The Project Against Autonomy

Author(s): Kelly Chan

Source: Log , Winter 2015, No. 33 (Winter 2015), pp. 121-126
Published by: Anyone Corporation

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43630856

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Kelly Chan

The Project
Against Autonomy
When R.E. Somol and Sarah Whiting guest edited the Spring/
Summer 2005 issue of Logy they hatched a plan, a go-for-
broke scheme à la The Italian Job to jailbreak architecture
from "the hoosegow of critical commentary and commercial
complicity."1 Their mission, in essence, was to set aside archi-
tecture's crippling preoccupation with being "critical" and
"dynamic" and to relocate the ends of the discipline some-
where within reach: the plastic. As opposed to the dynamic,
the plastic, as understood by Somol and Whiting, "projects
a specific virtuality - one with its own stable points, orders,
and figures - that explicitly scripts and reroutes the material
1. R.E. Somol and Sarah Whiting, "Okay, and behavioral protocols of the world."2 Throwing caution
Here's the Plan . . .," Log 5 (Spring/Summer
2005): 5. to the wind, the duo advanced the notion of a postcritical or
2. Ibid., 7.
projective architecture, an architecture unconcerned with
1. See Stan Allen, "Pragmatism in Practice,"
an unpublished paper presented at theory and, by default, exclusively concerned with perfor-
"Pragmatist Imagination," a conference mance and effect. Though their approach self-consciously
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
City, November 2000. announces a paradigm shift - a new era of practice free of
4. Critic Michael Speaks advances a similar
intellectual skirmishing - its fixation on the explicit or literal
notion of pragmatism in "After Theory:
Debate in Architecture Schools Rages About effect of architecture finds uncanny precedence in the recent
the Value of Theory and Its Effects on
history of art, an analysis of which will help elucidate the
Innovation in Design," Architectural Record
193, no. 6 (June 2005): 72-75. Like Allen, stakes of architecture's post-theoretical turn and heighten
he proposes to merge theory and practice our awareness of its residual effects.
through a lablike design procedure of
collaborative and profuse prototyping. The two puckish editors of Log 5 were not the first to ar-
5. See Allen, "Pragmatism in Practice."
ticulate a death wish for architectural theory. Without their
brand of rhetorical theatrics, Stan Allen had also renounced
the theoretical praxis that informed his own architectural
education, writing in 2000, "Architecture has never been
particularly effective as a vehicle of criticism. It is, on the
contrary, insistently affirmative. Architectural practice does
not comment on the world, it operates in and on the world.
It produces ideas and effects through the volatile medium of
artifacts, short-circuiting the established pathways of theory
and discourse."* Weary of architecture's theoretical equivo-
cations, Allen appealed to pragmatism, prescribing a com-
puter-aided, trial-and-error procedure aimed at deriving
immediately verifiable, empirical solutions.4 In adopting this
pragmatic attitude, he wished to "no longer [ask] what archi-
tecture is, or what it means, but only what it can do."5

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 This exhaustion of - or impatience with - the discourse
surrounding the ontology of one's discipline may sound
strangely old hat to cultural critics, particularly those famil-
iar with recent developments in Western art. What seemed to
provoke the postcritical "makers" of architecture in the late
1990s and early 2000s was one particular trope found in both
20th-century art and architecture: the project of autonomy.
Whereas the effort to develop art autonomously - that is, cir-
cumscribed within the limits of its discipline - waxed and
waned in the first half of the century, naming Jackson Pollock
and Clement Greenberg as its figureheads, architecture's
project of autonomy did not synchronize with the develop-
ment of its Modern Movement. Rather, autonomy in archi-
tecture came to be associated with the theory and practice
that came after modernism, particularly in the work of Peter
Eisenman. Seeded by predecessors such as Aldo Rossi and
cultivated alongside the historiography of Manfredo Tafuri,
Eisenman's project applied to late 20th-century architecture
the Adornian model of self-critique that flashed so brightly in
the American art scene of the 1930s and on into the '50s. The
underlying assumption of his transfigured, superimposed,
process-oriented compositions was that architecture could
sustain its critical edge through a negative dialectic. In es-
sence, by turning its creative energies inward - as abstraction
did for painting and sculpture - and experimenting with its
own formal and rhetorical limits, architecture could, to the
best of its abilities, refuse to service the prevailing social order
in which it was steeped and, moreover, potentially undermine
its illusion of stability.
The theory was compelling. The problem, however, was
that architecture's self-criticism as formulated by Eisenman
and others - including associates of the short-lived decon-
structivist movement - was formally equivocal at best. Voicing
skepticism about deconstructivism's subversive abstractions
just one year after the "Deconstructivist Architecture" show
at the Museum of Modern Art, Mary McLeod wrote: "Al-
though the general public might respond to the images'
aesthetic exuberance and technological bravura, most likely
only a small cultural elite will appreciate the iconoclasm of
forms, the inversions of common sense and everyday expecta-
6. Mary McLeod, "Architecture and Politics tions."6 Architecture's new terms and concepts smacked of
in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to
Deconstructivism," Assemblage 8 (February dubiousness almost as soon as they were coined. The contort-
1989): 50.
ing space frames of Coop Himmelb(T)au and the colliding
grid systems of Bernard Tschumi simply did not elicit the
same univalent shock provoked by the crude paint splatters

122 Log «

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 and soldered cantilevers of mid-century abstract art. In fact,
as McLeod suggests, these attempts to destabilize architecture
were easily misread as positive statements of aesthetic or
technological prowess. As a result, the entire project of auton-
omy seemed only to reaffirm architecture's critical impotence,
suggesting that the hard path of negative dialectics was just as
ineffectual as the positivist pipedreams of the Modern
Movement. Autonomy had steered the discipline into another
dead end.

While early 20th-century abstract art enjoyed more of

a heyday than the sputtering late 20th-century attempts at
self-critical architecture, it too burned through a rapid suc-
cession of movements - a last reserve of shaped canvases
and asymmetrical assemblages - and lost much of its critical
steam by the late 1960s. Assessing the output of this twilight
period, Greenberg remarked on how techniques of formal
abstraction had quickly ceased to provoke. In a matter of
years, the paint splatters, voided picture planes, and other
implosive artistic gestures appeared to him as "domesti-
cated," promptly finding their place in the sanctioned art
7. Clement Greenberg, "Recentness of world.7 As new takes on monochromatic and action painting
Sculpture," in Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: yielded increasingly slick results, art's methods of self-ques-
University of California Press, 1995), 181. tioning seemed less and less critical, and no longer subver-
Originally published in the exhibition
catalogue American Sculpture of the Sixties sive. It was at this moment when a group of American artists
(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum hatched their own plan.
of Art, 1967), 24-26.
8. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Writing partly in response to Greenberg, critic Michael
in Art in Theory 1900-1990 , eds. Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood (Maiden, MA:
Fried gave his own assessment of contemporary art in his 1967
Blackwell Publishers, 200?), 822. Originally essay "Art and Objecthood," in which he interprets the activi-
published in Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12-2?.
ties of a small group of artists as representative of a broader
and largely ideological movement that now demanded critical
analysis. "The enterprise known variously as Minimal Art,
ABC Art, Primary Structures, and Specific Objects . . . seeks to
declare and occupy a position - one that can be formulated in
words, and in fact has been formulated by some of its leading
practitioners," Fried writes.8 He goes on to analyze the work
of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Tony Smith, suggesting
that these artists - and others receptive to their self-confident
assertions - conceived of their own work as repudiations of
modern painting and sculpture as well as later pop and op
art. In the fundamentally antagonistic position of what Fried
terms "literalist art," one can perhaps detect the tabula rasa
attitude of postcritical architects; just as postcritical archi-
tecture is premised on the negation of an eclectic heritage of
architectural theory and practice, literalist art is premised on
the negation of modernist, pop, and op art.

123 Log K

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 But the analogy does not end there. The strategy with
which literalist art sought to disengage from its myriad pre-
decessors is remarkably similar to the one postcritical ar-
chitects advanced at the turn of the 21st century. As Fried
observes, literalist art claimed to overcome the "relational
character of almost all painting" and the "ubiquitousness . . .
of pictorial illusion" by concentrating all its creative energies
on arťs literal, phenomenal presence, what he calls arťs "ob-
9. Ibid., m. jecthood."9 Instead of experimenting with the formal logic
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 825. of painting and sculpture or exploring the ephemeral bound-
12. Ibid.
ary between art and nonart, literalist art reveled in the effects
of what Fried called shape: "For both Judd and Morris . . .
the critical factor is shape." Their installations of impersonal,
reticent, and often serially produced volumes "resist being
grasped other than as a single shape: the gestalt simply is the
'constant, known shaped "10
The recourse to "shape," especially given the vernacular
use of the word, may at first seem benign. For Fried, how-
ever, this commitment to shape spelled a grim fate for art. By
endeavoring to produce shape instead of form, Judd, Morris,
Smith, and their literalist co-conspirators no longer sought to
strip away arťs relational and illusionistic qualities and con-
tinue the push for the autonomy of art. Rather, their ideol-
ogy was based on the new and more extreme supposition that
"the demands of art and the conditions of objecthood [were]
in direct conflict," as Fried summarizes.11 From Frieda per-
spective, literalist artists completely scrapped modernism's
hard- won dialectic between art and nonart (or objecthood)
and replaced it with an unforgiving binary. From there, they
surrendered art's critical faculty and pledged allegiance to the
object. Their cold, uninflected "primary structures" and their
supporting theoretical texts announced that art had become
object, and shape had subsumed form. To employ Stan Allen's
phrasing, literalist artists stopped asking what art was, or
what it meant, and started asking what it could do.
What exactly was at stake with this uncritical endorse-
ment of shape, this glorification of objecthood? Why was the
primary structure more lethal than previous modernist ab-
stractions? For Fried, the answer to this line of questioning
was clear: "The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to
nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and the-
atre is now the negation of art."12 The critic cautioned against
what he perceived to be minimalism's theatrical nature, its
preoccupation with the circumstances conditioning the be-
holder's encounter with the artwork over the artwork itself.

124 Log lì

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 With its forceful, unyielding shape and often human-scale
proportions, the literalist artwork did not attempt to gener-
ate a self-contained logic for the viewer to apprehend. Rather,
according to Fried, it deliberately negated its own contempla-
tive substance. In doing so, the literalist object reached outside
itself in an effort to actively program the experience of the
viewer. Far from continuing the project of autonomy, literal-
ist art completely inverted it, hedging all its bets on the ability
of the carefully specified art object to control the circum-
stances of its viewing. To hijack Somol and Whiting's choice
of words, literalist art "explicitly scripts and reroutes the ma-
1?. Somol and Whiting, "Okay, Here's the terial and behavioral protocols of the world."1*
Plan," 7.
14. R.E. Somol, "12 Reasons to Get Back in Already, literalist art and postcritical architecture appear
Shape," in Content, eds. Rem Koolhaas and to share significant conceptual overlap. It is not surprising that
OMA (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 86. The
article is also illustrated in this issue of Log Fried's discussion finds its way directly into Somol's post-the-
[pages 130-31]. oretical literature. In 2004, the architectural theorist contrib-
15. Somol, "12 Reasons," 86.
16. Ibid., 87. uted a graphically exuberant listicle titled "12 Reasons to Get
Back into Shape" to Rem Koolhaas and OMA's Content. In it he
defends the concept of shape in architecture, casually alluding
to Fried's essay as if, 40 years later, the author's anxieties had
been mitigated, leaving a neutral concept of shape for 21st-
century architects to appropriate. As Somol recounts, "While
trying to save shape for (modernist) art, Michael Fried nev-
ertheless reveals that shape is generally involved with the con-
textual and situational."14 Fried's critique of shape becomes
a bullet point in Somol's plan, and what was once taboo now
arguably sounds compelling. For Somol, shape is "crude, ex-
plicit, fast, material."15 It operates with "graphic immediacy."
It "eliminates information." It is "regulated not by the articu-
lation of geometry but by the seduction of contour." It "re-
quires no special pleadings; it simply exists."16 Unapologetic,
literal, and irresistibly contrarian, shape emerges as a thrilling
last hope for the discipline, the starting point of a final scam-
per for avant-garde status. Rather than laboriously maintain-
ing architecture's negative dialectics, Somol embraces shape
and its promise of immediate, positive effects.
Setting aside his jocular tone, could Somol have been
right to downplay Fried's critique? One crucial factor seems
to support this gesture: Fried was writing about art, and
Somol about architecture. What is more, the literalist art that
Fried criticizes formally resembles and has often been com-
pared to architecture. Carried to its extreme, the logic of lit-
eralist art would hypothetically terminate not with an object
but with an artificially controlled, all-encompassing environ-
ment , what Greenberg - echoing some of Fried's concerns

125 Log V>

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17. Greenberg, "Recentness of Sculpture," 186. - referred to derogatively as "Good Design."17 Needless to
say, it seems counterintuitive to suppose that "Good Desi
makes for bad architecture. Architecture, more than any
other artistic medium, must take into account the exper
of the beholder. The conventional means of engaging wit
architecture is not to contemplate its form from a distanc
to physically inhabit it.
But just as giving priority to literal effect threatens to
crush the very notion of art, the preoccupation with emp
cal performance threatens to flatten the very notion of a
chitecture. The literalist approach - call it post-theoretic
postcritical, or projective - does not expand the capacity
architecture to effect change. Rather, it diminishes it by i
scribing architecture's critical engagements strictly withi
the limits of existing situations. And although the disdain
theory seems to have subsided since Somol and Whiting's
provocation, there is reason to believe their devil-may-ca
plan did in fact specify a course for practice today.
Like literalist art, postcritical architecture is premised
a more or less total acceptance of existing aesthetic terms
as with the hyper-polished installations of artists like Jud
it entrusts the last theoretical stronghold of the disciplin
innovation - to a separate cultural field altogether: techn
ogy. In the postcritical, post-theoretical world, it falls upo
technology to endlessly add nuance to shape and not form
to project exactly how we experience the world. The mos
conspicuous abuse of this logic would be the more indulg
experiments with parametricism. But I would argue that
postcritical legacy extends further than this; it includes a
architecture that fixates on its immediate, empirical effec
any architecture that attempts to positively express how
engages with its surroundings. Many of the recent preoc
pations with environmental sustainability, technical effica
sensory stimulation, and even so-called social change betr
post-theoretical faith in instantly quantifiable gains.
The project of autonomy may have encrypted archite
ture's criticality, but the project against autonomy - and
various understated postscripts - aborts the mission alto-
gether, settling for the status quo with deceptive optimis
Divested of its anticipatory power, projective architectur
longer adumbrates formless ideals, plots heterotopias, an
Kelly Chan is a graduate student
portends alternatives to compromise. It simply exists; it is
OF ART AND ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

at Columbia University and has

content to be an object. If we are to truly jailbreak archit
WRITTEN FOR ARTInFO.COM AND ture from idle commentary and complicity, we must firs
Modern Painters magazine.
lieve that architecture is possible.

126

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