Why not? Jeff Kipnis on Art, Architecture, and the New Self.
“Why not?” is Tobias Rehberger’s answer when asked by Jeffrey Kipnis if he thinks everything he said was true at their discussion hosted by the AA last February. Why not is the question Kipnis was waiting for: “Why not?” says Kipnis “is the last form of liberation, because it allows for multiple ontologies to proliferate.”
To understand this statement and to get a better grasp of the relationship between art and architecture Kipnis proposes, I am going to pull arguments together from two of his lectures and one of his essays.
In “Some thoughts on contemporary paintings in the hope that analogies to architecture might be drawn…”, an article published in Hunch 9: Disciplines
Kipnis highlights disciplinary boundaries as permeable membranes.
Talking about painting’s internal discourse, it trying to achieve disciplinary autonomy as mapped out by Jasper Johns and Clement Greenberg, Kipnis notes:
Painters talk to each other of course, but the conversations that occur between paintings are much more interesting. For one thing, paintings live much longer than people.
One such conversation is between Philip Akkerman’s self-portraits and On Kawara’s Date paintings of the Today Series. In both cases the art is not the paintings — they are not the same matter: the art lies in the concept (serialised paintings) and not in the actual paintings themselves. The key difference between the two bodies of work, according to Kipnis, is the way they construct their relationship to the historically self-conscious discipline versus the conceptual ambition of the art. Kawara subordinates painting to concept. Kipnis goes so far as to say each of Kawara’s paintings annihilates painting itself, by using painterly methods to transport the viewer from a state of seeing to a state of reading. In contrast, Akkerman works with the common motive of the self-portrait and like a Renaissance painter never puts the brush down until every spot on the canvas is covered in paint.
What then would be the architectural equivalent to this discussion? To me it’s Peter Eisenman as Kawara and Frank Gehry as Ackerman: Eisenman who prefers project over practice, and Frank Gehry who follows a project through practice. Kipnis’ analogy certainly reflects the shift from a critical to a projective architectural discourse.
This is something he touches upon in his discussion with Tobias Rehberger at the AA mentioned in the beginning of this post. Kipnis wants to initiate a move away from tragedy and the critical project towards comedy:
I am really tiered of tragedy and the critical project, 2000 years of tragedy are enough.
We need to prefer life over death, and comedy over tragedy.
Architecture has inscribed itself to tragedy — according to Kipnis, there is no comic acupuncture in architecture. This relates to what I wrote on the work of David Shrigley, who managed to deconstruct the white cube by making us visitors lough. Although Kipnis points out that comedy doesn’t have to be laughing comedy, and people can still die in the end. It is more a move away from thanatos (daemon, or the Freudian death drive) towards eros (love, desire). I am compelled by Kipnis claim, but can’t eros be just as much a daemon?
Kipnis is interested in Rehberger because as a process-artist he spontaneously brings unrelated people into his work. For Jeff this is a form of disestablishing conventions of authority, which is one of the three things that motivate him about art. Kipnis’ prime example of this is Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning”:
The picture links the work of Rauschenberg to that of Willem de Kooning, it depicts the relationship of picture to frame, and points to the problem of how pictures are hung on the wall. But most importantly it finds within that “yet another way of disestablishment” — presenting the erasure of another great artist’s work.
The second point of interest Kipnis names is art which constructs a new self (which is not about the traditional conflict between the individual and the collective). That is an individual that “is trying to express its sameness with everyone else as a collective.” The new self is “both the author and the erasure of the author”. Much like On Kawara’s Date paintings are the annihilation of painting. This puts forward a new political self. And for Kipnis it is also a reason why he is interested in art that deals with new relationships to labour (labour-less, extremely laborious, factory):
I think no longer of the self as an internalised construction of myself and a body, that is finished. We are now constructing a sense of self in organic groups — a sameness we have together that has nothing to do with difference equals zero.
He talks about the contingent self — a self built upon the approval of others or upon social comparisons. A self that is relevant — contingent — to the events around it.
Finally, the third point he raises is the critic as performer, which is to say he does not see himself as a judge of the work or as explaining the work to the audience, he sees himself more like a musician interpreting a score. Which he immediately sets into action showing some of his own art. Jeff Kipnis the artist — why not?
In a discussion with Peter Eisenman under the title “Form why bother?” at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State, Kipnis elaborates on “Why not?” as mobilising the possibility of multiple stories. Referring to a painting by David Salle Kipnis speaks of the occurrence of multiple ontologies — in this case the layering of a painting and a drawing that “come together in a disturbing, frivolous, yet intellectually interesting way”. However — Kipnis is keen to point this out — they do not come together as a collage:
The strategy of multiple ontologies is a potential way out of architecture’s pit falls. Namely that due to its size and the shear amount of capital, matter, and political will necessary to make architecture happen it is always on one level or another an instantiation of power (which lead to the critical practice). Multiple ontologies is the simultaneous and in-congruent layering of two ontologies, which produces a possibility of a new world condition.
To me being able to differentiate between a collage and a moment of multiple ontologies is a fine line, potentially one that is not walk-able. Going back to my post on Kipnis’ “Towards a new architecture”, where he uncovers the collage producing nothing but a collage. On could say the defining feature of the collage is the juxtaposition of a fragmentation. A work of multiple ontologies then is defined by the layering of two stories.
This season’s purple book (#17) features Olaf Breuning’s work. By photographing his simple yet poignant drawings does he create a setting of multiple ontologies or a collage of different media?
Looking back to Tobias Rehberger’s work, is his cafe design for the Venice Biennale perhaps a space of multiple ontologies? It is a layering of the medium of architecture with that of graphics. Is it a successful one? In order for multiple ontologies to have a similar effect in architecture as in David Salle’s painting, I think architecture would have to return to the semiotic project of postmodernism.
What Kipnis doesn’t do is give examples in architecture or potential applications or implications on design (unlike his essay “Towards a new Architecture”, where he explicitly lists the design implications of his thoughts). Instead he refers to the permeable membrane of disciplinary borders and claims that architecture should copy, re-appropriate, and finally assimilate art’s effects, until they become intrinsic to the discipline. What Kipnis does do, is give great performances in written and spoken words.
