The longer we live in postmodern times, the less we take for granted the once familiar assumption of their distinction from the modern. The older postmodernism gets, the more it loses that exclusive »presentness« that once made the modern appear outdated – whether it was a case of bidding it farewell or attempting to rescue it. And the more it is interpreted as a concept encompassing culturally divergent experiences and perspectives, the more it becomes the focus of historical interest, which shifts from the object to the meta level in an attempt to pinpoint the specific forms of articulation and ways of speaking that constitute what is »postmodern«. Now that we have almost become accustomed to using the adjective »postmodern« in our everyday speech, whether as a pejorative reference to arbitrariness and bad taste, or as an appreciation of complexity and situatedness, there seems to be a call for an archeology or genealogy of pertinent conceptions and their horizons of meaning.

Charles Jencks, as author of the standard work »The Language of Post-Modern Architecture« (1977) one of the key figures in this story, entitled the seventh edition of his book (2002) »The New Paradigm in Architecture«, according to the author »because the word ‹postmodern› has become so contested and confused that it almost means nothing – or everything«. Jencks and the saga of the successive editions of his classic are one of the »case studies« in Martin Beck's artistic review of transformations »at the edge of the modern«, which he had previously dubbed »half modern, half something else«. The continuation of this project in Beck's »an Exhibit« show at the Grazer Kunstverein is devoted not only to Jencks but also to Reyner Banham, a second architecture critic, or more precisely to his late work »Scenes in America Deserta« (1982), a book about the deserts of the American Southwest.

As the framework for this confrontation, Beck constructs an exhibition display whose modernistic vocabulary is overlaid on the irregular rooms of the Renaissance building in which the Kunstverein is housed. An orthogonal white ideal space is framed by a line of beige on the wall that masks the »surplus« room segments, surrounding the modern white cell like a framing mat and transforming it into a kind of picture. Arranged along the coordinates of this cell, Beck places three elements selected from the construction kit of modernist space disposition: a cube at the entrance with signs on its surface to guide visitors through the exhibit; a long movable wall as video projection surface; and a platform suspended from the ceiling to hold the projectors. Martin Beck is harking back here to a project carried out by London's Independent Group in 1957, an abstract exhibition model also entitled »an Exhibit«. In that show the space and the perception-organizing elements within it – panels of different colors, hanging, floating, lying flat – are inscribed inside a White Cube, becoming themselves the sole focus of the exhibit. The project can be understood as a late example of modernist interior design in the form of an exhibition, resonating with echoes of artists ranging from Friedrich Kiesler to El Lissitzky. It appears notable today insofar as its orthogonal purism seems almost like a last-ditch attempt to rebel against the penetration of the living outside world, which the Independent Group, whose members included not only Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway but also Reyner Banham, was working its way toward as spearhead of the British Pop Art movement. On the other hand, the exhibit had less to do with artistic objects than with an empty apparatus, »to be played, viewed, populated«, that is, subject to use of whatever kind, not barring even modification. Whatever ambivalences were ascribed to the historical model, the show's character as a projection space is ideally suited in its adapted version to evoke reflections on our shifting concept of space, which could very well be regarded as »half modern, half something else«.

»For me, postmodernism has always been modern and has always been critical of modernism«, says Charles Jencks in an interview that Martin Beck conducted for his own book on the publication history of »The Language of Post-Modern Architecture«. What Beck traces in his exhibition and in his book, published in Florian Pumhösl's Montage series, can be read as a micro-history of the articulation of the postmodern attitude in the narrowly defined field of architectural theory. His history is recounted in close reliance on the various means of representation available to him -- the text, the illustrations and the layout. A comparative review of the seven editions published between 1977 and 2002, each time modified and expanded, reveals an attempt at recording a cultural and historical upheaval that begins with a polemic against the architectonic modern, but is then increasingly confronted with the differentiation of the new way of thinking and building being propagated, and finally finds itself forced to introduce new parameters, clarify arguments and to draw »internal« borders. Beck does not limit his analysis to the discursive plane, but also makes reference to the importance of cover photos, graphics and format as means of communicating the arguments that consecutively took the field, each defining the respective up-to-the-minute postmodern. In the exhibition Beck supplements these genealogical studies with a series of photographs that he commissioned. A number of photographers from divergent fields were each given an edition of »The Language of Post-Modern Architecture« to photograph in a certain genre. The diverse aesthetic strategies of these genres (fashion-, product-, architecture-, art photography, etc.) not only duplicate the suggestive photographic presentation of architecture as an ideologically colored way of backing up an argument; they also bear witness to the different readings and adaptations a work like that by Jencks is subject to under specific regional, historical and disciplinary conditions.

As Jencks was bringing out the first edition of his book, Reyner Banham -- Jencks' doctoral adviser and the key figure marking the modernist boundary for the younger man -- was roving around in the American desert, becoming more and more of a »desert freak«. Beck includes in his show some photos by Tim Street-Porter of Banham all alone at Silurian Lake in California, riding along on a folding bicycle – the same signature vehicle on which Banham could be encountered on the streets of London in the sixties. While Jencks was turning away from the stiff geometry of the universalized modernist concept of space and agitating in favor of the complexity, localness and communicative dimension of the postmodern space, the aging modernist was withdrawing into a space »in which ›Modern Man‹ ought to feel at home«. This quote comes from the dual-channel video projection in which Martin Beck sets citations from Banham's book, »Scenes in America Deserta«, against pictures of the desert sites he visited. The abstract, immeasurable space of the desert, in which Banham is first interested only in finding architectonic traces, more and more becomes for him the spatial paradigm par excellence. On his bicycle at the salt sea he feels »total freedom«, »the visual high of pure space«. He imagines transporting Mies van der Rohe's buildings there, which would have given some architectonic order to this endless space, and he reminds us of »modern man's last frontier of exploration (…) space itself«.

Beck translates moments in Banham's fascination into similarly geometric images: a 360° pan over Silurian Lake or a moving train as horizontal space divider in an empty landscape, the straight line of which is repeated in the adjacent image of a detail from Frank Lloyd Wright's desert house, Taliesin West. Such motifs – the train as reference to early film and the changes in our perception due to acceleration; the salt sea as testing ground for new technologies of mobility – locate the abstract space within media history and the utopianism of the modern. Banham has doubtless arrived at a completely different »edge of the modern« than Jencks. And his unique book on the desert is, compared with that of Jencks, perhaps merely a side note. Nevertheless, Martin Beck succeeds at suggesting how in this volume, as opposed to the seven editions by Jencks, a position is developed that is increasingly interested in fathoming which sources feed the incredibly durable modernist perception. At the same time, we cannot help being suspicious of a position that, in the void of the desert, is fascinated by the multiplicity of types taken on by a (European) »modern man«, and tries, ultimately in vain, to explain the strong sensation of »natural beauty« in aesthetic terms, in the end understanding all of these reflections »even less than before«. In its inner progression from stable objects to the relativity of perspective, from the observation of phenomena to self-scrutiny, »Scenes in America Deserta« sometimes seems almost more »postmodern« than Jencks' proclamation of paradigm change. This is doubtless no more than an impression. But it is thanks to Beck's subtle preparation of thought movements and their materializations that the modern vs. postmodern dialectic begins to gain in substance going beyond ideological differences. Beck's own practice corresponds with this sensibility for media and formats, alternating as it does between artistic authorship and the role of a curator who produces, represents and commissions and thus also harks back to the appropriation discourse of the late seventies.

Grazer Kunstverein, 6 June to 13 July 2003

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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