Conde, Yago; Architecture of the Indeterminacy; 1994

Indeterminacy

… By ‘indeterminacy’ we understand a certain state of suspension within the precise meaning of the object, a consequence of the redefining of limits… A number of comparable… terms exist, such as ‘indescribability’, ‘undecidability’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘indistinctness’… But it is the word ‘indeterminacy’ which best applies to what we seek to delineate here… In ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’, Robert Venturi concerns himself with the relative impreciseness of meaning,… [concentrating] on situations of paradoxical contrast… (the Villa Savoye, a square ground plan or not?;… Le Corbusier’s Shodan house, closed even though it’s open)… [These] are contradictory but not necessarily indeterminate. The word ‘indeterminacy’ has also been used recently by Rem Koolhaas,… but principally focused on the notion of architectural programming… (instead of formal construction or object relations)… ‘Determinare’ means ‘to limit’, to ‘set limits’. ‘De’ means ‘from’, and ‘terminare’ means ‘to limit’… Indeterminacy would thus be related to that which does not have verifiable, defined, specified limits…

We can encounter this interest in an ‘indeterminacy’ or questioning of limits in certain artists of the historical avant-garde and in certain interdisciplinary practices… The main organizing principle of the current situation is the collapse of the distinction… between [criticism-theory]… and artistic practice…

In Mallarmé we already meet the union of language and the critique of language… Roland Barthes once explained… that modern poets, beginning at least with Stéphane Mallarmé, had already demonstrated the unification of poetry and criticism, that literature itself was a critique of language… Barthes arrived at the conclusion that the categories of literature and criticism could no longer be kept separate, that now there were only writers. The relation between critical text and its object of study could no longer be conceived from the viewpoint of subject-object, but from that of subject-predicate…

Beginning with Duchamp we give attention to the questioning of the status of the object and to indeterminacy in the field of visual perception… What Mallarmé develops in the field of language, Duchamp translates in the field of vision… This parallel between Mallarmé and Duchamp has best been treated by Octavio Paz in ‘La Apariencia Desnuda’… Uninterested in purely retinal problems, Duchamp displays an interest in optical phenomena, [reflecting upon]… physical science… or philosophical doubt… (chromophotography and simultaneity, projections of the shadows of objects on a wall or a canvas, painting [delay] on glass, stereoscopic cinema, rotary glass plates, precision optics, a rotary demisphere, rotoreliefs, etc.). All of these experiments pave the way for later explorations, as in the case of Op Art,… which provides us with a way of appreciating the ‘quivering’ or ‘jolting’ effect Derrida seeks to arrive at in evoking the idea of form… (through ‘kinetic surfaces’; 2-dimensional surfaces with an apparently 3d pulsation; and the moiré effect;… and color irradiation)…

In Surrealism, [as opposed] to Dada, we do not particularly meet a liberation of ties in the meaning of language, but in fact the opposite, a state of overdetermination… The manipulation of language and pre-existing objects in the pictorial work of René Magritte is of a very different kind. In some cases, as in the painting of bottles and carrots,… even though an invention of new figures and a certain fluidity of meaning exists, we are closer to a state of polysemy than a shuttle of meaning… (here we see a changing state and fluctuating relations between objects,… the representation of objects, their linguistic denomination, and the different substitutive combination of these factors, which always constitutes an ‘exact fantasy’). This is opposed to the notion of Magritte as a Surrealist painter of dreams… In Surrealism there results a kind of overdetermination in meaning,… which Magritte sought to go beyond… Interested in the freeing-up of speech, Derrida observes that, instead of obviating it, the writing of

dreams subordinates it… The writing of dreams… “is not a transcription, because nowhere is there a text present as an unconscious text to be transposed or transported…” Deleuze and Guattari see in Surrealism “a vast undertaking aimed at the oedipization of earlier movements”, and do not encounter in it… approximation to their notion of ‘desiring machines’…

Cage, Derrida, and Deleuze,… all develop different forms of indeterminacy… The liberating impulse towards breaking ties, changing registers, structures, perspectives, seeking out multiplicities, can also be met with the investigations of Schwitters or in the experimental art of Cage… There is, in both, a similar use of the fragment; all kinds of material in Schwitters, all kinds of noise in Cage… We are, in a sense, faced with a transcending of simple collage (the origins of each of the fragments in the collage can be recognized) by means of montages or graftings-on (to the extent that the fragment now loses the determinability of its origins and acts on its new context in a parasitical manner)… It is interesting to consider how [the new relationships] are noted down, how a ‘map’ of this state of indeterminacy is drawn up. In the notational systems of John Cage, along with other contemporary composers… we encounter a situation analogous to the conventional notational systems of architecture. In effect his graphic scores organize the disposition of events in space, in their concentration or dispersion, their rhythm, timbre, form, volume, etc. They are ‘maps’, ‘cartographies’, of events…

Jeffrey Kipnis… suggests that it is both necessary and desirable that the production process of the architectural object be in an ‘undecidable’ state,… ([such as] the pharmakon, which is neither remedy nor venom, neither good nor bad…, mushrooms,… indeterminable in their classification, or Deleuze’s… ‘rhizome’, the plant which grows without roots, the opposite of the tree)… Architecture cannot remain aloof from the phenomena that have occurred in other fields. Yet this does not mean insisting on interdisciplinary transpositions that are unproductive… Architecture does not have to reflect the state of chaos that may exist outside of it, [but can be influenced by it]… (liberating indeterminacy,…. Not coercive unpredictability)… We can work in architecture using models which already contain a constructive force, as, for example, assemblage,… or notational systems… Above all [it is important] to be conscious that it is impossible to predict the totality of the experience, the attention paid, the response of the spectator. We might define an architecture of indeterminacy as an architecture conscious that it will be looked at dispersedly, scatteredly, passively.

Architecture and the Critical Avant-Garde

Methods of indeterminacy:1. The methods of Dadaism: Arbitrariness and chance Automatism, frottage, decalcomania, and ‘Exquisite Corpse’ Readymade and altered readymade The use of materials Fragmentation and montage The invention of the useless

2. Merz Fragmentation in Schwitters (the constructive impulse of the Merzbau)3. Johannes Baader ‘Deutschlands Gröse und Untergang’4. The superposition of distant realities The Romantic lineage: the umbrella and the sewing machine Collage versus grafting The conflict between verbal and visual Dada5. Readymade versus object-type6. Dada in the Bauhaus: negative avant-garde of Moholy-Nagy7. Destruction and construction in Germany, versus the French ‘return to order’

8. Adolf Loos’ house for Tristan Tzara (Duchamp-Loos)

We will attempt here, by means of the study and comparison of 3 contemporary constructions, to analyze the situation of the most ‘anti-constructive’ avant-garde of the 20s, Dada in Berlin:1. Johannes Baader’s ‘Dio-Dada-Drama’2. Vladmir Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the 3rd International’3. Kurt Schwitter’s ‘Merzbau’

Each of these displays a varied degree of negative impulse, of autobiographical implication in the design, and of political commitment… Similarly, the 3 works have been related to the 3 different manifestos signed by Baader, Tatlin, and Schwitters respectively:1. The ‘Dada Manifesto’- 19182. The ‘Program of the Productivist Group’- 19203. The ‘Manifesto on Proletarian Art’- 1923

Baader’s major work was the ‘Dio-Dada-Drama’: The Grandeur and Collapse of Germany’, in 5 storeys, 3 gardens, one tunnel, 2 elevators, and a revolving door. This work can be understood as the first genuinely Dadaist ‘architectonic’ construction. Unlike Constructivist works, which normally aspire to a ‘superior construction’, we are confronted here with a concatenation of found objects, stitched together with wire, without any aesthetic consideration. The total impression is of chaos more than tectonic purity… The piece is an autobiography of Baader himself, as well as a history of the decadence of Germany, constructed and written as an allegorical tour through a number of levels (‘The Making of the Oberdada’, ‘Metaphysical Proof’, ‘Initiation’, ‘World War’, and ‘World Revolution’); architectonic composition as a journey… Baader the architect, just like Futurist Sant’Elia, had been strongly influenced at the outset of his career by the Secessionist movement. This is evident in his designs for mausolea, in a similar style to Sant’Elia’s funerary project for the Monza cemetery. But while for the rest of his brief life Sant’Elia maintained an interest in this type of monumentality, Baader, as an authentic Dadaist, seeks not only top break with monumentality but with his whole constructional past… ‘Dio-Dada-Drama’ gives us an idea of fragmentation and superposition by using a collage of real objects whose intention is chaotico-allegorical… The use of trashy materials must be understood as an attempt to avoid using art for commercial ends, by means of the reduction of its material worth: art simply for contemplation… And there is another important standard by which to measure collage, that of simultaneity. When Baader says: “The figure of History, whose authentically Bavarian wax head, decapitated, has been strung up beside the remains of a royal Prussian ‘Rex’ jam-making machine,” this makes us think of Lautréamont’s famous phrase: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” (the juxtaposition of distant objects/realities at once)… [This significance tends towards] the French Surrealism of Baader’s future… (linked with Romanticism, as hinted by the subtitle of Baader’s piece: ‘Grandeur and Collapse of Germany’). But here any Romantic… [tendency exists primarily to highlight] its definitive destruction… (remember that the ultimate universal simultaneity occurs only at the beginning and end of everything)… In Dadaism this violence is often combined with machinist sensibility… Everything, including the other avant-gardes, is interpreted in terms of an uncontrollable machinery. The human body, too, is thought as a series of mechanical connections… And greater emphasis is placed on the mechanical and scatological dimensions of the body than on its erotic component… (typical of Dadaist representation, the face is never shown, thus avoiding any human expression)…

The ‘Tower to the 3rd International’… was at once architecture, provisional structure, and Constructivist sculpture on a gigantic scale… Tatlin’s tower [actually highlights] one of the points of the Futurist architectural manifesto:… “Oblique and elliptical lines are dynamic in themselves, they have an emotive power a thousand times greater than horizontals and verticals, and there can be no dynamically-integrated architecture without them”… (while the Berlin Dadaists… emphasized the ‘objet trouvé’ and junk materials, the Russian Productivist manifesto of 1920 displayed an obsession with materiality, while emphasizing the industrial-productive aspect)… In regards to Berlin Dada,… Tatlin’s tower was closer in appearance to an apparatus than to abuilding or monument… In fact, [spiraling is] not the most efficient structure for obtaining the desired height. It remained far from being purely functional in terms of mechanical efficiency, economy of means, or usefulness as a building. Although the [tower is supposed to showcase a sophisticated] rotary movement of the different volumes,… Tatlin’s plans unfold without describing how this mechanism worked… [It is known that in various works of] Berlin Dada,… there exists a purposeful lack of information on how the mechanisms of these constructions work; they are incomprehensible in functional terms… Tatlin declared that “the results of bringing together purely artistic forms and purely utilitarian notions” were “models that give rise to inventions”… In fact the place where the tower caused greatest impact was in Dadaist Berlin,… exhibited at the Dada International Fair in Berlin, 1920… [Later, as part of the development of] an international

avant-garde, artists would interpret Tatlin and his tower in a very different way… (emphasizing the more geometrical, elemental, constructional, and mathematical aspects)…

Schwitters’ ‘Merzbau’… was a construction inside his house, which went on getting bigger by the day until it all but exceeded the limits of the space containing it. It was a living document of Schwitters, his art, and his friends. There were holes devoted to each of them, for example the ‘Arp hole’, the Gabos, Van Doesburg, Lissitsky, Malevich, Mies van der Rohe, and Richter holes. Each hole contained an object belonging to that person. In one hole there was a dental bridge still bearing a few teeth; in another a small bottle of urine, labeled with the donor’s name. We could say at first glance that… the ‘Merzbau’… was similar to Baader’s maquette… But as it continued to grow from day to day the old holes were hidden by new geometric forms. When this happened, the work completely changed, assuming a much more Constructivist appearance… (a living example of the movement from destruction to construction)… Here the situation… comes about… through the admitting of fragments of reality into its fabric, yet without referring back to reality as sign… [Although it seems that] Baader’s construction is chaotic,… a more tentative analysis shows us that in fact Baader is unsuccessful in developing a de-hierarchized state of object relations (something that Schwitters succeeds in doing;… Baader’s construction is somewhat like a pyramid with a base and an apex; it has a beginning, a development, and a final apotheosis, and is even built around a certain compositional axis;… the ‘Dio-Dada-Drama can in fact be seen as a ‘classical’ funerary construction,… elaborated with Dadaist sensibility)… Within Schwitters’ relations of construction and destruction, new connections, new possibilities and movements become possible… Like both Baader’s ‘Dio-Dada-Drama’

and Tatlin’s tower,… the ‘Merzbau’ too was a far-reaching project. It was not, however, an ambitious project ‘a priori’, but became so as a consequence of [gnomonic growth]… It is difficult to distinguish where Schwitters’ collages end and the ‘Merzbau’ begins. “In 1919 the walls of Schwitters’ house were already overflowing with collages and reliefs, and the floors were replete with free-standing objects that began to merge with the furniture. Soon there was no distinction between the collage or independent relief and the supporting wall of rubbish that Schwitters installed”… [Here, as opposed to] ‘monumentality’,… the issue is one of the ‘total work of art’ (‘Gesamtkunstwerk’… although Schwitters’ ‘Gesamtkunstmerz’… is not an ordered synthesis of genres but rather a Dadaist confusion of these)… The notion of time in the ‘Merzbau’ must be understood from 2 perspectives: firstly, from the perspective of the evolution of the Merzbau over a period of years, as an endless labor; and secondly, within the perspective of the simultaneity of its parts… [In the piece,] even though the collage content is Dadaist, the way it was assembled as a montage… is Constructivist… Schwitters represents a moment of fusion prior to the death of the avant-gardes and the entrance onstage of architecture, highlighted in the following:1. October 1921: ‘A Call for Elementarist Art’… Elementarist elements… were simple units of structure and spatial division. This absence of symbolic or mystical nuance… probably derives from the 2 Dadaists among the Elementarists…2. ‘Dada Tour of Holland’ undertaken by Schwitters and… Van Doesburg… The association of these 2 figures demonstrates the confluence of the seemingly most opposed of avant-gardes… When Schwitters lends attention to every element of reality,… and includes these in the ‘Merzbau’, and this ‘Merzbau’ grows and grows until it occupies all the available space, can we not read this as the impulse to want to order the universe, simile De Stijl’s?3. The ‘Constructivist-Dadaist Congress’ at the Bauhaus in Weimar,… and the letters between Gropius and Baader in which the

latter asked to join the Bauhaus…4. ‘Manifesto on Proletarian Art’ signed by Dadaists,… directed against the art of political agitation and against any politicization of art…5. The ‘review G- Material zur elementaren Gestaltung’… in which Mies van der Rohe’s skyscraper is published for the first time, in a review edited by a Dadaist…6. In ‘the Neo-Avant-Gardes Touch’, H. Piñon speaks of the publications of completely opposed, but similarly oriented, neo-avant-gardes: each needs the other in order to be able to define itself…7. The influence of Richter’s ‘Filmmoments’ (1923) on Mies’ designs for patio-houses from 1930 to 1935…8. ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (‘New Objectivity’) emerges,… defined by some as part of constructive arts (taking the term ‘construction’ in its most immediate sense), or even at the opposite extreme (given that New Objectivity architects were concerned with ‘construction’ more in terms of production than in terms of formal construction)…

Dadaism, despite not having direct implications for the field of architecture,… had implications… for a certain kind of sensibility that made the development of modern architecture possible. Furthermore, Dadaism prepares and also facilitates… the terrain for future experiments…