In eleanor antin's video art minetta lane-a ghost story, what does the ghost represent?

Chapter 40, p. 1313-1325 in The Humanities: Culture, Continuity, and Change by Sayre, H. M.Chapter 40Without Boundaries

Multiple Meanings in a Postmodern World

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when “modernism” ended and “postmodernism” began, but the turning point came in the 1970s and 1980s. Architects began to reject the pure, almost hygienic uniformity of the Bauhaus and International styles, represented by the work of Mies van der Rohe (see figs. 37.30 and 38.20), favoring more eclectic architectural styles that were anything but pure. A single building might incorporate a Classical colonnade and a roof line inspired by a piece of Chippendale furniture. Or it might look like the Rasin Building that occupies a corner block in Prague (fig. 40.1). Built on the site of a Renaissance structure destroyed in World War II, the building’s teetering sense of collapse evokes the postwar cityscape of twisted I-beams, blown-out facades with rooms standing open to the sky, and sunken foundations, all standing next to a building totally unaffected by the bombing. But that said, the building is also a playful, almost whimsical celebration, among other things, of the marvels of modern engineering—a building made to look as if it is at the brink of catastrophe, even as it is completely structurally sound. So lighthearted is the building that it was called the “Dancing House,” or, more specifically, “Ginger and Fred,” after the American film stars Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The more solid tower on the corner seems to be leading the transparent tower—Ginger—by the waist, as the two spin around the corner. The building was the idea of Czech architect Vlado Milunić (1941–), and he enlisted American architect Frank Gehry (1929–) to collaborate on the project. To many eyes in Prague, a city renowned for its classical architecture, it seemed an absolutely alien American element dropped into the city. But Milunić conceived of the building as addressing modern Prague even as it engaged with the city’s past. He wanted the building to consist of two parts: “Like a society that forgot its totalitarian past—a static part—and a society that forgot its totalitarian past but was moving into a world full of changes. That was the main idea. Two different parts in dialogue, in tension, like plus and minus, like Yang and Yin, like man and woman.” It was Gehry who nicknamed it “Ginger and Fred.”

The use of many different, even contradictory elements of design is the hallmark of postmodern architecture. The English critic Peter Fuller explained the task of the postmodern architect this way:

The west front of Wells Cathedral, the Parthenon pediment, the plastic and neon signs on Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, even the hidden intricacies of a Mies curtain wall, are all equally “interesting.” Thus the Post-Modern designer must offer a shifting pattern of changing strategies and substitute a shuffling of codes and devices, varying ceaselessly according to audience, and/or building type, and/or environmental circumstance.

But perhaps the clearest and most seminal statement of the postmodern aesthetic is that of architect Robert Venturi (1925–), whose 1966 “Gentle Manifesto” described criteria for a new eclectic approach to architecture that abandoned the clean and simple geometries of the International Style (see Chapters 36 and 37). For Mies van der Rohe, “less is more” had become a mantra which he used to describe the refined austerity of his designs. Venturi argued for the opposite:

An architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.

The model for this new architecture became, for Venturi, Las Vegas (fig. 40.2). In Learning from Las Vegas, written in 1972 with his wife Denise Scott Brown (1931–) and Steven Izenour (1940–2001), both fellow architects, Venturi describes Las Vegas as a “new urban form”:

Although its buildings suggest a number of historical styles, its urban spaces owe nothing to historical space. Las Vegas space is neither contained and enclosed like medieval space nor classically balanced and proportioned like Renaissance space nor swept up in a rhythmically ordered movement like Baroque space, nor does it flow like Modern space around freestanding urban space makers.

It is something else again. But what? Not chaos, but a new spatial order. … Las Vegas space is so different from the docile spaces for which our analytical and conceptual tools were evolved that we need new concepts and theories to handle it.

In what the authors describe as “the seemingly chaotic juxtaposition of honky-tonk elements,” they also discovered an “intriguing kind of vitality and validity.” Thus, for Venturi and his colleagues, faced with the multiplicitous visual stimuli of Las Vegas, the postmodern architect has no choice but to design with various, even contradictory elements in order to communicate not a homogeneous sense of unity, but rather “a difficult whole.”

Especially at night, Las Vegas attacks the senses with a profusion of signs and lights. The area known as the “Strip,” a 4.2-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South, represents the overload of sensory input that has created the postmodern condition. The neon cowboy on the left is known as “Vegas Vic.” In 1981, Vegas Vickie rose across the street above Glitter Gulch, which took its name from what locals were already calling the four-block length of Fremont Street.

Credit: Ron Dahlquist/SuperStock

Living in this “difficult whole” constitutes the postmodern condition. The postmodern art and architecture examined in this chapter cannot be understood as a product of a single style, purpose, or aesthetic. It is defined by multiple meanings and its openness to interpretation. “Meaning” itself becomes contingent and open-ended. Indeed, postmodern media art introduces situations in which sight, sound, and text each challenge the “undivided” attention of the audience, sometimes creating a sensory overload in which meaning is buried beneath layers of contradictory and ambiguous information. Confronting the postmodern object, the postmodern mind must ask itself, “How do I sort this out?” And this is a question that, as people living in the postmodern age, we are increasingly adept at answering.

Postmodern Architecture: Complexity, Contradiction, and Globalization

1. 40.1 What are the characteristics of postmodern architecture?

Architects and builders exemplify the affluent nomads of the new postmodern society. They, like the people for whom they design and build, inhabit the “world metropolis,” a vast, interconnected fabric of places resembling Las Vegas in large measure, where people do business, and between which they travel, work, and seek meaning. Travel, in fact, accounts for nearly 10 percent of world trade and global employment. As nearly 700 million people travel internationally each year, a half million hotel rooms are built annually across the globe to house them.

Today’s architect works in the culture first introduced by the Sony Walkman and carried forward by the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. These are technologies “designed for movement,” as cultural historian Paul du Gay describes their function, “for mobility, for people who are always out and about, for traveling light … part of the required equipment of the modern ‘nomad.’” And architects are also responsible for helping to provide the most elusive of qualities in the postmodern world—a sense of meaning and a sense of place.

Architecture in this culture is largely a question of creating distinctive buildings, markers of difference like Frank Gehry’s “Ginger and Fred” building in Prague that stand out in the vast sameness of the “world metropolis,” so that travelers feel they have arrived at someplace unique, someplace identifiable. In this climate, contemporary architecture is highly competitive. Most major commissions are competitions, and most cities compete for the best, most distinctive architects.

Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and International Competitions

Gehry first distinguished himself with the design of his own home in Los Angeles (fig. 40.3), a project that was hardly international in scope, but which fostered his sense of how to stand out among the many other architects of international stature. On the surface, it is a collision or eruption of parts. In the mid-1970s, still a young and relatively unknown architect, Gehry and his wife moved into a Santa Monica house that fulfilled their main criterion—it was affordable. “I looked at the old house that my wife found for us,” Gehry recalls, “and I thought it was kind of a dinky little cutesy-pie house. We had to do something to it. I couldn’t live in it. … Armed with very little money, I decided to build a new house around the old house and try to maintain a tension between the two.” The new house surrounding the old one is deliberately unfinished, almost industrial. A corrugated metal wall, chain-link fencing, plywood walls, and concrete block surround the original pink frame house with its asbestos shingles. The surrounding wall, with randomly slanted lines and angled protrusions, thus separates not only the “outside” house from the house within, but the entire structure from its environment. The tension established by Gehry between industrial and traditional materials, between the old house and the almost fortresslike shell of his home’s new skin, intentionally creates a sense of unease in viewers (one certainly shared by Gehry’s neighbors). The sense that they are confronting the “difficult whole” Venturi speaks about defines, for Gehry, the very project of architecture. If Gehry’s architecture is disturbingly unharmonious with its surroundings, it cannot be ignored or taken for granted. It draws attention to itself as architecture.

1977–78.

Gehry’s neighbors were not at all pleased with his new house, but Gehry claims that he was trying to use “materials that were consistent with the neighborhood.” He explains: “When I built that house, that neighborhood was full of trailer trucks in the back yards, and often on the lawn. A lot of old, aging Cadillacs and big cars on blocks on the front lawn, people fixing their cars. A lot of chain link fences, corrugated metal; I know they didn’t use it like I did, and that’s the difference.”

Credit: Photo: Wolfgang Neeb/Bridgeman Images

Gehry’s use of sculptural frames to surround his house—note the steel and wire fencing that extends over the roof behind the front door, which would be “decorative” or “ornamental” were it not so mundane—has continued throughout his career, culminating in his design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (fig. 40.4), a commission he won in 1991. Working on the models with the Catia computer program originally developed for the French aerospace industry, Gehry notes, “You forget about it as architecture, because you’re focused on this sculpting process.” The museum itself is enormous—260,000 square feet, including 19 gallery spaces connected by ramps and metal bridges—and covered in titanium, its undulating forms evoking sails as it sits majestically on the river’s edge in the Basque port city. But it is the sense of the museum’s discontinuity with the old town and the surrounding countryside (fig. 40.5) that most defines its postmodern spirit. It makes Bilbao, as a city, a more “difficult whole,” but a more interesting one, too.

Fig. 40.4

Frank Gehry, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Bilbao, 1991–97.

The official description of the building begins: “The building itself is an extraordinary combination of interconnecting shapes. Orthogonal blocks in limestone contrast with curved and bent forms covered in titanium. Glass curtain walls provide the building with the light and transparency it needs.” Even in its materials, it embodies complexity and contradiction.

Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim in Bilbao was stunningly successful, drawing critical raves, massive numbers of visitors, and even reservations that the architecture was so noteworthy that it overshadowed the art within the structure. One of the key elements of this success was Gehry’s ability to ensure that the “organization of the artist” prevailed, as he put it, “so that the end product is as close as possible to the object of desire that both the client and architect have come to agree on.” So postmodern architectural design and theory were not necessarily incompatible with the efficient completion of large, complex, and innovative structures like the Guggenheim (or the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle, another large-scale Gehry structure). And it turns out that the digital design models produced by the Catia program were not only useful for envisioning the shapes of “sculpted” buildings. The data produced by such computerized designs was also critical in estimating construction costs and budgets.

Besides Gehry, one of the most successful architects in these international competitions where contemporary architects make their reputations has been Spaniard Santiago Calatrava (1951–), who has degrees in both engineering and architecture. Known especially for the dynamic curves of his buildings and bridges, his designs include the Athens Olympics Sports Complex (2001–4), the Tenerife Opera House in the Canary Islands (2003), and the Turning Torso residential tower in Malmö, Sweden (2005). Based on the model of a twisting body, the 54-story Malmö tower consists of nine cubes, twisting 90 degrees from bottom to top, and rising to a rooftop observation deck with vistas across the Øresund strait to Copenhagen. Calatrava also won the design competition for the Port Authority Trans Hudson (PATH) train station at the site of the former World Trade Center in New York (fig. 40.6). Completed in 2016, it is based on a sketch Calatrava drew of a child’s hands releasing a bird into the air. Calatrava said that the goal of his design was to “use light as a construction material.” At ground level, the station’s steel, concrete, and glass canopy functions as a skylight that allows daylight to penetrate 60 feet to the tracks below. On nice days, the canopy’s roof retracts to create a dome of sky above the station.

Fig. 40.6

SANTIAGO CALATRAVA, DESIGN FOR PORT AUTHORITY TRANS HUDSON (PATH) STATION

The Green Architecture Movement

One of the newest approaches to contemporary architecture takes into consideration the compatibility of the building with its environment. Increasingly, a building’s viability—even beauty—is measured by its environmental self-sufficiency. Rather than relying on unsustainable energy sources, architects strive to design using sustainable building materials—eliminating steel, for instance, since it is a nonrenewable resource. The other important factor in modern architecture is adapting new buildings to the climate and culture in which they are built. These are the principles of what has come to be known as “green architecture.”

One of the more intriguing new buildings to arise in the South Pacific region is the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, an island northeast of Australia. It illustrates green architecture at work (fig. 40.7). The architect is Renzo Piano (1937–), an Italian, but the principles guiding his design are indigenous to New Caledonia. Named after a leader of the island’s indigenous people, the Kanak, the center is dedicated to preserving and transmitting indigenous culture as well as incorporating sustainable environmental principles. The buildings are constructed of wood and bamboo, both easily renewable resources, and each of the center’s ten pavilions represents a typical Kanak dwelling. Piano left the dwelling forms unfinished, as if under construction, but they serve a function as wind scoops, catching breezes from the nearby ocean and directing them to cool the inner rooms. As in a Kanak village house, the pavilions are linked with a covered walkway. Piano describes the project as “an expression of the harmonious relationship with the environment that is typical of the local culture. They are curved structures resembling huts, built out of wood joists and ribs; they are containers of an archaic appearance, whose interiors are equipped with all the possibilities offered by modern technology.”

The principles of environmentally sensitive architecture are, of course, harder to implement in densely populated urban environments. But when the city of Fukuoka, Japan, realized that the only space available for a much-needed government office building was a large two-block park that also happened to be the last remaining green space in the city center, Argentine-American architect Emilio Ambasz (1943–) presented a plan that successfully maintained, even improved upon, the green space (fig. 40.8). A heavily planted and pedestrian-friendly stepped terrace descends down the entire park side of the ACROS building. Reflecting pools on each level are connected by upward-spraying jets of water, to create a ladderlike climbing waterfall, which also masks the noise of the city streets beyond. Under the building’s 14 terraces lie more than 1 million square feet of space, including a 2,000-seat theater, all cooled by the gardens on the outside. The building is not entirely green—it is constructed of steel-framed reinforced concrete—and its interior spaces are defined by unremarkable and bland white walls that might be found in any modern high-rise office building. Still, the building suggests many new possibilities for reconceptualizing the urban environment in more environmentally friendly terms.

In planning for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government invested in expensive energy-efficient heating and transportation systems and water-saving technologies that were designed to improve greatly the environmental quality of the city—one of the world’s most populated. For the Olympic Stadium (fig. 40.9), the Chinese hired the Swiss design firm of Herzog & de Meuron, who conceived of a double structure, dubbed the “Bird’s Nest”: a red concrete seating bowl and, 50 feet outside the bowl, the outer steel frame, which structurally resembles the twigs of a bird’s nest. The stadium floor provides enough space for the underground pipes of a geothermal heat pump (GHP) system, which in winter absorbs the heat from the soil and helps heat the stadium, while in summer the soil cools the stadium. A rainwater-collection system, on the stadium roof and the surrounding areas, purifies water and recycles it for use in the venue. The translucent roof provides essential sunlight for the grass below, and a natural, passive ventilation system. Pluralism and Postmodern Theory

1. 40.2 How does pluralist thought inform postmodern theory?

During the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, a painting by Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu (1943–), Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism (fig. 40.10), was seized by Chinese officials when it arrived at customs for exhibition at the German embassy. They were holding it, they said, pending “clarification of its meaning.” As it turned out, officially, the painting’s muted palette was deemed inappropriate for the celebratory nature of the Olympic Games, and the government demanded that the painting be removed from China. But more than the painting’s Cubist idiom, the government was provoked by the inclusion of the word “Tibet” just above “Human Right,” both of which directly refer to China’s 50-year occupation of that country (or province, from China’s point of view). Also prominently displayed in the picture are the Chinese characters for the French supermarket chain Carrefour, which has stores all over China, and whose purported support of the Dalai Lama (the Buddhist head of the Tibetan government in exile) resulted in protests across the country in the spring of 2008. The number “8” is repeated 23 times: the Chinese had decided to open the Olympics at 8 pm on August 8, 2008, and Zhang Hongtu was mocking what he called China’s “stupid” numerological superstitions. At the bottom right is the letter J beside four horizontal lines, a reference to June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989. Finally, the motto for the 2008 Olympics appears in Chinese characters: “One World, One Dream.” If nothing else, these words clearly mean very different things to Zhang Hongtu and to Chinese government officials.

Zhang Hongtu’s Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism is a clear-cut demonstration of one of the primary theoretical principles of postmodern thought: the growing conviction that meaning resides not in the work itself but in its audience, together with the understanding that the audience is itself diverse and various. Such thinking in turn gives rise to the belief that meaning is itself always plural in nature. There is no meaning, only a plurality of meanings. Structuralism and the Linguistic Study of Signs

The roots of this idea lie in French structuralism first developed in the early twentieth century by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), which argues that meaning occurs not through identification but through difference. For instance, the words woman and lady both refer to the human female, and yet their meanings are determined by cultural markers or codes of enormous difference. Structuralism also forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs. A sign consists of the relation between the signifier and the signified—that is, the relation between the word tree, for instance, and all the possible trees to which that word might refer. Semiotic theory thus posits the following formula as fundamental to the study of signs:

The string of signifieds is potentially infinite. That is, the word tree technically refers to every possible tree, and we understand its reference only in context. For instance, we add other words to “tree” to differentiate it from other trees—“pine tree” or “willow tree”—to delimit the plurality of its potential meanings, or still more words, “the tallest pine tree in the park.” This construction of difference is fundamental to understanding, but it is important to understand that the word tree in and of itself is infinitely plural in its potential meanings.

Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings. The French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–80) described these as “mythologies.” Anything can take on the characteristics of myth. For example, two-story pillars supporting the portico of a house are a mythic signifier of wealth and elegance, and Barthes’s great self-appointed task as a philosopher was to expose the mythologies—instances of what he calls the “falsely obvious”—that inform contemporary understanding. Zhang Hongtu’s Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism could usefully be approached as an example of just such a reading of the Beijing Olympic Games. The act of reading cultural “texts”—and “texts” need not be thought of here as actual sentences strung together, but as any system of signs, including painting, performance, advertising, film, and so forth—becomes an act of decoding and revealing the mythologies at work in the text. We have come to call this process deconstruction.

Deconstruction and Poststructuralism

The chief practitioner of deconstruction was the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Deconstruction is not synonymous with “destruction,” as is commonly thought, but rather it suggests that the “text” be analyzed and taken apart in order to show what has been left out or overlooked. Why does this matter? Because it indicates that there is always more to be said, that meaning is never complete. Deconstruction poses meaning as an arena of endless and open possibility.

Derrida is considered a poststructuralist (as is Barthes in his later writing) because one of the “texts” that poststructuralists most thoroughly submit to deconstruction is structuralism itself. Because it is founded on the principle of difference, structuralism tends to focus on the binary opposition as fundamental to the structure of thought. In his most famous work, Of Grammatology (published in France in 1967 and in English translation in 1976), Derrida points out that binary oppositions are algebraic (a = not-b), and thus the two terms in binary pairs (good/evil; conscious/unconscious; masculine/feminine; light/dark; presence/absence) cannot exist without reference to the other. That is, light (as presence) is defined as the absence of darkness, goodness as the absence of evil, and so on. Of Grammatology looks particularly at the opposition speech/writing. In Western philosophy, speech has always been privileged over writing because in the act of speech the self is fully present in its being; on the other hand, writing, in its dissemination across time and space to an audience necessarily removed from the originary moment of meaning, is always experienced as an absence, as second-hand speech. Metaphoric speech is a particularly potent example of this. A metaphor is a form of substitution, at one remove from its meaning. It is but a trace (Derrida’s word) of what is already absent. In the end, what Derrida reveals in his deconstruction of the speech/writing binary in Western culture is that the emphasis on that fullness of being realized in the act of speech is actually a cultural nostalgia for a wholeness that has long since—perhaps always—been lost.

Chaos Theory

Derrida is by no means easy to understand, but it should be clear that his thinking is not unrelated to Robert Venturi’s idea of the “difficult whole.” It is also akin to developments taking place in the natural sciences first introduced to a wider public in James Gleik’s 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science. To many, in fact, the new chaos theory offered a way to go beyond deconstruction, which seemed doomed to subvert endlessly the binary structures that structuralists construct. Chaos theorists posited that biological and mathematical patterns that appear random, unstable, and disorderly are actually parts of larger, more “difficult wholes.”

The fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) is a prime example. Mandelbrot disdained traditional Euclidean geometry because it was incapable of describing such forms as clouds, mountains, and coastlines, all of which, like most things in nature, exhibit a different order of complexity than the traditional building blocks of geometry—the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone, for instance. Mandelbrot was convinced that such irregular shapes as coastlines and mountains display previously unrecognized orders. When certain basic forms, he argued, are repeated again and again at different scales of length, structures emerge that are quite different from the basic forms of which they are composed. One of Mandelbrot’s favorite examples was the so-called Koch snowflake in which the structure of an equilateral triangle is repeated again and again to create remarkably intricate curvilinear and twisted shapes. Equipped with mathematical models he developed to describe these shapes, Mandelbrot was able to generate dynamic, unpredictable, and seemingly living organisms on the computer screen from basic rectilinear or triangular forms.

The computer has, in fact, made it possible to visualize this complexity. If each pixel on a computer screen is assigned a numerical value and then submitted to what is known in mathematics as iterative equations, a series of increasingly and infinitely complex patterns emerge that have come to be known as the Mandelbrot set (fig. 40.11). If the result of these iterative equations is stable, the pixel is colored black. If the equation moves off toward infinity, the pixel is assigned a color, depending on its rate of acceleration—blue, for instance, for slow rates, red for faster ones. Acceleration occurs at the boundaries of the set, and it is possible, in these areas, to bring out finer and finer detail by zooming in to smaller and smaller areas of the edge. The haunting beauty of these designs has attracted artists and scientists alike.

From Hans-Otto Peitgen and Peter H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1986).

Since an infinite number of points exist between any two given points, by zooming in to a small area of the set, the infinite complexity of the set reveals itself. The detail of the Mandelbrot set is infinite. The stable iterative equation of this set is at the lower left of this image in black.