------------------------------------------
An Architectural Response to Interdisciplinarity and the Interrelational
Jurgen Strohmayer
The most recent ideas in the arts still focus on interdisciplinarity and connectivity, as highlighted by Bourrioud’s Altermodern exhibiton[1]. This article will attempt to map out boundaries and definitions relating to these ideas, where these are concerned with designed space. Conceptual architecture, as far as this exists, often verges on a comparison with Conceptual art through self-definition. This comparison is unhelpful when the two fields are merged and boundaries are occluded, a common (though not untreatable) symptom of interdisciplinarity. How is architecture more than a formal exercise, give or take structural and social variables? In the course of this article I will situate architecture parallel to a contemporary practice in art that looks back at the ideas of the 20th century, though still fully entangled in the processes of Modernism.
Interdisciplinarity and Aesthetics
I start by identifying two different forms of interdisciplinarity in the academic fields, a group I define as comprising the arts, sciences, and humanities. Academic fields are usually focused around places of Further Education in the Anglo-American world. One usage of the label “interdisciplinarity” is in the subject of study, where the interaction between fields of study is not necessary. In this case, interdisciplinarity describes an outcome (a painting using a biological motif). Secondly, interdisciplinarity can imply a mode of action that describes the process used to reach an outcome. This form of interdisciplinarity, where members of different groups leave behind learnt methods of action and form new methodologies, has attracted a far higher degree of polemics in all fields. Contemporary practice in Higher Education implies learning methodology and vocabulary specific to one mode of research. We can extend Kuhn’s idea of a closed and self-specific research community in the sciences, to the arts. Reading lists and tutoring ensures the continuation and evolution of vocabulary and methodology. This ensures tools that are understood by other members of the research community, while not obstructing a sort of progress. Taking away these boundaries could cause a paralysis of thought-systems through miscommunication and un-understanding. By Leaving behind a definition of interdisciplinarity that claims a dissolution of boundaries, I am foregoing any hostilities towards the topic.
In his book, Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud claims the centrality of installation art in the current production of art. Installations oscillate between spatial and interactive concerns and seem to be emblematic of an age where sculpture, media, performance, and architecture have lost their own autonomies. Under these terms, installation art seems like a coalition of fields, standing up against the finality and dead-end of Postmodernism. This dramatic image oversimplifies the many strands of late-20th century thought, while capturing the force with which many fields have stood against and ignored Postmodernism. The ideas of postmodernism (those of simulacra, the levelling of hierarchies and ideologies, etc) are visible much more in the arts than in the social sciences and humanities. The number of historians with a thorough postmodernist viewpoint in high academic chairs around the world is very slim, if not zero. On the other hand, a critique of any contemporary art exhibition, say Alternmodern or the Turner Prize, without a perspective of deconstruction or simulation would not provide a well-rounded image of the artwork.
Florencia Pita, Macedonia Philharmonic Orchestra, competition 2007
This perspective of contemporary society described above flies past many important distinctions within the referenced fields and ideas. For many, though, the experience of postmodernism is one of hostility and misunderstanding. Terms such as “Altermodern” (also Bourriaud) become powerful in this situation as they provide a new working vocabulary. We are in a time in which The Death of the Author has become common vocabulary and Jeff Koons’ sculptures are referenced in architectural proposals. Fields of study continue to re-examine themselves through the terms of Modernism and its later derivatives.
Focusing more closely on Bourriaud’s term, is an aesthetic of relations (interconnections and cross-referencing) simply that? An aesthetic that emerges not from figures of lines and shapes, like in Modernist paintings, but through the knowledge that specific things (as proposed by the artist) are connected and therefore Relational? Following Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud has worked on defining the present as an era of the Alternmodern. In his view, connectivity and interaction have become the primary modes of production, far more than a mere aesthetic.
Curation, Architecture, and the Interrelational
Charles Moore and Perez Architects, Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, 1978.
The position of architecture in the postmodernist debates has become unclear. While early on, architects performed research in pop-architecture and collaged buildings with historical references –columns, Roman, Greek, spliced, and colourful – postmodernist architecture has come to be an image of expressive forms. We can read critics moan about the “postmodern blobs, slices, wedges and cornets that crowd every Gulf skyline, screaming ‘look-at-me’ at the brain-dulled passerby”[2]. Though this is not an academic view of architecture it exposes the unease of postmodernism for people.
Derrida and Deleuze both talk about bricolage in their philosophical works. The French term illustrates the borrowing and collecting of material in new works. This stitching of materials has a multifaceted appearance in the art of the 20th and 21st century. It ranges from the appeal of collage in present art to the golden patchwork of motifs by Richard Wright that won the latest Turner Prize. The juxtaposing of concepts that are distant in their historical, thematic, ideological, and visual focus creates the image of present art. I remember particularly well, the curating of New Art from the Middle East, as it was called, at the Saatchi Gallery. The modes of production ranged from a sort of medieval style of oriental painting by Hayv Kahraman to installations of motorized wheelchairs. This beautiful arrangement of contradicting motifs and mechanisms existed throughout and above the exhibition. Both artists and curators were aware of the extreme historical and social variety that existed in the New Art. It is this spirit that I encountered weeks later at the Triennial by Bourriaud at Tate Britain. The massive scale of both exhibitions had a visually culminating effect through the bricolage of materials, motifs, and history that artists engaged with.
It is this concept that I see most promising for architecture and contemporary art. Interdisciplinarity, as a mode of production, engages with a patchwork of goals and beliefs. Artists are concerned with endless combinations of visual and conceptual elements – it could be said that each artists curates his work of art and as an extension architecture can be seen as the curating of design and structure. This overarching view of curating sets itself apart from bricolage in that it strives for a particular effect after creation. Architectural historian Sylvia Levin describes curating:
Curation begins where architecture is supposed to end but does not. To curate is to address the field of effects, unique or mundane, through the treatment of lighting, of decoration, of objects, of surface, of geometry, of beauty, of “delight.” To curate is to exhibit much that modernism inhibited and that architecture historically identifies as supplemental. The curator is not a person or a subject but a function and practice that stages contemporaneity through activating the effects that architecture inevitable produces bur rarely confirms. [3]
She speaks of the “contemporary” as a period coming after Modernism, though not calling it Postmodernism, per se. What Levin describes is a more immediate approach to elements of design that are already being addressed. To create contemporaneity we should activate and confirm effects. An extreme case of curating can be seen at the house and Museum of Sir John Soane (WC2A 3BP London). The compulsive collecting of Soane, an 18th and 19th century architect, forced him to extend his house at numerous times. “[A]rchitecture was generated by the curatorial impulse”. Levin describes the astonishement of all generations after Soane with his museum: “Soane’s surfaces are concerned with effect: they have no legible cause. While they are effective insofar as they de-emphasize causality and legibility, the surfaces also accentuate and dramatize their effectiveness.”
Interdisciplinarity, when treated as an allegory to this architectural idea, could solve its risks of stranding at the edges of two disciplines. Effectiveness and clarity of purpose then become the focus of the work. The two-fold definition of interdisciplinarity (one being a mode of action the other a subject of study) could be treated with the same intentions. Installation art, as an interdisciplinary artform that combines various aspects of art and space, may become a more streamlined. The effectiveness and dramatization that Levin describes comes close to the point at which an aesthetic is formed in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetic. Rather than coming from fixed visual stimuli, effect is created through the dramatization of relations with other visual or conceptual stimuli. In this process, art leaves its physical form and becomes a sensation of relational form. The vocabulary being used is very spontaneous though we are not necessarily speaking of temporary art. The dramatic force behind a Relational Aesthetic arises from the curating of artistic elements, the creation of a structure in which these elements behave and achieve their effect. In this process, ideas such as cross-dependency, migration, and the “Other” become important not only in our everyday lives but also in the creation of art – of an aesthetic.
[1] Damian, Diana. “Altermodern and the Death of Postmodernism”, Firefly Performance Journal. 2009
[2] Jenkins, Simon. “When this gaseous burp explodes in the desert air, we’ll still have Burj Dubai”. Guardian.co.uk Written 17 December 2009. Accessed 08 January 2010.
[3] Lavin, Sylvia. “The Temporary Contemporary”. Perspecta, Vol. 34, (2003), pp. 128-135. MIT Press.