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Lose the Building: Systems Theory, Architecture, and Diller+Scofidio's Blur
Cary Wolfe
Rice University
cewolfe@rice.edu
(c) 2006 Cary Wolfe.
All rights reserved.
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"The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence."
--Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (153)
1. The Blur building designed by the New York architectural team of
Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller--a manufactured cloud with
an embedded viewing deck, hovering over Lake Neuchatel in
Switzerland--seems to have enjoyed nearly universal acclaim from
the moment it opened to the public in October of 2002 as part of
media Expo '02. The reasons for this are not far to seek; they
range from what a Swiss newspaper reviewer characterizes as the
liberating effect of the zany cloud on "the crotchety
Swiss"--"What a crazy, idiosyncratic thing! How deliciously
without purpose!," he exclaims (Diller+Scofidio 372)--to
Diller+Scofidio's knowing deployment of the relationship between
public architecture, the history and function of the exposition as
a social form, and the manufacture and use of spectacle in
relation to both (92, 162). The project went through many
different elaborations, enhancements, and embellishments between
July of 1998, when Diller+Scofidio was invited to participate, and
the closing of the Expo in October of 2002. Almost all of these
were, for various reasons, unrealized in the final project. At one
point, the cloud was to house an "LED text forest" of vertical LED
panels that would scroll text--either from an Internet feed
(including live "chat" produced by visitors to the structure) or,
in a later version, produced by an artist such as Jenny Holzer
(163, 324). Another idea early in the project was to build an
adjacent "Hole in the Water" restaurant made of submerged twin
glass cylinders with an aquarium layer in between, in which diners
would sit at eye level with the lake and eat sushi (100-111);
another, to have an open air "Angel Bar" embedded in the upper
part of the cloud, in which patrons could select from an endless
variety of the only beverage served there: water--artesian waters,
sparkling waters, waters from both glacial poles, and municipal
tap waters from around the world ("tastings can be arranged," we
are told) (146-55). Yet another elaborate idea, rather late in the
project's evolution, involved the distribution of "smart"
raincoats--or "braincoats"--to visitors to the cloud, which would
indicate, through both sound and color, affinity or antipathy to
other visitors on the basis of a preferences questionnaire filled
out upon entry to the cloud (209-51).
Figure 1
*Figure 1: The "Blur Building."*
Courtesy of Diller+Scofidio
2. As even this brief list suggests, the project went through many
permutations. But in the end--not least for reasons of money--what
we are left with in Blur is the manufactured cloud with the "Angel
Deck" (now, not a water bar but a viewing deck) nestled at its
crest. For reasons I will try to explain by way of contemporary
systems theory, the fact that these permutations and sideline
enhancements were not realized in the end is not entirely a bad
thing, because it rivets our attention not only on what has
captivated most viewers from the beginning, but also on what makes
the project a paradigmatic instance of the way contemporary
architecture responds to the complexities of its broader social
environment in terms of its specific medium--and that is, as
Diller+Scofidio put it, "the radicality of an absent building"
(15), the remarkable, audacious commitment to a building that was
not a building at all but a manufactured cloud: "the making," as
they put it, "of nothing." This core commitment was sounded by
Diller+Scofidio early and often; at the core of the project, as it
were, was no core at all, but a commitment to something
"featureless, depthless, scaleless, spaceless, massless,
surfaceless, and contextless" (162). And this overriding concern
was reiterated at the end of the design phase, about a year before
the Expo opened, in a very important communiqué from Diller:
BLUR is not a building, BLUR is pure atmosphere, water
particles suspended in mid-air. The fog is a dynamic, phantom
mass, which changes form constantly . . . . In contradiction
to the tradition of Expo pavilions whose exhibitions entertain
and educate, BLUR erases information. Expos are usually
competition grounds for bigger and better technological
spectacles. BLUR is a spectacle with nothing to see. Within
BLUR, vision is put out-of-focus so that our dependence on
vision can become the focus of the pavilion. (325)
And, she adds in bold type: "The media project must be liberated
from all immediate and obvious metaphoric associations such as
clouds, god, angels, ascension, dreams, Greek mythology, or any
other kitsch relationships. Rather, BLUR offers a blank
interpretive surface" (325).
3. But not quite blank, as it turns out. In fact, the architects
thought the perceptual experience of the Blur building would
either metaphorize or, conversely, throw into relief a larger set
of concerns about electronic media and how we relate to it. Midway
through the project, in a presentation to a media sponsor, they
characterized it this way:
To "blur" is to make indistinct, to dim, to shroud, to cloud,
to make vague, to obfuscate. Blurred vision is an impairment.
A blurry image is the fault of mechanical malfunction in a
display or reproduction technology. For our visually obsessed,
high-resolution/high-definition culture, blur is equated with
loss . . . . Our proposal has little to do with the mechanics
of the eye, but rather the immersive potential of blur on an
environmental scale. Broadcast and print media feed our
insatiable desire for the visual with an unending supply of
images . . . [but] as an experience, the Blur building offers
little to see. It is an immersive environment in which the
world is put out of focus so that our visual dependency can be
put into focus. (195)
At a different stage--one in which the LED text forest played a
central role--the experience of the cloud figures "the
unimaginable magnitude, speed, and reach of telecommunications."
As Diller+Scofidio put it, "unlike entering a building, the
experience of entering this habitable medium in which orientation
is lost and time is suspended is like an immersion in 'ether.' It
is a perfect context for the experience of another all-pervading,
yet infinitely elastic, massless medium--one for the transmission
and propagation of information: the Internet. The project aims to
produce a 'technological sublime' . . . felt in the scaleless and
unpredictable mass of fog" (qtd. in Dimendberg 79).
4. There are some interesting differences between these versions of
the cloud, of course. In the first version, the resonance of the
project falls on the iconographic and visually based forms of mass
media; in the second, it is the ephemeral yet pervasive presence
of electronic, digital forms of telecommunication generally that
is in question. In the first, the point of the cloud is that it
deprives us of the unproblematic visual clarity, immediacy, and
transparency that the mass media attempt to produce in its
consumers; in the second, the cloud's water vapor metaphorically
envelopes us in the electronic ether that we inhabit like a medium
in contemporary life, but deprives us of the information that
usually accompanies it and therefore distracts us from just how
immersed in that medium we are. I am more concerned here, however,
with what the two accounts have in common: that /this/ particular
form has been selected by Diller+Scofidio, and selected, moreover,
to represent the unrepresentable--hence the notion of the
"technological sublime" upon which both accounts converge.
5. We ought not, however, take this notion of the sublime (or the
term "representation," for that matter) at face value. In fact,
resorting to the discourse of the sublime here can only obscure
the specificity of the project's formal decisions--/why/ it does
/what/ it does /how/ it does--and how those decisions are directly
related to the ethical and political point that the project is
calculated to make. At its worst, it leads down the sorts of blind
alleys we find in the July 2002 issue of Architecture, where one
reviewer reads the project in terms of the symbolic significance
of clouds and of Switzerland in Romantic literature (Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, among others) and painting (J.M.W. Turner,
among others), all of which is supposedly mobilized in Blur's
rewriting of the sublime as a "cautionary tale about the
environment" (Cramer 53). And all of which recycles exactly the
sorts of "immediate and obvious metaphoric associations" and
"kitsch relationships" that, as we have just seen, Diller rightly
rails against.
6. It might seem more promising, at least at first glance, to pursue
more theoretically sophisticated renderings of the sublime in
contemporary theory, most notably in the work of Jean-François
Lyotard (though other recent renditions of the concept, such as we
find in Slavoj Zizek's conjugation of Kant and Lacan, might be
invoked here as well). In Lyotard--to stay with the most
well-known example--the /locus classicus/ is a certain reading of
Kant. The sublime is rendered as a kind of absolute outside to
human existence--one that is, for that very reason, terrifying. At
the same time, paradoxically (and this is true of Zizek's
rendering as well), that radically other outside emerges as a
product of the human subject's conflict with itself, a symptom of
the Enlightenment subject running up against its own limits. In
Lyotard's famous rendering of the Kantian sublime in The
Postmodern Condition, it emerges from the conflict between "the
faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to `present'
something" (77). "We can conceive the infinitely great, the
infinitely powerful," he explains, "but every presentation of an
object destined to 'make visible' this absolute greatness or power
appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are ideas of which no
presentation is possible. Therefore they impart no knowledge about
reality (experience)" (78). And the entire ethical stake of modern
art for Lyotard is "to present the fact that the unpresentable
exists. To make visible that there is something which can be
conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible" (78).
But how to do this? Here, Lyotard follows Kant's invocation of
"'formlessness, the absence of form,' as a possible index to the
unpresentable," as that which "will enable us to see only by
making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain"
(78). The sublime, then, is a "feeling" that marks the
incommensurability of reason (conception) and the singularity or
particularity of the world and its objects (presentation). And it
is an incommensurability that carries ethical force, for it serves
as a reminder that the heterogeneity of the world cannot be
reduced to a unified rule or reason. And this incompleteness in
turn necessitates a permanent openness of any discourse to its
other, to what Lyotard calls, in a book by the same title, the
"differend."
7. Lyotard's rendering of the Kantian sublime would seem to be useful
in approaching Blur, and Kant's invocation of "formlessness" as
the sublime's index would seem doubly promising. But its
limitations may be marked by the fact that Kant's sublime remains
tethered to "something on the order of a subject" (to use
Foucault's famous phrase)--hence it remains referenced essentially
to the language of phenomenology, to the affective states of a
subject-supposed-to-know who, in experiencing her non-knowledge,
experiences pain, and thus changes her relation to herself. What I
am suggesting, then, is that in Lyotard's rendering of the
sublime--and it would be far afield to argue the point in any more
detail here--the price we pay for a certain deconstruction of the
subject of humanism (one that will be traced from Kant to
Nietzsche in The Postmodern Condition) is that the subject remains
installed at the center of its universe, only now its failure is
understood to be a kind of success (77). Moreover, the fact that
this failure /is/ ethical--is the hook on which the ethical
rehabilitation of the subject hangs in its forcible opening to the
world of the object, the differend, and so on--is the surest sign
that we have not, for all that, left the universe of Kantian
humanism. For we must remember that the ethical force of the
sublime in Lyotard's Kant depends upon the addressee of ethics
being a member of the community of "reasonable beings" who must be
equipped with the familiar humanist repertoire of language,
reason, and so on to experience in the ethical imperative not a
"determinant synthesis"--not one-size-fits-all rules for the good
and the just act--but "an Idea of human society" (which is why
Kant will argue, for example, that we have no direct duties to
non-human animals) (Lyotard and Thébaud 85). And this in turn
re-ontologizes the subject/object split that the discourse of the
sublime was meant to call into question in the first place.
8. In contrast to this, Diller+Scofidio insist that their work be
understood in "post-moral and post-ethical" terms (qtd. Dimendberg
79). This does not mean I think, that they intend their work to
have no ethical or political resonance--that much is already
obvious from their comments on Blur--but rather that they
understand the relationship between art, the subject, and world in
resolutely /post/-humanist terms. In Diller+Scofidio, the human
and the non- or anti- or a-human do not exist in fundamentally
discrete ontological registers but--quite the contrary--inhabit
the same space in mutual relations of co-implication and
instability. This boundary-breakdown tends to be thematized in
their work in the interlacing of the human and the technological
(as in, for example, the multimedia theater work Jet Lag, the
Virtue/Vice Glasses series, and the EJM 2 Inertia dance piece); it
is also sometimes handled even more broadly in terms of the
interweaving of the organic and the inorganic, the "natural" and
the "artificial" (think here not only of Blur, but also of
projects like Slow House and The American Lawn). Sometimes those
unstable relations are funny, sometimes they are frightening, but
almost always the signature affect in Diller+Scofidio is radical
ambivalence--an ambivalence that, in contrast to the sublime,
isn't about a clear-cut pain that becomes, in a second,
pedagogical moment, pleasure, but rather an ambivalence from the
first moment of our experience of the work. This ambivalence is
often tied to the difficulty of knowing exactly what is being
experienced (as in works that intermesh real video surveillance
with staged scenes, such as the Facsimile installation at the
Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco), or, if we do know,
how we should feel about it (think here of Jump Cuts or, again,
Blur). All of which leads, in turn, to the ultimate question:
namely, /who/ is doing the experiencing? Who--in phenomenological,
ethical, and political terms--are "we," exactly? In this light,
Diller+Scofidio (like Lyotard's Kant) show us how questions of
ethics are just that: /questions/; but they do so (unlike
Lyotard's Kant) without recontaining the force of that radical
undecidability in terms of a humanist subject, an all too familiar
"we"--a "reasonable being" directed toward an "idea of
society"--for whom, and only for whom, those questions /are/.
9. What this suggests, I think, is that a move beyond an essentially
humanist ontological theoretical framework is in order if we are
to understand the Blur project or, indeed, Diller+Scofidio's work
as a whole. We need, in other words, to replace "what" questions
with "how" questions (to use Niklas Luhmann's shorthand) (Art 89).
Here, recent work in systems theory--and particularly Luhmann's
later work--can be of immense help, not least because it gives us
a theoretical vocabulary for understanding the sorts of things
that Diller+Scofidio have in mind when they suggest that in Blur
"our objective is to weave together architecture and electronic
technologies, yet exchange the properties of each for the other"
(44). For the fundamental postulate of systems theory--its
replacement of the familiar /ontological/ dichotomies of humanism
(culture/nature and its cognates: mind/body, spirit/matter,
reason/feeling, and so on) with the /functional/ distinction
system/environment--is indispensable in allowing us to better
understand the sorts of transcodings that Diller+Scofidio have in
mind, because it gives us a common theoretical vocabulary that can
range across what were, in the humanist tradition, ontologically
discrete categories. Moreover, systems theory will allow us to
explain not only how those transcodings are specific to particular
systems--how art and architecture, for example, integrate
electronic technologies /as Art/--but also how, in /being/
system-specific, they are paradoxically paradigmatic of, and
productive of, the very situation to which those systems
respond.[1 <#foot1>] That situation is "hypercomplexity," created
by what Luhmann calls the "functional differentiation" of modern
society (what other critical vocabularies would call its
specialization or, more moralistically, its fragmentation), which
only gets accentuated and accelerated under post-modernity.[2
<#foot2>]
10. For Luhmann, the social system of art--like any other autopoietic
system, by definition--finds itself in an environment that is
always already more complex than itself, and all systems attempt
to adapt to this complexity by filtering it in terms of their own,
self-referential codes which are based on a fundamental
distinction by means of which they carry out their operations. The
point of the system is to reproduce itself, but no system can deal
with everything, or even many things, all at once. The legal
system, for example, responds to changes in its environment in
terms of--and only in terms of--the distinction legal/illegal. In
litigation, decisions are not based--and it is a good thing
too--on whether it is raining or not, whether you went to Duke or
to Rice, if you are wearing a blue shirt or a white shirt, whether
or not you're a vegetarian, and so on. One might well object that
this ignores, say, the obvious influence of the economic system on
the legal system, but for Luhmann this is simply evidence of the
need for the legal system to further assert its own
differentiation and autopoietic insularity. The determination of
the legal by the economic system would be a symptom, to use
Raymond Williams's well-worn distinction, of the undue influence
of a residual, premodern mode of social organization
(center/periphery or top/bottom), in which one system dominates
and determines the functions of the others, on the dominant, yet
incompletely realized, mode of functional differentiation that
characterizes modernity.
11. Two subsidiary points need to be accented here. First, it is by
responding to environmental complexity in terms of their own
self-referential codes that subsystems build up their own internal
complexity (one might think here of the various sub-specialties of
the legal system, say, or for that matter the specialization of
disciplines in the education system, particularly in the
sciences); in doing so, systems become more finely grained in
their selectivity, and thus--by increasing the density of the
webwork of their filters, as it were--they buy time in relation to
overwhelming environmental complexity. As Luhmann puts it in
Social Systems, "Systems lack the `requisite variety' (Ashby's
term) that would enable them to react to every state of the
environment . . . . There is, in other words, no point-for-point
correspondence between system and environment . . . . The system's
inferiority in complexity [compared to that of the environment]
must be counter-balanced by strategies of selection" (25). But if
the self-reference of the system's code reduces the flow of
environmental complexity into the system, it also increases its
"irritability" and, in a very real sense, its dependence on the
environment.
12. As for this latter point, it is worth noting that systems theory
in general and the theory of autopoiesis in particular are often
criticized for asserting a kind of solipsism separating the system
from its environment, but what this rather ham-fisted
understanding misses is that systems theory attempts to account
for the complex and seemingly paradoxical fact that the
autopoietic closure of a system--whether social or biological--is
precisely what /connects/ it to its environment. As Luhmann
explains, "the concept of a self-referentially closed system does
not contradict the system's /openness to the environment/.
Instead, in the self-referential mode of operation, closure is a
form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure
increases, by constituting elements more capable of being
determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for
the system" (Social Systems 37). And this is why, as Luhmann puts
it in Art as a Social System,
autopoiesis and complexity are conceptual correlates . . . .
Assuming that the system's autopoiesis is at work,
evolutionary thresholds can catapult the system to a level of
higher complexity--in the evolution of living organisms,
toward sexual reproduction, independent mobility, a central
nervous system. To an external observer, this may resemble an
increase in system differentiation or look like a higher
degree of independence from environmental conditions.
Typically, such evolutionary jumps simultaneously increase a
system's sensitivity and irritability; it is more easily
disturbed by environmental conditions that, for their part,
result from an increase in the system's own complexity.
Dependency and independence, in a simple causal sense, are
therefore not invariant magnitudes in that more of one would
imply less of the other. Rather, they vary according to a
system's given level of complexity. In systems that are
successful in evolutionary terms, more independence typically
amounts to a greater dependency on the environment . . . . But
all of this can happen only on the basis of the system's
operative closure. (157-58)
Or as Luhmann puts it in one of his more Zen-like moments, "Only
complexity can reduce complexity" (Social Systems 26).
13. The information/filter metaphor already invoked is misleading,
however, on the basis of the second subsidiary point I mentioned
above: because systems interface with their environment in terms
of, and only in terms of, their own constitutive distinctions and
the self-referential codes based upon them, the "environment" is
not an ontological category but a functional one; it is not an
"outside" to the system that is given /as such/, from which the
system then differentiates itself-- it is not, in other words,
either "nature" or "society" in the traditional sense--but is
rather always the "outside" /of/ a specific inside. Or as Luhmann
explains it, the environment is different for every system,
because any system excludes only itself from its environment
(Social Systems 17). All of this leads to a paradoxical situation
that is central to Luhmann's work, and central to understanding
Luhmann's reworking of problems inherited from both Hegel and
Husserl: What links the system to the world--what literally makes
the world available to the system--is also what hides the world
from the system, what makes it unavailable. Given our discussion
of the sublime and the problem of "representing the
unrepresentable" this should ring a bell--but a different bell, as
it turns out. To understand just /how/ different, we need to
remember that all systems carry out their operations and maintain
their autopoiesis by deploying a constitutive distinction, and a
code based upon it, that in principle could be otherwise; it is
contingent, self-instantiated, and rests, strictly speaking, on
nothing. But this means that there is a paradoxical identity
between the two sides that define the system, because the
distinction between both sides is a product of only one side. In
the legal system, for example, the distinction between the two
sides legal/illegal is instantiated (or "re-entered," in Luhmann's
terminology) on only one side of the distinction, namely the
legal. But no system can acknowledge this paradoxical identity of
difference--which is also in another sense simply the
contingency--of its own constitutive distinction /and/ at the same
time use that distinction to carry out its operations. It must
remain "blind" to the very paradox of the distinction that links
it to its environment.
14. That does not mean that this "blind spot" cannot be observed from
the vantage of /another/ system--it can, and that is what we are
doing right now--but that /second-order/ observation will itself
be based on its /own/ blind spot, the paradoxical identity of both
sides of /its/ constitutive distinction, and so on and so forth.
First-order observations that deploy distinctions as difference
simply "do what they do." Second-order observations can observe
the unity of those differences and the contingency of the code of
the first-order observer--but only by "doing what they do," and
thus formally reproducing a "blindness" that is (formally) the
same but (contingently) not the same as the first-order system's.
And here, as I have suggested elsewhere, we find Luhmann's
fruitful reworking of the Hegelian problematic: Hegel's "identity
of identity and non-identity" is reworked as the "/non/-identity
of identity and non-identity"--and a productive non-identity at
that.[3 <#foot3>] As Luhmann explains:
The source of a distinction's guaranteeing reality lies in its
own operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity
that the distinction cannot be observed--except by means of
another distinction which then assumes the function of a
guarantor of reality. Another way of expressing this is to say
the operation emerges simultaneously with the world which as a
result remains cognitively unapproachable to the operation.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the connection
with the reality of the external world is established by the
blind spot of the cognitive operation. Reality is what one
does not perceive when one perceives it. ("Cognitive Program" 76)
Or as he puts it in somewhat different terms, the world is now
conceived, "along the lines of a Husserlian metaphor, as an
unreachable horizon that retreats further with each operation,
without ever holding out the prospect of an outside" (Art 92).
15. The question, then--and this is directly related to the problems
raised by the /topos/ of the sublime--is "how to observe how the
world observes itself, how a marked space emerges [via a
constitutive distinction] from the unmarked space, how something
becomes invisible when something else becomes visible." Here, we
might seem far afield from addressing the Blur project, but as
Luhmann argues, "the generality of these questions allows one to
determine more precisely what art can contribute to solving this
paradox of the invisibilization that accompanies making something
visible" (Art 91). In this way, the problems that the discourse of
the sublime attempts to address can be assimilated to the more
formally rigorous scheme of the difference between first- and
second-order observation. Any observation "renders the world
invisible" in relation to its constitutive distinction, and that
invisibility must itself remain invisible to the observation that
employs that distinction, and can only be disclosed by /another/
observation that will also necessarily be doubly blind in the same
way (91). "In this twofold sense," Luhmann writes, "the notion of
a final unity--of an 'ultimate reality' that cannot assume a form
because it has no other side--is displaced into the unobservable .
. . . If the concept of the world is retained to indicate reality
in its entirety, then it is that which--to a second-order
observer--remains invisible in the movements of observation (his
own and those of others)" (91). This means not only that "art can
no longer be understood as an imitation of something that
presumably exists along with and outside of art," but more
importantly for our purposes, "to the extent that imitation is
still possible, it now imitates the world's invisibility, a nature
that can no longer be apprehended as a whole" (92). "The paradox
unique to art, which art creates and resolves," Luhmann writes,
"resides in the observability of the unobservable" (149). And this
is a question of form.
16. It is in these terms--to return to Diller+Scofidio--that we might
best understand the uncanny effect of Blur's manufactured cloud
hovering over a lake, with the point being, we might say, not that
the cloud is not a cloud but rather that the lake is not a lake,
precisely in the sense that art can be said to imitate nature only
because nature isn't nature (an insight that is surely at work as
well in Diller+Scofidio's Slow House project)--which is another
way of saying that all observations, including those of nature,
are contingent, /and/ of necessity blind to their own contingency.
To put it in a Deleuzean rather than Luhmannian register, we might
say that Blur virtualizes the very nature it "imitates," but only,
paradoxically, by concretizing that virtualization in its formal
decisions--an "imitation of nature" that formally renders the
impossibility of an "imitation of nature." As Luhmann puts it, in
an analysis that is thematized, as it were, in the blurriness of
Diller+Scofidio's project (and in the critical intent they attach
to it), "Art makes visible possibilities of order that would
otherwise remain invisible. It alters conditions of
visibility/invisibility in the world by keeping invisibility
constant and making visibility subject to variation" (Art 96). And
here I think we can bring into the sharpest possible focus (if the
metaphor can be allowed in this context!) the brilliance of the
project's "refusal" of architecture and its strategy of focusing
on "the radicality of an absent building." In this context, the
strength of Blur's formal intervention /via à vis/ the medium of
architecture is precisely its formlessness, because it is
calculated to show how "the realm officially known as
architecture" (to borrow Rem Koolhaas's and Bruce Mau's phrase)[4
<#foot4>] can no longer "keep invisibility constant and make
visibility subject to variation." "Official architecture" renders
the invisibility of the world invisible precisely by being /too/
visible, too legible. And in so doing, as art, it might as well be
/invisible/.
17. Here, we might recall Luhmann's suggestive comments about
Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's wrapping of architectural
structures. In an earlier moment of the "postmodern" in
architecture, "quotation" of historical styles and elements
attempts, as Luhmann puts it, "to copy a differentiated and
diverse environment into the artwork," but this in turn only
raises the formal problem of "whether, and in what way, the work
can claim unity, and whether it can assert itself against its own
(!) 'requisite variety'" (Art 298-89). "How," as Luhmann puts it,
"can the art system reflect upon its own differentiation, not only
in the form of theory, but also in individual works of art?"
(299). Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's response to this problem, he
suggests, is "particularly striking: if objects can no longer
legitimize their boundaries and distinctions, they must be
wrapped" (400 n.220). From this perspective, we might think of
Blur as a wrapped building /with no building inside/. Or better
yet, as a wrapped building in which /even the wrapping has too
much form/ and begins to obsolesce the minute form is concretized.
Figure 2
*Figure 2: Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin 1971-95.*
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
18. But what can it mean to say that an architectural project is
concerned primarily with having /little/ enough form? Here--and
once again the otherwise daunting abstraction of systems theory is
indispensable--we need to understand that when we use the term
"form," in no sense are we talking about objects, substances,
materials, or things. Nor are we even, for that matter, talking
about "shape." As Luhmann explains,
The word /formal/ here does not refer to the distinction,
which at first guided modern art, between form and matter or
form and content, but to the characteristics of an indicating
operation that observes, as if from the corner of its eye,
what happens on the other side of form. In this way, the work
of art points the observer toward an observation of form . . .
. It consists in /demonstrating the compelling forces of order
in the realm of the possible/. Arbitrariness is displaced
beyond the boundaries of art into the unmarked space. If . . .
one transgresses this boundary and steps from the unmarked
into the marked space, things /no longer happen randomly/.
(Art 147-48)
In this way, form stages the question of "whether an observer can
observe at all except with reference to an order" (148), /and/ it
stages the production of the unobservable (the "blind spot" of
observation, the "outside" of any distinction's "inside") that
inevitably accompanies such observations (149). As Luhmann will
put it (rather unexpectedly), "the world displays all the
qualities that Nicholas of Cusa ascribed to God: it is neither
small nor large, neither unity nor diversity, it neither has a
beginning nor is it without beginning--and this is why the world
needs forms" (150). "From this vantage," he writes,
the function of art, one could argue, is to make the world
appear within the world--with an eye toward the ambivalent
situation that every time something is made available for
observation something else withdraws, that, in other words,
the activity of distinguishing and indicating that goes on in
the world conceals the world . . . . /Yet a work of Art is
capable of symbolizing the reentry of the world into the world
because it appears--just like the world--incapable of
emendation/. (149, emphasis added)
19. With regard to this "reentry," two related points should be
highlighted here to fully appreciate the specificity of Blur's
formal innovations. First, form is in a profound sense a
/temporal/ problem (if for no other reason than because of the
contingency of any constitutive distinction); and second, formal
decisions operate on two levels, what we might call the "internal"
and "external"; they operate, that is, in relating the formal
decisions of the artwork itself to the larger system of art, but
also in relating the artwork as a whole to its larger environment,
of which the subsystem of art is only a part. As Luhmann explains,
What is at stake, operatively speaking, in the production and
observation of a work of art is always a temporal unity that
is either no longer or not yet observed. In this sense, the
artwork is the /result/ of intrinsic formal decisions and, at
the same time, the /metaform/ determined by these decisions,
which, by virtue of its inner forms, can be distinguished from
the unmarked space of everything else--the work as fully
elaborated "object." (Art 72)
Even more forcefully, one can say that here we are not dealing
with objects /at all/ but rather with what systems theory
sometimes calls "/eigenvalues/" or "/eigenbehaviors/," recursive
distinctions that unfold--and can only unfold--over time, even as
they can only be experienced in the nano-moment of the present.[5
<#foot5>] From this vantage, "objects appear as repeated
indications, which, rather than having a /specific/ opposite, are
demarcated against `everything else'" (46). In fact, Luhmann
suggests that we might follow Mead and Whitehead, who "assigned a
function to identifiable and recognizable objects, whose primary
purpose is to bind time. This function is needed because the
reality of experience and actions consists in mere event
sequences, that is, in an ongoing self-dissolution" (46).
20. These terms, it seems to me, are remarkably apt for understanding
how Blur's significance as a work of art under conditions of
postmodernity goes far beyond the mere thematizations we can
readily articulate. Indeed, in its unstable shape, shifting
constantly in both density of light and moisture, this building
that is not a building could well be described as epitomizing "a
temporal unity that is either no longer or not yet observed": a
something that is also, to use Diller+Scofidio's words, a
nothing--in short, a blur. At the same time, paradoxically, as a
"metaform," one could hardly imagine a more daring and original
formal decision that dramatically distinguishes itself from "the
unmarked space of everything else."
Figure 3
*Figure 3: The "Blur Building."*
Courtesy of Diller+Scofidio
When we combine this understanding of the artwork as what Luhmann
(following Michel Serres) calls a "quasi-object" with attention to
the double aspect of its formal decisions outlined above, we can
zero in on the fact that, paradoxically, the "shapelessness" of
the Blur building is precisely what constitutes its most decisive
and binding formal quality--and not least, of course, with regard
to adjacent formal decisions in architecture. Its "refusal" of
architecture and its dematerialization of the architectural medium
paradoxically epitomize the question of architectural form from a
Luhmannian perspective; the shape-shifting, loosely-defined space
of Blur only dramatizes what is true of /all/ architectural forms.
As the shifting winds over Lake Neuchatel blow the cloud this way
and that, the joke is not on Blur, but rather on any architectural
forms that think they are "solid," real "objects"--that have, one
might say, a compositional rather than systematic understanding of
the medium. In this light, one is tempted to view those moments
when the winds at Lake Neuchatel swept nearly all the cloud away
to reveal the underlying tensegrity structure of Blur--leaving, as
one reviewer put it, the view of "an unfinished building awaiting
its skin" (Schafer 93)--as the most instructive all, insofar as
THE BUILDING (as object), "official architecture," is revealed to
be precisely /not/ "the building" (as form).
21. And as we have already noted, the effectiveness of these formal
decisions is only enhanced by the fact that they are smuggled
inside the Trojan Horse of the work's savvy play with the "art
imitates nature" theme. From a systems theory point of view, the
joke is not on those who think that art imitates nature, but
rather on those who think it /doesn't/--not in the sense of "an
imitation of something that presumably exists along with and
outside of art," but rather in the sense that "it now imitates the
world's invisibility, a nature that can no longer be apprehended
as a whole" (Art 92). Another name for this fact, as we have
already noted, is /contingency/--namely, the contingency of the
distinctions and indications that make the world available and
that, /because/ contingent, simultaneously make the world
unavailable. And it is against that contingency that the artwork
and its formal decisions assert themselves. To put it succinctly,
the work of art begins with a radically contingent distinction--a
formal decision that could be otherwise--and then gradually builds
up, through recursive self-reference, its own unique,
non-paraphrasable character--its internal necessity, if you like.
As Luhmann characterizes it,
The artwork closes itself off by reusing what is already
determined in the work as the other side of further
distinctions. The result is a unique, circular accumulation of
meaning, which often escapes one's first view (or is grasped
only "intuitively") . . . . This creates an overall impression
of necessity--the work is what it is, even though it is made,
individual, and contingent, rather than necessary in an
ontological sense. The work of art, one might say, manages to
overcome its own contingency. (120)
But here (and this is a crucial point), the recursive
self-reference of form--and not the materiality of the medium per
se--is key; as Luhmann puts it, "in working together, form and
medium generate what characterizes successful artworks, namely,
/improbable evidence/" (119). The genius of Blur from this vantage
is that submits itself to this contingency in the vagaries and
malleability of its shape, its "loose" binding of time (to recall
Whitehead and Mead's definition of objects), while simultaneously
taking it into account, but as it were preemptively, within its
own frame, as "an indicating operation that observes, as if from
the corner of its eye, what happens on the other side of form"
(147-48). And in doing so, "/it employs constraints for the sake
of increasing the work's freedom in disposing over other
constraints/" (148), and this includes, of course, those
contingencies that, rather than threatening the work with
obsolescence, now increase the resonance of the work with its
environment.
22. Of course, this raises the question of what, exactly, art /is/, if
the formlessness of the object is equated with the strength of its
formal statement--if the strongest form of "something" turns out
to be "nothing." Here, however, we need only remind ourselves of
the point we made a moment ago: that questions of form are not
questions of /objects/ (and indeed, if we follow Whitehead, Mead,
and systems theory, even /objects/ are not questions of objects).
Or to put it another way, it is a question not of the being of the
artwork but rather of its /meaning/. And if that's the case, then
we would do well, Luhmann rightly suggests, to remember the
lessons of Duchamp, Cage, and conceptual art in general.[6
<#foot6>] "One can ask how an art object distinguishes itself from
other natural or artificial objects, for example, from a urinal or
a snow shovel," Luhmann writes (Art 34). "Marcel Duchamp used /the
form of a work of art/ to impress this question on his audience
and, in a laudable effort, eliminated all sensuously recognizable
differences between the two. But can a work of art /at once pose
and answer this question? /" (34). The answer, as it turns out, is
no, because the meaning of Duchamp's snow shovel--the significance
of its first-order formal decisions--depends upon (and indeed
ingeniously anticipates and manipulates) a second-order discourse
of "art" criticism and theory in terms of which those first-order
decisions are received. The first-order observer need only
"identify a work of art as an object in contradistinction to all
other objects or processes" (71). But for those who experience the
work and want to understand its significance, the situation is
quite different. Here, the project of Cage and Duchamp is "to
confront the observer with the question of how he goes about
identifying a work of art as a work of art. The only possible
answer is: by observing observations" (71):
The observer uses a distinction to indicate what he observes.
This happens when it happens. But if one wants to observe
whether and how this happens, employing a distinction is not
enough--one must also indicate the distinction. The concept of
form serves this purpose . . . . Whoever observes forms
observes other observers in the rigorous sense that he is not
interested in the materiality, expectations, or utterances of
these observers, but strictly and exclusively in their use of
distinctions. (66-7)
23. Luhmann argues, in fact, that this is the issue that art and art
criticism have been struggling with at least since the early
modern period. The convention of the still life, for example,
which assumes great importance in Italian and Dutch painting,
presents us with "unworthy" objects that "could acquire meaning
only by presenting the art of presentation itself," focusing our
attention on "the blatant discrepancy between the banality of the
subject matter and its artful presentation" (Art 69)--a process
that is only further distilled (more abstractly and formally, as
it were) in Duchamp's snow shovel. Indeed, part of the genius of
Duchamp's work is that it reveals how the formula of
"disinterested pleasure" fails to clarify what can be meant by
artful presentation as "an end in itself," which only begs the
question of whether "there is perhaps a special interest in being
disinterested, and can we assume that such an interest also
motivates the artist who produces the work, and who can neither
preclude nor deny an interest in the interests of others?" (69).
For Luhmann, such questions index the situation of art as a social
system under functionally differentiated modernity, of art
struggling to come to terms with its /raison d'être/--in systems
theory terms, to achieve and justify its operational closure, its
newly-won "autonomy." "To create a work of art under these
sociohistorical conditions," then, "amounts to creating specific
forms for an observation of observations. This is the sole purpose
for which the work is 'produced.' From this perspective, the
artwork accomplishes the structural coupling between first- and
second-order observations in the realm of art . . . . The artist
accomplishes this by clarifying--via his own observations of the
emerging work--how he and others will observe the work" (69-70).
24. Now such an understanding is well and good, but it would seem to
leave wholly to the side the question of the /experience/ of art
as a perceptual and phenomenological event--something that would
appear to be rather spectacularly foregrounded in Blur, as Mark
Hansen has recently argued, and foregrounded, moreover, quite
self-consciously in terms of the function of /spectacle/ in the
tradition of the international Expo as a genre (a matter
emphasized in Diller's lectures about the project at Princeton and
elsewhere) (Hansen 325-30; Diller+Scofidio 92-4). Indeed, one
might well argue that this, and not the coupling of first- and
second-order observations by means of form, is what motivates
contemporary art, its experimentation with different media, and so
on--a rule that is only proved, so the argument would unfold, by
the exception of conceptual art. Yet here, it seems to me, we find
one of the more original and innovative aspects of Luhmann's
theory of art as a social system. Luhmann's point is not to deny
the phenomenological aspect of the artwork, but rather to point
out the fact--which seems rather obvious, upon reflection--that
the /meaning/ of the artwork cannot be referenced to, much less
reduced to, this material and perceptual aspect. Rather, the work
of art co-presents perception and communication--and does so in a
way that turns out to be decisive for what another theoretical
vocabulary might call art's "critical" function in relation to
society.
25. To understand how this happens, we need to remember that for
Luhmann, perception and communication operate in mutually
exclusive, operationally closed, autopoietic systems, though they
are structurally coupled through media such as language. As
Luhmann puts it in a formulation surely calculated to provoke:
"Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate;
not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication
can communicate" ("How Can the Mind" 371). "Communication operates
with an unspecific reference to the participating state of mind,"
he continues; "it is especially unspecific as to perception. It
cannot copy states of mind, cannot imitate them, cannot represent
them" (381). At first, this contention seems almost ridiculously
counter-intuitive, but upon reflection it is rather
commonsensical. As Luhmann explains--and there is ample evidence
for this in contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science--"what
we perceive as our own mind operates as an isolated autopoietic
system. There is no conscious link between one mind and another.
There is no operational unity of more than one mind as a system,
and whatever appears as a consensus is the construct of an
observer, that is, his own achievement" (372). At the same time,
however, consciousness and perception are a medium for
communication. On the one hand, unperceived communications do not
exist (if they did, how would we know?); communication "can hardly
come into being without the participation of the mind," Luhmann
points out, and in this sense "the relationship is asymmetrical"
(374). On the other hand, "communication uses the mind as a medium
precisely because communication does not thematize the mind in
question. Metaphorically speaking, the mind in question remains
invisible to communication" (378). The mind is its own
operationally closed (biological) system, but because it is also a
necessary medium for communication, "we can then say that the mind
has the privileged position of being able to disturb, stimulate,
and irritate communication" (379). It cannot instruct or direct
communications--"reports of perceptions are not perceptions
themselves"--but it can "stimulate communication without ever
becoming communication" (379-80).
26. This "irreducibility" of perception to communication (and vice
versa) and their asymmetrical relationship are important to art
for several reasons. First, as Dietrich Schwanitz notes,
perception and communication operate at different speeds--and this
is something art puts to use. "Compared to communication," he writes,
the dimension of perception displays a considerably higher
rate of information processing. The impression of immediacy in
perception produces the notion that the things we perceive are
directly present. Naturally, this is an illusion, for recent
brain research has proven that sensory input is minimal
compared with the complexity of neuronal self-perception . . .
. Together, cultural and neuronal construction thus constitute
a form of mediation that belies the impression of immediacy in
perception. That does not, however, alter the fact that
perception takes place immediately as compared to
communication, the selective process of which is a sequential
one. (494)
To put it another way, although both perception and communication
are autopoietic systems that operate on the basis of difference
and distinction, their very different processing speeds make it
appear that perception confirms, stabilizes, and makes immediate,
while communication (to put it in Derridean terms) differs,
defers, and temporalizes. In the work of art, the difference
between perception and communication is "re-entered" on the side
of communication, but (because of this asymmetry in speeds) in a
way that calls attention to the contingency of communication--not
of the first-order communication of the artwork, which appears
incapable of emendation (it is what it is), but of the
second-order observation of the work's meaning /vis à vis/ the
system of art. This can be accomplished, as in Blur, by making
perception "outrun" communication, as it were (a process well
described by Hansen), the better to provoke a question that the
work itself is made to answer; or, conversely, in a work like On
Kawara's Date Paintings, by using the calculated deficit of
perceptual cues and information in the "paintings" themselves to
call attention to the difference between the work's immediate
perceptual surface and its meaning.
Figure 4
*Figure 4: Date Painting*
On Kawara
Thus, the artwork co-presents the /difference/ between perception
and communication and it /uses/ perception to "irritate" and
stimulate communication to respond to the question, "what does
this perceptual event /mean?/ " And it is this difference--and how
art uses it--that allows art to have something like a privileged
relationship to what is commonly invoked as the "ineffable" or the
"incommunicable." As Luhmann puts it,
The function of art would then consist in integrating what is
in principle incommunicable--namely, perception--into the
communication network of society . . . . The art system
concedes to the perceiving consciousness its own unique
adventure in observing artworks--and yet makes available as
communication the formal selection that triggered the
adventure. Unlike verbal communication, which all too quickly
moves toward a yes/no bifurcation, communication guided by
perception relaxes the structural coupling of consciousness
and communication (without destroying it, of course) . . . .
In a manner that is matched neither by thought nor by
communication, perception presents /astonishment and
recognition/ in /a single instant/. Art uses, enhances, and in
a sense exploits the possibilities of perception in such a way
that it can present the /unity of this distinction/ . . . .
[T]he pleasure of astonishment, already described in
antiquity, refers to the unity of the difference between
astonishment and recognition, to the paradox that both
/intensify one another/ (Art 141).
And, Luhmann adds--in an observation directly relevant to Blur's
audacious formal solution to the "problem" of
architecture--"Extravagant forms play an increasingly important
role in this process" (141).
27. This is not, however, simply a matter of "pleasure." In fact, it
is what gives art something like a privileged critical
relationship to society, because art "establishes a reality of its
own that differs from ordinary reality"; "despite the work's
perceptibility, despite its undeniable reality," Luhmann writes,
"it simultaneously constitutes another reality . . . . Art splits
the world into a real world and an imaginary world," and "the
function of art concerns the meaning of this split" (Art 142). By
virtue of its unique relationship to the difference between
perception and communication, art can raise this question in an
especially powerful way not available to other social systems. If
we think of objects as "eigen-behaviors" (to seize once again on
Heinz von Foerster's term), as stabilizations made possible by the
repeated, recursive application of particular distinctions, then
we might observe that "the objects that emerge from the recursive
self-application of communication"--versus, say, rocks or
trees--"contribute more than any other kinds of norms and
sanctions to supplying the social system with necessary
redundancies." They literally fix social space. This is probably
even more true, Luhmann observes, of such "quasi-objects" (to use
Michel Serres's phrase) "that have been invented for the sake of
this specific function, such as kings or soccer balls. Such
'quasi-objects' can be comprehended only in relation to this
function"--indeed it is their sole reason for being. "Works of
art," Luhmann continues,
are quasi-objects in this sense. They individualize themselves
by excluding the sum total of everything else; not because
they are construed as given but because their significance as
objects implies a realm of social regulation. One must
scrutinize works of art as intensely and with as close
attention to the object as one does when watching kings and
soccer balls; in this way--and in the more complex case where
one observes other observers by focusing on the same
object--/the socially regulative reveals itself./ (47,
emphasis added)
28. And when we remember that for Luhmann this "more complex" case is
represented nowhere more clearly than in our experience of the
mass media, the relationship between Blur's formal decisions as a
work of art and its /critical/ agenda of shedding light on "the
socially regulative"--on the terrain of an international media
Expo, no less--comes even more forcefully into view. In these
terms, works of art, in calling our attention to the realm of "the
socially regulative," cast light on precisely those contingencies,
constructions, and norms that the mass media, in its own specific
mode of communication, occludes. In the first instance (the
artwork), we seem to be dealing with completely /ad hoc/,
constructed objects whose realm of reference is not "the real
world" but rather that of the imagination; in the latter, we
appear to be dealing with the opposite, in which the
representations of the mass media are supposedly motivated by the
objects and facts of "the real world." In fact, however, this
thematization in terms of "imaginative" and "real" only obscures
the need to be rearticulate the relationship in terms of the
dynamics of first- and second-order observation of different
social systems. As Luhmann points out, "the mass media create the
illusion that we are first-order observers whereas in fact this is
already second-order observing" ("Deconstruction as Second-Order
Observing" 775); or, more baldly still, "put in Kantian terms: the
mass media generate a transcendental illusion" (The Reality of the
Mass Media 4). The mass media's rendering of reality, however--and
this is a point that the "post-ethical" character of
Diller+Scofidio's work insists on as well--is not to be taken as,
"as most people would be inclined to think, a /distortion/ of
reality. It is a /construction/ of reality. For from the point of
view of a postontological theory of observing systems, there is no
distinct reality out there (who, then, would make these
distinctions?) . . . [T]here is no transcendental subject,"
Luhmann continues. "We have to rely on the system of the mass
media that construct our reality . . . If there is no choice in
accepting these observations, because there is no equally powerful
alternative available, we have at least the possibility to
deconstruct the presentations of the mass media, their
presentations of the present" ("Deconstruction as Second-Order
Observing" 776).
29. That deconstruction of the mass media in Blur proceeds by means of
the artwork's second-order observation of the first-order system
of the mass media, but it can carry out that observation only as
art, only by "doing what it does" within the codes of the social
system of art. The formal symmetry between those two observing
systems, however--the fact that the dynamics of communication in
autopoietic social systems operate in the same ways in each system
(on the basis of the "blind spot" of paradoxical self-reference,
and so on)--only throws into critical relief the important
/difference/ in the relationship of communication and perception
(and in the case at hand, specifically /visual/ perception) that
is quite specific to each system: a difference that Blur will put
to critical use under the thematics, as Diller suggests, of
"spectacle." We can gain a sharper sense of just how this is the
case when we remember that for Luhmann, electronic mass media is
just the latest in a series of powerful developments in the
history of what he calls "media of dissemination," beginning with
language and then, crucially, the invention of writing and
printing, whose power lies in their ability to make communication
independent from a specific perceptual substrate or set of
coordinates. "Alphabetized writing made it possible to carry
communication beyond the temporally and spatially limited circle
of those who were present at any particular time," he writes, and
language /per se/ --and even more so writing and
printing--"increases the understandability of communication beyond
the sphere of perception" (Social Systems 160). Unlike oral
speech, which "can compensate for lack of information with
persuasion, and can synchronize speaking, hearing, and accepting
in a rhythmic and rhapsodic way, leaving literally no time for
doubt" (162), writing and printing "enforce an experience of the
difference that constitutes communication," and "they are, in this
precise sense, more communicative forms of communication" (162-63).
30. For Luhmann, the electronic mass media represent the culmination
of this general line of historical development. Indeed, "for the
differentiation of a system of the mass media, the decisive
achievement can be said to have been the invention of technologies
of dissemination which not only circumvent interaction among those
co-present, but effectively render such interaction impossible for
the mass media's own communications" (The Reality 15-16)--a
process begun with the advent of the printing press, when "the
volume of written material multiplied to the extent that oral
interaction among /all/ participants in communication is
effectively and /visibly/ rendered impossible" (16). And so it is,
Luhmann argues, that
in the wake of the so-called democratization of politics and
its dependence on the media of public opinion . . . those
participating in politics--politicians and voters
alike--observe one another in the mirror of public opinion . .
. . The level of first-order observation is guaranteed by the
continuous reports of the mass media . . . . Second-order
observation occurs via the inferences one can draw about
oneself or others, if one assumes that those who wish to
participate politically encounter one another in the mirror of
public opinion, /and that this is sufficient/ (Art 64-65).
31. It is just this situation that Blur attempts to address, if we
believe Diller+Scofidio--namely, by subjecting communication in
its mass mediated mode (as immediately legible and consumable) to
a perceptual Blur, so that /spectacle/ here operates not in the
services of an immediately meaningful, pre-fab content (as in the
electronic mass media) but rather as the quite unavoidable
"irritation" or "perturbation" for /another/ communication--one
whose meaning is far from immediately clear and, in being so,
operates directly in the services of art's own communication and
autopoiesis about itself (i.e. "what does this mean?; is this
art?"), /and/ its second-order observation of the all-too-tight
coupling of perception and communication in the mass media. In
this way, Diller+Scofidio's Blur might be understood as bringing
into focus 1)how the contingency of communication is managed and
manipulated (quite improbably, as Luhmann reminds us) by the
"socially regulative" in the electronic mass media and 2)how
/that/ dynamic, in turn, is coupled to a certain "consumerist"
schematization of visuality, in which the difference between
perception and communication is always already "re-entered" in
mass-mediated communication to produce a "pre-digested,"
iconographic visual space readily incorporated by a subject whose
(un)ethical relation to the visual might best be summed up as:
"CLICK HERE."
32. We could say, then, that Blur uses the difference between
perception and communication in a way diametrically opposed to
what we find it in the electronic mass media, and then routes
/that/ difference between art and the mass media through the
work's formal choices to render them /specifically/ meaningful as
art, and not just as well-meaning critical platitude. What is
remarkable here, of course, is not that Blur makes this (somewhat
unremarkable) observation about the relationship of perception and
communication in electronic mass media, a relationship
particularly evident in the realm of visuality; what is remarkable
is that Blur does so without saying so, by insisting only on
itself. This is simply to say that Blur communicates this
difference /as Art/. And if it didn't, we wouldn't pay any
attention to it.
/ Department of English
Rice University
cewolfe@rice.edu /
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. It should be noted here--and it is abundantly clear in
the catalog, Scanning, that accompanied the retrospective of
Diller+Scofidio's work at the Whitney in New York--that the
distinction between "art" and "architecture" is of relatively
little moment for Diller+Scofidio, and indeed their body of work
is calculated to blur it (if the expression can be allowed in this
context) beyond recognition. The same is true for Luhmann, who
treats architecture as a subspecies of art, even while addressing
here and there its differences from, say, painting or literary art.
2 <#ref2>. It should be noted that the term "postmodern" is one
for which Luhmann has no use. For him, the postmodern is merely an
intensification of features already fully present in modernity. On
this point, see his essay "Why Does Society Describe Itself as
Postmodern?"
3 <#ref3>. See on this point Wolfe, 67-68.
4 <#ref4>. This phrase was used by Koolhaas and Mau in their
presentations of their Tree City project for the Parc Downsview
Park competition in Toronto in 1999-2000. For an overview, see Polo.
5 <#ref5>. As Luhmann puts it, "Objects are therefore nothing but
the eigenbehaviors of observing systems that result from using and
reusing their previous distinctions" ("Deconstruction" 768).
6 <#ref6>. In this connection, we should remember, as Roselee
Goldberg reminds us, just how influential conceptual art was for
the early, formative stages of Diller+Scofidio's career.
Works Cited
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Cramer, Ned. "All Natural." Architecture 91.7 (July 2002): 51-59.
Diller+Scofidio. Blur: The Making of Nothing. New York: Abrams, 2002.
Dimendberg, Edward. "Blurring Genres." Anderson et al. 67-80.
Goldberg, Roselee. "Dancing About Architecture." Anderson et al.
44-60.
Hansen, Mark. "Wearable Space." Configurations 10:2 (2002): 321-70.
Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Trans. Eva M. Knodt.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
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Remains Unknown." Selforganization: Portrait of a Scientific
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and Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 35-49.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans.
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Polo, Marco. "Environment as Process." Canadian Architect 45.10
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