{"id":16391,"date":"2014-09-21T22:15:36","date_gmt":"2014-09-21T20:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/up-2\/"},"modified":"2015-10-07T13:23:25","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T11:23:25","slug":"up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/up\/","title":{"rendered":"Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abstraction proceeds by degrees. Every representation both pares and substitutes, proposing a way of seeing as well as a vision of its object. Painting and drawing \u2013 whether Lascaux or Leonardo \u2013 confronts the primary abstraction of worldly depiction: the removal of the third dimension from the medium of representation, giving rise to the optical magic of perspective, begged by the question of distance. This is not a matter of idealism or essence but does raise the question of content. What meets the idea in a work of art always represents something.
\nModernism bridled against this fact, understanding representation as constraint.\u00a0 To defeat this, modern art produced the idea of abstraction and conscientiously diversified its methodologies. Cubism broke down the object via conceits of simultaneity and geometric reduction. Surrealism abstracted by the free interchange of object and context. The Russians assaulted optic prejudice via the representation of geometry, itself an abstraction. This last style of representation had a particularly profound effect on architecture and design, liberating objects to express primarily the conditions of their own construction.
\nThis also gave rise to a rhetoric of immanence, to the idea that construction and expression were completely isomorphic. Obscured was the object\u2019s powerful representation of the desire for the palpable. The artistic and architectural worlds were responding, in part, to the press of technical events that fell increasingly outside their purview.
\nArt was challenged by the proliferating, deadpan, expression of engineering and science, a system that grew increasingly hermetic and bold in meeting its own needs. The dazzling technological artifacts of the past two centuries conjoined to produce a vast system of visuality that was largely indifferent to received formal criteria.\u00a0 This was a tremendous challenge to the enterprise
\nof art, which was forced out of its role in the vanguard of cultural expression.
\nWhat was easel painting in the era of the Great Eastern or the Brooklyn Bridge? What was the relevance of history in the face of such enormous ruptures as the world wars?
\nIn the face of these social and technical convulsions, art responded both enthusiastically and critically. The pornography of Futurism, the free association of collage, the asymptotic reductivism of \u201cpure\u201d abstraction and of minimalism, the evanescence of performance art, the private authenticity of action painting, all sought to make art in light of new technologies of both making and seeing.\u00a0An oscillation between embrace and horror defined the condition of modern art and defines it still. Most recently, the idea that art is the representation of something amorphously defined
\nas \u201ctheory\u201d at once allies the artistic with an idea of a rigorous, analytical, scientific \u201cprogress\u201d and allows it to continue to flirt with its old styles of depiction, if with an increasingly rarefied object. The highly theorized art of today is decidedly post-romantic. If sublimity is alterity \u2013 the experience of otherness \u2013 depiction becomes sentimental, a sublimated sublime. This is, of course,
\na highly idealist picture and we receive it as relentlessly identified with the bourgeoisie and its cozy notions of the security of what is seen.
\nIn this reading, the \u201cframed view\u201d must always answer for its exclusions, own up to the narrowness of its self-interest. Indeed, the modernist default is to relegate all representation to the territory of kitsch, pathos lapsed into bathos.
\nSurrealism, the working method of modern life, recuperates representation via irony. This extends beyond the droll atmosphere of its charged juxtapositions to its dramatic breakdown of distinctions of high and low, of what is properly artistic and what is mere consumption. Duschamp\u2019s \u201cdiscovery\u201d of the ready-made insisted that the act of seeing differently was a sufficient definition of artistic practice. This mode of observation had the power to \u201cturn\u201d objects from one thing to another. Whether this was a urinal brazenly hung on a gallery wall or a deft bike-part bull, this mode of art-making used the mass-produced consumer object as its medium. However, its critical relation to this means depended on devaluing its useful status to convert it to mere contemplation, bringing it in line with traditional styles of artistic valorization. The period of early modernity is also the period in which the discipline of industrial design originates.
\nLike modern architecture, industrial design depends on the prior representation of the object to be produced ad seriatim by machines.
\nThis relocation \u2013 with its separation of designing and making \u2013 was also taken up in the discourse of the appropriate form of the industrial object and of the manner in which it was
\nto be judged. While the mythic rhetoric of functionalism provided and continues to provide the main means of judging such production, it was clear from the outset that this was not nearly enough.
\nIn this sense, both William Morris and the Bauhaus represent similar styles of resistance to the anonymity of the mass-object – dosing it up with craft or style that far exceeds the simple requirements of use. All of which is a somewhat long-winded way of suggesting that abstract art seethed with both represented meanings and with their denial.
\nIn mainstream architecture, this contradiction offered an especially intractable dead-end, such that by the nineteen sixties the gigantic vacancy of corporate minimalism that had come to largely dominate the sanctioned face of architecture and was ready to take a fall. The assault came from many competitors, including historicists, sentimentalists, and ironists, as well as from the free-for-all visual convulsions of the counter-culture with its tooth for depiction \u2013 however mind altered \u2013 and its political critique of the oppressive forms of late capitalism.
\nIn this re-creation of the art of design, there was (and is) no greater figure than Gaetano Pesce who \u2013 as no other practitioner of recent times – recaptures representation for both politics and pleasure. To a degree, this is accomplished by a strategy of \u201cturning\u201d but not precisely the kind favored by the likes of Ant-Farm or Archigram, with their affectionate capture of mass-consumables like cars, comics, cozy suburbs, advertising, etc. Pesce has instinctively understood something a level deeper, that the creation of images \u2013 in particular images of the human body \u2013 is a fundamental property of the way we behave as a species and also a means of defending the body against the threats of \u201cpost-human\u201d culture. His work \u2013 at all scales \u2013 is suffused with body images, artfully abstracted to retain an energetic balance between media and message.
\nBut if this friendly inclusion of the human image were the end of it, Pesce\u2019s place would be misunderstood. His genius has been to unite his frank and idiosyncratic representational style with a vivid politics of craft and meaning and with an enthusiastic, adept, and brilliant use of new technology. While the majority of his cohort continues to work out the model of the rigid, metal, machine (however cowled in voluptuous shape or soft skins), Pesce has understood that the organic is a concept that far exceeds loosey-goosey forms, that organisms are both hard and soft, that matter appears in different phases and guises, and that the human body is the eternal subject of architecture and domestic design.
\nSerie Up (and particularly the Up 5\/6 chair) is a vivid example of Pesce\u2019s precise embodiment of meaning and technique in useful and artistic objects. In the late sixties, when foam was a material
\nof considerable fascination for designers, Pesce had a transcendently useful insight: foam is largely air. With B&B Italia, he designed a system for removing the air from foam furniture and vacuum-packing it such that the volume to be shipped was a mere fraction of the volume to be used. Thanks to foam\u2019s own \u201cshape memory\u201d, chairs squashed to pancake proportion rapidly \u2013 on being liberated from their packaging \u2013 resumed their shape and rigidity. This is surely one of the most astonishing innovations in the history of furniture design. In many ways, this \u201cinflatable\u201d technology inverts the preoccupation with inflatables that was so prevalent at the time. While Pesce\u2019s peers around the world produced endless variations on the balloon \u2013 inflatable objects as mere air supported membranes \u2013 Pesce was the first to produce an inflatable mass.\u00a0This nearly alchemical transaction is breathtaking both in its innovation and in the fundamental simplicity
\nof the observation that inspired it. The re-animation of the chair by exposure to the air is miraculous.
\nUp 5\/6 takes this innovation another step, layering the image of the body to support the body-to-be-seated. But not just any body, a woman\u2019s. To say that the female body was contested territory in this era – time of The Stepford Wives with its docile robot-women, of pneumatic , hyper- objectified, Playboy bunnies, of inflatable sex-toys, and of the raging, liberating reaction of the women\u2019s movement \u2013 is to gravely understate the situation. Pesce responded by carrying his design a little further, providing an \u201cottoman\u201d (another colonization) for the chair\/woman in the form of a ball and chain. The meaning is clear: the woman objectified is a prisoner. But there\u2019s ambiguity as well and this, too, is part of Pesce\u2019s genius. The chair is beautiful and, consequently, so too the represented woman. Her oppression seems so much more drear because the victim is so robust and generous. In Pesce\u2019s mind, the image of the woman\u2019s body could \u2013 at that historical moment \u2013 only be recuperated for artistic representation with appropriate critique.\u00a0 This contradiction \u2013 that an appliance designed to serve the body could only represent it with visible qualifications \u2013 captures something central to the struggles of that time and the present. In the work of Gaetano Pesce, a chair acquires astonishing eloquence.<\/p>\n