The end of the beginning.

“Repugnance is the sentry standing right near the door to those things we desire most.”1

 

In this essay I wish to explore two artworks whose themes and aesthetics are not obviously comparable; Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dali’s In Voluptas Mors (1951), and contemporary Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye’s series of Anal Kisses (1999). Both artworks can be situated within the framework of ideas expressed in George Bataille’s Visions of Excess: Selected Writings (1985). The unifying factor is a fascination with death and decay juxtaposed with desire and sexual gratification.

 

I wish to examine one text in particular in Visions of Excess, but will begin by situating this text within the context of contemporary thought and events. In early twentieth century French thought we see a counter-Enlightenment of sorts which changed the way the senses are perceived, toppling sight from it’s perch as the highest of the senses. Surrealist George Bataille disregarded the eye’s privilege as separate or above the rest of the body with its primary functionalities and wastes. This disenchantment of vision can be seen to be in part, a result of the First World War. Indeed Bataille himself experienced the stinking trenches of wartime Europe. Martin Jay articulates this notion in his 1994 book, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought.’:

 

‘It is striking that many of Bataille’s obsessive themes would betray an affinity for the experiences of degridation, pollution, violence, and communal bonding which were characteristic of life in the trenches. None of those themes was as dramatically intertwined with the war’s impact as that of the eye.’2

 

Jay also provides insight on Bataille’s obsession with the eye – and with blindness – attributing this in part to his experiences of his father who was blinded and paralysed.

 

In The Story of the Eye, Bataille succeeds in drawing the eye back from its heady status as mindful observer, using the metaphor of a phallus to express feelings of the abject; “I even thought my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror”3

 

I will now begin to look at one writing from Visions of Excess;The Solar Anus. This sees a world as a circulating, copulating, endlessly connected being – in which the turning of the earth is synonymous with sexual activity of its inhabitants:

 

“The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons. These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.”4

 

In this ‘purely parodic’5 world, one of the main themes is the duality of the phallic sun, with its circular movement; and the nightly sea, with its continuously advancing and receding tide. The tides here are “coitus of the earth with the moon”6 and the cycle of water, evaporating and then raining down is akin sexual movement. Circular movement is reiterated throughout the text as the governing principle in this world and indeed the universe. Bataille uses the image of the locomotive to explain this ongoing forward motion. So the pistons’ movement in and out of their brackets is akin to sexual intercourse, this fueling the rotation of the wheels, in the figure of love, and pushing the contraption along the earth’s surface. In this world nothing is distinct, but inexplicably linked to everything else. As Bataille states; ‘Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rythym of this rotation, the image of this movement is not the turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.’7

 

This phallic imagery is repeated throughout The Solar Anus, especially in reference to the sun, where we see the sun’s rays as shafts, relentlessly pushing down to earth the earth’s surface but never reaching the night.

 

The volcanoes on the earth’s surface are compared to anuses, “violently ejecting the contents of its entrails”.8 This is evocative both of excretion of waste from the body, and of climax as a moment of absolute violence and expulsion. In The Metaphor of the Eye, Roland Barthes wrote – of Bataille’s works – that ‘it is the very equivalence of ocular and genital which is original…the paradigm begins nowhere.’9

 

The Solar Anus itself is paradoxical, a duality of light and dark. The anus, at the end of the body, represents excrement and decay, a reminder of our earthly bodies and the inevitability of death. But it is also in these earthly bodies that desire lies. That the anus is blinding to Bataille suggests that it is its beauty that defies its very essence of darkness. As Bataille writes;

 

“The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night.”10

 

There is here a duality in the form of play on words with annulus, meaning ‘little ring’ in Latin11. This image is of course representative of the anus itself but may also reference the circular movement of love, or the physical consummation of love in the form of a ring.

 

To look to the night in the form of the anus instead of the phallic sun is subversive and particular to humans, as Bataille states;

 

“Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; Human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to the other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.

Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions”12

 

Like The Solar Anus, the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is paradoxical, defined by contradictions between decoration and decay, beauty and ugliness, purity and dirt, pleasure and pain. By holding opposing ideas and imagery against each other, Delvoye succeeds in creating new meaning and a distinctive style despite his plethora of methods. As Michael Onfrey writes; “What is his style like, then? ….As a technique belonging to our age of accidents, catastrophes and calamities, the oxymoron associates two contradictory terms or instances.”13

 

One example of Delvoye’s work that exhibits this are his x-rays, a process usually used to see what is wrong with the body; to check for broken bones, cancerous tumors et cetera. The artist instead uses the x-ray to show acts of sex: kissing, oral sex and masturbation, as well as bodies in the process of excretion.

 

The body of work that I wish to focus on for this enquiry however is Delvoye’s series of Anal Kisses (1999). These are exactly what their description suggests; a ‘kiss’ on a piece of hotel stationary, created by applying lipstick to the anus. These are evocative of documentation of fleeting acquaintances or sexual activity in a hotel room; a trace of the passion of the night before. The lipstick kiss-mark is a symbol of female sexuality and passion.

 

Thus here lies a contradiction, a conflict between the anus simply as the end of the human digestive system, and as a point of pleasure and desire. This is Bataille’s Solar Anus. This is an acknowledgement and celebration of the anus as an erogenous zone, not just something to be hidden beneath layers of clothes in the dark. It is an intimate portrait of the anus, and of the relationship between artist and subject. There are obvious connotations of homosexuality here, with the anus being more inexplicably linked to homosexual sex than with heterosexual sex.

 

Ideas about taboo also feature here, as Freud said, “The magical power that is attributed to taboo is based on the capacity for arousing temptation.”14

We see this at play in The Solar Anus where the point of fixation is the anus of a girl of just eighteen years, as Bataille writes; ‘I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I have been able to say: you are the night.’15 It is as if it is the guilty conscience, wary of trespassing taboo which makes the act of sex – or ‘violation’ – all the more seductive. To quote Freud again; ‘We are so constituted that we gain pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.’16

 

The notion of humankind finding pleasure in the forbidden – or taboo – if followed to its natural end, can be traced to the story of Adam and Eve, the apple becoming a recurring symbol for temptation and sin. Indeed Venus, goddess of love, is often portrayed holding an apple in renaissance painting.

 

In an interview with the artist, Nicholas Bourriard said, “I see all of your work revolving around those two extremes, the decorative and the excremental.”17 This is particularly descriptive of this series as lipstick is usually used as decoration, in order to maximize the feminine and to make oneself more sexually attractive. Here it is applied to the site of excretion in an act of subversive sexuality.

 

This act mirrors the natural reddening and projection of the anus and genitals of apes in anticipation of sexual activity which Bataille describes in The Jesuve, and again in The sacrifice of the Gibbon.

 

A quote by the artist himself in the same interview is evocative of the world imagined in Bataille’s The Solar Anus: “We are the result of millions and millions of seductive acts that were successful genetically. And everything is wasted. The ornament to an extent is a form of waste. Shit is too, for everyone.”18 In this we can see that there is another element to Anus Kisses, the lipstick as a wasted ornament when applied to either the lips or the anus. And the universality of the human body; its systems, waste and desires. Salvador Dali once wrote words to the same effect, stating “Gold and Shit, as is well known, represent the same thing to psychoanalysts.”19

 

Salvador Dali’s In Voluptas Mors “Voluptuous Death” (1951) explores themes of the duality of seduction and horror, thus it can be situated within the framework of Bataille’s Visions of Excess. Indeed Bataille himself was influenced by the work of the Spanish surrealist, which further concreted his obsession with the eye. Most notably Un Chein Andalou, the short film he made with Luis Brunel in 1929, which features the apparent slitting open of a young woman’s eye juxtaposed with images of clouds moving across the sky. I would like to note here, Martin Jay’s discussion of usage of imagery of the sky in the interwar years. He talks of the ‘all encompassing sky’20 providing an escape from the hazy chaos and filth of the trenches of World War One.

 

The film is mentioned in Eye (Visions of Excess) where Bataille writes; ‘It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably the boundary of horror.’21 and in Documents, the journal that Bataille edited between 1929 and 1930.

 

The photograph I wish to focus on here, In Voluptas Mors was made in collaboration with Phillipe Halsman features a human skull – a tableu vivant – made up of the bodies of seven naked women. The artist stands in the foreground assuming the pose of a circus ringleader perhaps, facing neither the women behind him, nor the viewer.

 

More than just a memento mori, this image is a fusion of sex and death. Following the symbolic tradition of vanitas (Latin; emptiness22), it serves as a reminder of the futility of pleasure and the certain inevitability of death. There is a contradiction here as one finds death in the voluptuous; the voluptuous in the ultimate image of death and descent, the human skull.

 

The voluptuous, a word coming from the name given to the greek goddess of sexual pleasure; voluptas, is a theme that seems to recur in the writing of the artist himself. From a young age, the artist is struck by the headiness of death and the narcissistic voluptuousness of his own body.23 There is a conflict between the ‘cold voluptuousness’ of death and the artist’s own lucid passion to succeed himself.24

 

Dali explores his own fascination with death in Maniac Eyeball, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (2008), indeed the entire first chapter is devoted to this theme. He describes his childhood experiences with death and his insatiable attraction to dead things. In one instance he is drawn to a dying bat and is overcome by the desire to touch, to kiss and eventually to bite the head off the animal.

 

In another instance later on, he describes a purifying dead porcupine which he forces himself to touch despite his body’s protests, he writes; “I was totally overcome by the desire, the need to touch that pile of vermin.”25 This relates to Bataille’s fascination with the informe, or formlessness, of peutrifying flesh on which he wrote in Documents.26

 

In a direct reference to Bataille’s The Solar Anus, on contemplating his own body after death, Dali compares the farting of his decaying body to a volcano.27

 

This morbid fascination which seems to be engrained within the human condition and can be described by the term inter-repulsion, the oscillation between attraction and repulsion, outlined here by Olivier Chow: “Inter-repulsion creates a pornography of death since it shows us our darkest and most obscene object of death.”28 Maybe it is only through exploring death that we can truly exist, Rodolphe Gasche suggests a definition for existence as “permanent decomposition, that is to say, governed the the tragic principle.”29

 

It is important here to consider ideas of the abject, as discussed in Julia Kristeva’s Power’s of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). As she states here:

 

‘It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful- a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned.’30

 

She defines the abject as something which disrupts a predetermined order or system, revealing the familiar or uncanny as something separate, something sinister. Like Bataille she attributes the abject nature of bodily waste to its affinity with death, ‘… refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit of what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.’31

 

 

1Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 75

2Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (1944) University of California Press, 1994

3Bataille, George, Story of the Eye, page 103

4Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985 page 6

5Ibid, page 5

6Ibid, page 7

7Ibid, page 7

8Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985 page 8

9Barthes, Roland, The Metaphor of the Eye (1963) In Critical essays, Evanston, 1972, page 242

10Ibid. page 9

11Latdict: Latin Dictionary and Grammar Resource http://www.latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/annulus Last accessed 13/1/14 at 1:30 pm

12Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985 page 8

13Onfray, Micheal, Michael Onfray on Wim Delvoye: Vitraux in Vitro et in Viro, for Eldorado exhibition catalogue, 2006

14Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo (London & New York: Routledge, 2002)

15Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, page 9

16Freud, Sigmund, Civilisation and its Discontents, Penguin London, 2002, page 27

17Bourriaud, Nicholas, in interview with Delvoye, Wim for Gallerie Perrotin, www.perrotin.com (last accessed 8/1/14 at 10:45pm)

18Delvoye, Wim in interview for Gallerie Perrotin, www.perrotin.com (last accessed 8/1/14 at 10:45pm)

19Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 71

20Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (1944) University of California Press, 1994, page 217

21Bataille, George, Eye, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, page 17

22 Latdict: Latin Dictionary and grammar resource, http://www.latin-dictionary.net/definition/38353/vanitas-vanitatis last accessed 13/1/14 at 1:30pm

23Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 66

24Ibid, page 5

25Ibid, page 7

26Georges Bataille: Informe. Documents 7(December 1929), p. 382. [Reprinted/translated in: Bataille 1970, p. 217

27Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 5

28Chow, Olivier, Idols/Odures: Inter-repulsion in Documents’ big toes, Drain Magazine, 2006, www.drainmag.com (last accessed 9/1/14 at 4:30pm)

29Gasche, Rodolphe, The Heterological Almanac, On Bataille: Critical Essays, State University of New York Press, 1995, page 180

30Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia UP, 1982, page 1

31Ibid, page 3

The object which I wish to consider for this study is a clip made from white plastic. The object is designed to seal opened food packaging to prevent the contents from going off. Due to the clip’s limited functionality, it plays a very specific and unchangeable role in my house and in my life. There are however other products which would suffice in a situation in which I needed to close a bag, for instance, a rubber band, or a clothes peg, or even a piece of tape. But, since purchasing this product and putting it in my kitchen drawer; when faced with a problem such as this, I reach for clip.

 

Let us now consider the design of this object, ir enables me to open the clip – it will bend along it’s join to any angle – I can then re-close the clip which clicks into place, securing whatever is enclosed. The clip was purchased as a multipack in IKEA, consisting of thirty clips of two sizes and six colours. When consulting the IKEA website to try to find out the designer of the clip, I discover intead helpful images depicting how one might put the product to use.

 

I did not find out the designer of the object, but it is interesting to consider that this banal object, and others like it, were designed, manufactured, distributed, sold and purchased by someone. The object can be situated within the framework of Steven Connor’s familiar or ‘fidget’ objects. Indeed whilst researching for this essay, I have made conscious effort to have it with me at all times, fidgeting with it in my pocket while I go about my daily life.

 

I would like to consider this object further; through exploring Martin Heidegger, and later Bill Brown’s, notion of ‘the thing’, to try to distinguish whether the item I have been carrying around with me is an object or a thing. I notice as I consider this question that I have been referring to the bag-clip as an object – up until this point where I have called it simply an item – as I struggle to think of a word that does not label it as either object or thing.

 

A first, somewhat simplistic notion is that a thing is something which is un-named or ambiguous, as Bill Brown outlines in his 2001 article, Thing Theory – ‘It (the thing) functions to overcome the loss of other words or as a place holder for some future specifying operation: ‘I need that thing to get at things between your teeth.”1 So here the bag-clip – a name I have given the item as a basic description of its function and therefore form – can be ‘that thing you use to close plastic bags’.

 

However, the bag-clip has a specific function which is identical to the others in the packet I purchased, and indeed all of the ‘ones’ that were manufactured. Then the bag-clip is an object amongst others identical to itself, to quote Bill Brown again; ‘Temporalised as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects.)’2

 

Now to contemplate Heidegger’s ‘thing’, which in accordance the old Germanic word for thing, he considers to be a ‘gathering’ of four; ‘In thinging, it stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Staying, the thing brings the four, in their remoteness, near to one another.’3 He uses a ceramic jug throughout the text as an example of a thing. The jug, he claims, stands alone, ‘self-sustained’, as he states here; ‘As the self-supporting independence of something independent, the jug differs from an object.’4

 

He then considers if this alone is what makes the jug a thing, or if it may be the making of the jug that provides its thingness. It is in the potters rendering of the vessel from the earth that the jug is self-supporting. It is interesting to consider then, how Heidegger would view a mass produced plastic jug with otherwise similar properties. Thus if it is the gathering of the four elements that he has articulated, through the making of the object that allows it to be considered a thing, the bag-clip must then be a mere object.

 

Heidegger goes on to conclude that it is the void, or rather the displacement of one substance for another: the basic function of the vessel that gives it its thingness. Stating that it is in the outpouring of liquid from the jug that the fourfold gathering occurs, ‘But the gift of outpouring is what makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell.’5

 

The bag-clip therefore does not comply with Heidegger’s notion of gathering, as the jug, as well as the bench, the plough, the tree and the hill do. In the closing paragraph of this text, he states; ‘But things are also compliant and modest in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere of equal value, compared with the measureless mass of men as living beings.’6

 

It is interesting to note however, that in singling out this particular bag-clip for study, I may have elevated it from the kitchen drawer where it is an object amongst others to a new position as a thing. Or indeed does the object become a thing when it is utilised? In actual fact, following this investigation, I feel no closer to a conclusion of the proper titling of the plastic bag-clip which I have dwelled upon.

 

1Brown. Bill. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001), pp. 1-22. University of Chicago Press. Page 4

2Brown. Bill. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001), pp. 1-22. University of Chicago Press. Page 5

3Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 175

4Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 166

5Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 170

6Heidegger. Martin. The Thing in Poetry, Language and Thought. 1971. trans. Albert Hofstader. Page 180

As human beings, we have created tools which have enabled us to colonise and utilise the planet in a way which is particular to our species. The tools we have used have changed over the years as we have developed and learned how best to exploit our surroundings. Our basic needs, however have not; like our earliest ancestors we must seek shelter, water, food and warmth. And, like our ancestors, we attach meaning and identity to the objects that we use or adorn ourselves with.

 

In an article for New Scientist, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller draws comparisons between the possessions found with the frozen remains of a man – Otzi – who lived over five-thousand years ago and the everyday essentials that we modern humans carry with us. These tools for survival differ tremendously, but carry the same fundamental meaning. Take first for instance Otzi’s longbow and the debit cards we carry, both are tools for acquiring food. Secondly, Otzi’s axe and position high in the mountains – both are ways of ensuring safety and security,these are comparable to the keys which we use to lock ourselves and our possessions within our houses.

 

I now wish to focus on a lost and found object – a company I.D. badge consisting of four plastic and paper objects inside a plastic sleeve, here is a breakdown of these objects:

Plastic name badge with photographic identification, number and company logo.

Plastic card with name and some sort of electronic device.

Gym membership card.

‘RCM Pocket Guide’ fold-out paper emergency instruction booklet.

 

In reference to the article cited earlier, we can see these objects as tools; for instance the electronic device attached to one of the plastic cards here may have been used to gain access to a building or to log one’s movement. We see here the development of technology as metal keys become plastic micro-chipped cards. The photographic ID card has significant meaning as a record of one’s existence and as a means of separating oneself from others possibly as a symbol of status or proof of one’s entitlement to certain privileges. To quote Geoffrey Miller:

 

‘Given modern supermarkets, hospitals, police and armies, the true analogies are the debit card, the health-insurance card, the driver’s licence and the passport. As physical objects, they are just shards of paper and plastic, hardly enough to swat a fly. But as identity technologies, they tap into all the threats and promises offered by a vast system of finance, medicine, security and governance.’1

 

Questions of control and surveillance come into play here as objects that we carry with us everyday track our movements and activity in our surroundings. For instance the oyster card that is obligatorily carried by London citizens, when registered online, one’s movements around the city are logged and can be accessed on the transport for London website. So the promises – of a better, easier, freer existence – that Miller refers to may also be the thing that repress or endanger us. Indeed the thought of the current level of surveillance utilising the technologies that humans have created is a scary one, with George Orwell’s dystopian society envisaged in 1984 increasingly seeming like a prediction of the future.

 

We see Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics come into play here, as articulated in Society Must Be Defended. According to this idea, the individual becomes merely one in a wider population which can be effectively regulated and controlled as an individual. With the emergence of biopolitics, the population becomes ‘a new body, a multiple body’2: neither an individual body, nor a society.

 

It is interesting to consider the significance of the photographic identification on this object, and of the frustration of the owner for having lost an object like this. Indeed in our contemporary society, one is not seen to truly exist without objects such as this, as well as passports and driver’s licences. So the I.D. Object is a re-presentation of oneself, a self of which the key information, movements and almost every other aspect of life can be traced in a global infrastructure. It does not however tell anything of one’s own personal identity – the things which we consider to be more significant – like personality, tastes, desires and opinions. The I.D. Object is then purely a tool of surveillance.

 

If we view these objects of identification as physical re-presentations of the person or body – indeed all photographic evidence of the body is mere representation – we can draw comparisons with them and Katherine’s Stubbs’ description of the utility of the internet in terms of projected identity. As she writes in Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions; ‘…users could strategically misrepresent themselves to others online. For many, the internet stood as a potentially emancipatory arena, a space in which it was possible to experiment with selfhood.’3 In this case however, it the the person who creates the re-presentation of the body, and not the governing body.

 

On finding an object like this, one’s imagination runs wild as one speculates about the owner’s life. It seems impossible not to ask questions such as; Who was he? What does he do? Why and how did he lose this compacted technological profile of himself?

 

The fold-out instruction manual is particularly intriguing as it vaguely points to the profession of the person – some sort of security guard. But the instructions themselves simply make things more unclear. With imperatives like ‘In the event of an evacuation all battle boxes will be retrieved from Iron Mountain’4, one could romanticise this man as a keeper of national security; an enforcer of a predetermined order or infrastructure. Now the unidentified electronic device attached to the object and the company logo become all the more open to speculation (even searching the company name online did not shed any light on the operation, the website was equally as surrounded in intrigue).

 

To conclude I wish to turn to Bruno Latour, as he states ‘The bizarre idea that society might be made up of human relations is a mirror image of the other no less bizarre idea that techniques might be made up of non-human relations.’5

1 Miller, Geoffrey, The Bare Necessities, in Stuff ed. Alison George, New Scientist, 29 March 2014

2 Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, Picador, 2003, page 245

3 Stubbs, Katherine, Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions in New Media 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003, page 91

4 LCH Clearnet, BCM Pocket Guide, Emergency Procedures

5 Latour, Bruno, Where Are The Missing Masses? The Sociology of a few mundane Artefacts, in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, USA, 1992 page 162

To start with a rather obvious statement; every building we interact with was designed by someone.

 

As mandatory as this statement is, it is easy to forget the fact that as we navigate our urban spaces, we are surrounded, and to some extent dictated by a plethora of often conflicting ideas, designs and motivations. Even as I sit at my desk and gaze out of the window; a 1930s terrace adjoins rather utilitarian yellow brick building from the 1960s, which in turn is juxtaposed with a modern breeze-block extension. Each of these designs has the same motive; to house the growing population of South London, but they are all unique in their execution and aesthetic. This point which I wish to make is most apparent, even exaggerated if one takes a walk through any part of central London. One such walk has informed this essay and will be described later on.

 

In this essay I wish to examine the extent to which the architect is visible in our cities and, more importantly, to what extent this is important. Through study of the buildings of Jean Nouvel and texts by the architect himself as well as Jean Baudrillard, I hope to answer the question: Can architecture be truly objective? In making this enquiry I also hope to explore the tension between ideology and aesthetics and observe what happens when it is necessary for a building to disappear. Most critically – can architecture be devoid of aesthetics?

 

One way into this question of aesthetics is a look to the concrete bunkers of the Second World War, which although designed with a plethora of concerns other than their aesthetic qualities, have informed post-war modernist architecture. Also, Britain’s industrial zones – in both cases we see a case of ‘accidental architecture’, I will try to decipher this term and ask whether it is possible for a design to be accidental, also whether this accidental aesthetic can occur on purpose.

 

A starting point for this essay is The Singular Objects of Architecture, this 2000 text takes the form of two interviews which in turn form a dialogue between architect Jean Nouvel and philosopher Jean Baudrillard. This text sought to display the lack of boundaries between practices which has come to define the postmodern society in which we find ourselves, in this case questions of philosophy and architecture are seamlessly woven into one-another without distinction.

 

The historical context of this work must be considered. Its publication date – 2000 – is interesting as a symbol of postmodernism; new millennium – new way of thinking. For many the year 2000 represented an exciting and imperative opportunity for radical change (the extent to which this change was actualised is hugely debatable, after all, how far does a society evolve from one calendar year to another?) Importantly though, this book embodies globalization, and its discontents. However, many of the themes which are apparent in the text may have been informed by Bernard Tschumi’s writing on architecture and event in the mid-1990s.

 

I will now draw attention to a section of this text by Jean Nouvel:

 

“What I personally like about American cities – even if I wouldn’t cite them as models – is that you can go through them without thinking about the architecture. You don’t think about the aesthetic side, with its history, and so on. You can move within them as if you were in a desert, as if you were in a bunch of other things, without thinking about this whole business of art, aesthetics, the history of art, the history of architecture.”1

 

Why this quote then, and why American cities in particular? American cities are characterised by their production as financial centres – the epitome of a commodity driven culture with growth and competition at its core. Despite attempts to humanise the corporation, this culture is necessarily impersonal and this fact is exhibited in the buildings that enable it.

 

I would like to make a distinction between American cities and those of Britain, for this enquiry I will take London as my example. Whereas in the case of many American cities, namely Chicago, the development of the urban space was constructed and occurred within a rather short time frame. The development of London is apparent too, but instead this urban environment boasts a plethora of buildings from different eras, each with their own individual styles and motivations.

 

This could not be more apparent than when taking a walk from the new Globe theatre across the river to Jean Nouvel’s One New Change. Here we see the Tate Modern in all its former industrial glory, the Millennium Bridge, Blackfriars station and St Paul’s Cathedral, all of these distinctly different elements almost obnoxious in their appearance, adding up to a vision of a metropolis with one foot firmly rooted in its industrial and empirical past and one stretching forth into the future.

 

On visiting the shopping centre, I notice it is not listed on The City of London pedestrian street maps, it is wholly inconspicuous in appearance – blending into the surrounding architecture and making little obstruction to the skyline. It is a hugely conscientious building, with little to say for itself but a sleek design. Interior and exterior are linked in perfect transition due in part to the paving stones which follow the pavement outside, into the centre itself. Unlike most buildings of the same function, One New Change feels open, inviting and somewhat neutral – even the individual shop signs within are standardised and restricted to a small square format.

 

Inside the central square which follows all the way up to the sky, the structure is reminiscent of a medieval town centre with its overlapping walkways and six storeys of densely populated real estate. Only here, the walkways and shop fronts are in glass, mirrors and brushed steel, and the space is populated by brands.

 

As one ascends in the lift, St Paul’s remains in view and one seems to ascend with the building itself. Here, One New Change -its structure, design and function – is forgotten. This is more apparent still when one emerges onto the roof terrace, the building slips away behind you in favour of the view of the cathedral and across London. Actually, it seems one thinks of anything but shopping when exploring this sixth storey piazza. I expect this would have been the main consideration for Jean Nouvel Ateliers when designing the space – just how to build something within such close proximity to one of the city’s most famous buildings without overshadowing it, while still remaining true to a certain aesthetic and brand conscience.

 

The building, it seems, is a means to an end and not typical of other shopping ‘destinations’. It would be possible to walk through the ground floor of the building as you made your way across the city without paying much attention to the building or its function. To quote Jean Nouvel: “…if we do architecture, we want it to be seen, and at the same time we don’t want to make waves.”2 So, we could say that One New Change has a carefully constructed aesthetic as to make no opposition, it is a building for which it is necessary to be invisible.

 

I now wish to take a look at another type of building which deals with ideas of appearance and aesthetics in a very different way. Unlike Nouvel’s One New Change which goes as far as it possibly could against its essential function; the aesthetics of concrete bunkers built by all sides during the Second World War are directed by the function of the structure. Aside from the inert sensibility of the architects who designed them, there is little concern for the appearance of these buildings. Here I would like to quote Jean Baudrillard on aestheticization:

 

“…it inevitably involves a loss: the loss of the object, of this secret that works of art and creative effort might reveal and which is something more than aesthetics. The secret can’t be aesthetically unveiled.”3

 

Thus we could say that the appeal of such structures is based upon something other than aesthetics, something which proves impossible to put one’s finger on. I therefore wish to make the claim that these concrete bunkers are pure object, I believe that this is the reason for their informing of post-war movements in architecture, most notably New Brutalism.

 

A 2014 photographic series by Jonathan Andrew shows bunkers that remain, of the hundreds that were built across German occupied Europe during the Second World War. The structures are presented dramatically, almost as though they were monuments. Their function has been removed, leaving them to ruin – their only function now to serve as a stark reminder of the last major European conflict. The structures have a strong sense of having been designed, their careful composition of vertical and horizontal elements is juxtaposed with their simple function founded in violence. This accidental aesthetic is modernist to its core and signifies the birth not just of modern warfare, but of immense change throughout Europe and indeed the world. It is clear that the appeal of the concrete defences has not diminished, with many photographers and architects documenting and taking inspiration from them: as was previously mentioned I would like to draw similarities between Second World War bunkers and brutalism.

 

Brutalist architecture is characterised by use of béton brut – concrete which is left raw or unfinished after moulding – and developed following advances in the design and practicality of architectural steel frames. On the surface of this unfinished concrete, one can often see an imprint of the wood or other material used in the moulding process. The principle application of such architecture was for public buildings – universities, housing, government buildings and spaces for the arts. This has lead to the movement being associated with socialist or utopian notions of public space.

 

The Royal National Theatre – and indeed much of London’s pedestrianised South bank – embraces the brutalist aesthetic of beton brut. The theatre was designed by Sir Denys Lasdun and Peter Softly in 1976, Lasdun is known for his following of Le Courbusier and for his involvement in post-war housing projects, such as the Hallfield Estate, London. In these buildings we find a simplicity of form and – not unlike the bunkers I have studied – a clear sense of function and materiality.

 

Here I would like to bring forth Britain’s industrial buildings for discussion, they too can be seen as pure object – devoid of aesthetic concerns – to quote Jean Nouvel once again:

 

“We need to realise that we’re surrounded by a great deal of accidental architecture. And an entire series of modern, or modernist, attitudes – in the historical sense – have been founded on this particular reality. There are countless numbers of sites whose aesthetic lacks any sense of intention … The same applies to industrial zones at the end of the twentieth century, which are, for all intents and purposes, radical architectural forms, without concessions, abrupt, in which we can definitely locate a certain charm.”4

 

We could define accidental architecture as that which has an unintentional purity of form. One example of this kind of building in London is the Tate Modern which has been elevated according to some indefinable logic of appearance – what Jean Baudrillard called the secret – from the post-war Bankside Power Station to a world renowned centre for the celebration of art and radical thinking. The Bankside Power Station was designed in 1947 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who is also responsible for the design of the exterior of Battersea Power Station which begun in 1929, was completed after the second world war. Both power stations, though long decommissioned, remain integral parts of London’s architecture and have been transformed into public spaces.

 

Through the study of a few London buildings I have explored the theme of appearance in architecture. This study has shown how the particular motivations of the architects who have designed the city are visible as we navigate the built environment. The ways in which they are visible vary hugely, for instance we could pitch Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre with its bare concrete towers and walkways, with Jean Nouvel’s One New Change which assimilates itself into the existing architecture of The City. So we could say that Jean Nouvel is less visible in this case than Denys Lasdun.

 

It was necessary to draw comparisons between Second World War bunkers and buildings of Brutalist style, assessing to what extent one could say that the latter was influenced by the former. This is an argument which needs to be developed, however in my eyes these types of building are intrinsically linked in terms of aesthetics and in their trueness to their materials and function. Thus the bunkers of the Second World War and Brutalist architecture have in common not only their use of beton brut, but a purity of form which comes with this and their essential functionality.

 

When considering my earlier question – can architecture be devoid of aesthetics? – one could say that within the course of this essay I have shown that even in the case of buildings who’s aesthetics are based purely upon their function, we find merit in their form and appearance. It is also apparent that buildings designed for the sole purpose of defence or industry have been elevated to some schema of aesthetics; with a resurgence of interest in ruins of the Second World War and in the renovation of London’s post-war power stations into public spaces. However, as I have quoted previously, Jean Baudrillard stated that the secret that a work of art holds is devoid of aesthetic concerns.

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Baudrillard. Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso. 1996. (1968)

Baudrillard. Jean and Nouvel. Jean. The Singluar Objects of Architecture. trans. Robert Bononno. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis – London. 2002. (2000)

Tschumi. Bernard. Architecture and Disjuntion. The MIT Press. Cambridge. Massachusetts – London. England. 1994

Tschumi. Bernard. Event-Cities. The MIT Press. Cambridge. Massachusetts – London. England. 1994

Ritchie. Ian. Jean Nouvel: One New Change. Architecture Today. 25th November 2010. http://www.architecturetoday.co.uk/?p=1180

http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/desktop/home/#les_ateliers