Andrew McNamara — A short sketch of spatial visual art

A short sketch of spatial visual art

Andrew McNamara

The story of spatial art is the alternative history explaining what occurred within the visual arts (and what happened to it) over the course of the twentieth century. Its legacy informs many of the practices found in the LANDSEASKY exhibition; we could not comprehend these practices without understanding this history. Nonetheless, this legacy of spatial visual art is understood only in a sporadic way as a set of disparate, individual or idiosyncratic practices that lack a coherent framework or narrative underpinning its history. In some ways, this is apt. The history of spatial visual art in the twentieth century is far from continuous, it is not a movement, and its history fractured, but it explains the pathways from modernism to contemporary art better than the standard history that concentrates on modernist painting as an exclusive sphere of self-contained possibility.

1. 1922/23 In 1923, Kurt Schwitters knocked on the door of Herkulesufer 15, Berlin. Finding no one home, Schwitters modifed one of Erich Buchholz’s business cards to let him know he had stopped by. What would Schwitters have found behind the door of that apartment if Buchholz had been at home to open it?

2. 1922/1972 In 1972, in an obituary for Buchholz in Berlin newspaper, Tagesspiegel, Heinz Ohff made a remarkable claim about that very apartment Schwitters had visited almost half a century earlier. ‘In 1922,’ Ohff declared, Buchholz had ‘remodeled his studio fat at Herkulesufer 15 into the frst “environment,” the frst abstractly designed three-dimensional space in art history.’ (I) Chiming in, Eberhard Roters wrote that Buchholz was the frst to create a new prototype in art: “the frst ‘walk-in picture.’ ” (II)

A walk-in picture? At the time, there was no set terminology for such an innovation in art, but the idea is clear: it was three-dimensional and encapsulated the space around the viewer, who entered the work like entering a room. In other words, Buchholz could claim a signifcant innovation in modernist art practice, today we might say he created the frst installation piece, or—given it took up his entire Berlin apartment— he took abstract art into the three-dimensional realm.

3. 1948/1923 Well after Buchholz’s innovation in post-World War One Berlin, the American critic Clement Greenberg noted an interesting feature of emerging abstract art: its reversibility. In a review of an exhibition of Mordecai Ardon’s art, Greenberg detects this aspect of abstract art much later (1948) in regard to artwork that was far less abstract at the time:

… the most important threads in contemporary painting now converge: the even, all over, ‘polyphonic’ picture in which every square inch is rendered with equal emphasis … Texture and surface carry everything, and the picture becomes reversible … with beginning, middle, and end made interchangeable. (III)

Already reversibility was a key feature of the impetus behind the abstract works of El Lissitzky. (IV) Like Mordecai Ardon (Max Bronstein), the Russian artist originally had an artistic ambition founded in Jewish mysticism, but emerged to focus on radical spatial, abstract goals. In 1923, Lissitzky was one of four artists—that originally included Buchholz—commissioned to create an abstract room for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in late 1923. The idea was to display whole rooms transformed by these new abstract, three-dimensional formulations in which the eye was led around the room. Works of visual art were now experienced by entering them; of course, ‘beginning, middle, and end’ had become interchangeable, if not to some extent evaporated.

Only Lissitzky’s Proun Room received funding and was realized. Buchholz missed out. The economy was a mess, the politics tumultuous and violent, and innovations in art were unheralded. Lissitzky’s Proun Room would eventually be regarded as a landmark of modernist art. It was perhaps the most directed because it did try to lead the viewer on a kind of directed visual journey along a sequence of walls, as if to suggest along the way that one could experience the course of painting into complete abstraction.

4. 1923 And Schwitters? We know he began to create assemblages in 1923 that would soon acquire a larger

scale, and also become an installation of sorts, initially inhabiting a portion of a room, then steadily consuming it, and fnally taking over his house in Hanover. But that was all to come: the resulting work, the Merzbau, or Cathedral of Erotic Misery, would eventually be retrieved for art history as a modernist classic, even though destroyed by allied bombing during World War Two and even though it was largely inassimilable to its most conventional accounts of abstract art. Another sort of modernism was brewing and the Merzbau would play an important role.

5. 1970 Schwitters readily acknowledged the precedent of Buchholz’s apartment, but Lissitzky was more reticent. Buchholz was left to lament the consequences of art-historical fate. Buchholz wrote often. One of the last pieces before his death was a 1970 treatise condemning art history, its fabrications, its inaccuracies and, most of all, for leaving him out of the picture:

Art history is nothing but a forgery; there are only differences of degree between deliberate interpretation—spawned by some fctional system of aesthetics—and interpretation that is inadequately informed. (IV)

6. Spatial art history Could we say something similar in regard to the whole, diminished history of spatial art? Are we inadequately informed about its history—and not just the particular case of Buchholz?

The story of spatial art is the alternative history explaining what occurred within the visual arts (and what happened to it) over the course of the twentieth century. Its legacy informs many of the practices found in the LANDSEASKY exhibition; we could not comprehend these practices without understanding this history. Nonetheless, this legacy of spatial visual art is understood only in a sporadic way as a set of disparate, individual or idiosyncratic practices that lack a coherent framework or narrative underpinning its history. In some ways, this is apt. The history of spatial visual art in the twentieth century is far from continuous, it is not a movement, and its history fractured, but it explains the pathways from modernism to contemporary art better than the standard history that concentrates on modernist painting as an exclusive sphere of self-contained possibility.

7. 1922/1969 By the 1960s, many of the practices and artworks just mentioned were being rediscovered after the tumult of two world wars, the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and atomic weapons. Recreations of Schwitters, Buchholz and Lissitzky were being constructed; the coloured environments of de Stijl were being recovered, all after fading from art-historical memory.

Buchholz wrote an article in 1969 to describe what he had created in his small apartment nearly half a century earlier. By then, the same section of Berlin he had lived in no longer existed in the same way. His article, “A Coloured Room, 1922,” explained what he had created back in 1922. Buchholz noted the interchange between colour and relief. The wall surfaces that remained smooth after the removal of a heavy brownish, foral wallpaper were painted light blue, the rough surfaces a vaguely complementary green. The wooden foor and austere furniture were painted grey; the door and window frame white; the relief elements and glass ceiling construction black and gold. The focus was on surfaces and the visual movement around the room.

Buchholz’s studio was simultaneously a space of discourse. He notes the many visitors to see what he had constructed and the debates and intense discussions over topics, such as kinetic art, spatial vibrations in the eye of the viewer, physiology of the eye, and physics.

These spatial practices, though often highly abstract, respond to issues within the visual arts and the general “cultural climate” one hundred years ago. For the artists, they were themes that could no longer be contained within the boundary of picture plane. Instead the practices responded to a sense that the world had transformed in ways that eluded or confronted conventional perception.

8. Sputnik and art, 1958 Over a decade earlier, Buchholz had written another essay on spatial art and its curious fate. On the 4th October 1957, the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik into space. For Buchholz, it was a confrmation of possibilities heralded by the avant-garde so many decades earlier. He did not mention that the Soviet Union had also successfully tested the world’s frst intercontinental ballistic missile earlier in August the same year. His main point was that by 1958 everybody had forgotten Malevich and his crucial importance for spatial art. Responding to Sputnik and Malevich, Buchholz declared that the pencil point on the page

should not be regarded as a point that leads to a line, but an accumulation on a surface that is vertical and suggests taking off from the page or surface and into space. That same year, 1958, the frst post-war exhibition of Malevich’s art was held in Braunschweig, Germany.

By the 1960s, Buchholz had begun to return to the theme of foating screens. In 1924, he had sketched designs for mobile screens in a public setting as part of an array of architectural projects he devised in the mid-1920s. In 1965, he created a mobile, foating installation, documentation b-3, which featured screens similar in design to the ceiling of the Herkulesufer apartment. These screens did not foat off into space but instead moved independently of the artist, courtesy of small machinery, in a shuffing sequence as if demonstrating kinetic spatial art—the topic of the discussions back in 1922. Movement was a perennial theme of spatial art.

9. Vilem Flusser, “Line and Surface”, 1973 (V) A few years later in Brazil, Vilem Flusser ruminated on similar themes to Buchholz, specifcally the spatial differences between lines and surfaces. Flusser’s ruminations were prompted by the technological transformations that impacted upon our perceptual awareness.

The line, Flusser suggests, is indicative of alphabetical writing. Its primary mode is linear or chronological; it suggests a sequence—from left to right—and that ‘one aims at getting somewhere.’ (23) For this reason, Flusser asserts that lines are distinctive of offcial discourse as well as the emblem of historical thinking. The focus is always on ‘getting somewhere.’ Of course, the directional impulse is assumed.

‘Until recently,’ Flusser notes, ‘offcial Western thought has expressed itself much more in lines than written surfaces.’ (25) So what happens with surfaces? Flusser thought that surfaces had begun to proliferate long before personal computers. Surfaces exert an all over effect and elicit a random, wandering eye. The initial response is one of synthesis followed by analysis. This is because the surface is categorically different to the line with its unidirectional movement, say from left to right. Yet, the transformation is not a linear one from line to surfaces.

Film, for instance, is hybrid. According to Flusser, flm ought to be considered a composite of surface— flms, he declares, are visually surfaces, but spatial to the ear (25)—and of a line due to their narrative structure, which follows a text. (24) One of the visitors to Buchholz’s apartment was Viking Eggeling and one could typify his ambition as promoting flm as pure surface, even though the movement of lines govern the abstraction of his Diagonal Symphony (1924). Eggling sought to escape the hybrid quality of flm, while utilizing both the linear and surface dimensions of the medium.

Flusser declares that we still “read” flm and television ‘as if they were written lines’, thus failing to ‘grasp their inherent surface quality.’ (25) Yet, somewhat echoing Greenberg on abstract painting, he observes that such media are ‘partially reversible’, thus allowing the possibility of ‘the reader to control and manipulate the sequence of pictures.’ (25) In more utopian fourishes (or do his observations merely anticipate a coming digital media transformation?), Flusser extends this insight to suggest that these potential transformations ‘imply a radically new meaning of the term historical freedom.’ (25) Flusser may project too much in his ruminations about the perceptual-historical changes prompted by technological transformations, but he does lend a vivid insight into the motivations prompting the earliest avant-garde aspirations when venturing into the frst wholly abstract, spatial visual artworks. In a declaration strangely resonant with the themes of Buchholz’s essay, “Sputnik and art,” (1958) Flusser notes in his essay, “The Vanity of History,” (1969): ‘Rockets have done away with the concept of distance in the traditional sense.’ (139)

10. Perceptual challenge and spatial art Examining what prompted spatial visual art, a common thread is not the question of optimism or pessimism, but that of art’s response to perceptual upheavals. It is possible to say that spatial visual art is always tied to a perceptual failing. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a common view was that the world had transformed without precedent, such that the changes surpassed traditional historical calculation. There was an almost tangible sense of things speeding up, everything changed before one’s eyes, and the intimation that the conventional parameters of perception were failing.

When spatial practices come to the fore again in the 1960s, this sense of foreboding that emanates from social or technological transformation becomes prominent. Whether it be Robert Smithson’s emphasis on entropy, completely expelling the linear, chronological expectation that Flusser argues is epitomized by the line; or Dan Graham’s contention that the proliferation of glass windows and surfaces actually does

not indicate greater transparency, but an evermore tightly circumscribed social and architecture space that we struggle to inhabit; or Gordon Matta-Clark’s suggestion that his strange cuts, or extractions, into derelict buildings sought a “… strange sort of connection AND divergence at the same time”, while also transforming “lost” spaces into “images”—these are all concerns that echo through the history of spatial visual art, that is seeking to animate new spaces of and for art, while transforming that legacy in continuing it.

Notes:

(I) Heinz Ohff, “Als Unbequemer unersetzlich. Zum Tode von Erich Buchholz [The Irreplaceable Inconvenience: an obituary of Erich Buchholz]”, Der Tagesspiegel, 30 December 1972; cited in Mo Buchholz and Eberhard Roters eds, Erich Buchholz (Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1993), pp.117-118. (II) Roters, in Erich Buchholz, ibid, p.21. (III) Clement Greenberg, “Review of an exhibition of Mordecai Ardon-Bronstein and a Discussion of the Reaction in America to Abstract Art”, The Nation, 6 March 1948; in John O’Brian ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-49, pp.217-218. (IV) Yves-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility”, Art in America, April 1988, pp.161-181. (V) All page references that follow are from Vilém Flusser, Writings, Andreas Ströhl ed., Erik Eisel trans., (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

Above: a model of Erich Buchholz’s studio at 15 Herkulesufer, Berlin.

上图：埃里希·布赫霍尔茨位于柏林海格立苏菲尔街15号工作室的模型。