Architectural Association The Slice: School of Architecture Cutting to See

A cut and a slice is there any question when a cut and a slice are just the same.

A cut and a slice has no particular exchange it has such a strange exception to all that which is different.

A cut and only slice, only a cut and only a slice, the remains of a taste may remain and tasting is accurate.

A cut and an occasion, a slice and a substitute a single hurry and a circumstance that shows that, all this is so reasonable when every thing is clear.

— Gertrude Stein, What Happened: A Play (1922)

Seeing is a matter of surfaces. It’s for this a secret order, spill lurid innards and open reason that both vision and representation new views. The convention of the architec- are continually haunted by the problem tural cross-section here finds its parallel of insides and outsides – the relationship in the physical sectioning of histological between the external and what lies within. specimens. The pleasures of the Paris- A merely perceptual matter? If only. It has ian voyeur meet the dutiful labours of the crept on us: the ocular paradigm of post- lumberjack. The earth itself, like an onion, Cartesian metaphysics gradually sublimed reveals its hidden structure. So take a look. this pervasive visual anxiety, creating in But remember, cutting to see is an object the process our basic metaphors for critical lesson in the violence of vision. The world inquiry itself: ‘superficial’ propositions, looks different when you wield an edge. ‘trenchant’ analysis, the joys of insight. THE SLICE is a laboratory for a With these matters in mind (and a future themed issue of Cabinet, a quarterly whetted blade in hand), the editors of non-for-profit magazine based in New York. Cabinet magazine here take up THE SLICE, Now in its tenth year, Cabinet embraces that clean incision that forever links the and promotes the most expansive definition sharp knife to the keen eye. Moving across of ‘culture’ possible, one that includes both historical moments and disparate fields, the quotidian and the extraordinary, in or- this exhibition examines the peculiar tradi- der to foster an ethic of curiosity about the tions that link visibility to the swift saw. world we have made and inhabit. From the cutaway view to the geometry of projection, from the microtome to the CAT- Exhibition curated by D. Graham Burnett Scan, from the surgeon’s scalpel to and Christopher Turner the sadist’s guillotine, the slice can reveal www.cabinetmagazine.org THE THIN FILM: VANNEVAR BUSH visualisation techniques in the biological delicate modification of the familiar car- tion – nothing less than an unspooling of AND VISION BY INCISION sciences.1 He called it an ‘Automatic Micro- penter’s plane. Interestingly, a set of six the tightly wrapped world of microscopic tome’, and his device – a dead end, finally, of his mounted specimens traded for more forms. D Graham Burnett in the history of technology, but a lovely than a common microscope circa 1800. If All this was handcraft. Knack. and suggestive dead end indeed – will you were a gentleman, and you owned one Technique. Skill. And I can say this with serve as a choice occasion for a moment’s of these bloody drawing-room conversation some confidence. Back when I still thought reflection on the charged intersections of doo-daads, you wanted to make sure you I wanted to be a doctor, I worked for a sum- the blade and the eye. had something interesting to look at with mer in an immunology lab, where I killed A word about microtomes, which it. Something to show the ladies. And that many hundreds of white mice and removed had been around for more than a century basically required a microtome, which you their pancreases. I then froze these sad by the time Bush began to think about how probably did not have – and couldn’t have little blood-sacks into tiny ice-cubes in they might be reinvented. At its heart, a made work if you did. long trays – all this being preparation for micro-tome is nothing more than its name Improvements in screw-cutting lowering them, one at a time, onto the stage implies: a fine-cutter, a cobbling together technologies in the early nineteenth of a refrigerator-sized cryotome (basically of the Greek words for ‘small’ and ‘cut’. The century (linked to the increasingly large a microtome built into a freezer). The point term itself seems to have been coined in and sophisticated industry producing then was to use a delicate brush and a nee- 1839 by the French microscopist Charles chronometers and navigational instru- dle and a little touch to crank out beautiful, Chevalier, but finely machined devices for ments) eventually gave rise to commercial long ribbons of paraffin-ice, each with its preparing transparently thin shavings of microtomes that allowed a user to advance little translucent smudge of pancreas. I was specimens can be traced back to the mid- the specimen onto the cutting blade with not very good at it. The project stagnated. In the late spring of 1952 the most power- eighteenth century at least. The technical great control, measuring out the slice in It is a testimony either to the difficulty of ful scientist in the world, Vannevar Bush, rationale for such mechanisms is clear micrometer increments. These devices – the technique, or to my troubled youth, submitted a short paper to Science, the enough: the higher magnification generated made by instrument makers in England and that I eventually nicked the extra cryotome American journal of record for investigators by increasingly sophisticated compound mi- Germany in particular – stimulated powerful knife, for which I made a handsome inlaid of nature. Little surprise there. By the early croscopes in this period placed a premium new techniques in the biological sciences. handle in the woodshop. I thought there 1950s Bush had been generating signifi- on powerful illumination; it is very difficult Combined with the development of chemical was something grand about owning the cant scientific results in half a dozen fields to get adequate light on an opaque speci- stains and embedding procedures (fixing a sharpest street blade in West Philadelphia. for some 30 years. In the 1920s his forays men placed vanishingly close to a strong soft specimen in a block of wax or jelly to It was not, however, convenient to carry, into radio signal amplification had led to objective lens. Much better to project the improve slice quality), reliable microtome being seven inches long and shaped like a the founding of the Raytheon Corporation light through the specimen. Not only does sectioning procedures allowed a new gener- blocky candy-bar. Nice handle, though. (soon a leading defence contractor), and this make it easier to concentrate and ation of medical doctors and anatomists in Which brings us back to Vannevar made him a very wealthy man. During the direct the light through the viewing tube, it the late-nineteenth century to make major Bush. His ‘automatic microtome’ repre- war his administrative gifts, technical savvy also permits the close examination of fine discoveries in pathology, histology and sented a prescient bid to get punks like me and diplomatic futurism propelled him to inner structures of the tissue itself. But embryology. From precise sequential slices out of the whole process. What he and his the helm of the Manhattan Project, and po- all this hinges on sectioning the specimen these investigators could reconstruct com- colleagues had designed was a microtome sitioned him to serve as the de facto archi- into sufficiently thin slabs – thin enough plex three-dimensional structures with geo- that – in principle – obviated all the fussy tect of American Cold-War science policy. to be translucent, and precise enough to metrical precision. It has even been argued lab-tech work with those delicate ribbons. It has been calculated that in the 1940s minimise depth of field problems during that certain mechanistic approaches to Instead, trading on the machinery at the something like two-thirds of US physicists focusing. Hand cutting will only get you so morphology and development in this period heart of a movie-camera, his device fed a were working either directly or indirectly for far on this, especially with rigid or messy can be understood to reflect the predilec- ribbon of modified 35mm Kodak film stock Vannevar Bush, who is now most often re- materials. tions of men who spent much of their lives through special tractor feeds down onto the membered for his visionary Memmex project The earliest documented micro- shaving reality into two-dimensional planes face of the specimen. The microtome blade, – a mechanical, extendable, configurable, tomes were in fact designed to cut whisper – and plotting the results on graph paper.2 working a little like a shutter, then shaved microfilm-based cognitive prosthetic fre- thin chips of wood. It had been plant tis- Eventually fancy rotary microtomes were off a micro-fine tranche which adhered to quently cited as a forerunner of the World sue, of course, that had lead the earliest even rigged up – machines that worked a the emulsion as it passed by. Presto! Turn Wide Web. microscopists to coin the term ‘cell’ back little like a modern deli-slicer, automatically the crank and the three-dimensional world So what was this titan of power/ in the seventeenth century – a word meant advancing the blade (or the sausage) on becomes a moving picture. Think of it as knowledge working on in the early 1950s? to liken these boxy microscopic structures each pass by a preset interval. A skilled the Hollywood version of Edwin A Abbot’s It turns out that he was tinkering with a to the floorplan of a monastery. One of user could tease from one of these devices Victorian romance of n-dimensional space, most improbable contraption. The published the very greatest of the early microtome a long ribbon of serial sections, each less Flatland. version of the Science paper, which ran in makers was, in fact, a ‘common carpenter than a cell in thickness. Such strips were a Bush loved the idea of decomposing mid-June 1952, lovingly detailed Bush’s of Ipswich’ (surname Custace) who jeal- pain to manage (they had to be floated onto physical objects directly onto film, section progress on a finicky mechanical cutting ously defended the secret to his homemade glass slides and allowed to relax to flatness by sequential section. In the first place, tool that he hoped would revolutionise ‘cutting engine’ – which was doubtless a before being fixed), but they were a revela- it made it possible to imagine copying the originals by film-transfer technologies. A sudden slice changes the whole plate, BLIND SIGHT: SLICING EYES TO create smoother incisions, which would Not only that, all the staining and fixing it does so suddenly. RESTORE VISION speed healing and minimalise the chance could occur in the tins and baths used for Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, 1914 of infection (a wide variety of these commercial film development. And then, of Christopher Turner instruments are in the Wellcome collection). course, there was the possibility of actually I should like to let you know how important Surgeons developed their own signature viewing such films through a projector: one sliced bread is to the morale and sane- cuts, and ophthalmology illustrations would literally tour, say, an embryo, head to ness of a household. My husband and four show a variety of these marks, scarred toe, slice by slice – an animated flip-book children are all in a rush during and after onto the cornea like runic signs. of the body. In full colour. Here was the breakfast. Without ready-sliced bread I Eighteenth-century philosophers body as film.3 must do the slicing for toast – two pieces were fascinated by blindness – Locke, This is not the place to play out the for each one – that’s ten. For their lunches Leibnitz, La Mettrie, Diderot and Voltaire tissue of suggestive allusions (Eadweard I must cut by hand at least twenty slices, were all interested in the intellectual Muybridge’s time-and-motion studies, for two sandwiches apiece. Afterward I problems thrown up by the new science, or Duchamp’s infra-mince, the notorious ‘balo- make my own toast. Twenty-two slices of art, of cataract operations. The blind man ney-man’ of Chicago’s Museum of Science bread to be cut in a hurry! restored to sight became a paradigmatic and Industry, the ‘Visible Human Project’, Letter from ‘A Distraught Housewife’, The figure in enlightenment thinking. ‘To Justine Cooper’s MRI sculpture Rapt, etc, New York Times, 1943 rediscover the permanent truth of this etc). For that matter, I don’t even know what bright, distant, open naivety of the gaze’ became of Bush’s prototype. He was still The rational reconstructionist ontology was, according to Michel Foucault, one of working on improvements to the device in may be sketched thus: Science is a body the ‘great mythical experiences on which 1955, and there are several files of related of knowledge; or at a given stage, the On 8 April 8 1747, Monsieur Garion, a the philosophy of the eighteenth century papers in his manuscript collections at the synchronous time-slice of this body of blind wig maker, sat on a stool in nervous had wished to base its beginning.’ Library of Congress. The original machine knowledge. anticipation. A man standing behind him In 1688 the Irish scientist and and/or some of his films may even survive. Marx W Wartofsky, ‘The relationship held his head steady, one hand firmly under politician William Molyneux, whose wife What is certain, however, is that Vannevar between philosophy of science and history Garion’s chin, the other peeling back the lost her sight in the first year of their pushed the fantasy of ‘vision by incision’ of science’, Essays in Memory of Imre upper lid of his eye. Surgeon Jacques marriage, posed a question to John Locke: in a radical way by tying the movie camera Lakatos, 1976 Daviel sat in front of them on a slightly would a man born blind, who has learnt to to the microtome: here were slices of life as higher chair and held down Garion’s lower distinguish objects by touch, be able to never before. The measuring of time produces anxiety lid. Steadying his elbow on his knee, Daviel distinguish a globe and a cube by sight And, perhaps, in the end, as when it serves to assign us social tasks, but brought a sharp triangular-shaped knife up alone if he were ever cured? After Locke never again. it makes us feel safe when it substantialises to the wig maker’s clouded eye and, without wrote about it in his Essay Concerning time and cuts it into slices like an object anaesthetic, pierced the cornea. Using Human Understanding (1690), philosophers Notes of consumption. another curved cutting knife and convex grappled with what came to be known as Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, scissors this wound was opened to create the Molyneux problem. However, it was only Image: Wellcome Library, London Microtome of the type used by Quekett. From: A practical treatise on the 1968 and lift a half-moon-shaped flap. A sharp in 1728, when the London surgeon William microscope. By: John Thomas Quekett. Published: H. needle was applied directly to the lens; Cheselden operated on a 13-year-old boy, BaillièreLondon 1855 There being no question of a slice upon any adhesions between it and the iris were removing the cataracts that had made him

1 V Bush, ‘Automatic Microtome’, Science 115 which the further question of where and severed with a blunt spatula. As fluid blind soon after birth, that Molyneux’s (13 June 1952), pp 649–52. how to cut it does not wait, the office of flowed out of the eye, gentle pressure was thought experiment could be practically method, the idea of choice and comparison, applied to the lower lid to help dislodge tested. 2 For one such argument, consider Nick Hopwood’s interesting paper on Wilhelm His, ‘Giving Body to have occupied the ground from the first. and remove the patient’s cataract. Cheselden, working before Daviel’s Embryos: Modelling, Mechanism and the Microtome This makes clear, to a moment’s reflection, This was the first extracapsular pioneering surgery, used a method known as in Late Nineteenth-Century Anatomy’, Isis 90 (1999), that there can be no such thing as an amor- cataract extraction operation on record. ‘couching’ to push the opaque lens from the pp 462–96. phous slice, and that any waving aside of It was a seemingly miraculous procedure: line of vision with a special needle. This 3 In the course of the research for this show, I stumbled inquiry as to the sense and value of a chunk when his bandages were removed after a method had been practiced, with minimal on a fascinating precursor of this kind of projective of matter has to reckon with the simple week of bed rest, Garion could see again. success, since antiquity. The lens rather anatomy. In the late 1870s an American doctor by the name of Carl Seiler toured the northeast showing the truth of its having been born of naught Over the next 40 years, Daviel performed than the retina was thought to be the vehicle results of a large ‘immersion microtome’ of his own else but measured excision. 206 such operations, 182 of which he of sight and the cataract (from cataracta, invention. This apparently allowed him to make fine Henry James, ‘The New Novel’, 1914 claimed were successful – impressive odds Latin for waterfall) a coagulated obstruction sections of relatively large bits of the body: ‘a human larynx, a fetal foot, a cat’s kidney’. He mounted these for the time. After he explained his method between it and the pupil. By working the in such a way as to be able to use them as slides in a to the Académie Royale de Chirurgie in hardened, or ‘ripe’, cataract away from the modified magic lantern – projecting the stained slices 1753, other surgeons followed suit. Over pupil with a sharp point, pushing it to the onto a screen at medical gatherings. the next century, hundreds of different back of the eye or breaking it into pieces, it medical knives were designed to try and was hoped that sight could be restored. The Cheselden boy’s ‘conversion’ exploited the victims of his bad faith.’ Chekhov never just made a slice of life – he UNTITLED FRAMEicarium to sight (attended by a local minister) was In 1750 Taylor operated on the was a doctor who with infinite gentleness described in almost biblical terms. ‘When 66-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach in and care took thousands and thousands of Hugh Hayden the patient first received the dawn of light Leipzig. On this occasion Taylor was still fine layers off life. These he cultured, and there appeared such ecstasy in his action around when the composer’s bandages then arranged them in an exquisitely cun- The ant farm projects were initially that he seemed ready to swoon away in the were removed a week later. Having failed to ning, completely artificial and meaningful developed in collaboration with Katie surprise of joy and wonder’, wrote one restore his sight, Taylor operated on Bach’s order in which part of the cunning lay in so Vitale. Katie and I were architecture witness to the boy’s Damascus moment. In eyes a second time and administered disguising the artifice that the result looked classmates at Cornell University and the sensory confusion of first sight, the boy mercury treatment and bleeding. Rendered like the keyhole view it never had been. remained great friends following ‘thought all objects whatever touch’d his completely blind, and in terrible pain, Bach Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 1996 graduation. We decided to collaborate on a eyes’. Molyneux’s problem was therefore died a few months after his surgery from a proposal for a design show creating answered in the negative – the boy couldn’t post-operative infection. Eight years later, [Zeus] said: ‘Methinks I have a plan which sophisticated pet enclosures. The project distinguish a cube and sphere without Taylor operated on George Frideric Handel will enfeeble their strength and so extin- we realised was a collection of framed ant testing them first with his hands (he had to in London with a similar lack of success. guish their turbulence; men shall continue farms we called FRAMEicariums. learn to see) – but the debate still raged. Handel, who had already undergone several to exist, but I will cut them in two and then Childhood ant-farms are Was the boy asked leading questions? Had couching operations, spent the last decade they will be diminished in strength and re-imagined into a living work of art that he been given time to recover from the of his life in darkness. He would cry as he increased in numbers; this will have the ad- showcases the geological excavations of operation? Was he intelligent enough? listened to the aria from his oratorio, vantage of making them more profitable to the tunnels formed by ants. The Surgeons were keen to replicate Samson (1741): ‘Total eclipse: no sun, no us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and FRAMEicarium is constantly changing and Cheselden’s success and contribute to this moon, all dark amidst the blaze of noon.’ if they continue insolent and will not be qui- active. It demonstrates the elegant philosophical discussion. However, eye Jacques Daviel’s newly invented et, I will split them again and they shall hop performance of everyday tasks and surgery, with its promise of dramatic cures, technique, which might have saved Handel’s about on a single leg.’ He spoke and cut men behaviours of an ant community. remained a controversial field. Operations vision, gave some much needed legitimacy in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for Viewers of the ant farm will soon were often performed by itinerant barber to eye surgery and remained the pre- pickling, or as you might divide an egg with discover how complex and sophisticated the surgeons, rogue oculists who would travel dominant technique until the 1950s, when a hair; and as he cut them one after another, ant community really is, both in terms of across Europe, and as far as Russia and ophthalmologists began inserting artificial he bade Apollo give the face and the half behaviour and the building of its spaces. Persia, performing these dangerous lenses into the eye; now technological of the neck a turn in order that man might The tunnels created are quite geometrical procedures in the central squares of towns developments and prosthetics such as laser contemplate the section of himself: he would in form, typically sloping down to the right, and before large audiences. One such surgery, retinal simulators and touch-sight thus learn a lesson of humility. with transverse branches. The ants quack doctor, John Taylor, who had in devices offer new hope to the long-term Plato, Symposium create different spaces within the tunnels, fact been trained by Cheselden at St blind. While a few charlatan cataract cut- typically including a kitchen, a dining hall, Thomas’s, would arrive in a carriage painted ters replaced them, couching quacks like Apartment houses were seen as privileged a sleeping area and even a cemetery. with pictures of eyeballs and the motto: Taylor went out of business in the late- settings for Parisians and their plots…as The ants used in this installation ‘Qui dat videre dat viver’ (He who gives eighteenth-century. Taylor died in obscu- sites of a narrative available only to the are Lasius Niger (Black ants), a common sight, gives life). rity; with poetic justice, and like his many urban initiate, who with the aid of the urban ant found in the UK. Taylor treated people from all social victims, he also died blind. Samuel Johnson observer would become aware of ‘entire Untitled FRAMEicarium: acrylic strata, and claimed to have cured emperors, liked to cite his career as a cautionary tale, novels hidden in the walls of a house’ … The sheets, stainless steel bolts and nuts, sand, popes and kings (including George II). It an example of ‘how far impudence may visual arts represented apartment houses water, Lasius Niger (Black ants), frame from was lucrative work; if people couldn’t pay carry ignorance’. as both static objects and animated scenes, the estate of American financier, banker his exorbitant fees, he accepted valuables, as pictorial, frontal planes to be viewed and art collector J P Morgan and such a gold fob watches instead. He Notes and as spaces through which to move, if a reproduction Hudson River-esque print distributed handbills that lauded him as only illusionistically … The writers who titled Enchanted Glade by T Banks Image: Eye operation from Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie ‘Chevalier’ and ‘Ophthalmiater Royal’ and (1762–72). Wellcome Library, London. represented the city to itself thus not only used flamboyant, occult techniques, such emphasized apartment houses as elements HUGH HAYDEN is a 26 year-old architect, as administering eye drops created from the of the Parisian landscape but also saw artist and designer from Dallas based in blood of slaughtered pigeons. The French through the apartment house, treating it as New York City. Hugh was a recent winner of surgeon Pierre Guérin described how Taylor a lens or as a point of view and not simply the prestigious Skidmore Owings & Merrill would bind his patients’ couched eyes with as an opaque visual object. In the process, $20,000 Travel Fellowship to study dining gauze that included egg white, baked apple they imagined apartment houses to be as design in the US, Japan, France and Spain. or salt, and sometimes a coin: ‘He would transparent as they wanted the city to be. exalt; he would proclaim a miracle; he Sharon Marcus, ‘The Portière and the plugged the eye with firm recommendation Personification of Urban Observation’, The not to uncover it until after five or six days, Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, and he left on the fourth, after having 2004 To look at the cross-section of any plan of a an electron microscope, produce images so WEBSTER WITHDRAWN At the seed-time, the farmers of a district big city is to look at something like the sec- clear that details which could never be seen would assemble together; a human victim tion of a fibrous tumour. before become visible. Brian Dettmer was selected, was bound as a sacrifice to Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City, 1958 ‘Thinnest Slice’, Life, 1949 the altar, and was devoted to the most bar- The age of information in physical form is barous death. While the priests proclaimed Kramer: ‘I’ve cut slices so thin, I couldn’t Removal of the brain, slice by slice, in the waning. As intangible routes thrive with the omens to be propitious, our farmer even see them.’ lower animals is followed by a correspond- quicker fluidity, material and history are would come, and with a large knife, would Elaine: ‘How’d you know you cut it?’ ing reduction both of intelligence and of being lost, slipping and eroding into the take a slice from the victim, would carry it Kramer: ‘Well, I guess I just assumed.’ power of voluntary movements which disap- ether. Newer media swiftly flips forms, away to his field, and would press the blood Kramer and Elaine, discussing a meat slicer, pear together in about an equal degree. unrestricted by the weight of material and out of it while it was yet warm, and then ‘The Slicer’ (Seinfeld), 1997 Frances Emily White, ‘Muscle and Mind’, the responsibility of history. In the tangible bury it in the earth. A second, and a third, Popular Science, 1889 world we are left with a frozen material but and a fourth, would come and act a similar But the enemy were quick to gain the pro- in the intangible world we may be left with part, till the wretched man was sliced in tection of the wandering line of fence. They Two slices or two hundred, as long as the nothing. History is lost as formats change pieces while he was yet alive, and was slid down behind it with remarkable celerity, indicator points to the same position, each from physical stability to digital distress. consigned to various parts of the ground. and from this position they began briskly to slice will be exactly like the one before – The richness and depth of the book But why this barbarity? That the favour slice up the blue men. controlled by our Flexible Timer that indi- is universally respected yet often of Maree might he obtained, and that no Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, vidually times each slice of toast. undiscovered as the monopoly of the form curse, nor blight might rest upon their land; 1895 Advertisement for Toastmaster Hospitality and relevance of the information fades over and that a richer harvest might arise from Tray, Life, 1937 time. The book’s intended function has fields watered by the blood of sacrifices. Got me a movie decreased and the form remains linear in a Oh! these dark places of the earth are still I want you to know We are only tenants non-linear world. By altering physical forms full of the habitations of cruelty. Slicing up eyeballs Living on the Land of information and shifting preconceived Kazlitt Arvine, Cyclopædia of moral and I want you to know It is not ours to slice and box functions, new and unexpected roles religious anecdotes, 1848 Girly so groovy And mark it ... Contraband emerge. This is the area I currently operate I want you to know Rhoza A Walker, ‘We Are Only Tenants’, in. Through meticulous excavation or I am not going to indulge in a no-rent mani- Don’t know about you The Crisis, 1943 concise alteration I edit or dissect festo. But we put a programme before you But I am un chien andalusia communicative objects or systems such as that will lead to that result – that will first Pixies, ‘Debaser’, Doolittle, 1989 The secret of seeing through normally books, maps, tapes and other media. The take one slice, then take a second slice, and opaque, hard materials lies in the proc- medium’s role transforms. Its content is we will keep slicing at it till nothing remains. Red Murray’s long shears sliced out the ess of preparing them for the microscope. recontextualised and new meanings or M Harris (Member for East Galway), in advertisement from the newspaper in This consists essentially of slicing them interpretations emerge. Edmund Burke (ed), The Annual Register: four clean strokes. Scissors and paste. into sections thinner than the finest tissue In this work I begin with an existing A Review of Public Events at Home and James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 paper. book and seal its edges, creating an Abroad, for the Year 1887 Morton C Walling, ‘Seeing Through Coal’, enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. ‘Slice-of-life’ commercials are much in Popular Science, 1938 I cut into the surface of the book and The threat, then, posed to democratic vogue on Madison Avenue these days. The dissect through it from the front. I work with politics in an era of information saturation trend has reached such proportions in fact, His school mascot is the ‘Slicer’, an emblem knives, tweezers and surgical tools to carve and savvy reflexivity, is quite different from that some advertising men have begun to that recalls the northern Indiana town’s one page at a time, exposing each layer that associated with information scarcity. wonder, as one agency man puts it, ‘just hardworking origins; the name comes from while cutting around ideas and images of Techniques for cutting through the glut and how many slices the American public the local plant that produces meat-slicing interest. Nothing inside the books is thin-sliced thought are offered up as strate- will take’. equipment, and La Porte High School is the relocated or implanted, only removed. gies for managing information proliferation Peter Bart, ‘Advertising: ‘‘Slice of Life’’ only school in the nation with the Slicer Images and ideas are revealed to expose and the threat of misrepresentation, but Sparks a Debate’, The New York Times, mascot. alternate histories and memories. My work they reinforce and reproduce the logic of 1963 Eric Fruth, ‘Hoosier Harriers Then and Now’, is a collaboration with the existing material the affective fact. Running Times, 2008 and its past creators and the completed Mark Andrejevic, ‘Thin-Sliced Thoughts A cutting machine so delicate that it can pieces expose new relationships of the and Theory’s Ends’, MediaTropes, 2010 slice microscopic germs in two has given And the Dial-0-Matic® slicer lets you eas- book’s internal elements exactly where they scientists their first means of seeing and ily control the precise thickness of foods have been since their original conception. Here a vertical labyrinth in a tower, like a studying the minute structures within the for drying uniformity. slice through a helical shell; there a maze nucleus of a cell. The machine cuts tis- Ronco Dial-0-Matic Slicer advertisement, BRIAN DETTMER is originally from Chica- of obstacles in the street, first cousin to the sue into slices so thin that edgewise they Vegetarian Times, 1993 go, where he studied at Columbia College. tangle of the forest. could not be seen by the naked eye. But He currently lives and works in Atlanta, Paul Hammond, Constellations of Miró, these infinitesimal films, examined under Georgia. Dettmer’s work has been exhib- Breton, 2001 ited and collected throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe Socialist human nature is, after all, but a BAYLEY STREET TO BEDFORD SQUARE BIOGRAPHIES COLOUR IMAGES slice from the common stock, and is not 2008–2010 CURATORS OF THE SLICE cast in any ultra-heroic mould. 1. Uta Kögelsberger J Keir Hardie, ‘The International Socialist Kevin Sheppard D GRAHAM BURNETT is Professor of His- road series, Yosemite, 2006 Congress’, The Nineteenth Century and tory of Science at Princeton University and 120 x 150 cm After, 1904 Our view of the world is a lie, corrupted by an editor at Cabinet magazine. He is the au- perspective. We know objects further away thor of four books, including Descartes and 2. Sue Barr What in fact results from selection and edit- are not smaller than objects closer to us, the Hyperbolic Quest (2005) and Trying Contrada Cerrano, 2010 ing is a compression of reality, a slice of but our eyes tell us otherwise. Leviathan (2007), which won the New York Sotto A14 Autostrada Adriatica reality – which must nonetheless reflect the How can we escape this view? What City Book Award and the Hermalyn Prize in 120 x 90 cm essential truth without distortion … Produc- does the world look like without perspec- Urban History. His video collaboration with tion techniques may not be used to distort tive? What does the world really look like? the artist Lisa Young, “Free-Fall: The Life 3. Eva Stenram reality nor to have the effect of producing My photographs are an attempt to and Times of Bud ‘Crosshairs’ MacGinitie” Per Pulverem Ad Astra 5.AP1, 2007 editorial comment. answer these questions. I want to was shown at the Wellcome Collection C-type /unique print ‘Corporate Policies – 1.2, Journalistic revisit the world with orthographic eyes. I earlier this year. In 2011 he will complete 23 x 34 cm Standards and Practices, Sect IV Produc- want to represent the world truthfully, not a two-year Mellon Foundation Fellowship Source images courtesy of tion Standards, B Information Processing, how my eyes see it, but how it really is. supporting work at the intersection of sci- NASA/JPL-Caltech 2 Editing’, Canadian Broadcasting The section is a way of seeing ence, technology, and the visual arts. Corporation/Radio Canada relationships between spaces. Relation- 4. Bleda y Rosa ships between main rooms and service CHRISTOPHER TURNER is the editor of Mendaza, invierno de 1834 One writer in International Design Maga- spaces, between inside and out, between Icon magazine. A former editor-in-chief of Mendaza, 1995 zine waxes philosophical about the Visible roof and basement, between people and Modern Painters and an editor at Cabinet, 85 x 150 cm Human Project (‘… a mesmerising beauty space, between permanent and temporary, he is a regular contributor to the London and realism … Death never looked this between formal and informal. The section is Review of Books, the Sunday Telegraph 5. Hélène Binet good’), describing the interior of Jernigan’s a portrait of place. and The Guardian. He completed a PhD at Paysages en poésie, 2004 skull as ‘a quiet cathedral whose congrega- the London Consortium – a post-graduate 100 x 100 cm tion and clergy have been removed, al- KEVIN SHEPPARD studied architecture at PhD programme in the humanities at the though the sacred remains.’ This epitomizes Westminster University and the AA. After University of London, of which the 6. Corinne Silva for me the instrumentality of the aesthetic graduating, he pursued a career in the Architectural Association is a Part – and Badlands, 2009 itself, which requires that we replicate emerging field of digital special effects. helped set up the Central Cities Institute, Fibreglass rock II, Desert Springs gated Jernigan’s execution by abstracting the He has worked on numerous Hollywood an urban think-tank based at the University golf community, 127 x 101 cm image of his body from the conditions of his films and TV projects and has received of Westminster. Turner’s Adventures in the life. When we see his cadaver we are not multiple awards. He is currently head of Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution meant to ask questions about who he was, creative 3D at Saddington Baynes. He has Came to America will be published in 2011. how he came to die, and what it means for also taught at the AA and been a visiting the state to take a man’s life. Rather, his critic at the Bartlett, Goldsmiths College death as an empirical and specific subject and Falmouth School of Art. was the precondition for his elevation to the status of an aesthetic event that will place us in touch with the universal questions of man’s spiritual identity. The aesthetic de- mands a kind of amnesia of the object; we must forget where it came from. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics after the End of Art: An Interview with Susan Buck Morss’, Art Journal, 1997 No matter how thin you slice it, it’s www.aaschool.ac.uk still baloney. Alfred E Smith, Governor of New York, 1936

Exhibition curated by D. Graham Burnett and Christopher Turner and designed by AA Exhibitions: Vanessa Norwood, Lee Regan and Luke Currall.

With thanks to: Catherine Hansen Brian Miller Anna Platt Selina Hurley and Emma Duggan at the Science Museum Dr Marie-Louise Collard at Wellcome Library

Exhibition guide produced and edited by AA Print Studio Design: Wayne Daly Art Direction: Zak Kyes

Printed by Aldridge, England

Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square AA Exhibitions London WC1B 3ES www.aaschool.ac.uk/exhibitions T +44 (0)20 7887 4000 F +44 (0)20 7414 0782 The Slice: Cutting To See Architectural Association (Inc) AA Gallery Registered Charity No 311083 20 November – 15 December 2010 Company Limited by Guarantee Monday to Friday 10am–7pm Registered in England No 171402 Saturday 10am–3pm Registered Office as above 1 2

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