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Francisco Sobrino. Transformation Instable-Juxtaposition-Superposition 6 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00142/1753695/octo_a_00142.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Francisco Sobrino. Transformation instable-juxtaposition-superposition 6. 1962–63. © Francisco Sobrino. Kineticism-Spectacle-Environment* Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00142/1753695/octo_a_00142.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 LARRY BUSBEA During the 1960s, the sublatory project of the historic avant-garde seemed to be transforming from a revolutionary utopian dream into a counterrevolution - ary cultural inevitability. The breakdown of the ideological barriers separating the arts, and moreover those separating art from the “praxis of life,” was being effected not by artistic visionaries but by mass culture, by a society caught up in a seemingly ineluctable movement toward a consumerist and spectacular world. 1 Of course, under these conditions, the sublation could only be seen, in Peter Bürger’s terms, as “false.” 2 In this sense, the interpenetration of art and life came into perfect alignment with what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublima - tion,” in which “higher culture becomes part of the material culture.” 3 But this counterrevolutionary model of desublimation was not simply understood as a vertical collapse of cultural strata. It was immersive. It had a breadth and depth that allowed it to be experienced quite literally as a new kind of environment . “The horrors and the comforts of functional architecture” 4 were merely symptomatic of the revelation of this new environment, which found many theoretical formulations: “urban society,” “the society of the spec - * I would like to thank several individuals who encouraged me in developing this material and provided me with venues in which to present my ideas: Daniel Adler and Jeannette Redensek, Elyse Speaks and Chuck Loving, John Harwood, and Oscar Olivier-Didier. My sincere thanks also to Laurence Le Poupon at the Archives de la critique d’art, where the papers of Frank Popper are held. 1. This transformation is noted by Hal Foster: “A reconnection of art and life has occurred, but under the terms of the culture industry, not the avant-garde, some devices of which were long ago assimilated into the operations of spectacular culture (in part through the very repetitions of the neo- avant-garde).” The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 21. Jacques Rancière has suggest - ed that these two movements—art becoming life or life becoming art—have constituted the very struc - ture of modern aesthetics and social life: “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 (March –April 2004), pp. 133 –51. 2. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 3. “[The] liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of ‘cultural values,’ but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction on a massive scale.” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 57. 4. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man , p. 11. OCTOBER 144, Spring 2013, pp. 92 –114. © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 94 OCTOBER tacle,” “postindustrial society,” etc. In each of these instances, something funda - mental about the human milieu seemed irreversibly changed or intensified (labor, spatial patterns, technology, communication). 5 Accordingly, each such formulation implied a profound disruption in the apparent barriers separating the human subject’s inner psychical and existential life from the exterior envi - ronment of intensified urbanization, information, and technology. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00142/1753695/octo_a_00142.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 The porosity of the border between interior and exterior life was perceived acutely in France, and it was during the historical crucible of these transforma - tions—the 1960s—that the sociologist Edgar Morin attempted to make some sort of descriptive generalizations. Morin’s 1962 L’Esprit du temps became a touchstone for those seeking to understand the cultural vicissitudes of this emerging environ - ment, one in which the “uninterrupted progress of technology” was beginning to have observable effects on humanity. For Morin, the “strange noosphere” of the tertiary era was one in which, quoting Clement Greenberg, “there is no disconti - nuity between art and life.” 6 Accordingly, employing the ascendant cybernetic vocabulary of the time, he described the new global situation as a network—or even “nervous system”—in which “there is no longer a single molecule of air that is not vibrating with messages that some apparatus, gesture, does not render immediately audible or visible.” 7 The connection between this pulsing, networked world and the human perceptual apparatus was more than just metaphorical, and Morin described the merging of the two using an incredibly charged metaphor: a “second colonization” (the first being the literal colonization of the globe), in which the human soul became a “new Africa” penetrated and filled by the prod - ucts of the culture industry. 8 Guy Debord would also invoke the trope of colonization to describe the visual dissemination of the commodity: “The spectacle corresponds to the histori - cal moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.” 9 But whereas Debord saw the spectacle as a visual phenomenon with the exclusive effect of reification, Morin and others saw a potentially liberating potential in its inclusionary logic. Indeed, communications technologies, according to Morin, led 5. As Sanford Kwinter has recently written: “We cultivate and theorize our technological environ - ment today in strange and partial ways, without ever admitting to ourselves that this is what it is, an environment .” Sanford Kwinter, Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Barcelona and New York: Actar, 2008), p. 18. 6. Edgar Morin, L’Esprit du temps (Paris: Grasset, 1962; 1975 edition cited), p. 14. Morin employs the quote from Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and Kitsch” on p. 20. The term “noosphere” is taken from Teilhard de Chardin, whose mystical theories of human evolution were published in Le Phénomène humain (Paris: Ed. Du Seuil, 1955). 7. Morin, L’Esprit du temps , p. 13. 8. Morin, L’Esprit du temps , pp. 13–14. Morin introduced the Frankfurt School concept of the Culture Industry into French discourse. For more on how the theme of colonization and in particular the French war in Algeria (of which Morin was an outspoken critic) shaped postwar culture, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 29. Kineticism-Spectacle-Environment 95 to a “democratization of culture,” and to potentially more participatory forms of cultural production. 10 For Morin, modern culture tended toward the spectacle, which, in contradistinction to Debord’s definition, encouraged the “consumer imaginary” into a mode of aesthetic engagement and participation—a formula - tion that anticipated Michel de Certeau’s understanding of everyday life. 11 Indeed, the spirit of interactivity would infuse much artistic production at this Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00142/1753695/octo_a_00142.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 time. The art critic Guy Habasque signaled the enthusiasm for this conception of art in recognizing, in reference to a vast field of multidimensional, animated art of the 1960s, that “[this work] is no longer the petrification of a privileged moment or aspect, it is a spectacle. ”12 Morin’s technological agnosticism and his willingness to recognize some positive aspects to the “integrated society,” as he often described it, make his work resonate strongly with that of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), whose experiments with kinetic art, spectacle, and participatory envi - ronments occupied a gray area between technological integration and social intervention. Several key works and essays of the GRAV will constitute the main objects of analysis of this essay, as well as their theoretical inflection by Frank Popper, whose 1968 exhibition “Cinétisme-Spectacle-Environnement” has pro - vided my title. As Popper’s sequence of terms suggests, the present analysis will move quickly beyond the simple device of kinetic art, suggesting that kineticism itself maintained at best a metaphorical relationship with its true raison d’être: the highly charged spaces of the modern environment. The problem of the environment and the architecture that often structured it was one of the key problems of postwar art and design, from the formulation of a synthèse des arts majeurs by Le Corbusier and his colleagues to the rise of institu - tional critique in European and American Conceptual art. Commenting recently on Daniel Buren’s artistic development from the moment of the Hommes/Sandwichs (1968) signboards, in which people held aloft his “signature” vertical-stripe compositions and circulated around the Palais de Tokyo, to later works in which these same stripes are applied to existing architecture and public spaces, Benjamin Buchloh was moved to ask a question that could very easily be applied to the work of the GRAV as well: At
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