Like a small photograph - Peter Behrens

“Art is the performance of the cosmic drama in which by means of pictures as symbols the cosmic event is shown in deep convincing acts. The cosmic story, the cosmic drama, the cosmic statue, the cosmic painting, the cosmic building, in short, the harmony, the whole cosmos put together in one aspect, like a small photograph which shows the whole scene.”

J.L.M. Lauweriks, Het nut en doel der kunst, in Theosophia, 1907
Quoted in and translated by F.G. Evelein, “‘Pure Theosophical art.’ cosmogenesis, cosmic consciousness and evolution.” 

Paper presented at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting, April 1996, via Susan R. Henderson 

Peter Behrens - Crematorium - Hagen - 1906/1907

Peter Behrens - Crematorium - Hagen - 1906/1907

Peter Behrens - Crematorium - Hagen - 1906/1907

To control and shape the entire social arena - Constant Nieuwenhuys

“Architecture exists only to control and shape the entire social arena. 

It is constituted by this impulse propelling it to erect itself as the center 

and to organize all activities around itself.”

Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, 1974

Guy Debord and the Situationist International shared, with others of the sixties characteristic attempts at realizing a Utopian praxis, an interest in reforming the human experience in it's totality. The sheer ambition of the project endowed their sometimes vague ideology with a visionary and sometimes nearly mystique quality, where the re-constructed, post-revolutionary world they prophesied had become so foreign to our contemporary alienated consciousness, that only abstract and poetic descriptions could be achieved.

Žižek famously claims in the 2005 eponymous documentary that is is more difficult to imagine the end of all life, than it is to picture the end of capitalism. This no doubt never stopped several generations of thinkers on the left, before and after Debord, to attempt at picturing what the reformed reality would be like: Adorno and Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, find the re-enchantment of the world to be a process overlapping with the Marxist struggle but also, historically, straying from the stalwart historical materialist and the dominant modernist narratives that often presided to the leftist politics.

And indeed the sixties would-be revolutionaries learned the Frankfurt School's lesson well: all power was now to be given to the imagination rather than the soviet, a slogan, like many in those days, that made use of concepts and terminology vague enough to accommodate the increasing diversity of an atomized and bourgeois radical milieu. Yet, if preference was given to an inclusive praxis over a perceived dogmatic theory, the alleged leaders of the movement, and among them the situationists, did not loose the opportunity to perpetuate the speculative tradition, albeit with a timely twist.

Guy Debord - The Naked City - 1958

"When man plays he must intermingle with things and people in a similarly uninvolved and light fashion. He must do something which he has chosen to do without being compelled by urgent interests or impelled by strong passion; he must feel entertained and free of any fear or hope of serious consequences. He is on vacation from social and economic reality – or, as is most commonly emphasized: he does not work."

Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950

Psychogeography and other elements of their philosophy mark a clear rejection of the productivist, disciplined and intrinsically teleological spirit of orthodox Marxist thought, leaving only untouched (alongside with the authority of Debord...) the revolution itself, as an eerie absolute, largely bared from it's economic and class-based mechanics.

One of the models inspiring the situationists for this reconstruction of social relationships was to be found in the work of Johann Huizinga, a cultural historian who penned a landmark work in the field of game studies entitled Homo Ludens (1938) - Huizinga, like other radicals of his generation, attached himself to producing a discreet critique of the rational and mechanized way of life promoted by modernity, but the alternative, the model of social interaction against which he contrasted the alienated condition of the XXth century man was the model of the game.

Much could be said - and has been said - of the mindset fueling this pervasive and virtually indefinable activity that is play: Wittgenstein famously asserted that games, much like words, cannot be defined as such and only hold a "family resemblance" between themselves. An interesting attempt at separating the ludic activity from the quotidian, more recently, is to be found in Michael J. Apter's psychological reversal theory and it's opposition between telic (purpose oriented) and paratelic (process oriented) activities.
From this, inferring how a society based on those principles would function might prove more difficult.

Constant Nieuwenhuys - New Babylon - 1963

"Play is free movement within a more rigid structure."

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, 

Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals, 2003

Debord himself, acknowledging the importance of Huizinga and of games in general, will develop in 1977 a game of his own, "The Game of War", a lucky mixture of the long tradition of wargames and simulations, and of the more accessible variations on chess. The tokens could easily accommodate the archetypes of strategy and military theory he had been reading eagerly. And maybe the checkerboard proved a more welcoming support for the war he had been waging not unsuccessfully in the compromised realm of artist, student and worker politics some ten years earlier.

One of Debord's early collaborators, Constant Nieuwenhuys, who was to leave their increasingly politicized situationist milieu in the early sixties, embarked on an ambitious project of creating an alternative reality - a gigantic, all-encompassing project of semi-abstract urbanism, somewhat akin to other sixties, unapologetically utopian, "paper" architecture as presented by Archizoom, Haus-Rucker-Co, or recent Turner Prize nominee Paul Noble.

The New Babylon, as he titled it, he envisioned for all of the fifteen years he spent working on the project as a world-spanning city designed for the new modes of living that were to arise after the downfall of capitalism in the world, and more importantly, in the minds. The city as metaphor for political organization has of course a long ancestry, from Thomas More to St Augustine, but the peculiar approach artists have taken on those questions differentiate it radically from the mere ideological illustration: in the space of fifteen years of work, someone like Nieuwenhuys (or Noble) has not only time to develop individual, self-standing artworks, but also to extend, and enmesh or coordinate their respective mythologies to create a total framework. The choice of the urbanistic model for the construction of a grand-narrative likely reflect a will to evidence, in the inevitable variety of the artist production, a structure and a meaning, that could transcend the limited scope of the particular artwork to reflect the author's life-as-art.

Black Dog Publishing has an excellent book A User's Guide: The Situationist International by Simon Ford if you would like to read more on the situationist ideology

Constant Nieuwenhuys - New Babylon - 1963

"If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement."

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Swayer, 1876

The principles governing to the organization of New Babylon's modular megastructures and of it's imagined inhabitants reflect the peculiar world-view that was arising from the creative milieu of both Debords and Nieuwhenhuys:
The ludic model they read in Huizinga offered powerful alternative to the mythic one for the blue-print of their utopia. Whereas myths pointed towards a monolithic and ossified future, the game provided the same self-contained narrative, but focused on the individual and affording him the meaningful choices a mythical framework denied. The game, in a way, was the myth for the liquid modernity.

In an interview given to BLDBLOG, architecture theorist Mark Wigley agree with the interviewer that the New Babylon "actually seems to be an example of architectural Stalinism – a world of total control." - agreeably a step or two from what is usually projected on the deconstructed and surreal architecture.
Surely games are not the most current metaphor for totalitarian societies: play, with it's associations of insouciant spontaneity, of creative individualism seems hardly to fit in as the typical activity in a regime where the individual initiative is sacrificed on the altar of the static and monolithic state.
Yet Boris Groys has written at length of the "The total art of Stalinism", as did Ulrich Schmid for fascism, on totalitarism as aesthetic pursuit, and Mussolini wrote in his Popolo d’Italia on the 14 July 1920 that “Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.”

Huizinga sees poetry and in particular the Vate, like Wittgenstein, as engaging in a form of play -of play with words- that creates myths by accumulating layers of discordant meanings. What Claudia Salaris calls the "lyrical order" (A la fete de la révolution, 2002, p.137) of modernist politics attempt at merging those contradictory meanings, and in the process at anchoring the concrete into the mythical.
Whether art was used as a metaphor for the construction of a coherent political community, or whether it was the political community that was metaphor of a creative endeavor, the relationship between art as a practice and that of politics seems in the case of totalitarian regimes to be more complex than purely instrumental - the sole constraint, for meta-political readings of the totalitarian discourse, be them artistic, literary or tragic, is to keep in mind the compulsory obsession with purity. Purity expresses the homogeneity of the organic whole and justify the movement/regime as Gestalt.

Constant Nieuwenhuys - New Babylon - 1963

"Play is the purest, the most spiritual, product of man at this stage, and it is at once the prefiguration and imitation of the total human life,--of the inner, secret, natural life in man and in all things. It produces, therefore, joy, freedom, satisfaction, repose within and without, peace with the world. The springs of all good rest within it and go out from it."

Freidrich Froebel, The Education of Man, 1888

The game seem a paradoxical activity: although it is intrinsically defined by it's rules, and often only by its rules, it is also a fundamentally free activity, in that it is, in it's purest forms, not compulsory. Beyond the obvious advantages, in terms of ideological construction, to build on a model that accommodate both rules and yet presupposes absolute freedom, it is worth calling on a concept of Huizinga to understand better this duality: what the Dutch writer refer to as the "magic circle" is the conceptual or imaginary frontier that separate world of the game from the real world. Just as the rules of the game do not need applying in the the players lives when they quit playing, the norms and hierarchies of the quotidian are in many ways suspended in the time and space of the game.
Although the "magic circle" is obviously porous (money stakes, relationships building between players, or celebrity for a few examples) it is easy to imagine that the stretching of this circle to englobe the entirety of human life, as Constant Nieuwenhuys was fantasizing, would be a lot less idyllic than might at first appear.
As Wigley inform us, Constant himself acknowledged rapidly that life in his city would probably, if safeguard a sense of individuality, crush any sense of privacy, but, and this is probably the most amazing thing in the New Babylon project, that did not stop him from developing his project further and further for many years, willingly sliding into dystopia, mirroring history.

Was there an acknowledged connection between modernist politics and games, before the Situationists? It is hard to say: Many modernist artists, like Duchamp who apparently gave up on Art for the sake of chess, readily acknowledged their fondness of games - but if dictators were fond of comparing their work with art, I have not yet come across any references to games; The analogy between politics and theatre, where one certainly "plays", has been widely discussed concerning both modernity and modernism, but this is still remote from games as we understand it here.
Roger Griffin defines in his foreword 'Another Face, Another Mazeway' a process of 'Mazeway Resynthesis', where "old and new ideological and ritual elements - some of which would previously have been incongruous or incompatible - are forged through 'ludic recombination' into a totalizing worldview." This, he considers to be the key process that allow the surprising medley of sometimes contradictory elements that characterize fascism.

He borrows the notion from anthropologist Victor Turner, for whom play and ritual are intrinsically related - the notion of liminality with which he refers to the idea of a world separated from the quotidian, is bound to remind us of the kingdom locked inside the magic circle: rituals, to Turner, just like games, have for primary purpose to construct and delimit this liminal space, escaping norms and traditions, yet fundamentally regimented. This, to me, sounds a lot like Carl Schmidt defense of the State of Exception and the marxist Permanent Revolution.

Haus-Rucker-Co. - The Epoch of Space

"We are living in the rococo of modernism today"

Peter Eisenmann

The good people at WORK Gallery in Kings Cross often host exhibitions presenting exciting contemporary artists involved in political and radical practices - but their latest exhibition, no less exciting for all interested in Utopias and counter-culture, is dedicated to the work of Austrian architectural collective Haus-Rucker-Co. Composed of Laurids and Manfred Ortner, Gunter Zamp Kelp and Klaus Pinter, they gained international attention between the late sixties and the early eighties, proposing daring interpretations of the urban landscape in a number of temporary installations ("Provisional Structures") in various cities and gallery space. They also produced a large amount of paper architecture - a field, you might have gathered, of particular interest to this blog. 

The exhibition runs until the first of September and sample a variety of projects spanning over their entire production, from furniture to full size buildings - all richly documented through a variety of pictures, sketches, collages and models: 

Organic shapes, synthetic materials, sensual futures, pea coats and mustaches: what Haus-Rucker-Co, has been known for on the blogosphere is well represented but are also treated to a unique insight in the theory and the concepts that sustained their projects. 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Environement Transformers - 1968

The Space Age was not all Sputnik and The Jetsons: it also brought more theoritical investigation of space. Not, this time, as a liminal world where the grown man's impatient imagination could roam free, but the ambiguous environement where physicality meets cultures and practices - the space of Fontana's actions, of Foucault's geography and of Lefebvre's justice.

"The great obcession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history (...) The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space."

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

The epoch of the Space Age future was to be an epoch of space; Freed from the contingency of history, freed from the guilt and the responsabilities, the architect was at last allowed to experiment for experimentation's sake: "Its design is free from local politics and utilitarian pressure because provisional architecture is not burdened with the mortgage of having to sustain the next hundred years" says Laurids Ortner, one of the founding members of the collective.

And indeed, the idea of provisional structures, constructions that are designed and produce to last a limited period, addresses directly this primacy of space over time: whereas architecture until then, more openly than any other field of design, seemed to be concerned with history or it's rejection, here it may have found in ephemerality it's full avant-garde realization. 

On the contrary, interrogations about space become central, and of public space in particular. Spaces of interaction, of exchange, where social life potentially enters the realm of the experimental:

"Within urban areas 'naturally grown' provisional structures have already shaped the general appearance to a large degree: the 'every day' architecture of traffic lights, add-paintings, traffic signs, masts and wiring has long since overcome classical architecture."

Laurids Ortner 

Indeed a lot of the Austrians work is concerned with urban, common space, it's use and it's appropriation - certainly the most obviously political element in their practice. Many of their works, treading the thin line between public and private spheres, would address in Jurgen Habermas words, our relationship to the other, but also to the sphere of public authority.

The experiments of the group in soft structures, modular architecture and transparent surfaces are indicative enough of their expectations, whereas later works like Insel Hamburg, Schrage Ebene or Wellenweise hint at their oblique strategies, and interrogations concerning the inclusiveness and the delimination role of architecture.

"The construction of voluminous changing shapes from a moving malleable substance."

Manifesto Blanco, 1946

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Gelbes Herz - 1968

Space Age has pretty much disappeared, relegated to the backlands of quirky furniture and retro hype - every once in a while we see it resurfacing in a film or collection, recently in it's soviet flavour in particular (Kosmograd, Post-gravity Art, CCCP, etc.) 

Conceptions of the future have evolved a lot throughout history and often provide quite peculiar evocations of the zeitgeist: Futurism, we will see, was an obvious forerunner, and if it's fanatical devotion to mass media brings it closer to the Space Age populist strategy, it's brutal avant-gardism still leaves it miles away from Twiggy and Mary Quant's child-like optimism:

The 1960s Space Age was rooted not, as for the Italian Futurists, in that metaphysical experience of the mechanized war machine, but in an other type of machine: one pointed to the stars, in a collective effort to propulsing the human body beyond the sky, into this abstract and minimalism empyrean kingdom were life was so alien that functionalism itself could look exotic, reconciling in the process pop culture's demand for spectacular with high-modernism. 

The conquest of space certainly brought about the near mystique optimism in the potency of human thought, but in parallel the western world's economy was settling into a new paradigm, seeing the parallel rise of youth culture and leisure society: the complex interactions between these two concepts will determine large chunks of both the mainstream to come, and the vociferous Marxist counter-culture:

"Should a man wander through the city and see through the busy but aimless throngs, 

consuming themselves, he would be amazed" 

Robert Chasse, Hall of Mirrors, Council for the Liberation of Daily Life, 1967

A number of pieces of Haus-Rucker-Co. presented in the exhibition address questions of environmentalism (like "Grune Lunge" or "Natur Inszenierung") and the space occupied by nature in the city: the entire "Berg in der Stadt" proposal (1973-74) suggest the construction of large facades of fake mountainous surfaces, mounted on a metallic skeleton, simulating from one side a slice of raw, natural landscape, and displaying on the other the full artificiality of it's construction. 

Here there is a clear departure from the polished and industrialized aesthetics of the Space Age: in exposing the underlying structure, architecture is changed from a commodity to a process. William Kent, who is credited for inventing the English garden, created vast enclaves of tightly controlled nature, paradoxically mimicking the natural landscape as it can be found outside of gardens. Yet throughout his pastures one can find ruins, fake obviously, but as carefully aged and deconstructed as his garden were skillfully overgrown. The ruins, he said, were a pivotal element, as they were to be the sole indicator of the presence of man, stressing how much work and thought went in the design of those modern arcadias. Maybe it is under this light that one should see the structures proposed by Haus-Rucker-Co. : as many displays of artifical nature, be it an oasis or a mountain, to remind the city-dweller of the skills and perfection of nature that went into the creation of our cities. 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Palmtree Island, Downtown Megastructure & Environement Transformers - 1971

"provisional architecture is agressive. It breaks up burnt-in habits of seeing." 

Laurids Ortner

Many of their projects address classical tropes of the modernist to post-modernist turning point:  the hidden is made apparent, the structure become external and the artifice, the technicality becomes part of the overall aesthetics. 

There is little doubt that their work has had a decisive influence on further architecture, not on only their fellow paper architects (AntFarm, Archigram...) but also on the deconstructivist "movement" for example: the own "Uberbauung" project of hanging gardens on the roofs of Vienna partly prefigured Coop Himmelb(l)au's iconic Falkestrasse rooftop structure. 

"As if we who are accumulators and generators of movement, with all our added mechanical limbs, with all the noise and speed of our life, could live in the streets built for the needs of men four, five or six centuries ago."
Antonio Sant'Ellia, The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1917

Just like googie, borax and streamline moderne, or the Italian Futurists before any of them, it seems that the eference to the future, an essentially imagined space, place them at the edge of modernity: planning and optimism, central to modernist urbanism and superstructures, retain it's pragmatic credentials as long as projection in the future is presented as idealism - when the artist is perceived to take a step into fiction or speculation, he suddenly becomes guilty of arbitrary indulgence. 

 

"Technological achievements of our time are way ahead of our physical and intellectual development. We are human beings of the eighteenth century and have to live in an environment of the twentieth and twenty-first century." 

Laurids Ortner

 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Mind Expanders - 1967

 

 

Not withstanding their shared fascination for the machine, one key difference between the Space Age aesthetics and Italian Futurism is their respective relationship to the body: the fifty years that separate the two movements left their mark on the new conception of the future. Whereas Marinetti was vehemently calling for the renunciation of the physical, for a transformation of the body into a machine, the 60' and Haus-Rucker-Co. in particular, on the other hand, work towards a transformation of the machine into a body. 

Of course organic shapes (Gaudi, Hundertwasser, their contemporary Werner Panton) and concepts (Kisho Kurokawa) had been in use long before: at the beginning of the XXth century, the rise of concrete had meant as much the liberation from straight lines and right angles as it had heralded the modernist rationalization. Similarly the speedy development of plastic and it's easy shaping, by way of injection or void pump, allowed further transgression of the angular and asexual models of yesteryear.

 

 

"The right angle as a principle of all rigid structures oculd be overcome without formal arbitrariness, simply through the characteristics of new materials. What possibilities! Changing a society by the fact it now finds itself in a softly flowing environement: gliding into a different way of thinking on gentle wings." 

Laurids Ortner

 

 

Gelbes Herz, an blow-up structure designed for two, inflate and deflate rhythmically, imitating maybe the respiration of a living body, coming, we are told, to press it's soft synthetic interior onto the visitors at each pulsation. 

The evocative experience tell probably as much about our longings as to those of it's inventors - Whether the throbbing alcove seems like a squeaky sexual playground, like a maternal safe-space or like an isolation tank for oceanic consciousness, it is the tension between those options, placing the work miles away from the hyper-virile and brutal sexuality invoked by the Futurists and Marinetti in particular, that situate it in an ambiguous and therefore perverse sexuality. 

 

 

"Perverse as well as impersonal" 

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

 

 

Many of the group's structures (Balloon for Two, Oase no7, Gelbes Herz...) are designed to offer a sense of intimacy inside the public space: the plastic membrane isolate the visitor from the world around them, participating one can imagine, in re-appropriating the public sphere - but paradoxically, all those modules, all the spaces seemingly designed to restore human interactions in their perfected, edenic sense, are formed of mostly transparent membranes. 

This might hold one of the paradoxes of Haus-Rucker-Co. and one that spreads over the sixties and their uneasy relationship to political radicalism and utopia: their reforming ideals are unabashedly a form of spectacle. Militants are media-conscious, spirituality is communal, sexual liberation brings about commodification.

Of course Haus-Rucker-Co. is not Amon Duul II - but in crystallizing the typical tension of the age between radicalism and commodification (generally justified as a strategy of efficiency), they seem to exemplify what Eisenmann's catchy saying, "The Rococo of Modernism", always brings to my mind: a society, to use Situationist terminology, where détournement and récupération have become so deeply embedded into each other that deciding whether radicalism uses spectacle or spectacle uses radicalism is virtually impossible. 

 
 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Cover and Balloon for Two

 
 

"Toys for adults simulating contact, contact between two people, a man and a woman, 

who experience their environement and themselves in a completely new way." 

Haus-Rucker-Co. on Vanilla Future, 1969

 
 

The very impermanence of the structures not only question their role in the urban context but also grant them a specific status: as a construct that can be removed and transported, we tend to identify the provisional structure with a tool - but in the mean time, it's artistic ambition leave it largely deprived from a practical use. The useless tool is then left with only two option: too tactile and eager for an audience participation to be a work of art, the structure aims at delivering an experience rather than a message: it's a toy, a Froebel's gift for the epoch of space. 

 
 

"Play is (...) imitation of the total human life, of the inner, secret, natural life in man and in all things. It produces, therefore, joy, freedom, satisfaction, repose within and without, peace with the world. The springs of all good rest within it and go out from it." 

Friedrich Froebel, Inventing Kindergarten

 

 

The "goals" of the Haus-Rucker-Co. structure, seems in good part to have relied on the characteristic terminology of the times: development of "psychological capacity", "exploration of the inner world" and "concentrated experience" are ludicrous psychobabble. They share this ludicrous psychobabble with an other contemporary culture of keen experimentators, psychedelics. 

The goals and the medium of the "environement transformers" and, considering it was also producing sound and light effects from the inside of it's dome, the "mind expander", are as reminiscent of Pucci's 65 fligh attendants as of the mind machines of the seventies and their low-fi hallucinogenic virtual reality. but unlike those, the construction of a space isolated from the quotidian, such as Nicolas Schoffer's Cybernetic City, or the some of Warhol's more ambitious Happenings aimed at the immersion of the audience as a group. 

What the sixties brought to this age-old dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk is a radical shift of focus from the demiurgic artist to the audience: the relationships within it, and their relationship with both the world inside and outside of the artwork. Quite characteristically the "Mind Expanders" are designed for two seaters, just like the Happenings or the Cybernetic City were intended as spaces of exchange - not only between the artist and the audience but within the audience itself, becoming what Habermas coined Offentlichkeit. 

When the designer aim at creating or re-organizing the social interactions of it's audience he becomes irremediably political. The space of the piece becomes a temporary autonomous zone, and the artwork becomes a utopia. 

"In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature." 

Roger Caillois, Men, Play and Games

If, as Caillois argues, reality is likely to corrupt the world of the game, then the game itself might be, in return, able to corrupt the game of life: 

The experience of the game, and it's collective experience even more, constitutes the essence of the situationist alternative life experience. A self contained world, with it's own rules and it's own goals (if any) - both a prophetic vision of what the future could be, and an experiment on how to build it. 

"Everything that was lived has moved away into representation." 

Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle

Not having had the chance to try out any of the mind expanding "machinery", I am allowed to remain skeptical as to the actual mind expansion this would provide: if one was particularly eager to link back Haus-Rucker-Co. to situationist ideas, one could see in the presentation of normal quotidian experiences, though the absent lense of the mind expanders and environement transformers, as a form of détournement, or even maybe as over-identification with the society of spectacle it adresses: within the particular frame provided by the helmets or the dome, that provide little if any effectual transformation to the sight of the eyes, the capitalist world is framed as what it is, a spectacle. 

"Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well build, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men able to use their opportunity." 

Alcaeus, quoted by Donal Kagan

Many of the works of Haus-Rucker-Co. like a number of their contemporaries, attempt to re-asses our relationship to space and it's purpose: a space abstracted from history and positioned in what must have seemed at the time like a timeless future. The continuous emphasis on impermanence they saw as a key to experimentation, an unstable state where architecture is freed from it's constraints of firmness, commodity and delight. Freed from the contingencies of purpose and durability they were allowed, more than functionalist architecture and urbanism could ever dream, to re-write human relationships between themselves, but also of course, human relationship with their environment. 

"Architecture is a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people, and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing." 

Kisho Kurokawa

It seems that the timely pop aesthetics that presided over many of Haus-Rucker-Co designs emphasizes, consciously or not, the playful and inconspicuous aspects of their work - "relaxation" and "changes in consciousness", for all their savoury meaninglessness, hint at a growing sentiment in the sixties: the prevalence of experience over ownership - happiness no longer a situation it is a state of mind.

Like all narratives that attempted, throughout the twentieth century to bridge the gap between style and politics, to rationalize the utopia into a historical or post-historical situation, the Space Age was bound to end up stripped off from it's militant substance and relegated to the quirky and the inconsequent. But in the case of Haus-Rucker-Co. it seems that the collective moved away from away from the kitsch early enough and stuck instead to it's Utopian ideals. 

"The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of space abruptly coincide." 

Bernard Tschumi, The Pleasure of Architecture

N-Sphere

"Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things."

Georges Bataille, In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939

I have an article on Mishima and the Total Performance in the June issue of N-Sphere:

N-Sphere

Geotheanum

“Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. 

Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”

Rudolf Steiner in Goethean Science (1883)

...

via Form is void


“The sense for the perception of architecture is not the eyes — but living. Our life is its image.” 

Rudolph Schindler

Hexen 2.0 - Part 3

Black Dog Publishing, who is also running the gallery space where the Litterature exhibition is hosted, published an art book and, interestingly, a tarot deck of Treister’s project. They have been working with Treister for several years and my copy of Hexen 2039 was already published by them – as I said earlier they provided me with a book and a deck: The book itself is a paperback in calendar format, full colour and thick matte paper. No fold-in poster in this one, but a succession of the various elements constituting the complex Hexen 2.0 ecosystem, from the diagrams to the tarot cards, via the bibliography, the portraits, etc. as well as a short discussion of the project by art historian Lars Bang Larsen.

During the talk they hosted at WORK gallery, Suzanne Treister mentioned the sign at the Science Museum recommending a thrity minutes circuit between her artworks – certainly in 30 minutes spent in a gallery space, one can only experience the technique of the artist. The concept and the narrative, which for me holds the more revolutionnary aspects of the project, we can at best glimpse at – neither the extreme complexity of the diagrams, nor the coherence of the narrative or the seamless integration of the artwork into history, can there be experienced. One need time, patience, and research to fully uncipher the project, and in that regard, the book format seems very appropriate.

...

Mathew Wilson Smith in his seminal study of the relatively overlooked subject of the Gesamtkunstwerk titled The Total Work of Art, drawing on Adorno, posit Wagner, who is widely regarded as the originator of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as we understand it, at the root of a dialectic movement between organicist immersive art work and the ideal of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus theater, or, more surprisingly, of Bertold Brecht. Smith argues that Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung did not contradict, and indeed worked with the notion of Total Art Work, in a “synthetic” or at least non-organic sense.

Hexen 2.0 : Installation at the Science Museum

I am yet to read his conclusions but his tackling of the notion of cyberspace I see in the continuity of this evolution: Treister’s practice is inherently multimedia, not only in the computerized sense of the word, as demonstrated by her pioneering publications of Rosalind Brodsky’s adventures on CD-rom, but also in her more recent use of different medias on each sides of the Hexen’s diegesis. On the level of the artwork, visual arts certainly have the upperhand, but through the use of large amounts of texts, as well as prints or photo-montage, she achieves enough variety to be immersive. On the level of the “narrative” itself, the artworks represent a variety of formats, documenting in the particular complementarity of historical research, the subject of her work. The particular ungraspable quality of this subject, part history, part scientific phenomena, and part political manifesto, participate in it’s “real world” aesthetic quality – but it is in collapsing the clear-cut separation between the world at large and the microcosm of her artwork that she achieves the quality of Gesamtkunstwerk, harnessing, like various experimental video games in the past (In Memoriam for example), real world genre and events into her own “narrative”.

Hexen 2.0 : HISTORICAL DIAGRAMS: The Computer - From the 

MK ULTRA via Counter-Culture to Technogaianism

Here I put narrative in inverted comas because, indeed, the narrative structure of Hexen 2.0, which was already rather unusual in Hexen2039, is virtually non-existent, or more accurately it is invisible. In gamification this is what they would call a sandbox project, as in the fact that the author provides the audience with a certain number of modules in which they are free to evolve, to explore or to ignore, with no particular goal, a defining feature of open-world game design, which certain commentators (Bullfrog’s Peter Molyneux or SimCity’s Will Wright for example) has defined as a the essential separation between game and virtual realities.

Maxis/Electronic Arts, SimCity 4, 2003

This types of environments, be it in the form of games or of pure simulation (SugarScape), are often credited as archetypal emergent systems, and, funnily enough, studied closely by a variety of inheritors of the cybernetic tradition, from AI engineers to social scientists.

...

But all is not emergent in the world of Hexen 2.0. In the sixties, when Philip K. Dick was writing The Man in the High Castle  one of his most famous works and probably the most celebrated uchronia in Science Fiction (exemplifying the counter-narratives dear to the artist, reminiscent of the recent development of counter-factual history), he was using the I Ching to write, to devine the plot. Many years later he was actually blaming inconsistencies in the story-line on that practice. As I do for Treister he seemed back then to consider his work as one of world-building, which might be a bit creepy given his later gnostic leanings, but which we can imagine to have involved the creation of actors and forces, which, once associated with the abstract elemental forces of the I Ching, were then combined and recombined according to the “interpretations” of the book.

Philip K. Dick's famous letter to the FBI about 

Solarcon-6 and a (alleged...) worldwide Nazi conspiracy

The influence of Dick, whose style has been occasionally coined “paranoid fiction” and involved a variety of governmental, occult or philosophical factions, is often quoted by Treister – maybe her decision to use a tarot deck, with it’s rich symbolism and modular potential, to illustrate the various elements of her mythos, is again a reference to the writer.

HEXEN 2.0 : Tarot: XXI : THE WORLD

The 78 card deck itself is large enough to be fully readable, printed on thick card and seemingly takes Crowley’s own tarot deck as a starting point. The cards constitute in my eyes the “meat” of the project, more so maybe than the large historical diagrams, and many of the most interesting elements of the Hexen nebula are more widely developped here. The form itself is ambiguous: like Jodorowski, or Jung, one can think, as we do for every symbol resisting historicisation, of the major arcana at the very least, as timeless archetypes – or one can follow Timothy Leary in seeing them as a narrative of themselves, depicting the evolution of man, or in the present case, the evolution of society.