Journal #23:

"deviant"

Between Air and Space: Prologue to An Te Liu's Exchange
by: Rodolphe el-Khoury

The work of An Te Liu is strategically situated between architecture and art. Unlike other works of architectural means and proportions that we are now accustomed to find comfortably installed in art galleries, some of Liu's more unsettling pieces are nowhere quite at home. They are designed for the gallery, yet they perform as architecture: "machines for living" seemingly designed to correct behavioral and environmental deviance. The fact that they perversely succeed in being totally useless does not detract from their pragmatic-architectural-logic.

"Condition," Liu's recent show at the Henry Urbach Gallery featured, Type/Need and Exchange, two new works elaborating themes initially tackled in the Sclerotic (1998) and Soft Load (1999) series¹. Much like its precursor Sclerotic III-a pair of safety grab-bars flanking an electric outlet-Type/Need contrives strange but uncannily plausible artifacts from a dystopian universe where a hygienic re-construction of the body is played out to perverse extremes (Fig.2).² Flesh-colored contraptions are assembled from salvaged exercise equipment in unlikely yet seamless configurations. The purpose and origin of the machine parts are still legible in the new assemblage, much like the latent bicycle in Picasso's Bull's Head (Fig. 3). The fragments here are not reconstituted into an organic figure; they are merely reshuffled to produce a different machine. A deviant machine. The perversion is latent: Type/Need is not so much an iconic conflation of the mechanical and the organic-the familiar topos of the historical avant-garde-but more of a catalytic platform for potentially grotesque rituals and obscene hybridizations.

Exchange, the piece de resistance of the "Condition" show, aligns with the Soft Load series-household sponges arranged into architectural and artistic parodies (Fig. 4)-in staging the uneasy convergence of the aesthetic and the hygienic. Exchange presents fifty-six HEPA air cleaners in seven column-like stacks (Fig. 5). Together they are claimed to recycle the air of the gallery every twenty-one seconds. They also generate a considerably high level of white noise and a distinct odor akin to that of freshly opened plastic packages. The installation mobilizes all the senses to dramatize the discourse of hygiene in an assault on imperceptible air pollutants.

Exchange is consistent with Liu's earlier parodies of hygienic practice, contriving a "pathological" performance from "normal" domestic rituals. What is unusual here-and certainly not typical of contemporary art practice-is the empirical preoccupation with air, the air of the gallery. Exchange operates on the air of the gallery as much as in the space of the gallery. Ostensibly because of its hygienic mandate, modern architecture is known in particular to have occasionally equated air with space. Liu's work overlays a haptic experience of air on the abstract intuition of space-the ubiquitous medium of art.

Although equally fixated on space, architecture has had a more sustained dialogue with air. The notion that air has a critical role to play in the precarious equilibrium of health and is therefore subject to architectural speculation has been a commonplace since antiquity. Hence Vitruvius's instructions for the optimal orientation of the streets: "They will be properly laid out if foresight is employed to exclude the winds from the alleys. Cold wind are disagreeable, hot winds enervating, moist winds unhealthy."³ The mechanical and physiological intricacies of pneumatic processes remained confused and controversial until the dissemination of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's (1743-1794) research on respiration and Jan Ingenhousz's (1730-1799) on photosynthesis. Still, the beneficial effects of "fresh air"-i.e., freely circulating air-and the hazards of stagnation were never in doubt. The sight of laboratory animals promptly dying in hermetically sealed vessels was ample proof.

Air became a focus of scientific research after 1750, thanks mainly to Stephen Hales (1677-1761), whose work turned air, hitherto understood as an elementary fluid, into a heterogeneous mixture of chemical components.⁴ Research into its unknown and threatening composition was followed with particular urgency in the second half of the eighteenth century, when it was obsessively fueled by the anxieties of pre-Pasteurian mythologies.
The interest in air pathology was not limited to the scientific academies. By the end of the century, the trend spread toward the bottom of the social pyramid to become a staple of popular culture. Public opinion was repeatedly mobilized to protest the degradation of the urban atmosphere. The writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier's (1740-1814) invective is characteristic of the collective hyper-sensitivity to aerial pollution in eighteenth-century Paris:

The moment that air ceases to contribute to the preservation of good health, it becomes lethal. But health is that attribute which man treats with utmost indifference. Streets that are narrow and poorly accessed, houses that are too small and that impede the free circulation of air, butcher shops, fish stalls, sewers, cemeteries-all these corrupt the atmosphere. And the enclosed air becomes laden with impure particles, heavy and malignant.⁵

The city is consistently incriminated in this discourse: by virtue of its sheer mass, it is an obstacle to the movement of the air. Hence, a general tendency toward looser and more permeable urban fabrics, advocated in many treatises and partially tested in the "openness" of the Place Louis XV.

Nicolas Ledoux's (1736-1806) ideal city of Chaux is a radical departure from the norm and yet is entirely consistent with the "decongestive" trend (Fig. 6). The traditional-and pathological-urban fabric is here entirely relinquished in favor of an open and expanded field where detached and individuated structures are bathed in unhindered airflow.

For Emil Kaufmann, whose formalist reading was largely responsible for the postwar revival of Ledoux as a "visionary architect," the jeu de masses of detached pavilions anticipates the freestanding blocks of Le Corbusier and Gropius's combinatory of discrete spatial units. The freestanding structures, Kaufmann claims, are the concrete manifestation of the principle of autonomy in which the architectural object is released from all external contingencies to realize its own material, formal, and tectonic volition.⁶

For Kaufmann, architectural autonomy is indicative of a paradigm shift that is registered in other spheres of cultural production. It is recognized in the emphasis on line and contour leading to the formal detachment of the figure in late-eighteenth century painting. It is also relevant to the formal structure of the political order theorized by Rousseau: "a form... by which each may be united to all but nonetheless retains command over himself and remains as free as he had been beforehand. Such is the fundamental problem that is resolved by the social contract."⁷

That the ideal city of Chaux should reflect the political philosophy of The Social Contract comes as no surprise, considering Ledoux's explicit allegiance to Rousseau. Still, beyond denoted affinities, the freestanding building represents the confluence of deeper structures, converging on the transformation of the environment since the late-eighteenth century. From Ledoux to Le Corbusier, efforts at hygienic ventilation by means of decongestion and separation resonate with aspirations for a society of individuated and emancipated subjects merging with longings for an unobstructed view in open space.

Hygienic arguments for thoroughly ventilated and separated dwellings may have driven the discourse of "decongestive" urbanism. Yet the longing and struggle for open space is largely visual: an aesthetic impulse that was enacted and legitimized in various ideological registers: political, economical, and social.

The hygienic/aesthetic impulse is manifested in the great optical utopias of Fourrier, Bentham, and Rousseau: imaginary worlds built on varying measures of transparency and visibility. While some strove primarily toward the transparency of the subject in a naturally crystalline nature, others had less faith in the purity of human nature: they sought the transparency of the environment only to precipitate the hopelessly opaque subject into greater visibility.

Hence the contradictions of the modernist city. The city mass is reorganized to benefit from greater exposure and permeability to its natural milieu: air-an empirical medium. The city is also reconstituted rationally in space-a theoretical abstraction. The hygienic building is subject to external processes; it must be permeable to clean air. While the rational building is to be an object developed plastically in absolute space, it must simultaneously be made to go away, because it is an obstacle to the epiphany of transparency in open space: "Great blocks of dwellings run through the town. What does it matter they are behind the screen of trees."⁸

Similar contradictions are effectively rehearsed in Liu's Airborne at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2000 ( Figs 1, 7, 9, 10). In this direct precursor to Exchange, sixty household humidifiers, air purifiers, and negative-air ionizers are painted a uniform gray and distributed on a white platform in a composition strangely reminiscent of a modernist city. A scale-model of a modernist city, to be more precise, the kind we are accustomed to see photographed along with the disembodied hand of the architect ominously hovering above (Fig. 8).

The modernist city is most promising-and convincing-in model form, ideally photographed from above, as a rational and total artifact. Ironically, the realized version is typically found lacking in the bird's-eye view: it looks too much like a model-the cliché reaction to aerial photographs of Brasília! The model satisfies the demand for the rational materialization of the object; the bird's-eye view frustrates the concomitant fantasy of its dematerialization in space.⁹

Airborne operates on several levels and scales, equally gratifying and frustrating in its oscillation between model and machine, between symbolic representation and indexical process, and between a position in space and a situation in air. It is at once a scale-model for an imaginary modernist city; a dizzying mise en abime of the Ville Radieuse-imagine the same appliances plausibly deployed in Corbusian housing blocks, stubbornly filtering the air that was supposed to ventilate the same building; a Van Doesburg-inspired composition of solids in space; a sardonic display of mass-produced consumer goods-Hannes Meyer comes to mind; a show room for Honeywell; a dystopian domestic setting; a minimalist sculpture; a new-age wellness center in downtown Vancouver.

The multiple readings and registers capture the predicament of the modernist city-and that of its legacy in today's urbanized world. Just like the air-cleaning appliance, which is promoted against all sorts of domestic pathologies from allergy to furniture damage, modern urbanism requires a leap of faith in its hygienic claims. Its short-lived success may have been due to the "placebo" effect rather than the "science" of the Unite d'habitation.¹⁰ It delivered the promise of a liberated and lucid environment as an aesthetic experience rather than a material and social fact.¹¹

The placebo appliance is most effective in its conspicuousness, as a physical presence in domestic space-the only tangible evidence of its remedial but imperceptible operation. As demonstrated in Exchange and Airborne, the cumulative effect of the residual but critical physicality-the noise-polluting, energy-consuming object-is psychologically counterproductive. An isolated HEPA machine may suggest the possibility of healthier air, but its relentless deployment is indeed more alarming than therapeutic: The air may be actually cleaner in the Henry Urbach Gallery-it is recycled and filtered every twenty-one seconds! Its hygienic virtues are hardly more credible.

In Liu's installations, the effect of the placebo-dare we say "the aesthetic"-falters against the overpowering effect of the real. And vice versa. May we say the same of the Ville Radieuse?

The pragmatic and aesthetic agendas of modern urbanism are ostensibly consistent. Yet they may not completely overlap: there is a gap between space and air in the world they project. This is where Liu's work is uncomfortably at home.

 

 

Notes:

¹ An Te Liu's Exchange and Type/Need are part of the "Condition" show at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 2001. Other works mentioned in this article were displayed at the following: Airborne and Sclerotic, "Pathology" at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2000. Soft Load, "Luster" at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 1999.

² An Te Liu, Sclerotic III, 2000 (Fig. 14).

³ Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1960): 24-31.

⁴ Air, formerly an elementary medium of generation and vitality, was hence recast as a suspicious brew: "…a frightening mixture of the smoke, sulfurs and aqueous, volatile explosive, oily and saline vapors that the earth gave off, and occasionally, the explosive material that it emitted, the stinking exhalations that emerged from swamps, minute insects and their eggs, spermatic animalcules and far worse, the contagious miasma that rose from decomposed bodies." Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986): 13.

⁵ Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 1 (Paris: Mercure de France, [1782-88] 1994): 114.

⁶ In Kaufmann's words: "The new combination of parts is the free assembly of individual elements that do not have to sacrifice their particular existence and whose form is subordinated only to their own finality. It is their particular laws that determine their form." Emil Kaufmann, De Ledoux à Le Corbusier (Paris: Livre et Communication, 1990): 79.

⁷ Ibid., 77.

⁸ Le Corbusier, The Home of Man (London: Architectural Press, [1942] 1948): 91.

⁹ Brasília and Chandigarh are most photogenic in wide-angle shots at eye level when the dwarfed monumental architecture defines-negatively-the far more sublime immensity of open space (Fig. 15).

¹⁰ An Te Liu speaks of the appliance's placebo effect in an interview with Aaron Betsky: "My college roommate and I had two Bionaire purifiers/ionizers in our apartment. We would sit around drinking scotch in a smoky haze with the machines running full blast in case our parents showed up unexpectedly. After a few hours, the air seemed to tingle with clean negatively charged ions, and we were sure we could feel it. Or was it the single malt? In any case, the indicator light was on, and we were assured that something good was happening, even if we didn't understand the mysteries of negative-air ionization. 'Placebo' comes from the Latin 'to please,' and we were damn happy with our new devices." Aaron Betsky, "Safe Haven," interview with An Te Liu, Surface 25 (Fall 2000): 155.

¹¹ The social and political critique of the modernist city that fueled the postmodern return to a traditional configuration of block, street, and public space is beyond the scope of this essay but not foreign to Liu's work: that a display of consumer goods should so readily evoke a modernist cityscape is a striking but familiar demonstration of affinities between capitalist and utopian logic.

 

 

Illustrations:

 

Fig. 1: An Te Liu, Airborne, installation view, 2000. Exhibited at the "Pathology" show at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2000.

Fig. 2: An Te Liu, Type/Need, 2001. Exhibited at the "Condition" show at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 2001.

Fig. 3: Pablo Picasso, Bull's Head, 1943.

Fig. 4: An Te Liu, Soft Load, 1999. Exhibited at the "Luster" show at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 1999.

Fig. 5: An Te Liu, Exchange, 2001. Exhibited at the "Condition" show at the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 2001

Fig. 6: Nicolas Ledoux, ideal city of Chaux, bird's-eye view, 1804.

Fig. 7: An Te Liu, Airborne, 2000.

Fig. 8: Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, Plan Voisin proposal for Paris, 1925. The hand points out the business center of the proposed city.

Fig. 9: An Te Liu, Airborne, installation view, 2000.

Fig. 10: An Te Liu, Airborne, installation view, 2000.

Fig. 11: National Congress Complex in Brasilia, view of the ramp leading to the complex, 1958-60. Oscar Niemeyer, architect.

Fig. 12: Hannes Meyer, Co-op Vitrine with Co-op standard products, exhibited in Basel, 1925.

Fig. 13: An Te Liu, Exchange, detail, 2001.

Fig. 14: An Te Liu, Sclerotic III, 2000. Exhibited at the "Pathology" show at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2000.

Fig. 15: Museum of the City of Brasilia, 1958-60. Oscar Niemeyer, architect.

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