to be made then its register is diferent. Art’s work makes
demands. Responding is to act responsibly. Enacting a responsi-
bility to art. At the same time, of course, such a response is itself
that which is responsible for art.
At work here—a work whose description must note the pres-
ence of photographs, mirrors and sculptural form—is a project
deined by a sense of passage. No matter how that sense is under-
stood—and in this instance ‘passage’ can signal the movement
to form as much as any more speciic and thus individualized
sense—the work’s most demanding quality is the nature of the re-
lationship it envisages to sculpture’s own relation to the interplay
of materiality and form. An interplay always realized in terms of a
becoming determinant. And yet, it is not as though there is a sin-
gle question that can deine sculpture’s relation to form creation.
The history of sculpture could be formulated such that it divides
as much between a concern with ostensible subject matter (i.e.
with the work’s meaning) as between one deined by the difering
ways form creation occurs. Any concern with form that grounds it
in the use of materials while at the same time linking it to the pro-
cess of becoming form begins to deine the sculptural beyond the
hold of idealism. The efect of idealism is that it either precludes a
concern with matter (often by repositioning it in terms of matter’s
idealization), or which subjugates form such that it is then taken
to be no more than the expression of a dominant Idea. The sculp-
tural elements in Moon Water operate in a radically diferent way.
Their break with idealism can be located in the way material pres-
ence—form—is created. The process by which jellyish covered in
plaster registers a presence does not occur by providing the form
as though all that is at work is their imprint. The contrary is the
 There in the Vanishing 145

case. Form emerges, as does the luminescent coating given to the

individual works, with their vanishing. Form occurs—it should be
possible to begin to establish a relationship between process and
form as an event—as a result of vanishing.
Who then creates? The question of creativity is not intended
to open up the problem of intentionality. It is clear that Elizabeth
Presa’s hand is at work. Rather, what is raised by the question of
creation is the temporal direction of form creation. That temporal-
ity is also played out in the other elements that comprise the in-
stallation. The inclusion of mirrors whose tain has faded to such
a point that the visual and temporal immediacy demanded by the
operation of the mirror is no longer operative, also works to com-
plicate time. What becomes complicated is the possibility that the
immediacy, which comes to have its correlate in an understand-
ing of a simple continuity of construction, constitutes, perhaps
constructs, the work. Rather than the sculpture appearing from
stone, wood, etc., where the material is the point of origination
that is in some sense prior to sculptural presence even if it is re-
tained as part of that presence such that there is an apparent slide
from matter to its sculptured form—a sculptural gesture that lit-
eralizes matter by trapping it within a logic of production struc-
tured by temporal continuity—with the constitutive elements of
Moon Water form emerges neither from extension nor contraction
but from vanishing.
Vanishing has at least two registers. In the irst instance it is
inextricably bound up with the way the plaster and gauze models
acquire form and take on texture. Linked to this register are the
mirrors whose power of relection is retained in the tain’s vanish-
ing. Vanishing registers a trace precisely because it is a process.
Processes admit of degrees. Vanishing is linked to a logic of pro-
duction as much as it is to material presence. The other register is
equally concerned with the presence of matter. Nonetheless, van-
ishing is now more directly concerned with the relationship be-
tween matter and time. Time not, however, as the abstract quality
within which matter can be both said to exist and thus experi-
enced. The temporality in question is the operation of time as part
of matter’s work and therefore as part of the work of art. Rather,
than occurring in time, the temporality of the object is integral to
the operative quality of a work. What this means is that the rela-
tionship between time and matter—the temporality of a material
presence deined by vanishing—is articulated within the object’s
146 Writing Art and Architecture

presentation. Presentation is not deined by the simple existence

of an object. What is of concern is the presentation of art work.
Presentation, or more accurately the event of form, is that
which becomes determinant—becoming through vanishing.
Locating this process within material, delimiting it therefore in
terms of an account of matter’s becoming present, is to allow the
object’s material presence to be positioned beyond the hold of im-
mediacy. Immediacy, understood as a temporal term identiies a
speciic moment. That which occurs immediately can be under-
stood as taking place in the ‘now’ of its happening. What occurs
does so immediately. Immediacy and vanishing—punctum and
process—cannot be assimilated to each other. Moreover, vanish-
ing is not a moment within a process. The elements that comprise
Moon Water hold out against immediacy. They do so through the
event of form.
Matter and time are given a diferent coniguration. Once the
object’s presence is taken into consideration—and this is a consid-
eration whose quality acquires a necessary insistence because of
the nature of an installation—then what is being presented is the
process by the which the object becomes form. Here an array of
objects is present. With their presence there is the event of form.
Form occurs because vanishing is allowed to work and thus to be-
come the work. What is there is so, as the vanishing.
32. Terri Bird, Recycling Fictions of Being, recycled plastic panels, 2002.

33. Terri Bird, Recycling Fictions of Being, recycled plastic panels, 2002.
34. Richard Goodwin, Parasite Actions: Monkey Model 06.

35. Richard Goodwin, Bond Street Parasite.

36. Richard Goodwin, Parasite Façade in Cope St Alexandria.

37. Richard Goodwin, Pyrmont Parasite.

38-39. Elizabeth Presa, Moon Water, Jelly fish, plaster, gauze, salt water, mirrors, 8m x 9m, 2005.
WRITING
SEEING FLORENCE

What is Florence’s name? What is named by Florence? These

question point to the complex relationship that pertains between
translation and place in the irst instance and then experience and
place in the second. Moreover, the question of experience is al-
ready mediated by an economy of images that provides any origi-
nal experience—the often craved irst experience—with a sense
of déjà vu. The question remains, is it possible to begin either
writing or experience with the words, ‘What I see, what I see.’
(As Joseph Roth did his 1921 essay on walking.) And then con-
tinue with a description. As if seeing and reporting were simply
there. Both having the status of unclouded and unproblematic ac-
tivities. Seeing and describing working together in the creation of
an experiential mapping of the seen. The city woven within sight
and description. If anything were to check this slide from view to
words then it would be the already present intrusion of the image
into experience itself.
In his famous story A Little Ramble, the title here is all, Robert
Walser inished with these words: ‘I encountered a few carts, oth-
erwise nothing, and I had seen some children on the highway. We
don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so
much’. Walser wrote this words in 1914. Prior to the First World
War and thus prior to the moment in which experience would be-
gin to be accompanied not just by images but images that had the
same timed sequence as experience. Moreover, they were on pub-
lic display. The horror of the war and its efect on experience can-
not be separated from its re-presentation, at the time, and then
subsequently, within images. Images not only took the place of ex-
perience they allowed for it. Walser’s words today are simply naïve.
What has happened both to experience as well as to the pervasive
155
156 Writing Art and Architecture

hold of images means that despite the desire for both simplicity
and originality, neither is possible. We have simply seen too much.
And yet a longing is harboured. Something could remain.
There may be a reality, part of city, a view, a corner caught at sun-
set, holding open in the moments of its passing a remnant of expe-
rience that no matter how leeting might be thought to be authen-
tic. What is longed for is that which has as not already been either
transformed or consumed. A longing already dashed in advance.

From the Duomo to San Lorenzo is a short walk. The approach

via Borgo San Lorenzo takes minutes. As for the Chapel, Manetti
inishing Brunelleschi’s original plans allows a thought of the
Duomo to be carried down one street prior to an opening in which
the organization of space has a type of familiarity. Proceeding
from the Church through Palazzo Mannelli-Ricardi, it is again a
short distance to the market: the Mercato Centrale. The impres-
sive nineteenth century building designed by Mengoni and built
in 1874 was a place that deined the city’s internal life. The im-
portation of food, its consumption and then exportation as waste
chart the history of any city. As a complex cycle of activity it accom-
panies the city’s political and cultural development. Moreover, not-
ing the transformation of the market is to note the city’s transfor-
mation. What occurs is neither intentional nor planned.
To the extent that the name Florence names a set of possi-
ble experiences, some of which will have already occurred prior
to any entry into the city, (this will, of course, be true for any of
the names that Florence has) the continual multiplication of the
name keeps returning in forms of singular events. The market
continues to refer to a past in which the provision of meat, ish,
fruit and vegetables kept the market open as a popular site. As
times changed diferent economies were at work. What marks
that change is not the market, it remains open, but the reorienta-
tion of the popular. In lieu of a conception of the popular deined
by residents and internal needs, there is a conception in which
the dependence of the internal economy on tourists and thus on
the provision of a service industry has meant a transformation in
what the market sells. There are still remnants of the market that
still serve the residential population. Stalls that are a reminder of
that other sense of the popular. While the supermarket usurps the
 Seeing Florence 157

market, the Mercato Centrale begins to sell more ornate forms of

pasta. The olive oil is ready packaged for a trip back to Baltimore
or Kyoto rather than to the Borgo Pinti.

The packaging of Florence, of its ‘treasures’ and thus of that which

has been left behind and from which a certain present is creat-
ed have been taken over by a version of the international. It is as
though whatever Florence may be it is ‘our’ concern. There is of
course a truth in this. Restoration and conservation are not done
for the inhabitants. Such projects are done for ‘us’. Conservation’s
prevailing ideology is that what is conserved is the work’s eternal
quality. The eternal has been saved to sure up a speciic naming.
The naming in which were it not for ‘us’ our Florence would have
been lost. While outside, this ‘us’ grants itself the status of an au-
thentic concern with Florence, a concern not thought to be evi-
denced necessarily by the Florentines themselves.
The whir of cameras and voices, groups assemble and are then
held after the simulated click of the digital camera marks the im-
age’s creation. Image upon image, groups created to be displayed.
Equally, art, no longer a silent site of contemplation, let alone the
locus of discovery, provides the points that deine groups. Places of
visit and instruction create and recreate images of Florence that are
folded into the visit. Folding into it and beginning to deine the city
since they will have already provided it with its measure. Post cards
and photos capture sculptures and painting. They are all reduced to
a manageable size such that material presence will have been sub-
dued and whatever chance a work may have had to overwhelm, will
have already been expunged with the image’s creation. Experience,
to the extent that it accepts the already given, has become unthink-
able without an accompanying image. And yet, precisely because
of the memory that material presence occasions—think of Cellini’s
Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi—the image will always disappoint.
Materiality can only give rise to a form of melancholia.

The railways station—Statzione di Santa Maria Novella—de-

signed by the Gruppo Toscano stages the complex relationship be-
tween modernism and fascism. Not only was the orginal design
158 Writing Art and Architecture

for the station approved by Mussolini, Florence’s Jews were deport-

ed from it. Today, as leading members of Italy’s ruling elite revisit
that past in order to mute its complications—fascists become pa-
triots—Florence continues to be visited by those for whom history
remains uncertain. While it is possible to experience the station
as no more than a site of entry the question of its past efaced by
its meld into Florence as an already experienced event created and
recreated through images, there is the possibility that this other
presence will be able to insist. If this were to occur it would involve
the possibility of another mark and thus another naming.

Experience is always limited by expectation. Expectation has its

contemporary form in images that allow for while they accompany
experience. The name ‘Florence’ consist therefore of that structure
of expectation. Expectation means that there is an already present
form of knowledge. ‘We’ know how to experience Florence. What
has already occurred will continue. It is of course at this precise
point that there is an opening. The opening does not reveal the au-
thentic as opposed to the already present. It is not as though there
are actual moments that have been kept away and remain the true
vestiges of an authentic past. What counters the structure of ex-
pectation is not the authentic but that which undoes the structure
itself. Moments, marks, signs even events that refuse the setting
of the already experienced. While they need not be remarkable in
themselves what they introduce are forms incredulity. Aesthetic
moments that charge sites whilst diminishing the hold of others.
An introduction of a political sensibility that reintroduces the com-
plex interplay of power and the present by charging the present in a
way that refuses the blanketing efect of an already experienced and
thus already deadened now. The result would be that ‘we’ no longer
knew. In not knowing, Florence would begin to name other possi-
bilities. While such a description might obtain for all cities the way
this possibility occurs will always be speciic. It may be therefore
that seeing, perhaps writing, would low from this not knowing.
PLACE

* Place while given is never just given. More is in place. More will
have always been in place.

* Writing about a place—any place—will necessitate that the place

be identiied, that it be located and thus that it be placed. Each of
these moments is an activity; identifying, placing, locating. As ac-
tivities, as that which is undertaken, they bring with them the ine-
liminable mark of mediation. How then is this mediation to be
understood? What would be involved in any attempt to position
locating, placing, identifying? The question of positioning as with
that of understanding are made more diicult by the fact that the
activities are thought either to have been spontaneous or simply to
work with the given. Mediation is denied by the feint of innocence.
Once this position is shown to harbour a complexity that will belie
any innocence—rendering that innocence merely putative—how
then are these acts to be understood?

* If there is change, if moving from one to the other—from inno-

cence to complexity—is not a just a moving forward but a moving
back allowing for a possible future what will the time of this move-
ment be? What type of work will have been undertaken?

* With the question—and this will be true of questioning as an

activity—what is brought to bear upon that activity is the actual
process that it seeks to identify. Not the answer but the process/ac-
tivity itself. What is the place of questioning? What is placed by it?

* Even with the question place insists.

159
160 Writing Art and Architecture

* Developing place must be speciic; sites will always be speciic.

And yet speciicity is not just the evocation of this place, the pos-
iting of an already given geography; this place as opposed to that
place. Speciicity pertains to that which will always be involved
in the thinking of place, of the location of a site. What comes to
be given are the predetermined sites of meaning; corner, room,
building, street, city, region, nation.

* With the given—the predetermined present—there are the nec-

essary and important imposition of relations. Positions captured
and held by the play of prepositions; in, by, between, with, etc. Part
of that play will be an already present implication; one will always
be with another.

* What is it to question the given? What is the place of such a ques-

tioning? Answering will hinge on the gift and the work of its inex-
orable logic. With the gift and its impossible refusal the temporal-
ity of tradition is brought into play.

* Here in lieu of place as simple, place will need to be taken with

its necessary interconnection with space. What is at work with the
incorporation of space cannot be accounted for in terms of a sim-
ple addition. Space has not been added on. It is neither emblem
nor ornament but brings with it the attempt—albeit a halting ini-
tial attempt—to signal the already present work of complexity.

* With complexity there will be the question of its own under-

standing. What will it mean to open up complexity? What will have
been there?

* Once complexity comes to insist as a question then the answers

that are already given will begin to lose their hold. What had been
held in place prior to the opening allowed by the question is the in-
corporation of complexity into a schema that locate it in opposition
to the simple (the axiom, the simple particular, etc.) such that the
speciicity of complexity lay in its being an amalgam of simples.
Complexity became no more than the consequence of the process
of addition. Process here will be a simple movement that admits
of regress. The supposition would be therefore that complexity can
be reduced to it founding simples. What had been built is able
to be broken down and then rebuilt. At work within this already
 Place 161

structured presence is the possibility of a simple beginning. Here

simplicity will take on the guise of innocence and, as with inno-
cence, what will have been disguised is the insistent presence of
a founding complexity; in other words a set up that is ab initio
complex.

* Complexity will have started to admit of its own founding

complexity.

* The interplay of space and place will have to allow for a complex
geography. Once geography has to maintain complexity then the
standard place allocated to geometry may have to change. With it
time will have to be reworked. The temporality of progress and re-
gress will no longer pertain—other time holds sway.

* With any jumble of possibilities speed—the nature of speed, the

right of speed—must be taken up. Movement from one position to
the next; abandoning one understanding to take up another; un-
doing a speciic link to allow for another, all these undertakings—
undertakings that bring with them an inevitable necessity, espe-
cially in their formulation—cannot just happen. Positing brings
with it an inescapable foundering.

* Allowing for speed—the right speed coupled to the actual possi-

bility of movement—returns insisting considerations.

* With speed, with the possibility of the orchestration of a move-

ment the inherent complexity—its inhering as an originally pres-
ent—will emerge.

* What is there, will have been there, is the site of an intrusion.

The intruder is neither enemy nor friend. Intrusion marks the
presence of a primordial relation that will always defy simplicity.

* Who intrudes? Whose intruder? What is it to live with intrusion?

* Intrusion places the gift. The gift intrudes. Intrusion cannot be

refused. With this presence there is more than one. And yet there
cannot be just two. At work here is that which exceeds addition.

* Intruding by becoming the given creates place. The more than

162 Writing Art and Architecture

one that was always more than one will come to deine the nature
of place. Being more it allows for relation. In allowing it, it spaces.

* Spacing becomes the site of the more than one.

ON/WITHIN

* On what will it be written? Within what domain and thus what

place will that which is written give itself over to an understand-
ing; as a gift even to its own understanding? A self-giving opening
opened up by refusing the possibility of any original singularity.
Denying by re-fusing it a place (in place) and thus allowing for an-
other fusing. Another place turning the singular back upon itself
and with it inscribing it in a complexity from which it cannot hold
itself apart since it will always have been a part of it. Within the
inseparability of apart/a part there is that which grounds any sin-
gularity. The singularity is the other gift, always given après coup.

* Within this opening there are questions and positions that turn
around the temporal distinction between singularity and plurality.
In holding the distinction as temporal and thus allowing existence
(maintained as a diferential ontology), this holding as allowing
opens up the surface by demanding that it be given another depth.

* Within it, on it, it is given space and thus a place however both
take place in time. The time in question is not an addition. It does
not add to existence as though it were present as a mere ornament.
Time inheres in any thought of existence and with any instantia-
tion. Presence does not just occur in time, presence is as the oc-
currence of time. Time’s presentation. What will have to be re-
tained—maintained throughout—is the already complex nature
of any presentation. In retaining what must be held open is the
diiculty of thinking this complexity.

* Within writing, within its initial presentation, a reductive and

simple presentation, writing could be taken as being that which
163
164 Writing Art and Architecture

is placed on. With it therefore there is that taking and placing that
tradition has for writing. Held for it. Writing as always writing on.
On internality, a topi; an already existent place for its occurrence.
The latter is that on which the writing is. Its being—the ‘is’—
leads writing to the surface and thus as only ever supericial; of the
surface, supericies supericialis.

* Within writing what emerges is the place of its own enactment.

With what is maintained, within it though not reducible to it, is
the language of surface and depth, of form and function, of in-
formation and poetry, of statement and ornament, etc. What is
held up, buttressed, therefore is the site of a language of construc-
tion and efectuation. In thinking through this site what will arise
within it is the ineliminable presence of conlict; the conlicting
logics of construction. They are written with a writing that will
bear out conlict’s primordality and as such these writings de-
mand a thinking of both construction and efectuation which in
resisting the attribution of the essence (Wesen)—and with it es-
sential thinking, even a putative redemption of the essence—ne-
cessitates taking up these conlicting possibilities. In distancing
the essence, in holding to conlict, a politics of construction—a
construction that will still allow for writing as itself conlictual—
comes to be housed.

* On the writing there will always turn another type of adventure,

a diferent eventuality, another coming-to-be, which itself will al-
ready have turned back upon itself, thereby turning back any sim-
ple ‘itself’ thus causing that change that alters the becoming and
which left it—the writing—no longer an inscription. Neither on it,
nor with it, this not really within it, but as it, as writing itself; the
primordially present active within substance.

* On a turning, which, in already being present, airms the ine-

liminable necessity and with it the anoriginal presence of dou-
bling there must be another writing. Its possibility demanding an-
other alterity. Demanding equally to be built upon.

* On and within a writing coming to its own by being a com-

plex inscription—inscribing time within space, holding spaced
time—that in being the only hold of any singularity, is at the same
time the only possible place of its inscription. Singularity’s own
 On/Within 165

opening. Writing’s own—that to which writing must own up—is

a plurality and thus a complexity that can never be disowned.

* Within this writing the extending range of time must continue

to be noted, noting thereby the already present inscription. Time
remains always iguring within any productive logic.

* On time what will always remain to be added is that any addi-

tion will demand to be thought within that construal of addition
as complexity where the later demands to be understood as what
has already been subject to—here the subject of—that which the
term names. What will always need to be taken up, therefore, is
complexity’s own complexity.

* Within any given term, any apparent simplicity must igure an

original complexity. An already present complexity prior either to
addition or singularity.

* On the surface there will not have been any addition since the
surface, in being recast, is no longer a simple face on which in-
scriptions, additions, supplements, etc., are placed, in order then
to be taken as an adjunct; a joining marked out as secondary. With
the dispersal of the surface another logic is demanded, enacted
within a diferent production. The diiculty is that any dispersal
of the traditional presentation of the surface and therefore of writ-
ing as that which igures on surfaces, in part declaring them to be
surfaces, is that it will have to maintain, again at the same time,
what is given, and therefore what is presented as marking out the
surface, what marks it is the presence of a face, a sur-face.

* Within time, thus at the moment that the surface is taken as ef-
faced it must also, at the same time—a time already complex be-
cause of its harboured and maintained plurality—occasion that
doubling that moves the simple oppositions between surface and
depth or writing and content back from the posited—thus tradi-
tional—centrality. Again the same that resists any reduction to it-
self. Marking thereby the abeyance of the same-as-itself.

* On what is given by tradition—a gift that will always already

have been given—it will never be a question of either subtraction
(denial, disavowal, repression, etc.). Refusing is always a form of
166 Writing Art and Architecture

acceptance. Change as alteration cannot but maintain a repetition

of the Same. Ornamentation will involve another setting and thus
its incorporation into a diferent logic.

* On, once taken as a designated setting, on here rather than there

and thus, as ‘on’ being the apparent provision of any setting, it
follows that the word ‘on’ will itself therefore have to be taken as
presupposing a site, or as a positioning prior either to another po-
sitioning or another placing. With these possibilities it—’on’—
marks out a type of pre-position that is already positioned. This
complex site working within that complex disavowing reduction
positions it as the site on which there is writing, on which there is
ornamentation, on which the decoration.

* On within doubles, since within what is marked out as being

‘on’, or indeed of being ‘in’, there will be the automatic efacing of
a reduction that holds the distinction between surface and depth
in place. Replacing becomes a form of repetition that holds open
the possibility of a redemption working beyond the dominance of
the same.

* On any surface there is a decoration. Even if it were functional

any ornament is to be found on the building. And yet the question
that must endure, the one that is still left is the relation between
this on and that which takes place within? With this question writ-
ing and the surface, with their designations given by their own
traditional formulations can be taken to occupy the same space.
Occupying it at the same time. As such the same open and re-
opens—opening any positing of an initial and singular time—
allowing in the opening an instantiation with which the same is
no longer able to remain the same as its self. (It is of course that
this position was always there, present as a potentiality.) There has
to be therefore another possibility for the same. A possibility that
cannot be the same.

* On, taken as that which brings the surface and in bringing it

brings depth will ind its position incorporated within a logic that
always works within and in so doing generates the surface, etc. On
will have ceded its place to within. In giving that place away it will
come to be repositioned. What will never be lost is the possibility
of holding on. And yet with it, in holding on, it must be positioned
 On/Within 167

beyond its place within the oppositions that cannot be held on and
thus can no longer be allowed to hold.

* On igures within, with in. Harboured within another logic. Not

the logic that is to be taken as working within—if that is taken to
be simple opposition to the surface—it is rather another logic one
working within, working the within; in other words that which
comprises within’s work.

* On the end, no matter how arbitrary, what can never be elimi-

nated is its future enactment, another repetition. Repeating on.

* On repetition what can never be excluded is a inality marked

out as on the end.

* On however, that which is marked out as being on, can only be

maintained if it is incorporated within that logic—within’s work—
in which it will emerge as the always present singular. A singular
that is necessarily secondary and in being secondary is secured as
part of that logic that in taking place within constructs the whole.
40. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 1, 2008.
41. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 2, 2008. 42. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 3, 2008.

43. Andrew Benjamin, Seeing Florence 4, 2008.

philosophy/aesthetics

In his new book, the eminent philosopher Andrew Benjamin turns his
attention to architecture, design, sculpture, painting and writing. Draw-
ing predominantly on a European tradition of modern philosophical
criticism running from the German Romantics through Walter Benjamin
and beyond, he ofers a sequence of strong meditations on a diverse en-
semble of works and themes: on the library and the house, on architec-
tural theory, on Rachel Whiteread, Peter Eisenman, Anselm Kiefer, Peter
Nielson, David Hawley, Terri Bird, Elizabeth Presa and others.

In Benjamin’s hands, criticism is bound up with judgment. Objects

of criticism always become more than mere documents. These essays
dissolve the prejudices that have determined our relation to aesthetic
objects and to thought, releasing in their very care and attentiveness
to the ‘objects themselves’ the unexpected potentialities such objects
harbour. In his sensitivity to what he calls ‘the particularity of material
events’, Benjamin’s writing comes to exemplify new possibilities for the
contemporary practice of criticism itself.

These essays are a major contribution to critical thought about art and
architecture today, and a genuine work of what Benjamin himself identi-
ies as a ‘materialist aesthetics’.

Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical

Aesthetics at Monash University where he is also Director of the
Research Unit in European Philosophy. His most recent books are
Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (North Western
University Press, 2006), Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh University
Press, 2010) and Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental
Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks (Continuum 2010).

Cover Image: Terroir, Prague Library competition entry, 2007

(www.terroir.com.au).

www.re-press.org ISBN 978-0-9806683-6-0

re.press