REPETITION!

another pamphlet 2011 #02 \ / | < | \ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

repetitionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s other truth and repetition remembering repetition the hard work of repetition repetitionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sweet spot deploying repetition losing yourself in repetition repetitive acts repeating loops a repetition story

Eye Exam II, Tauba Auerbach, 2005

REPETITION!

01

Telephone T_______ R , Joseph Beuys, 1974

ANOTHER AND ANOTHER AND ANOTHER AND another Meaning both “more of the same” and “something different”, the word “another” contains the seeds of both continuity and change.

An apparently irreconcilable internal contradiction, this tension is perhaps also the fundamental driver for any creative act.

“Repetition” too is rarely as benign as it seems. Sigmund Freud wrote in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle that life is not merely a linear development towards a singular “natural death,” but instead a complex symphony of millions of minor cellular births and deaths, a grand cyclical performance of repetition and renewal.1 Freud’s shift in emphasis from development to repetition, when considered in terms of art or architecture, questions the traditional teleological narrative of creativity as a linear path from idea to realization. Issues of “influence” are no longer attributable to neat causal or mere chronological alignments, but are instead understood to emerge from an interactive repetition of persistent obsessions, anxieties, inquiries, and answers.

Joseph Beuys, in his many Multiples projects and in his ambitious 7000 Oaks project2, employed repetition to not only make more of the same, but also to allow for more of the other.

In his words: Schellmann & Klüser: Beuys, why do you make multiples?

Beuys: The whole thing is a game… It’s a sort of prop for the memory, yes, a sort of prop in case something different happens in the future. For me, each edition has the character of a kernel of condensation upon which many things may accumulate.3 “Repetition” then, like “another,” can describe a technique for both looking back and for looking forward. While it has been easier to acknowledge the multiple origins and influences that shape a work of art or architecture, it has been more difficult to see that the inherent paradox of a repetitive process also creates the potential for multiple futures.4

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), vol. 18, 39-40.

2 Begun in 1982 and completed in 1987, the project called for planting 7000 trees paired with 7000 basalt stones along the streets of Kassel, Germany. In 1996 Dia continued the project along W. 22nd street in NYC. 3 Excerpt from www.walkerart.org.

4 For more on this topic, see Peggy Phelan, Building the Life Drive: Architecture As Repetition, in Herzog & deMeuron: Natural History (Baden: Lars Muller, 2002) 1

02

Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing (I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get no) Satisfaction, Fischli and Weiss, 1981

STRANGE COVERS I’ve always been fascinated by covers; not remixes, mash-ups or other technologically dependent genres but old fashioned covers.

Take someone else’s song and do it again, your way. A pure form of repetition with difference. The criteria for a great cover are few and simple. In the first instance, you can’t have a cover without an original, and that original has to be sufficiently iconic. Covers work with already known material, reshaping it rather than starting from scratch. It is precisely this mix of respect and aggression toward the original that makes the cover such a high stakes wager.

And then there is the tricky business of doing something new with material that is already so well known. Covers work with familiarity, but faithful repetition will never make for a good cover; on the other hand, change for the sake of change can just sound wrong. A good cover needs to locate the crux of familiarity in the song, but one of the things we learn from good covers is exactly how fluid that core identity is. Covers simultaneously validate and destabilize the original. Think about it: if the original is the only faithful, true rendition, how can the cover also be true to the material? But they are, and this tells us that there are multiple ‘truths’ in the realm of culture.

Covers also tell us something interesting about artists. There are those who refuse to do covers, insisting on the “integrity” of their personal creative vision. Frankly I never trust those artists. Then there are those like Patti Smith who are so secure in their own creative identity that they don’t hesitate to work with other people’s material, never doubting that they will be able to make it their own. Take her 1975 version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” It’s is a relentless, almost violent, reimagining of the song but one which in some indefinable way seems to get to the core, despite stripping it down to the point where almost nothing of the original remains. Finally, when, say, The Feelies do the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On,” or Yo La Tengo does “You Tore me Down” by the Flaming Groovies, or Nirvana does “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” by the Vaselines, they are paying homage to those who came before; not so much insisting on their own originality as inserting themselves into an ongoing conversation. Covers leverage that recognizibility, and remind us that music is a social experience first of all, embedded in a collective memory that is larger than any one artist.

03

Scroll Sketch, 2009

REPEAT AFTER ME...

In my penultimate semester of graduate school, my studio professor, a gruff Chicago native, convened his weekly session of critiques. Most students were drawn to him not necessarily for his ability to elicit good work, but for his skill as a consummate storyteller. In critiques, he forewent the usual one-on-one dialogue in favor of round table discussions with the group. The most memorable of these sessions produced not a story per se, but rather a scroll.

When asked a simple question about detailing, the professor grabbed the nearest roll of tracing paper and began drawing. He quickly addressed the question — something about windows — and then proceeded to draw each significant detail in the history of curtain wall construction. At first, each detail was accompanied by a brief explication, “…in the 30s they woulda done it like this, here… and then, right, Mies came around, right, and he did this…” (scribble, scribble) . . . but as he reached the eighth or ninth detail in the series, he was no longer speaking to us. Mumbling to himself as trace paper cascaded over the edge of the table onto the floor, his ink-stained fingers graphically recounting tales of architectural history, I realized this man was repeating himself.

Engaged in an act of recall that he had seemingly performed numerous times before, he was gaining momentum as he repeated these treasured details. It was unclear where his trajectory of repetition would lead, though it seemed it would only momentarily pause at the present, and slide effortlessly into the world of invention. “Inventing,” writes Jacques Ranciere, “is not of another order than remembering.”1

Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991).

1

04

Red Hook Container Terminal, Brooklyn, 2011

INSIDE AND OUT Pick the box. Drop the box. Check the box. Haul the box.

Repeat 1.4 million times, and you have a successful container terminal. Repeat 9 million times and you have Los Angeles, the largest port in the US. Repeat 25 million times and you have a great transshipment port of the Far East - Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong.

Not everything goes into a shipping container, but, like Newtonian physics, it can handle all but the very small and the very large. Pick, drop, check, haul your box and repeat, and you’ll watch the container erase differences between cotton bales; boxed papayas; TVs; sofas; rugs; beer (bottled); whiskey (bulk); uranium hexafluoride (scary dangerous liquid bulk); drywall screws; panties; bicycles; paper; crushed grass; pet food; Ting soda; hats; narcotics (sometimes); light bulbs; shoes; Argentine wine; aluminum rods; like, a zillion #6 washers; DVDs (legit); DVDs (bootleg); appliances; printing presses; bananas; pharmaceuticals; tires; spatulas; pushpins; designer jeans; screwdrivers; foam noodles; the occasional car; shopping bags; mile-long spools of electrical cable; cans of baby corn. The underwater robot Jason, when not Plumbing the Abyss, travels snug in a 20-foot container. A container doesn’t discriminate. And after one load it’ll happily accept different cargo for the trip back.

The box’s fair-mindedness makes it possible to scale up these movements to the millions-per-year, but maintaining this rhythm is hard work. With any action repeated a million times, variety creeps in. Boxes are loaded lopsided and lurch when picked.

This box leaves by train; those by truck. Equipment gets stuck in snow. Customs tags a box for inspection. For no apparent reason there are no fucking chassis.

Each box is the same; each different. Cargo varies box to box (inside). Each box is handled the same way (outside). This paradox unleashes the scary efficiency of modern global trade, but it exchanges the hassle of treating different cargos differently for the delicacy of a single-poled system. It only works if it’s always the same. Variety tries to find a way in, but any break in the rhythm, a movement that is not a repetition of the one before, is a problem. This natural trend towards entropy is staved off only by terminal operators’ effort, cost, and discipline.

The simplicity of repetition becomes something else when you scale it up. Pick, drop, check, haul, repeat. But inside and out, it’s different every time.

05

Carnival, Rio de Janeiro

BREAK ON THROUGH Once is a statement. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern. Four times is boring. Five times is the start of something altogether different.

A friend of mine told me how he played with a samba school in Rio one year for the Carnival parade. It’s a big and very important contest. The parade committee picks an official song, and the various samba schools rehearse this song day and night to perfect their own unique version that they’ll play when they pass the judges on parade day. All night the cervesa-fueled rehearsal thunders on... 500 drummers and one ukulele player rehearsing the same song over and over and over.

My friend tells me the song is great for the first 10 times you play it. After 20 times it starts to get a little old. By 30 times it actually becomes pretty annoying. After 40 times you can’t stand this stupid song any longer. And by the time you get to 50... it’s the greatest song you’ve ever heard in your entire life.

At what point does repetition itself affect our perception of repetition?

When does conscious dancing lead to an unconscious trance?

Where does casually observing a pendulum slip into hypnosis?

How does a growing fractal design transform into an indiscernible texture? Why does the mediocre punch line, repeated ad nauseam, become inexplicably hysterical?

Repetition confounds human perception. Like a rubber band, it requires some point of anchor in order to stretch. But stretched too far, it snaps and becomes something altogether different.

06

The Uncertain Museum, Olafur Eliasson, 2004

REPEAT, DISCOVER, REPEAT “The new architecture has suppressed monotonous repetition and destroyed the equality of two symmetrical halves. It does not allow for continuous repetition. In place of symmetry the new architecture proposes a balanced relationship of unequal parts or parts which differ (in position, proportion, size and materials) in functional character.”

- Theo van Doesburg, “Fundamental Principles”, 1930

Architects work in deployments. We constantly manage vast systems of mechanical, material, geometric, and spatial elements that belong to their own families and internal rules.

The character of any architectural space is almost entirely dependent on these repetitive deployments, and it’s through them that secondary qualities often emerge.

As Theo van Doesburg proposed in the 1930’s, and practiced to a greater extent today, new architecture is consumed by the desire for “more difference”. To this end, many firms go to great lengths to create projects as a mash-up of many different formal types in an effort to destroy any vestige of the modernist array. Weary of modernism’s predictably spaced A,B,A,B,A repetition, variable façade patterns driven by visual complexity dominate the field. Attempting to apply a painterly logic to repetitive slab buildings the difference created is often ineffectual and highly graphic.

In the search for this manufactured difference, the possibilities of discovery built into formal repetition are overlooked. Repetition not only concerns the reproduction of a basic element but the space built into its offsets, left over through its matching rules, and created through its collisions and combinations. In one type of deployment a repetitive element may be completely expansive, tending to cover territory and fill space in a relentless march towards the edge.

Meanwhile, in a different deployment the same base element rotated, scaled, and following different matching criteria may produce new spatial types and unintentional zones that become areas of interaction and surprise.

It’s clear that repetition and difference are two sides of the same coin. Difference can arise from specific types of repetition! While continuous repetition yields predictable results that are staggering en masse, non-continuous repetition of the same or like elements can reveal an unintended space of potential.

07

24.4.1990 90/11, Gerhard Richter, 1990

FEAR OF GRIDS “Those two planes - the physical and the aesthetic - are demonstrated to be the same plane...Considered this way, the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined materialism.”

- Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” 1979

Anything but the grid. Any office worth its salt today doesn’t draw rectangular grids, not even when laying out acoustical ceiling tile. Reeking of relentless repetition, sameness, Socialism, and worst of all, Modernism, the grid - what Modernism valued for its lack of symbolic value - has become the ultimate signifier; one to be avoided at all costs. We are left instead with the gesture, the nth-coming of the vernacular, and above all, a fetishization of the random. but the grid, in its true, overwhelming, and undeniable abstractness, is much more than a system or symbol of rational order. Its infinite reach and repetition turns it into the exact opposite of what it appears: an irrational, indeed delirious, immersive medium. Its homogenizing tendency doubles as a means to radically sublimate the subject-position at the heart of any design proposition that includes it.

Though intensely positional by nature, its resultant is the field rather than the coordinate. the grid pushes this field beyond the seamless gradients of intensity for which it has stoked interest. It pulls the subject in and assimilates her to its relentless repetitiveness. Its potential, and its peril to many, is its ability to dissolve the barrier between the ego and the object. What remains of the grid, here, is not the lines and nodes by which it is inscribed, but the limitless ocean of space that falls between.

08

Cyclegraph, Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, 1971

BUILT IN VARIATION For craftspeople, the co-evolution of the capitalist economic system with industrial mechanized production systems meant a slow evolution from planning their own manual production to executing repetitive tasks with machines. Capitalists wrested all planning tasks from workers and gave them to managers incentivized to treat workers as an objective factor of production.

Scientific managers endeavored not only to plan every step of production, but also to prove to themselves and to workers that tasks could be executed in a minimum allotment of time to be determined not by workers, but by management. Devices such as the chronocyclegraph were used to study the motions and timing of workers involved in repetitive tasks. The eye and hand motions of workers were codified and allotted time in strange units, like one hundred thousandths of an hour.

The textile and automobile industries were a few of the first to morph into minutely planned, nearly perfectly repetitive processes. Mechanization has affected the building industry enormously as well, but it has been impossible to fully sanitize a discipline so (literally) rooted to the ground from the contagion of craft, from the hands of the masses. Building has become a haven for the low-cost worker, who in some cases retains fresh air, autonomy, and variability in his work life.

However, there is also a trend in the discipline of architecture toward the study of unseen, fluid, ever-changing factors, manifest through the use of isotherms, heat maps, humidity graphs, and the like. As architects begin to visualize the unseen in the environment, to design it directly as part of the architectural project itself, they are beginning to make the variability of air and water and building chemistry part of their palette.

Perhaps soon the discipline will also begin to design directly the motions of workers, to engage their minds and bodies, to allow the mark of their hands to re-enter, and to allow the subjectivity of workers to add the variation that architects so often seek. Acknowledging the physical influence of the mind and body of the worker will require a visual tool. Perhaps an instrument as perverse as the chronocyclegraph, invented to analyze the workerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body and make it as controllable as a machine, could work on behalf of the worker and the architect in the building industry. Could the workers who make our buildings become more visible? Could their labor create a rich and unplanned layer to the architectural work willing to embrace it?

(This text is deeply indebted to Harry Bravermanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.)

09

Branching Line, Tony Cragg, 1990

CRACKING CODES “Irrational thought should be followed absolutely and logically.”

- Sol Lewitt

From the time we are young, we are conditioned to do things again and again and again. Most of these actions involve nothing more than basic muscle memory. However, when the repetitious task requires computation, we defer to the procedures of recursion.

In its purest form, recursion is a function that calls upon itself. Considered one of the most fundamental concepts in computer science, this method is an exercise of minimal means— the fewest possible steps to signal “repeat”. However, this simple definition implies a “dog chasing its tail” scenario, at risk of misunderstanding its actual power, because in fact a recursive process builds from itself, layer by layer, until it reaches a desired solution.

It is here that the darker side of recursion takes hold. For one, it only accepts orders from itself, completing a closed loop. As with any other hierarchical structure, data flows in one direction: downstream. The more recursion goes to work, the less we are aware of what it in fact does. Here, efficiency comes at the expense of discovery. While repetition is thought of as a redundancy, computationally it is a game of optimization. The tighter the code, the less space there is for interpretation.

Art historian Hal Foster has recognized a similar predicament in contemporary design culture. Suspicious of the “world of total design”, in which ‘designers’ spread themselves across all fields, Foster notes a lack of distinction between production and consumption. It is his assertion that the two have collapsed into a single self-perpetuating loop of consumerism, leaving little “running room” for us to occupy on our own.1 Instead, these tightly packaged products constrain our cultural development. Foster reminds us of the critical territory within distinction and separation.

Paradoxically, as our computer routines become more productive, we become less effective at understanding their very purpose.

The processing tools we use, once thought of as liberating agents, have in fact imposed the very limits on our ability to keep moving forward. The abundant speed of computation has stopped us in our tracks.

1

Foster, Hal, “Design and Crime”, (Verso, 2002)

10

The Awakening, 1980

I’LL MAKE HIM EAT FROM MY HAND, AND SIT UP, AND DO ALL SORTS OF THINGS A few years back, my husband and I were taken by a real estate agent to a property modeled on Toad’s house in Kenneth Grahame’s 1907 book, Wind in the Willows. According to scholars, this fictive house was in turn based on a real house, The Mapledurham House, a grand old manor built in the late 1500s in England. We had no special interest in Wind in the Willows, but we were new to house hunting and would look at almost anything.

‘Tell me about Toad Hall,’ said she. ‘It sounds beautiful.’

Outside, No.66 did look convincingly Toad Hall-ish. The agent corroborated the duplication: herringbone path, weathered bellpull, genuine English boxwoods, thick masonry walls built by European laborers. Taking us inside, she confided that the owner was a sculptor known for making replicas of people in bronze doing mundane things like reading the newspaper. Did we know of him?

In the foyer, the sculptor had followed Toad’s formula, mixing the new, the old and the unique: Craggy stones against a modern white expanse desecrated by a Victorian umbrella stand. Inside an open coat closet, empty of coats, we spied the unique element, a black hole. The agent disclosed that it led to a tunnel to the adjacent house serving as the sculptor’s office.

Asked if there were other tunnels, the agent duly stated there was one more; it led to a manhole cover in the street.

There was no such strangeness in the Great Room. A manly hearth faced lady-like window seats beneath wood beams with telescoping gallery lights. A couple of high backed settees, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodations for the socially disposed. As we sat listening to patter about the usefulness of the sliding wall for hiding one’s china, I thought I heard my husband mumble, “Folly”. His own father had a lavish side that led to ruin. Moreover, snazzy Toad had squandered his father’s money. And the sculptor, cut from his father’s will, carried on grandly, simply because he was used to it. Absorbed recalling “Seward’s Folly,” the treaty ending in gold and oil, I trailed behind to the next room.

Sunken, the kitchen was naturally fortified. Its tiny window allowed the barest view out to the street, and gave the world a minimal view in. Only the normalizing presence of the Miele+Subzero could be glimpsed. Cleverly hidden were the tall dumb-waiter and undersized bright red shower (Toad’s favorite color) used by the owner to bathe his pet wolf. In WW, the girl character states her refusal to refer “to animals as pets” because it would offend Toad. Wishing to avoid animal slander, I

focused on whether Wolf represented Toad, or if Wolf’s role was to protect Toad. The agent said in any case, not to worry about the wolf thing. I’ll make him eat from my hand, and sit up, and do all sorts of things. Sheetrock could cover it up.

Lower still was the “Santa Fe Room,” underground where nothing can get at you. Freeform, frosted with adobe clay and smelling of mold, entering the room made us feel like we had been dropped into a jug. In 1980, the same year that No.66 was built, the owner made his largest piece ever; “Awakening” depicts a giant trying to free itself from an underground pit. But this was a party pit. It boasted 2 saunas, a pool, a Hefner-esque billiard room, 2 vaults (one for money one for fur coats) and a salvagedwood disc jockey booth. Checking the turntables, I noted Madonna and John Denver as the last performers in the house before it was vacated three years earlier.

The Master Suite stayed true to the master of the house while Toad’s modern plumbing mandate was also honored. How home-like it all felt to him. You’re entirely your own master, and you don’t have to consult anybody or mind what they say. On our left was the push-button dry-cleaning rack. To our right was tea service. “Quite practical if you think about it.” I was speculating on the pairing of an eighties chrome mirror with a rocky-mountain fireplace (Madonna & John Denver,) when it hit me that there was neither a toilet in this bathroom, nor, in my quick calculation, a logical place for another in this wing. A few misses, then a smart zigzag down a pinched corridor, and we came upon the revelation. There, in a white room, large enough only for one seated man, sat an upscale Duravit toilet facing a gray panel with a grid of labeled buzzers, a skinny sharp slit of a window to one side. I looked from the panic buttons to the toilet and back again recalling that during the classic flightresponse animals defecate before fleeing. Though the toilet was unmanned, I had intruded on a man’s secret pathology, his Terror of the Wild Wood.

Segueing, the agent said it was rumored... she wasn’t sure if it was true... that there was a kidnapping incident in the family. He’s been missing for some days now... without finding the slightest trace. That... or maybe it was his fear of fire: supposing a fire breaks out - where’s Toad? The boiler room housed separate fuse boxes for every outlet, a “selling point” according to the agent.

Upstairs, the copy unraveled further. In the sweetly wallpapered child’s room, camouflaged cabinets harbored a rope ladder. Loved ones could escape, tying one end of the improvised rope round the central mullion of the handsome Tudor window... to the ground. With my head out the bulletproof window (they were all bulletproof,) I checked the drop. Nestled in the purple heather below, Mole, cast in bronze, waited. Joining for fresh air, the

agent suggested we try out Rat’s Restaurant, the place started by the sculptor. It was totally organic.

When Wind in the Willows is read to you as a child, you fall sweetly under the spell, charmed by the rumble-tumble adventures. You cheer Badger-Toad-Ratty on with their crazed escapades as if they were your very own pals, while being comforted by the gentle morality that keeps things right, or on the course back to right. No.66 set out to duplicate a child’s memory of the perfect home in Wind in the Willows, but had gone hither and thither off into a tangle of brambles right down to river’s edge. The forest bandits had weaseled their way into the copy of Toad Hall, driving tunnels, mold and ferret crap into the grand manor.

Or could it be that No.66 unknowingly garnered the precise fear that WW buried? Reading it again, now, the book’s idyll seems an architectural edifice to fear that manages to disguise all traces of that fear. It’s bullet proof. Even the woods, Nature’s Grand Hotel as Grahame called it, was designed with doors to keep the terror out. Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World... I’ve never been there, and I’m never going... Don’t ever refer to it again, please. Both sculptor and author1 careened away from the primary model, Mapledurham House, unable to bar entry of the deep self.

Recently, when we described No.66 to a friend, he told us he knew its former owner. The sculptor and his wife were really nice people. When I asked about their new house, he said it was exactly the same as the old one. It’s my home, my old home!

Repetition delineates itself here as the human side of the copy.

It lies adjacent to duplication, which is aligned with the product more than human process. This nice man’s act of building Toad Hall once again, on a hillside way out yonder, in a yet safer place, is a splendid case of repetition. His repetition has more to do with desire than the desire for perfection. The copy mutates even as the man stays the same.

Seen together, “like” things establish difference not sameness.

Positioned side-by-side, the absolute unit of anomaly surfaces neatly boxed. This box holds that which cannot be banished. In 1980, the box would have been called baggage.

I can quite see that; but now I’m going to be a good Toad, and not do it any more.

Kenneth Grahame’s mother died when he was five. His alcoholic father sent him to live with relatives shortly thereafter. In his forties he was injured by a bullet and lost his bank job. His only son, born blind, was hit by a train at twenty-one.

1

KAREN YAMA is an artist living and working in Princeton, New Jersey.

GIANCARLO VALLE is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.

PATRICK THRASHER is a technocrat working for the Port Authority of NY and NJ. He lives in New York City.

TAL SCHORI is an architect in New York City and an editor of The Real: Perspecta 42.

RYAN NEIHEISER is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.

ISAIAH KING is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.

GABRIEL GLOEGE is a musician and composer living in New York City. He is a founding member of The Dymaxion Quartet.

SARAH JAZMINE FUGATE is an architect living in New York City.

AARON FORREST is an architect living in New York City and founding partner of the cooperative Ultramoderne.net.

STAN ALLEN is an architect and dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

REPETITION! pamphlet contributors:

Above all, another pamphlet is a conversation, a loose exchange of forms and ideas, a shared excitement. It is a way to play, a frame through which to look, an open dialogue with our friends, our histories, and our surroundings.

For the fleeting life of this pamphlet, distinct voices are provisionally brought together into a contingent collective. But while the contributors and the ideas they contribute are vital, particular authorship is obscured.

The collective dialogue is given primacy over the individual position.

The next conversation will be about THE FUTURE!

If you are interested in contributing to the next conversation, please email another@anotherpamphlet.com