Proposal:
Kunstkalle
Introduktion Behind
the proposal for the establishment of a kunsthalle in Norway lies a
strategy that differs from what one is used to in Norwegian cultural
life. Rather than presenting a complete plan for an exhibition
program, an organization and a building, Oslo Kunsthall takes the
form of a practical laboratory for research into what a Kunsthalle
is, and what it might become.
To suggest the establishment
of a Kunsthalle in Oslo is both a professional and a political act.
First and foremost, it is a pointing to the fact that an important
element is lacking in the art-life of the Norwegian capital- the
dynamic interaction with the young, international artscene. This is
something that different Kunsthalle all over Europe take care of,
and where there are no Kunsthalle, the museums are generally quite
dilligent in establishing project rooms and other spaces where new
art can be developed.
It can seem hyperbolic to focus this
strongly on international participation, but like other areas of
society- be it research, sports or other forms of cultural
expression- contemporary art is defined internationally, whether we
like it or not. To put it bluntly, contemporary art does not exist
outside of the international discourse. If Oslo does not become
involved in the creation of this discourse we end up only as
consumers of international culture.
As opposed to many other
proposal for the establishment of cultural institutions, whether it
is a museum, an opera house or a competence center, there is little
previous discussion that suggests that either the city of Oslo or
private investors would be able to put up between 50 and 100 million
NOK to build and run a Kunsthalle in Oslo. Still, the art community
is in dire need of a Kunsthalle, and by establishing an institution
that will discuss its own becoming through doing, Oslo Kunsthall
wants to create this need at a political and corporate level as
well. It is, however not certain that it would cost this much, it
isn´t even certain that an authoritarian building structure must be
built in order to frame this activity. Oslo Kunsthall, even in its
formative phase, therefore contains the core of a future, more
permanent institution- i.e a flexible and nomadic character.
Oslo Kunsthall is based in a conceptual tradition and an
understanding of art influenced by institutional critique, and will
through its exhibitions, projects and publications actively seek to
discuss its own existence as an institution. In line with american
curator (now carpet salesman), Seth Siegelaub´s statement from 1969,
"Where any artist is will be the center", Oslo Kunsthall will invite
exhibiting artists to Norway, and, when possible, arrange artist
talks and other events that allow for interaction between exhibitor
and audience. By introducing artists in Oslo, Oslo Kunsthall has an
ambition to raise the consciousness towards international
artproduction, thereby also creating a synergy-effect for the
Norwegian artscene. This will in turn bring Oslo as an artcity into
the center of the activities of the kunsthalle.
The curated
artist archive of the kunsthalle will function as a link between the
international and the Norwegian artscene, and will contribute to
actualizing Norwegian art abroad while at the same time creating a
context that will encourage the ambitions of artists (in Norway).
Oslo Kunsthall will present a series of publications. These
publications are not meant as catalogues, but will seek to explore
theoretical areas that relate to the artistic practice of the
exhibiting artists. It is also intended that the publications can be
read independently of the exhibitions.
In this first
publication a.o. Lars Nittve, director of Tate Modern, gives his
view of the history and identity of the kunsthalle. Nittve first and
foremost underlines the fact that the Kunsthalle is oriented towards
the contemporary and that it has an open and impermanent structure.
We have also invited architect Gary Bates to take part in
the discussion of what a kunsthalle in Oslo could be. Bates has
formulated the results of this discussion under the title "We are
Here", a title that points out the openness of the project, an
openness that takes the current situation as its starting point.
We have also chosen to print- for the first time in
Norwegian- a text by American theorist Manuel DeLanda. DeLanda is
one of the leading exponents for a new turn in critical therory,
away from the focus on language and the body, towards the dicussion
of process and potential, both in geophysical and social structures.
This text can in this context be read metaphorically as a
contribution to the discussion on how heterogenous elements can be
composed in order to create a new dynamic(s). Oslo Kunsthall wants
to contribute with somthing comparable within the artworld.
GEE,JE,MF/Oslo
Kunsthall
www.oslokunsthall.no/publikasjoner/00uk/Nittve/
Kunsthalle
When
in the following I deal with the subject of kunsthalles, it is not
primarily because I want to cast an historic light on this part of
the public art scene, which otherwise consists in particular of art
museums, the art departments of cultural historic museums, private
and co-operative galleries, as well as the major artists'
associations' autumn and spring exhibitions, something which is for
the present unique to Denmark.
Even though the history of
kunsthalles is quite a rich and varied one, there is no doubt that
it has its social roots in the liberal bourgeoisie of the late 19th
Century or the early 20th Century and its geographical roots in the
German-speaking countries. Many kunsthalles originated from a
"Kunstverein", an art association that on the one hand worked on
introducing new, contemporary art to a larger audience, but also
that collected art, not infrequently as a protest against a
conservative museum's purchasing policy. In Germany and Switzerland
many kunsthalles are still constituted as member organisations,
while their counterparts, for example in the Scandinavian countries
or Great Britain (outside of London) are more likely to be publicly
financed, either by the city or the municipal authorities.
So
what is it that characterises the contemporary kunsthalle? (In
parenthesis we can point out that the term "kunsthalle" has, during
the last decade, become the international term for the subject I
will be describing here, at the expense of the British "Art
Gallery", which can easily be confused with the term for a
commercial gallery). There is a Kunsthall in So-Ho, New York and a
Kunst Hal in Rotterdam.
Today the crucial difference between
a kunsthalle and an art museum is that the museum has a collection,
while the art gallery does not. But, as is always the case in the
relationship between maps and reality, this generalisation is not
100 % accurate. For example the Kunsthalle Hamburg is definitely a
museum, and both Malmö Konsthall and Rooseum, which in principal
operates as an art gallery, do in fact have collections, though they
are not on show permanently, either in part or in their entirety.
Most of the art galleries that once had a collection or the
beginnings of a collection have anyway lodged them with or donated
them to one museum or another - not infrequently to the museum they
once opposed.
Apart from the fact that it must be without a
permanent collection, a kunsthalle is expected to be contemporary,
while a modern museum or a museum for contemporary art is expected
to work from an historical perspective, without losing sight of the
contemporary, and to create exhibitions using older artists, such as
Monet, Matisse or Mortensen, for example.
But here as well
the distinction is not very clear. As someone recently commented
during an international conference: It seems as if the kunsthalles
would rather be museums, and the museums kunsthalles. The museums
would like to deal with the contemporary, whereas the kunsthalles
like to present museum exhibitions. We have a very clear example of
this on the other side of the Sound, where Malmö Museum is investing
a great deal of energy in projects such as KM 2, where young artists
create installations in so-called "alternative" spaces, while Malmö
Konsthall shows Kandinsky, Klee, Miró and Giacometti. Rooseum's
Leonardo exhibition should however be regarded as a bit of an
exception. Another example is the Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum in
Eindhoven, Holland, which in the last 15 years has been regarded as
one of Europe's most interesting kunsthalles, while at the same time
it's stockroom hides one of the continent's better collections of
modern art, something which few people have realised. To be fair it
must be mentioned that they are at the moment working on a new
project, which will enable them to show exhibitions and collections
at the same time.
Why it is going to be like this is hard to
answer - it cannot possibly be just another primitive reaction along
the lines of "the grass is always greener on the other side." A
modern museum being interested in contemporary art is less
extraordinary than a kunsthalle creating historical museum
exhibitions. One reason for this latter phenomenon is without doubt
the larger public (and the greater level of comprehension from the
public, the media and perhaps also different kind of financiers) for
older, established art. For financial reasons people are forced to
choose exhibitions that pay off - which in a way goes against the
whole idea of kunsthalles. Unfortunately this is also a deplorable
development, since kunsthalles are rarely able to create historical
exhibitions as good as those created by museums. Not only do they
often lack the art historical resources, which are increasingly a
condition for being able to prove to the world that the loans they
wish to negotiate justify the risk involved for the works'
well-being, but they also lack the technical and restoration
resources required by historical exhibitions. Furthermore, and
perhaps most importantly, the kunsthalles miss out on a lot of
important loans from other museums, since they themselves do not
have any attractive collections to use in the exchanges between the
museums and which are a necessity for an historical exhibition. I
understand that the discussion about whether there should be a
kunsthalle in Copenhagen has already been going on for quite a long
time - and that this is perhaps the reason I am here today. In this
regard I would like to emphasise that a kunsthalle, much more than a
museum, is an empty shell that should, in time, be filled up with a
content. Having the building solves at most half the problem. A
museum, thanks to its collection, has a soul, a context which rubs
off on everything done there. The collection creates a continuity,
which is greater than any individuals. Moderna Museet will still be
Moderna Museet, even after Pontus Hultén, and similarly with
Stedelijk in Amsterdam after Sandberg, de Wilde and
Bereen.
The kunsthalle is, on the other hand, more a result
of the individual or individuals who run it, and when they go the
activities could undergo a sudden and radical change. This is
particularly obvious with what is perhaps the most visited
kunsthalle in Europe, the Basel Kunsthalle, which under its previous
leader, Jean-Christophe Amman, had an incredibly radical profile.
Under its present leader, Thomas Kellein, the main emphasis has
moved in the direction of the modernist classics and the similarity
between Basle's two art galleries has become striking. In the same
way we can see how Lund's Konsthall, to take a more regional
perspective, from having been an important institution in the
sixties, is now languishing somewhat.
The advantages of the
museum are clear, with the continuity and especially the educational
possibilities it has to offer the visitors seeing contemporary art
in the historical light of the collection (and seeing the
collection's contemporary works in the light of the historical
exhibitions) - the interaction between the collection and the
temporary exhibitions provides inexhaustible opportunities!
Furthermore it is of course the collection that writes the history
of the institution - provided that the museum buys from the
exhibitions that are created.
The advantage of the kunsthalle
lies most of all in flexibility and relative neutrality. It has to
be an open room, that is ready at all times to accept the rapidly
and unpredictably changing expressions in contemporary art and show
them more or less unconditionally. In some cases the museum
collections' rigid frame can turn out to be a safety net. The Museum
of Modern Art in New York, for example, as a result of its ideology
emphasising painting and masterpieces from which its collection has
been built-up, has enormous problems functioning in a reasonable and
reliable way in terms of art from the last twenty years. Art
galleries on the other hand have, for better and worse, something of
the newspapers' superficiality: they have a short
memory.
Among the advantages of the kunsthalle there is also
a certain lack of prestige, which can be more difficult to achieve
in a museum, whose most important principle is canonisation, whether
or not that is what we want. Variety gives prestige, which gives
value - even though Louisiana, for example, is an outstanding
example of how you can lower the value threshold. The kunsthalle
also represents an opportunity for the less well-to-do and perhaps
also the small locality to achieve a place on the cultural world
map. This might not be very important in itself (except for the fact
that it becomes easier to borrow the works one would most like to
borrow, thus becoming even better), but it does, without a doubt,
play a big role for international interest in local art life in
general and its artists in particular. The reason why the art
gallery suits the smaller wallet is of course the fact that the art
gallery does not need to build up (and keep and preserve) a
collection. It need only be said that you can do a lot with an
exhibition budget of 2 million, while on the whole the same amount
would only fund the purchase of one single painting by, for example,
Gerhard Richter…
There is no recipe for what a good
kunsthalle is supposed to look like. A certain neutrality and lack
of sensitivity is advisable - and also a well developed, or rather
in-built opportunity for the future's new electronic techniques. The
first rule to success is: independence of content, meaning that the
management should not have an agenda that is too obviously defined
from outside, and economic independence insofar as the program does
not have to be drawn up taking into account the takings at the door,
but what is, from an artistic point of view, of burning interest
right now. Once again it is crucially important to have a competent
management with visions, a network and timing, supported by a good
and flexible organisation.
During the last fifty years of
revolution in the art world, which is sometimes called the
breakthrough of postmodernism, the kunsthalle has played an
important role, while the museum has played a more passive role,
even though museums have been built like never before. Perhaps in
part because the museums have been children of the artistic vision
which the new art is questioning.
If you were to ask me where
I'd prefer to work, I probably wouldn't be able to give you an
answer. When I worked in a museum, I missed the freedom of the
kunsthalle from history's framed shadow, its ability to shake off
what has happened and move on. Now in Rooseum I find myself not
infrequently missing the museum's inertia and the opportunity to
give the public an historical perspective - just imagine being able
to show, for example, Rodin and Anthony Caro as references to
Charles Ray, or being able to see Morris Louis, Sam Francis and Per
Kirkeby in connection with Louisiana's Monet exhibition…
The
kunsthalle and the museum do not exclude each other nor do they
compete against each other. The latter is our constantly changing
and reworking memory, a room for slower and more thoughtful
processes, while the former is a room that is ready for the
surprises of the present - a vital catalyst in the artistic life of
a town or a region!
This is an edited edition of Lars
Nittve's opening speech given at the Academic Council,Royal Academy
of Art, Copenhagen
1995
www.oslokunsthall.no/publikasjoner/00uk/Bates/
We
Are Here
www.oslokunsthall.no/publikasjoner/00uk/DeLanda/
Uniformity
and Variability. An Essay in the Philosophy of Matter
The
development of the science and engineering of materials in this
century has many aspects which promise to enrich the conceptual
reservoir of the philosopher of matter. In this essay I would like
to explore a few of the philosophical issues raised by new
developments in materials science, particularly the new awareness of
the importance of studying the behavior of matter in its full
complexity. This awareness has, in turn, resulted in part from the
creation and experimentation with materials which involve a
heterogeneous meshwork of components, such as fiberglass and other
composites, as opposed to the simpler and more predictable behavior
of uniform, homogeneous materials such as industrial-quality
steel.
Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgist and an expert in
the history of materials, has explored the development of the
philosophy of matter in the West, from the ancient Greeks to the
present day, and has concluded that for the most part, the study of
the complexity and variability of behavior of materials has always
been the concern of empirically oriented craftsmen or engineers, not
of philosophers or scientists. In his own words:
"Through
most of history, matter has been a concern of metaphysics more than
physics, and materials of neither. Classical physics at its best
turned matter into mass, while chemistry discovered the atom and
lost interest in properties... [In both metaphysical speculation and
scientific research] sensitivity to the wonderful diversity of real
materials was lost, at first because philosophical thought despised
the senses, later because the… the new science could only deal with
one thing at a time. It was atomistic, or at least, simplistic, in
its very essence." (1)
This author claims that by the time
Greek philosophers like Democritus or Aristotle developed their
philosophies of matter, practically everything about the behavior of
metals and alloys that could be explored with pre-industrial
technology, was already known to craftsmen and blacksmiths. For at
least a thousand years before philosophers began their speculations,
this knowledge was developed on a purely empirical basis, through a
direct interaction with the complex behavior of materials. Indeed,
the early philosophies of matter may have been derived from
observation and conversation with those "whose eyes had seen and
whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials
during thermal processing or as they were shaped by chipping,
cutting or plastic deformation." (2) For instance, Aristotle´s
famous four elements, fire, earth, water and air, may be said to
reflect a sensual awareness of what today we know as energy and the
three main states of aggregation of matter, the solid, liquid and
gas states.
As metaphysical speculation gave special meanings
to these four elementary qualities, their original physical meaning
was lost, and the variability and complexity of real materials was
replaced with the uniform behaviour of a philosophically simplified
matter about which one could only speculate symbolically. It is true
that sixteen-century alchemists recovered a certain respect for a
direct interaction with matter and energy, and that
seventeen-century Cartesian philosophers intensely speculated about
the variable properties of different ways of aggregating material
components. But these early attempts at capturing the complexity of
physical transmutations and of the effect of physical structure on
the complex properties of materials, eventually lost to the emergent
science of chemistry, and its almost total concentration on simple
behaviour: that of individual components (such as Lavoisieris
oxygen) or of substances that conform to the law of definite
proportions (as in Daltonis atomic theory).
There was, as
Cyril Stanley Smith observes, an "immense gain" in these
simplifications, since the exact sciences could not have developed
without them, but the triumph of chemistry was accompanied by a "not
insignificant loss". In particular, the complete concentration of
analysis at the level of molecules caused an almost total disregard
for higher levels of aggregation in solids, but it is there where
most complex properties of interest to todayis material scientist
occurr. (3) As it is usual in the history of science, there were
several exceptions. Galileo studied the strenght of materials in the
sixteen-century, and in the seventeenth while Newton was reducing
the variability of material behaviour to questions of mass, his
arch-enemy Robert Hooke was developing the first theory of
elasticity. As materials scientist James Edward Gordon has remarked,
"unlike Newton, Hooke was intensely interested in what went on in
kitchens, dockyards, and buildings -the mundane mechanical arenas of
life...Nor did Hooke despised craftmen, and he probably got the
inspiration for at least some of his ideas from his friend the great
London clockmaker Thomas Tompion...". (4) Despite the imporatnt
exceptions, I believe it is fair to say that, at least in England,
much more prestige was attached to scientific fields that were not
concerned with these mundane mechanical arenas where materials
displayed their full complex behaviour. This may be one reason why
conceptual advances in the study of materials, such as the key
conceptual distinction between stress and strain (one refering to
the forces acting on a material structure, the other to the
behaviour of the structure in response to those forces), were made
in France where applied science was encouraged both officially and
socially. (5)
James Gordon has called the study of the
strenght of materials the Cinderella of science, partly because much
of the knowledge was developed by craftmen, metallurgists and
engineers (that is the flow of ideas often ran from the applied to
the pure fields), and partly because by its very nature, the study
of materials involved an interaction between many scientific
disciplines, an interdisciplinary approach which ran counter to the
more prestigious tradition of "pure" specialization. (6) Today, of
course, the interdisciplinary study of complexity, not only in
materials but in many other areas of science, from physics and
ecology to economics, is finally taking its place at the
cutting-edge of scientific research. We are begining to understand
that any complex system, whether composed of interacting molecules,
organic creatures or economic agents, is capable of spontaneoulsy
generating order and of actively organizing itself into new
structures and forms. It is precisely this ability of matter and
energy to self-organize that is of greatest significance to the
philosopher. Let me illustrate this with an example from materials
science.
Long ago, practical metallurgists understood that a
given piece of metal can be made to change its behaviour, from
ductile and tough to strong and brittle, by hammering it while cold.
The opposite transmutation, from hard to ductile, could also be
achieved by heating the piece of metal again and then allowing it to
cool down slowly (that is, by annealing it). Yet, although
blacksmiths knew empirically how to cause these metamorphoses, it
was not until a few decades ago that scientists understood its
actual microscopic mechanism. As it turns out, explaining the
physical basis of ductility involved a radical conceptual change:
scientists had to stop viewing metals in static terms, that is, as
deriving their strenghth in a simple way from the chemical bonds
between their composing atoms, and begin seeing them as dynamical
systems. In particular, the real cause of brittleness in rigid
materials, and the reason why ductile ones can resist being broken,
has to do with the complex dynamics of spreading cracks.
A
crack or fracture needs energy to spread through a piece of material
and so any mechanism that takes away energy from the crack will make
the material tough. In metals, the mechanism seems to be based on
certain defects or imperfections within the component crystals
called dislocations. Dislocations not only trap energy locally but
moreover, are highly mobile and may be brought into existance in
large quantities by the very concentrations of stress which tend to
break a piece of material. Roughly, if populations of these line
defects are free to move in a material they will endow it with the
capacity to yield locally without breaking, that is, they will make
the material tough. On the other hand, restricted movement of
dislocations will result in a stronger but more brittle material.
(7) Both of these properties may be desirable for different tools,
and even within one and the same tool: in a sword or knife, for
instance, the body must be tough while the cutting edge must be
strong.
What matters from the philosophical point of view is
precisely that toughness or strength are emergent properties of a
metallic material that result from the complex dynamical behaviour
of some of its components. An even deeper philosophical insight is
related to the fact that the dynamics of populations of dislocations
are very closely related to the population dynamics of very
different entities, such as molecules in a rhythmic chemical
reaction, termites in a nest-building colony, and perhaps even human
agents in a market. In other words, despite the great difference in
the nature and behaviour of the components, a given population of
interacting entities will tend to display similar collective
behaviour as long as there is some feedback in the interactions
between components (that is, the interactions must be nonlinear) and
as long as there is an intense enough flow of energy rushing through
the system (that is, the population in question must operate far
from thermodynamic equilibrium). As I will argue in a moment, the
idea that many different material and energetic systems may have a
common source of spontaneous order is now playing a key role in the
development of a new philosophy of matter. But for materials
scientists this commonality of behaviour is of direct practical
significance since it means that as they begin to confront
increasingly more complex material properties, they can make use of
tools coming from nonlinear dynamics and nonequilibrium
thermodynamics, tools that may have been developed to deal with
completly different problems. In the words of one
author:
"…during the last years the whole field of materials
science and related technologies has experienced a complete renewal.
Effectively, by using techniques corresponding to strong
nonequilibrium conditions, it is now possible to escape from the
constraints of equilibrium thermodynamics and to process totally new
material structures including different types of glasses, nano- and
quasi-crystals, superlaticces … As materials with increased
resistance to fatigue and fracture are sought for actual
applications, a fundamental understanding of the collective
behaviour of dislocations and point defects is highly desirable.
Since the usual thermodynamic and mechanical concepts are not
adapted to describe those situations, progress in this direction
should be related to the explicit use of genuine nonequilibrium
techniques, nonlinear dynamics and instability theory".
(8)
Thus, to the extent that the self-organizing behaviour of
populations of dislocations within ductile metals is basically
similar to the spontaneous collective behaviour in other
populations, tools and concepts developed in very different
disciplines may apply across the board, and this may help legitimize
the intrinsic interdisciplinary approach of materials science. As I
just said, however, the common behaviour of different collectivities
in nonlinear, nonequilibrium conditions is of even greater
importance to the philosopher of matter. This is very clear in the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who are perhaps the
most radical contemporary representatives of this branch of
philosophy. Inspired in part by some early versions of complexity
theory (e.g. Rene Thom´s catastrophe theory, and the theories of
technology of Gilbert Simondon) these authors arrived at the idea
that all structures, whether natural or social, are indeed different
expressions of a single matter-energy behaving dynamically, that is,
matter-energy in flux, to which they have given the name of
"machinic phylum". In their words: "…the machinic phylum is
materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneoulsy; it is
matter in movement, in flux, in variation…" (9)
The term
"phylum" is used in biology to refer to the common body-plan of many
different creatures. Human beings, for example, belong to the phylum
"chordata", as do all other vertebrate animals. The basic idea is
that of a common source of form, a body-plan which through different
foldings and stretchings during embryological development, is
capable of generating a wide variety of specific forms, from snakes,
to giraffes to humans. Deleuze and Guattari, aware that nonlinear
population processes are common not only to animals and plants but
to metals and other inorganic materials, have extended this meaning
to refer to a common source of spontaneoulsy generated form across
all material entities. I began this essay by quoting the opinion of
a metallurgist, Cyril Stanley Smith, on the historical importance of
sensually aquired knowledge about the complex behaviour of metals
and other materials. And indeed, in Deleuze and Guattariis
philosophy of matter, metallurgists play an important
role:
"…metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper
to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that
doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarly hidden or covered,
rendered unrecognizable… Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought
of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness.
As expressed in panmetallism, metal is coextensive to the whole of
matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the
grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or
mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere…
The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic
head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device."
(10)
One aspect of the definition of the machinic phylum is
of special interest to our discussion of contemporary materials
science. Not only is the phylum defined in dynamic terms (that is,
as matter in motion) but also as "matter in continuous variation".
Indeed, these philosophers define the term "machinic" precisely as
the process through which structures can be created by bringing
together heterogenous materials, that is, by articulating the
diverse as such, without homogenization. In other words, the
emphasis here is not only on the spontaneous generation of form, but
on the fact that this morphogenetic potential is best expressed not
by the simple and uniform behaviour of materials, but by their
complex and variable behaviour. In this sense, contemporary
industrial metals, such as mild steel, may not be the best
illustration of this new philosophical conception of matter. While
naturally ocurring metals contain all kinds of impurities that
change their mechanical behaviour in different ways, steel and other
industrial metals have undergone in the last two hundred years an
intense process of uniformation and homogenization in both their
chemical composition and their physical structure. The rationale
behind this process was partly based on questions of reliability and
quality control, but it had also a social component: both human
workers and the materials they used needed to be disciplined and
their behaviour made predictable. Only then the full efficiencies
and economies of scale of mass production techniques could be
realized. But this homogenization also affected the engineers that
designed structures using this well disciplined materials. In the
words of James E. Gordon:
"The widespread use of steel for so
many purposes in the modern world is only partly due to technical
causes. Steel, especially mild steel, might euphemistically be
described as a material that facilitates the dilution of skills…
Manufacturing processes can be broken down into many separate
stages, each requiring a minimum of skill or intelligence… At a
higher mental level, the design process becomes a good deal easier
and more foolproof by the use of a ductile, isotropic, and
practically uniform material with which there is already a great
deal of accumulated experience. The design of many components, such
as gear wheels, can be reduced to a routine that can be looked up in
handbooks." (11)
Gordon sees in the spread of the use of
steel in the late nineteen- and early twenty centuries, a double
danger for the creativity of structural designers. The first danger
is the idea that a single, universal material is good for all
different kinds of structure, some of which may be supporting loads
in compression, some in tension, some withstanding shear stresses
and others torsional stresses. But as Gordon points out, given that
the roles which a structure may play can be highly heterogenous, the
repertoir of materials that a designer uses should reflect this
complexity. On the other hand, he points out that, much as in the
case of biological materials like bone, new designs may involve
structures with properties that are in continuous variation, with
some portions of the structure better able to deal with compression
while others deal with tension. Intrinsically heterogenous
materials, such as fiberglass and the newer hi-tech composites,
afford designers this possibility. As Gordon says, "it is scarcely
practicable to tabulate elaborate sets of "typical mechanical
properties" for the new composites. In theory, the whole point of
such materials is that, unlike metals, they do not have "typical
properties, because the material is designed to suit not only each
individual structure, but each place in that structure." (12)
I do not mean to imply that there are no legitimate roles to
be played by homogenous materials with simple and predictable
behaviour, such as bearing loads in compression. And similarly for
the institutional and economic arrangements that were behind the
quest for uniformity: the economies of scale achieved by routinizing
production and some design tasks, were certainly very significant.
As with the already mentioned homogenizations performed by
scientists in their conceptions of matter, there were undoubtedly
some gains. The question is, what got lost in the process. I can
think of several things.
First, the nineteenth century
process of transfering skills from the human worker to the machine,
and the task of homogenizing metallic behaviour went hand in hand.
As Cyril Stanley Smith remarks
"The craftman can compensate
for differences in the qualities of his material, for he can adjust
the precise strength and pattern of application of his tools to the
materialis local vagaries. Conversely, the constant motion of a
machine requires constant materials." (13)
If its is true as
I said at the beggining of this essay that much of the knowledge
about the complex behaviour of materials was developed outside
science by empirically oriented individuals, the deskilling of
craftmen that accompanied mechanization may be seen as involving a
loss of at least part of that knowledge, since in many cases
empirical know-how is stored in the form of skills.
Second,
as I just said, not only the production process was routinized this
way, so was to a lesser extent the design process. Many
professionals who design load-bearing structures lost their ability
to design with materials that are not isotropic, that is, that do
not have identical properties in all directions. But it is precisely
those abilities to deal with complex, continuously variable
bahaviour that are now needed to design structures with the new
composites. Hence, we may need to nurture again our ability to deal
with variation as a creative force, and to think of structures that
incorporate heterogenous elements as a challenge to be met by
innovative design.
Third, the quest for uniformity in human
and metallic behaviour went beyond the specific disciplinary devices
used in assembly-line factories. Many other things became
homogenized in the last few centuries. To give only two examples:
the genetic materials of our farm animals and crops have become much
more uniform, at first due to the spread of the "pedigree mystique",
and later in this century, by the development and diffusion of
miracle crops, like hybrid corn. Our linguistic materials also
became more uniform as the meshworks of heterogenous dialects which
existed in most countries began to yield to the spread of standard
languages, through compulsory education systems and the effects mass
media. As before, the question is not whether we achieved some
efficiencies through genetic and linguisitic standarization. We did.
The problem is that in the process we came to view heterogeneity and
variation as something to be avoided, as something pathological to
be cured or uprooted since it endangered the unity of the nation
state. Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, the
nineteen-century quest for uniformity may had had damaging effects
for the philosophy of matter by making the machinic phylum
effectively unrecognizable. As the behaviour of metals and other
mineral materials became routine, and hence, unremarkable,
philosophical attention became redirected to the more interesting
behaviour of living creatures, as in early twenty-century forms of
vitalism, and later on, to the behaviour of symbols, discourses and
texts, in which any consideration of material or energetic factors
was completly lost. Today, thanks in part to the new theories of
self-organization that have revealed the potential complexity of
behaviour of even the humbler forms of matter-energy, we are
begining to recover a certain philosophical respect for the inherent
morphogenetic potential of all materials. And we may now be in a
position to think about the origin of form and structure, not as
something imposed from the outside on an inert matter, not as a
hierarchical command from above as in an assembly line, but as
something that may come from within the materials, a form that we
tease out of those materials as we allow them to have their say in
the structures we create.
References: 1) Cyril Stanley
Smith. Matter Versus Materials: A Historical View. In A Search for
Structure. (MIT Press, 1992). p. 115 2) ibid. p.115 3) ibid.
p. 120 and 121 4) James Edward Gordon. The Science of Structures
and Materials. (Scientific American Library, 1988). p. 18 5)
ibid. p. 21 and 22 6) ibid p. 3 7) ibid. p. 111 8) D.
Walgraef. Pattern Selection and Symmetry Competition in Materials
Instabilities. In New Trends in Nonlinear Dynamics and
Pattern-Forming Phenomena. Pierre Coullet and Patrick Huerre eds.
(Plenum Press 1990). p. 26 9) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
A Thousand Plateaus. (University of Minnesota Press, 1980) p. 409
10) James Edward Gordon. op. cit. p. 135 11) ibid. p. 200
12) Cyril Stanley Smith. ibid p.
313
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