|
INTRODUCTION
Ian
Burn coined the term 'Pictography' to describe an art history based
on writing directly about pictures in a way 'designed to bring into
visibility those decisions and intelligences that the eye of the
non-artist habitually skids across without thought' and which 'allows
viewers to enter the craft of a pictures making.'1
My thesis is that craftspeople are working with a palette just
as are painters and their techniques, design decisions, attitudes
to materials, etc. convey meaning and this is as vital a form
of personal and social expression as any other of the plastic
arts. In fact, a craftsperson who unwittingly contravenes the
semiotics of his/her own medium is missing a creative opportunity
and often will generate confused or even self-contradictory work.
Craftspeople may have an unconscious sense of the rightness of
their work which amounts to a subliminal grasp of the semiotics
of their medium. However, the richness of expression possible
within any medium is related to the depth of associations and
meanings that both practitioners and viewers can bring to the
work. In the case of designer-making, this can only be enhanced
by attempting something which apparently hasn't been done to date:
a conscious analysis of what a 'pictography' of design might look
like. That is, a cogent analysis of the meaning inherent in the
designed and made object.
Craft or designer-making, to use the more recently favoured term,
sits on a continuum of creative practice somewhere between art
and design. It shares with art the primacy of the individual artist
- the sole creator of the artistic statement which embodies that
person's aesthetics, experiences and attitudes. And it shares
with design an interest in the everyday and utilitarian and most
importantly a fixation on the produced object and its aspect as
'commodity'.
The detailed analysis of 'meaning' in art has a long and rich
history. Within design such critical analysis is quite recent.
Design as a distinct practice has existed since the mid-eighteenth
century but a search for the 'meaning' in designed objects is
very much a late twentieth century process.
Most of the literature of the last fifty years would have us
suppose that the main function of design is to make things beautiful.
A few studies suggest that it is a special method of solving
problems, but only occasionally has design been shown to have
something to do with profit, and even more rarely has it been
shown to be concerned with the transmission of ideas. 2
In
the realm of craft such analysis has only just begun.The greatest
proportion of craft literature deals with the huge variety of techniques
of material manipulation, to a lesser extent, the history and 'evolution'
of craft practice and almost never, with the meanings underlying
the surface appearance of an object. In this essay I hope to probe
beneath the surface of certain aspects of my own current work, thereby
joining that small but growing band of writer-practitioners determined
to reveal the meanings surrounding their work.
Material and form are the most superficial and readily perceived
aspects of an object. These are the concrete aspects that artists
and craftspeople manipulate. Naturally, a detailed analysis of
every aspect of the forms and materials used in a major body of
work would be a huge undertaking. Furthermore, the relevance of
such an analysis to the body of work itself could be questionable.
After all, the work should be able to 'speak for itself'. Many
craftspeople use this statement as an excuse to avoid any critical
analysis whatsoever. I wish to avoid this trap while at the same
time allowing the physical objects themselves to have an associative
realm wider than that which any rational analysis, no matter how
comprehensive, would permit. Circumscription is, fundamentally,
the creation of borders; of defining 'what is' and 'what is not'.
By defining and analysing some areas of my practice I am consciously
leaving others open to question; leaving the borders undefined.
Material
and form are inextricably linked in craft practice both technically
and metaphorically. Identical forms in turned wood and patinated
bronze are arrived at through entirely different technical processes
and have very different physiological, sensual and emotional presences.
Even the same form in different species of timber can show very
different faces. By separating material and form I am taking an
admittedly arbitrary and reductionist position. But this is arguably
the only suitable first step towards an analytical reading of
the crafted works.
Another
essential aspect of craft practice is process: the mediator between
material and form. In craft the artist is usually in control of
the process of production (not generally the case in design) and
in many cases the audience for craft work appreciates, or is even
intimate with, process as well. Process is such an important aspect
of craftwork that the skilful execution of technique is often
the only benchmark of the quality of a piece of work. Obsessive
attention to technique, per se, is praised irrespective of its
relevance to the 'content' of a finished piece. For the content
to be legible it is essential that process too be considered as
a vehicle for meaning. The process of production, which is of
such significance to the maker and often apparent to the audience
must be appropriate or contributory to the whole meaning of a
work.
Process
is arguably the key factor that distinguishes craft from visual
arts and design. During the latter half of this century it has
been the presence of the maker and the apparent mark of his/her
hand that has distinguished the crafted object from the designed
and manufactured one. Similarly, attention to material and a demonstrated
mastery of process has distinguished craftwork from contemporary
art practice.
Within
the context of the body of exhibition work that I am currently
preparing, several aspects of material, form and process would
benefit from closer analysis. These would include:-
Material
Preciousness of material - 'perceived' cf. 'real' value and
the role of surface treatments in the communication of these
values; the retention of 'imperialist' values in materials (eg.
ebony, ivory, precious veneers). Embodiment of concepts of 'nature',
'culture', 'history' and 'technology' in materials.
Process
Fetishization of labour - privilege of skill over content; the
role of processes such as 'transparent construction' and ornate
decoration as signifiers of technical expertise and expended
labour; romanticisation of the era of wageless labour and artisanry
as signifier of class, wealth, taste and power.
Form
Simple geometric solids cf. 'organic' forms. Grid - icon of
the modern; as a screen of rational thought; abstraction of
process.
Each
of these aspects requires a detailed analysis of historic precedence
in visual art, design and craft and a critical discussion of how
meanings derived from each of these disciplines together with aspects
of personal memory could be used as vehicles for meaning in a contemporary
craft practice. Unfortunately, such an undertaking is beyond the
limitations of the current essay. As a first step towards such an
analysis however, I will proceed with a detailed study of the 'grid'
form as this has particular relevance to my current work.
THE GRID
Geometric
patterns have been a fundamental aspect of human culture since
it began. Franz Boaz questioned the ubiquity of geometrical elements
considering that;
They
are of such rare occurrence in nature, so rare indeed that they
had hardly ever a chance to impress themselves upon the mind.
3
Gombrich
has argued that it is precisely for this reason that they are
so prevalent. The rarity of geometric order in nature makes such
patterns an undeniable product and signifier of human culture:
a distinct contrast to 'the random medley of nature' . The rectilinear
grid is prevalent in surface decoration, the intrinsic pattern
of weaving and in the patterns of land usage which humans have
adopted for centuries. In the 20th Century however, the grid's
long-standing signification of human culture, imposed order and
the mechanisation of the loom has broadened and deepened with
its application in abstract art, design and architecture.
Visual Art and Symbolism
The grid is perhaps the most ubiquitous element of the art of
the 20th Century. As a major element of seminal modernist movements
such as cubism and De Stijl, forerunners to the abstraction which
has dominated visual arts this century, it can be seen as emblematic
of modernism.
By 'discovering' the grid, cubism, De Stijl, Mondrian, Malevitch...landed
in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before.
Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything
else was declared to be past. 5
The
grid's undeniable abstraction created a unique space in the visual
arts, one that is 'flattened, geometricised, ordered', 'anti-natural,
anti-mimetic, anti-real'; 'it is what art looks like when it turns
its back on nature'. The grid was not referential to reality,
nor to any other predecessors in art, it became a map of the possible,
of the new.
The only real predecessors to the geometric abstraction seen in
modern art was the rational and symbolic construction of paintings
during the Renaissance. Where artists such as Uccello, Leonardo
and DŸrer explored the 'laws of perspective' and perceived these
geometric constructions in their painting as symbolic of higher
orders such as the Christian Trinity. But here the perspective
lattice was 'inscribed on the depicted world as the armature of
its organisation' and demonstrated 'the way reality and its representation
could be mapped onto one another' . The grid as perceived in the
first part of the twentieth century was less a mapping of reality
than a true depiction of that underlying order itself.
The
early proponents of the geometric in art saw within the rational
and hermetic paradigm of the grid a reflection of greater truths;
the rationality and order underpinning reality - 'a staircase
to the Universal' . In this sense the grid became an emblem of
both the rational and the spiritual. Krauss sees this apparent
contradiction as a fundamental aspect of 'the myth of the grid',
drawing comparisons between the structure of the grid and the
structure of myths as analysed by Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss's
pioneering work on the semiotic structure of myths led to the
conclusion that myths are constructed in a way that allows contradictory
attitudes to be held and valued simultaneously. Even though the
visual device of the grid is clearly non-narrative, Krauss argued
that its structure and the meanings given to it by early modernists
function in this mythic realm as defined by structural anthropology.
This mythic aspect, argues Krauss, accounts for its persistence
in modern art.
In
the increasingly de-sacralised space of the nineteenth century,
art had become the refuge of religious emotion; it became, as
it has remained, a secular form of belief...The grids mythic
power is that it makes us able to think that we are dealing
with materialism (or sometimes science or logic) while at the
same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion
or fiction). 9
Scientific
Rationalism
The perception of the Universal in the order of the grid does
harken back to the religious symbolism of the Renaissance. It
also follows on closely from the prevalent scientific paradigm
of the 19th century - positivism - which saw the laws of science
as being reflections of the laws of creation itself. This attitude
of science continued into the 20th century and despite the hiatus
caused by quantum mechanics, continues still in the search for
a 'Grand Unified Theory' in physics .
The links between scientific thought and art are closer than we
might at first think. Scientific research into the physiology
of optics informed early modern painting movements such as pointilism
and expressionism and were fundamental to the philosophies of
colour developed by Mondrian, Kandinsky and later Itten and Albers;
all of which had far reaching ramifications through the seminal
and ongoing influence of the Bauhaus. Artists interested in the
scientific basis of colour perception were presented in the scientific
literature with diagrammatic representations based on grids .
Thus the grid began to represent the matrix of knowledge itself.
Furthermore, the science of optics showed that perception was
distinct from reality:
the physiological screen through which light passes to the human
brain is not transparent, like a window pane; it is like a filter,
involved in a set of specific distortions.....there is an unbreachable
gulf between "real" colour and "seen" colour. We may be able
measure the first but we can only experience the second.
The grid came to represent the 'perceptual screen' and its separation
from the 'real' world.
Ozenfant,
Le Corbusier's colleague in the 1920's,...maintained that all
human perception is gauged through a 'geometric' filter of sensations,
and argued that since 'it is one of man's passions to disentangle
apparent chaos', then mathematics, geometry and the arts 'are
all forms of apparatus that reduce the incomprehensible to credible
forms.
Science has used the grid to objectify and detach analysis from
reality in other ways. The grid is the basis for most techniques
which sample and quantitatively analyse the 'real world'. Archaeology
uses the three dimensional grids as a baseline for complex digs
to order the plethora of information revealed through laborious
excavation. In biology numerical analysis of an entire environment,
site or large sample is generally so time consuming, that rational
methods have been developed to minimise the effort required to
collect meaningful, representative samples. The fundamental technique
for filtering the complexity of the observable is based on the
'quadrat' and 'transect', where small square or cubic areas (quadrats)
are examined in detail along a line or across a grid of evenly
distributed sample points (transect). Science uses the grid as
a technique to handle complexity but it can also be seen as a
filter of rationality through which the 'real' world can be viewed
and digested - a way of distancing oneself from the chaotic.
Design
When the grid first appeared in the decorative arts and design
at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries it
was used purely as a decorative device - a rejection of the preceding
styles based on natural representation and historical appropriation,
an icon of the new, of the modern. It was in this sense that it
was used by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and slightly later by the
designers of the Wiener Werkstatte (Josef Hoffman, Kolo Moser,
etc.).
Impulses from the avant-garde currents of painting were not
taken up in a spirit of continuing the painterly dialogue with
pictorial problems; rather, they were converted into something
decoratively useful and fashionably novel. 4
Even as late as 1925, Max Eisler in reviewing the ceramics in
the Austrian pavilion of the Parisian Exhibition of Decorative
Arts, felt that;
'neither Cubism or Expressionism have been in vain...they have
fruitfully helped the renewal of form'. 15
It
could be argued that the greatest influence on these designers
was not the avant-garde thoughts then developing around the grid
but the borrowing of visual imagery from the exotic Japanese aesthetic.
Mackintosh was particularly enamoured of the imagery presented
in the woodblock prints then becoming widely distributed in Europe.
The flat visual plane of these images and the regular appearance
of the grid in the tatami flooring, shoji screens, ordered tiny
rice fields, and even framed notations included in the woodblocks
must have had considerable influence on the imagery favoured by
these designers.
At
the end of the nineteenth century the ornament was still seen
as the receptacle for meaning in design . Throughout the early
part of the twentieth century structure came to the front as the
primary carrier of meaning and decoration increasingly was seen
as extraneous. To some extent Mackintosh and Hoffman's work spanned
this junction and some of their more minimal work where the grid
is paramount betrays the emergence of the structural aesthetic.
In its role as the most fundamental of structures the grid had
a vital part to play in the development of this philosophy.
By
the mid-20's the decorative arts had come to grips with the more
philosophical and metaphoric layers of the grid through the work
of the Russian avant-garde, the De Stijl designers in the Netherlands
and the work of designers such as Le Corbusier in France.
It
was in the early part of the twentieth century when art and design
drew closest together on the continuum of creativity and particularly
within the realms of avant-garde utopian thought, that the spiritual
aspects of the grid and geometry found application in the three
dimensional world of design, architecture and town planning.
Mondrian, the pre-eminent painter of the grid, never hesitated
to stress the architectonic implications of the new 'plastic art'
which he considered 'preparation for a future architecture'. 7
In fact, most avant-garde artists saw their creative work as immensely
practical and art as the only path towards making real the order
that society so deeply needed. For the inter-war avant-garde,
the grid 'offered a paradigm of the security of mathematical measure
as it plotted order and coherence upon a chaotic residue'.
In Soviet Russia the Suprematist and Constructivist architects
actually had initial success in their creation of a mathematically
ordered world functioning as a social catalyst. Here the spiritual
dimension of the grid came to represent the more secular ambition
for a pure human society. Following the Marxist revolution of
1917, it became apparent that the surviving capitalist architecture
was 'totally unable to accommodate the operational requirements
of the various new Soviet organisations' . An architectural revolution
paralleling the social one was proposed effecting an 'organic
link between political values, industrial techniques and the specific
possibilities of manipulated materials' . The grid was seen as
the perfect model for this new order. Its repetitive seriality
embodied the virtues of mass production and the machine aesthetic;
seen as the fundamental processes underlying the provision of
quality goods to the whole of society. And its uniformity and
implied infinite continuity was a parallel for the structure of
an egalitarian collectivist society.
Similar
ideas were being proposed throughout Europe in the early twenties;
where the ideals of socialism were coupled with a belief in the
positive power of art and design to effect social change. The
French architect/designer Le Corbusier was well known to the Constructivists
and his philosophies were most readily accepted within socialist
society.
According to Le Corbusier, the modern spirit and its particular
aesthetic were discovered not in nature, but in the relations
of contemporary production, and beauty was not found in the unique
work of the creative individual, but in the anonymity of a mass
production - the serial form....in repetition one found an aesthetic
model of unbounded dimensions. 2
Le
Corbusier's 'Voisin Plan' for the rebuilding of central Paris
shown in the Pavilion L'Esprit Nouveau in Paris in 1925 was based
on the grid whose 'plan revealed that social utility and aesthetic
form could be identical in the grid' . This plan was extended
and expanded even further into an infinitely extendable grid of
cruciform glass wall skyscrapers for his later proposal to rebuild
Paris; the 'Ville Radieuse'. We can imagine the consequences of
the realisation of this proposal through Le Corbusier's housing
block 'Unite d'Habitation' built in Marseilles between 1947-52.
Here the grid is paramount and the structural elements of the
building were designed to govern the social structures of the
inhabitants: the central location of the kitchen in each flat
symbolising the centrality of the feminine role in the home, a
self contained shopping district on the seventh (not ground) floor
to emphasise the detachment and independence of the inhabitants
from the larger city, etc.
Similarly,
his designs for furniture relied on the three principal ideas
of the standard unit, furniture and tools viewed as artificial
limbs (a corollary to his belief in architecture as a mirror of
social structure), and utilisation of new technologies . This
achieved its clearest expression in his 'casier standard'; a series
of modular cubic storage units of indeterminate function that
acted as universal storage to remove any unnecessary clutter and
create a clear stage for the furniture items which most directly
interacted with humans (chaise longue, chairs, desks, etc.).
The
group of Dutch artists and designers loosely grouped around the
painter, designer, polemicist, educator and publisher Theo van
Doesburg and known under the banner of 'De Stijl' , came closest
to dissolving the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture.
Their program was intellectual, abstract and largely apolitical.
Central
to the groups development was Piet Mondrian's speculative imagery.
His theories about colour and space were the basis for De Stijl's
language that carried Cubism's abstractions into a new non-figurative
realm. It was van Doesburg and the designer Gerrit Rietveld who
transformed the De Stijl idea of "pure plastic art" into the third
dimension with their furniture design and architecture. 25
Rietveld's pieces attempted to 'deconstruct' furniture both literally
(structurally) and intellectually. In his famous Red Blue Chair
(fig 4) for example, the structure of 'chair' has been reduced
to a nearly minimal number of components, with the structural
and functional role of each component clearly delineated by its
position, dimension and colour and with the method of production
clearly apparent. The chair has become an articulation of space:
a scaffolding to support the human form. The linear and planar
elements could continue indefinitely into space but are terminated
for function's sake; the ends being emphasised in bright yellow.
These aspects of modularity, orthogonality, infinite extension
and apparent process are common to Rietveld's furniture and architecture
and are congruent with the fundamental aspects of the grid.
Thus the grid came to represent not only the 'modern' through
its association with the new non-representational abstraction
of the visual art, but also the concept of a new social order
based on the paradigm of mechanised serial production. Both aspects
were taken up as key aspects of design in the teaching syllabus
of the Bauhaus. Van Doesburg taught at the Bauhaus and through
dissemination of De Stijl philosophies strongly influenced its
future path. His reverence for the machine aesthetic was unequivocal;
Every machine is a spiritualisation of an organism...The machine
is, par excellence, a phenomenon of spiritual discipline...the
new spiritual artistic sensibility of the twentieth century has
not only felt the beauty of the machine, but has also taken cognisance
of its unlimited expressive possibilities for the arts. 26
And
in parallel with the machine aesthetic comes geometric design;
The machine is calculation; calculation is the human creative
spirit contained in our being, which explains and proves precisely
to our understanding the universe which we apprehend intuitively,...The
graphic expression of this calculation is geometry, our very own
method, precious to us, the only means we have of measuring facts
and objects. The machine comes entirely out of geometry. 27
Here
also was achieved the total abandonment of decoration in favour
of structure - a process that began at the end of the nineteenth
century through the philosophy of 'truth to materials' engendered
by the Arts and Crafts Movement and its European and American
equivalents. The fixation with unadorned structure as the vehicle
for meaning resulted in domination of the grid - the most basic
structure and therefore the most pure.
The
dreams of the inter-war avant-garde for a new egalitarian order
evolving from the plastic arts were not to be realised. In Soviet
Russia, the initially strong official support for the constructivist
synthesis of utilitarian abstraction waned with the increasing
perception of abstract art as synonymous with the decadence of
the west . Similarly, the ideals of the Bauhaus were compromised
from the outset; their designs for mass production were mostly
laboriously handmade and even when mass produced today, are marketed
to an elite as expensive 'design classics'. The final demise of
the Bauhaus came when these proponents of rigid uniformity came
to be perceived as dangerous free-thinkers by the Nazi totalitarian
state. Many of the leading designers fled Europe with the rise
of totalitarianism. Ironically, the designers and architects of
Fascism and Stalinism also drew inspiration from the machine:
not as a paradigm of egalitarianism but as one of order, control
and the imminent eradication of human weakness.
It
was through the migration from Europe to the US of the leading
designers coupled with the US's financial and cultural dominance
following World War II that the 'International Style' came to
dominate world design throughout the remainder of the twentieth
century. The ultimate icon of this style is the curtain-wall skyscraper
which, through its ubiquity, has elevated the grid to the major
visual element of every major city of the world.
A
key figure in this was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, director of the
Bauhaus in its final years (1930-33) and undoubtedly one of the
most important architects of the 20th century. Mies' most significant
and influential work was constructed in the US, where he was able
to fully express his formal abstraction and devotion to Platonic
geometry. The critic Lewis Mumford summarised both his achievement
and his failure:
Mies
van der Rohe used the facilities offered by steel and glass to
create elegant monuments of nothingness. They had the dry style
of machine forms without the contents. His own chaste taste gave
these hollow shells a crystalline purity of form; but they existed
alone in the Platonic world of his imagination and had no relation
to site, climate, insulation, function or internal activity; indeed,
they completely turned their backs on these realities. 30
In the curtain-walled skyscraper the grid is exclusively a consequence
of structure; 'a non-supporting skin made up from window mullions
and in-fill panels which is cantilevered from a frame structure'
. No longer is it symbolic of higher spiritual orders nor of a
new social order to come. Ironically, it was just when the 'International
Style' was stripped of its social idealism following World War
II that it achieved widespread international acceptance. However,
the grid still retained a metaphoric level. Finally, through its
international acceptance the modular rectangular international
style building began to represent the minimum standard for all:
the basic human environment for work and business and living.
As a facade of corporate business the grid gained the new association
of 'anonymous power': the bland face of multinational finance.
Despite the increasingly widespread perception of the barrenness
of this style of architecture the glass-gridded skyscraper has
come to represent bureaucratic power and therefore continues to
dominate our city scapes. Moreover, as the symbol of the 'International
Style', the grid is used by late-Modernist architects such as
Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier to locate their work within a
continuing dialectic.
Another
structural aspect of the grid has facilitated its domination of
urban and more particularly, suburban design. The grid has been
used as the basis for urban planning since pre-Christian times
but here, once again the ordered structure of the grid was generally
perceived to both reflect and engender societal order and structure.
During the later part of this century the metaphoric aspects of
this structure have been subsumed beneath the pragmatic exigencies
of mass transport. The directional grid has proven itself to be
the simplest and most efficient system of ordering the built environment
that allows for extension, internal modification and variation
and the over-riding requirement of vehicular transport for straight
pathways . These features of the grid also made it attractive
to visionary architects of the 60's and 70's who proposed 'mega-structures'
on a scale intermediate between city and building where continued
extendability, adaptability and movement were primary concerns
(metabolist architecture, Superstudio, Archizoom, etc.).
Dissension
The
preceding brief overview of significance of the grid in twentieth
century art and design follows to some extent the 'master narrative'
of modernism. This is due to the fact that the grid has become
so associated with this movement that any discussion of it unfortunately
aligns one with this narrative. David Brett has warned -
The term 'International Style' was proudly adopted in the 1930's
for polemical reasons; it marked a sharp differentiation between
the progressive and the nationalistic tendencies. It was adopted
or put upon architects and designers of different characters,
working in very different circumstances. If we identify 'modernism'
with the International Style and its subsequent commercial extrapolation
and then reify it as the Modern Movement, we are mistaking polemic
for reality. A similar confusion has arisen in painting, in which
the term 'modernism' has come to be identified with a particular
theory of the course of painting put forward by critics such as
Clement Greenberg. But it is important to clear the mind of propaganda
and to look at the substance; and when we do that we see that
there are always several modernisms colliding, interlocking or
running on parallel tracks, and that particular designs can partake
of one or more of these alternatives. 33
Along with the disruption of modernism and the development of
pluralist approaches through the 60's and 70's the grid has developed
new meanings.
There
is an interesting irony in the abstraction of early twentieth
century painting. Cubism and then Constructivism and De Stijl
marked a developing abstraction from reality but at the same time
sought for an essence or truth underlying reality: essentially
a symbolism of reality. The resurgence of the geometric in Western
painting in the 60's and 70's, following the explosion of Abstract
Expressionism, had very different motivations.
Since the sixties, geometric abstract artists have formulated
structures that have chance, indeterminacy, ambiguity and irrationality
built into them, an approach that was spurned by their predecessors
who insisted on complete control and certitude. 34
The
Pop, Op and Kinetic artists used geometry and the grid to construct
illusionistic and multi-valent spaces which reflected a plural
and uncertain vision rather than an ideal one.
Although
contemporary writers saw Sol Le Witt's cubic constructions as
emblematic of the Mind and of rational thought, Krauss has argued
that they were in fact just the opposite: 'a "system" of compulsion,
of the obsessional's unwavering ritual, with its precision, its
neatness, its finicky exactitude, covering over an abyss of irrationality'
. Other Minimalist artists took the grid and seriality to its
nihilistic extreme. Donald Judd concluded that 'order is not rationalistic
and underlying, but is simply order, like that of continuity,
one thing after another' . These sculptors, by using mass produced
elements of identical form, which lack representational attributes
and provoke repetitive or serial composition, rejected the sculptural
illusion which converts one material into another (stone into
flesh for example). At the same time they denied the existence
of the private psychological space so valorised by the abstract
expressionists and relocated sculpture's meaning to the outside
communal space of a shared culture. The grid thus lost its representational
aspects but still symbolised order in the sense of a shared cultural
structure.
In
post-modern architecture Bernhard Tschumi and others (fig 5) use
forms that seem derivative or celebratory of the constructivist
geometry but with a very different intent - not to reflect a collectivist,
serial order based on the machine paradigm but precisely the opposite:
'for making negative, dissociative or probabilistic statements,
for demonstrating non-structure and questioning conventional connectives'
. Thus the ubiquity of the grid in twentieth century design has
now allowed it to be used, ironically, to signify its opposite.
Craft
The preceding discussion has demonstrated that the grid has an
inextricable link with process. In its earliest manifestations
this century it marked the beginning of the abandonment of ornament
and an increasing emphasis on structure. Later it became synonymous
with mass production, and we have seen how in architecture the
grid was a natural consequence of the modular construction of
curtain-walled skyscrapers and its continued prevalence in urban
planning has been due, at least partially, to the suitability
of orthogonal distribution grids to vehicular traffic.
Within
craft disciplines, the manifestation of the grid as an aspect
of process is most evident in weaving. As mentioned previously
the rectilinear pattern of warp and weft is one of the fundamental
well-springs of the grid pattern in human culture. And as the
first 'machine', the loom forged the link between the grid and
mechanisation millennia before the twentieth century. Recent art
weaving which explores the structure of weaving, underlines the
grid as the basis of process and in doing so draws associative
links with the wider issues signified by the grid. 38
In
the craft of furniture making too, the grid is a constant companion
to the making process. Until the late 20th Century furniture was
almost exclusively made of timber. And until the late 19th Century
timber was shaped with literally hundreds of specialised hand
tools. These in turn, were either made by the craftsman himself
or hand made by specialised trades which catered to the particular
needs of a wide variety of craftsmen working with wood: cabinetmakers,
chair bodgers, coopers, wheelwrights, carriage builders, carpenters,
joiners, timber millers, veneer cutters, etc. The first powered
woodworking machines were designed to speed up and standardise
the most basic processes; sawing and planing timber into smaller
regular sections. The consequence of these labour saving innovations
was to impose flat, straight, rectangular or square section boards
as the base line for all future processes. Furthermore, machinery
is used most economically if a particular setting is used again
and again; as a consequence serial production is favoured. Subsequent
machinery was designed around the existing baseline and enshrined
the orthogonal and serial as the fundamental mode of production.
Obviously
the huge variety of woodworking and furniture produced since the
19th century demonstrates the infinite potential from such a baseline.
However, any deviation from the orthogonal or serial requires
effort, skill and a decrease in the efficiency of production.
Maximum economy requires adherence to the orthogonal and serial
built into the existing processes. Thus the grid as the most fundamental
representation of the orthogonal and serial can be seen as a signifier
of the production process itself.
Conclusion
Clearly
the most enduring metaphor associated with the grid is its aspect
as an ordering principle. At the beginning of the century this
was seen as the divine or universal spirit, between the wars it
was the collectivist egalitarian society of socialism, and throughout
it has been linked with the structured view of the universe as
exemplified by scientific rationalism. In contemporary work the
grid has come to represent the results of human rationalist endeavours
- the urban and suburban landscape and our rational view of the
world around us. The grid is an abstraction of the human quest
for order.
Within
the craft disciplines this link with order extends into a paradigm
of process. The grid can signify the inherent structure of working
processes which are mostly tacitly accepted and overlooked. By
underlining the grid structure a craftperson can work towards
a deconstruction of inherent process and look afresh at the capacity
of process to convey meaning in craftwork.
Bibliography
Branzi,
A.,
The Hot House; Italian New Wave Design. Thames and Hudson, London.
1984.
Brett,
D.,
C.R. Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship. Reaktion Books, London.
1992.
Burn,
I.,
Dialogue. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. 1991.
Cooke,
C.,
Russian Precursors. in Papadakis, A., Cooke, C. and Benjamin,
A., eds., Deconstruction. Academy Editions, London. 1989. pp.
11-19.
Cooke,
C.,
The Development of the Constructivist Architect's Design Method.
in Papadakis, A., Cooke, C. and Benjamin, A., eds., Deconstruction.
Academy Editions, London. 1989. pp. 21-37.
De
Fusco, R.,
Le Corbusier, Designer Furniture, 1929. Barron's, New York. 1976.
Droste,
M.,
Bauhaus;1919-1933. Taschen, Koln. 1990.
Filler,
M.,
The Furniture of Gerrit Rietveld: Manifestations for a New Revolution.
in Friedman, M., ed. De Stijl: 1917-1931 Visions of Utopia. Phaidon,
Oxford. 1982. pp. 125-135
Forty, A.,
Objects of Desire. Thames and Hudson, London. 1986.
Friedman, M.,
Foreword. in Friedman, M., ed. De Stijl: 1917-1931 Visions of
Utopia. Phaidon, Oxford. 1982. pp. 7-12.
Friedman, M.,
Echoes of De Stijl. in Friedman, M., ed. De Stijl: 1917-1931 Visions
of Utopia. Phaidon, Oxford. 1982. pp. 207-227.
Gombrich,
E.H.,
The Sense of Order. Phaidon, London. 2nd Edn. 1984.
Jaffe, H.C.L., Introduction. in Friedman, M., ed. De Stijl: 1917-1931
Visions of Utopia. Phaidon, Oxford. 1982.
Jencks, C., Modern Movements in Architecture. 2nd Edn. Penguin,
London. 1985
Krauss,
R.,
Passages in Modern Sculpture. MIT Press, Cambridge. 1977.
Krauss,
R.,
The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
MIT Press, Cambridge. 1985.
McNamara, A.,
Between flux and certitude: the grid in avant-garde utopian thought.
Art History 15 (1). March 1992. pp. 60-79.
Overy,
P.,
De Stijl. Thames and Hudson, London. 1991.
Sekler,
E.,
Josef Hoffman: The Architectural Work. Princeton Univ. Press,
Princeton, N.J. 1985.
Sandler,
I.,
Al Held. Hudson Hills, New York. 1984.
Tilley,
C., ed.
Reading Material Culture. Blackwell, Oxford. 1990.
Weinberg, S.,
Dreams of a Final Theory. Pantheon. 1993.
|
