Transparency was one of the guiding concepts of modernist architecture. The heavy, ornate stone and brick of the nineteenth century evaporated into the glass curtain walls and skeletal steel frames of the twentieth. Modernist buildings revealed themselves, exposed their structure to view like an X-ray of steel bone through glass skin. There were multiple historical forces at work — nineteenth century industrial innovations in steel and glass construction (the railway, the ocean liner, the exhibition halls), an aversion to fin-de-siècle Victorian decor, the spread of tuberculosis and its pre-antibiotic remedy of sun and air (sanatoria were a laboratory of modernist form). The significance of transparency was debated, some heralding its futurism, others its hygiene, others its social and moral virtues. These various tributaries were not at odds, but merged into a utopian confluence. For architectural modernists, from the Glass Chain to the Bauhaus, from the Deutsche Werkbund to the Neue Sachlichkeit, from Constructivism to the International Style, transparency became a sign of ideological mists clearing, of structures becoming legible, of a revolutionary principle at work in the construction of a more rational and equitable society. As Walter Benjamin put it, “Living in a glasshouse is a revolutionary virtue par excellence.”1 But that revolutionary tide has long since ebbed.
Although our cities today are still built in steel and glass, they are hardly legible and are very far from utopian. What happened? Modernist architecture is said to have exhausted itself somewhere around 1980, along with the post-war social contract that it epitomised, and all the things modernism had repressed—opacity, symbolism, pastiche—returned. Fredric Jameson’s encounter with the Westin Bonaventure Hotel is a well known account of the shock of this new era, documenting his disorientation in the face of the Apollonian space of modernism contorting into the Dionysian space of postmodernism, transparency fogging into opacity, glass becoming mirror.2 But in recent years transparent modernism has returned from its own repression, in form if not in content. We live in an era not of postmodernism (or antimodernism, as it might better have been called) but of pseudomodernism, an empty echo of modernism “stripped of its promise of social redemption.”3 Today’s pseudomodern architecture—those ‘iconic’ steel and glass skyscrapers, retail complexes and housing developments—might be see-through, but it’s transparency is not in the service of legibility, it serves a new master.
In what follows, I consider two artefacts produced in the 1970’s—that threshold decade between May 68 and the Reagan/Thatcher era—that both mark an end to modernism and point towards the fault lines of transparency today. These two objects, while very different, are both premised on transparency, and specifically on the eradication of opaque dividing walls: the Centre Pompidou designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (1971-77), an entirely steel and glass edifice built with no interior dividing walls, and an artwork by Michael Asher in which he removed the dividing wall of a commercial gallery to open its back office to view (1974). One version of transparency, symbolised by the Centre Pompidou — neither a modern nor postmodern building, but one that looks forward to today’s pseudomodern architecture — points towards the inscrutable and highly policed steel and glass city of today, whereas another transparency, figured by Asher, agitates for a world of public access and institutional visibility. I will end by looking at a third artefact that brings these objects into direct dialogue, Micheal Asher’s 1991 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Let’s hold these different transparencies up to the light to see how the modernist concept of transparency has been, not negated, but involuted — to see transparency’s other side.
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Michael Asher
In 1974, for an exhibition at the Claire S. Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, Michael Asher did no more and no less than remove the solid wall dividing the ‘white cube’ room of the gallery from the office space to the rear normally closed off from public view. Asher did not bring any foreign objects into the gallery to be exhibited, he only took something away, stipulating that the revealed office space not be altered in any way, not even tidied. With this simple act of removal, Asher altered the conditions of the space visually, psychologically and conceptually. In an interview at the time of the exhibition with Sandy Ballatore, Asher explains his intentions:
Sandy Ballatore: About your piece at the Claire Copley Gallery—what were your intentions?
Michael Asher: To make the back space accessible to the front space.
SB: And what else?
MA: That’s it.
SB: It’s an environment?
MA: I don’t deal with environments. I do situational work. I’m not interested in manipulating perception.4
Asher’s remarks are both taciturn and concrete, as if mimicking in his speech the simplicity and concreteness of his artwork. These sparse words sharply distinguish Asher from other West Coast artists of his generation in not setting out to conjure new and strange “environments,” or to ‘derealise’ space. In the galleries and museums that Asher exhibited, he did not ‘manipulate perception’ with colour, sound or volume, but encouraged a heightened awareness of the space itself, focusing the attention of the visitor on aspects that would normally, silently, direct and condition the gaze. Asher teases out those points at which our phenomenological immersion in the world is mediated by, to borrow Jacques Rancière’s term, the “partitioning of the sensible,” the points at which our surroundings are stage-managed to present certain things to view and not others. In this discourse of transparency, the visible and the perceptible are preconditions for reflection, judgement, or even action. When the script is invisible, dissent is impossible.
For many commentators, Michael Asher is not a conceptual artist but a sculptor. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh claims that his work marks “the conclusion of modernist sculpture.” For Buchloh, modernist sculpture is a radicalisation of the logic of the monument, which is to “sit in a particular place and speak in a symbolical tongue about the meaning and use of that place.”5 Asher pushes this logic to its nearly immaterial end point, at which he no longer produces any new monuments (or sculptures), but either moves existing ones, or focuses solely on “that place” at which the monument (or sculpture) stands. Indeed, so much of Asher’s work is focused on “that place”—on the architectural context—that he not only pushes the logic of modernist sculpture to an extreme, but also the logic of modernist architecture and its desire for transparency. The contemporary art gallery and its sheer white cuboid interior is, after all, an offshoot of (International Style) modernism, but its aesthetic clarity serves to screen off the opacity of its inner workings. Asher’s work, in challenging this aesthetic purity that masquerades as ideological purity, is perhaps more in the spirit of Lenin-era Constructivism, demanding that transparency be not merely a style, but in the service of open and equitable economic relations.
From what theoretical perspective might such demands for transparency be understood? We could see a process of analysis at work here in the mode of that modernist loadstar, Freud, and his attempts to look beyond the “wall” of the conscious mind and cast light into the shady recesses of the unconscious.6 Alternatively, and perhaps more satisfyingly, we could see the division of the gallery into two spaces, one public and one private, as metonymic of the split between society’s cultural production and its underlying economic relations. Asher’s removal of the wall might then mirror the Marxist imperative to look through the fog of the visible ‘superstructure’ (here figured by the white cube gallery space) and into the invisible ‘infrastructure’ (here the private office where the ‘real’ business is done). From a slightly different angle we could see the front gallery space as a mirror of middle-class consciousness—static and contemplative—and the removal of the wall as something like an act of working-class praxis that removes the barriers on knowledge imposed by one class on another.7
These vantage points are not alternatives, but are thoroughly enmeshed, the one theorising the divided subject (or mind) that lives within the divided society theorised by the other.8 Looking at this work from both perspectives posits the gallery space as a metonym for, or a concrete instantiation of, that world or mind, divided from itself, split into opaque strata. Asher’s work, then, is a demand for greater visibility, demystification, access. The next artefact we will look at was also constructed on principles of accessibility and transparency, but proposes a new world very different from the divided, antagonistic one elaborated above. In the Centre Pompidou we see one of the first glimmers of a world imagined as the totalising system that we live within today.
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The Centre Pompidou
The Centre Pompidou in Paris emerged from the episode of class antagonism that we know as May 68. As is well known, the government of Charles de Gaulle was shaken to its core by social unrest and strike action that ground the French economy to a halt, and that many hoped, and many feared, would precipitate revolution. The situation was diffused by an election which saw the Gaullists comfortably re-elected, but with Georges Pompidou replacing de Gaulle as president. Pompidou was a more centrist and pro-American conservative than the patently authoritarian General de Gaulle. In the years that followed his election, Pompidou embarked on a series of projects to ‘modernise’ Paris, such as the demolition the historic Les Halles markets, replacing them with a shopping mall, and the construction of a modern art museum, at first called the Centre Beaubourg and later renamed after Pompidou himself.
Though the project was the brainchild of the conservative government, for the architects of the Centre Pompidou, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, the design ‘captured the spirit’ of May 68.9 Their building pushed modernist transparency to a new extreme — there are no concrete walls above ground, no permanent dividing walls in the six vast floors of the building, and the exterior glass ‘skin’ of the building stands within an exo-skeletal steel structure.10 Moreover, the air-ducts, pipes, elevators and escalators of the building are not only visible but overt and colour-coded to produce a kind of infrastructural baroque. Transparency here is not the revealing of a knowable structure so much as the spectacular confusion of interior and exterior.
The claim that the building captured the spirit of May 68—a claim made by the architects in interviews, bolstered by allusions to the 1960’s countercultural visions of the Archigram group or Cedric Price and his ‘Fun Palace’ (who were both, incidentally, critical of the building), by a performative anti-elitism and by phrases such as “fantastic flexibility” and “dynamism”—distracts from the fact that the building fit the government’s brief perfectly.11 Namely, the design fulfilled the mandate to construct an inclusive space in which ‘culture’ could be consumed as entertainment, as against the “dusty secrecy”12 of a traditional museum. The Centre Pompidou was intended as a ‘supermarket of culture.’ The architecture is fundamentally a supermarket ‘shed’ that can be rearranged at will to optimise its primary goal, the circulation of people. Pop Art and other forms of art thought to be accessible and entertaining are given centre-stage, and the building foregrounds amenities such as the cafe and the gift shop.13 In consequence, in the words of Douglas Spencer, “Art’s autonomy is desacralized in that the public’s relations to it are modelled on those of the consumer to the commodity.”14 The Centre Pompidou “captures” the spirit of May 68, not in the sense of sustaining its revolutionary force, but, on the contrary, of containing and diverting it.
The Centre Pompidou might seem quaint to us now, a colourful retro-futurist landmark, but for Jean Baudrillard, writing in 1980, it marked the “death of culture.”15 In his apocalyptic polemic, ‘The Beaubourg Effect,’ he sees its transparency as dystopian. Outwardly, the museum is a “carcass of signs and flux, of networks and circuits” and inwardly, a “space of deterrence, linked to the ideology of visibility, transparency, polyvalence, consensus, contact, and sanctioned by the threat to security, [which] is virtually that of all social relations today.”16 For Baudrillard, transparency is here put to the service of surveillance and controlled circulation, the visitors considered “in terms of input/output, just like a refinery handling petroleum products or a flow of raw material.”17 Here transparency is not a civic—let alone revolutionary—virtue, but a means by which the state renders its subjects visible and governable.
Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed this new world a year earlier, in The Postmodern Condition (1979), when he distinguished between a society imagined as “divided into two” (the modern society of class conflict imagined by Marx) as against a (postmodern) society imagined as an “organic whole.” This new kind of society is a “self-regulating system” whose “true goal” is “the optimisation of the global relationship between input and output—in other words, performativity.”18 Social antagonism, in this new understanding of society, is merely an “internal readjustment […] whose result can be no more than an increase in the system’s “viability.””19
The May 68 uprisings were fought on the basis of the society “divided into two,” and the Centre Pompidou is a symbol of the artificial resolution of those divisions, of the demands for access and transparency being granted in distorted form. From this new ‘transparency’ of the open-plan office, gallery and cultural centre whose lack of partitions masks the hierarchies that remain inherent within them, we can see emerging the neoliberal city that erodes the boundaries of interior and exterior whilst privatising all public space, and the society at large that does not recognise itself as divided, even as inequality widens beyond any historical horizon.20 Beatriz Colomina, in her recent book X-Ray Architecture, diagnoses these conditions today: “There is no simple opposition between the outside and the inside […] the public/private distinction has been so radically dissolved, an architecture without envelope may very well be upon us […] The body itself is now suspended in data.”21 This is the other side of transparency. Where do we go from here?
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MICHAEL ASHER & THE CENTRE POMPIDOU
In 1991 Michael Asher put together an exhibition for the Centre Pompidou. In preparation, he scoured through every book in the psychoanalysis section of the Public Reference Library (Bibliothèque publique d’information [BPI]) housed within the Centre Pompidou, removing every bookmark, post-it note and loose scrap of paper he found, carefully documenting and cataloguing each fragment. Asher recorded the position of each fragment within the book in which it was found, and noted the book’s position on the library shelves. He then displayed these found fragments on the walls of the Galeries contemporaines behind panels of glass, cut to correspond to the dimensions of the book in which the scrap was originally discovered, the position of the scrap behind the glass corresponding to its position in the book at the moment of discovery. Wall text identified each book’s author, title, and subject, along with the code for the section of the book in which the scrap was found, and the display itself was arranged in accordance with the book’s call number and shelf position.22
That the books inspected were from the psychoanalysis section of the library is not incidental, but a key to the work. In his notes in preparation for the exhibition, Asher writes:
“The library at Centre Pompidou represents the site of knowledge gathering […] Psychoanalysis on the other hand, is an area where consciousness is closely observed […] But it is the slip, the lapse or fragment, which often gives the patient a clue as to the history of their consciousness […] Thereby, the found paper in the book is in some way a parallel activity as the finding of fragments in consciousness.”23
Asher compares the fragment of paper to a lapse, a ‘Freudian slip.’ Just as the Freudian slip is made within a structure, language, the fragments of paper are themselves embedded within multiple structures — the book, the shelf, the library and the building, which Asher draws our attention to with his zealous cataloging. In highlighting the structures in which the slip is embedded, Asher, explicitly or not, puts the work in the orbit of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in particular, with its focus on the structures—language, the ‘symbolic order’—that we are embedded in and that constitute us: “All human beings share in the universe of symbols. They are included in it and submit to it, much more than they constitute it. They are much more its support than its agents.”24 Asher offers us a vision of the new conditions of transparency elaborated above—the book has become transparent, a sheet of glass through which we see the fragment, and the data that identifies it is another form of X-ray vision, a form that we are all subject to today.
Thinking about Asher’s artwork through Lacan’s seminar of 1969-70, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, given in the febrile atmosphere immediately following the May 68 uprisings, will help us see what is at work on the ‘other side’ of transparency. In this seminar, Lacan lays out his theory of social bonds, the so-called ‘four discourses.’ The basic social bond is the ‘discourse of the master,’ a relation of oppression and extraction premised on the blind, and blinding, exercise of power. Lacan made a famous pronouncement, recorded in this seminar, that the student revolutionaries of May 68 were unwittingly or unconsciously agitating not for a different kind of social bond altogether, but for a “new master.” Interestingly, the response from a student is rarely mentioned:
[Lacan:] What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.
INTERVENTION: We’ve already got one, we have Pompidou.25
It is a matter of debate among Lacanians what exactly Lacan had in mind in this rather cryptic statement, but the student intervention is in any case more accurate — the new master is indeed the ‘modernising’ Pompidou (and, I would add, the cultural centre named after him.)26 Whatever Lacan may have meant, he opposes the discourse of the master—a social bond aimed at total domination that in fact cannot contain the excesses generated by its divided subjects—to the discourse of the analyst, which persistently undermines the totalising impulse of the master. Analysis does this by recovering and analysing the excesses, or “rejects” that spill out through the cracks of this would-be totalising, or “not-whole,” social relation.27 Seen through this lens, the Centre Pompidou is an instant of the new face of the master’s discourse, and Michael Asher’s intervention within it is the analyst’s discourse at work. The “rejects” of this would-be totalising building cannot be made fully legible and transparent by the multiple systems that try to contain them, appearing, in spite of the granular data that indexes them, as so much inscrutable flotsam.
My interpretation may seem to cast Michael Asher in the role of analyst. But Asher’s work goes beyond the ‘prophetic’ pronouncement of Lacan—the ever-deferred “you will get one” that might encourage or at least excuse political apathy—and sides with the student, who retorts that the new master is already here before our eyes. (Indeed, in this exchange, Lacan might be seen to take up the position of master, capturing his audience within his own discourse).28 In applying the discourse of the analyst outside of the clinic and the academy, to the built environment of that new master—holding up to view the opaque rejects of the transparent “carcass of signs and flux” of the Centre Pompidou—Asher is engaged in a kind of artistic-analytic praxis within the neoliberal city. If Lacan’s insights—helpful as they are in showing us how a totalising system might repress its divisions—risk trapping us within the equivocations of discourse, Asher shows us how the practice of making art might refuse the pseudo-transparency of a pseudomodern world by revealing its incompleteness and blind spots. In doing so he makes this inscrutable world more legible, while rendering ourselves a little less transparent to it.
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This work is part of Doubled and Divided, a micro-issue on space and the built environment, edited by Lakshmi Luthra and Florence Uniacke.