Geometry and the Social
Published in Balcon, Madrid, n. 8–9 (1991): 64-84. [Original article title: “An Introduction”]
Adapted from a lecture delivered at the Vienna Secession in conjunction with the exhibition Modern Detour, in 1990.
In our culture, geometry is usually seen as a sign for the rational. For me, for whatever reason, that idea is reversed, and geometry has a primarily psychological rather than intellectual significance. I really see my development as an artist as trying to come to terms with my psychological attraction to or obsession with geometry. I have tried to make conscious an attraction which, when I was a young artist, was unconscious. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that, in general, moving from unconscious actions, urges, or imagery, to a conscious understanding of those things is crucial to how an artist matures.
In any case, I started working with geometry in the 1970s when I was a graduate student. At that time, along with many other artists in the ’70s, I was interested in the idea of a connection between geometry and the natural order – the idea that behind appearance there might be some kind of abstract order in nature, and perhaps that this order might be expressed by means of geometric forms or rhythms. Personally, I was most interested in the use of geometry in tribal art rather than in classical sources. I was interested how, in African tribal art or traditional Native American art, one sees the artist using geometric rhythms and progressions to express natural rhythms and patterns.
At the end of the ’70s, that point of view and that kind of involvement with non-Western art became impossible for me. I think at that time there was a watershed, reflected in many artists’ work, after which many of the truisms about cross-cultural experience, nature, as well as various other claims associated with Modernism and modernity, became problematic.
Thus, geometric sources outside of Western art also became problematic for me. I began to look at anthropological research in a more critical way, and I began to really question if we could look at other cultures without having the mechanisms of interpretation of our own culture completely color our perceptions.
In 1980, I moved back to New York City, where I had grown up. What impressed me there, on a very immediate level, was the functional role that geometry served in a giant metropolis – the role that geometry had in housing and in moving people, in commerce, and in the control of everyday life. I began to see the city as something of a geometric machine in which geometry was the most efficient means of moving people and things.
At the same time, and for the same reasons, the human body also became problematic for me. I began to lose faith in it as an image in art. It seemed to me that these geometric systems were so pervasive, so monumental, and so powerful that the human body, which had been itself a symbol of power since at least the Renaissance, could no longer be considered as such. In that way I found myself very much in opposition to the development of Neo-Expressionism and neo-figuration in the early 1980s.
After moving back to New York, I also began to come into contact with various artists and critics who were in touch with the issues that have come to be labeled ‘Post-Structuralist.’ This was of much help to me. I had been educated in a very humanist tradition of art history, so both the skepticism and the social and historical emphasis that is characteristic of deconstructive thought was very important to me.
Thus, at the beginning of the 1980s, I began to reexamine the nature of geometry in art and its symbolic role in culture. For the most part, geometry had always been considered as something classical, timeless, and ahistorical, as something divorced from the social landscape. In fact, geometry is often described as an a priori structure of human thought – that we naturally think in terms of geometric configurations and organization. I felt the need to challenge these assumptions based on my own growing intuitive perceptions of the city as functional machine.
I wanted to redefine geometry as something that was in the world, that had a history, and that was tied to issues of power and control. I wanted to show that geometry was not simply classical beauty, but that the use of geometry was fundamentally linked to the goals and objectives of certain groups at certain times. In examining these issues, the work of Michel Foucault was particularly important to me, especially his book on prison systems, Discipline and Punish. In it, he examined the ideas of incarceration and spatial control – the control of bodies in space – and traced the development of the prison, factory, school, and hospital in the nineteenth century as mechanisms of social control.
I am often criticized for my interest in theoretical writing and critical thought. I certainly was interested in Foucault. I was even interested in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, as well as a number of other writers. But I am really only interested in writers who talk about space. I have never had any interest in Jacques Lacan or in Jacques Derrida, for that matter. My involvement with writing is not an attempt to find a text to illustrate, but rather to find an affinity with work in other fields that also constitutes an analysis of the same issues of social space.
At the same time, I was thinking that the history of geometric art in the twentieth century could be reexamined and perhaps tied to these issues. I began to see in the Analytic Cubism of Picasso the fragmentation of the human body, how the body was increasingly thought of and analyzed according to abstract notions of planes and linear vectors. In the work of Mondrian, I saw a kind of utopian model for what an idealized and totalized geometric space might be like. I was also interested in the work of Barnett Newman, and particularly in the religious connotations that he gave to geometry. It seemed very curious to me that the idea of spirituality should be located in the idea of geometric form. I speculated that this equation between spirituality and geometry had a specific social role: if we see the geometric invested with the spiritual, then the geometrization of the space we live in and the geometrization of our lives becomes more acceptable.
So I wanted to draw attention to this geometricized, rationalized, quantified world. I saw it as a world characterized by efficiency, by regimentation of movement, and by the rationalization of all social structures and bureaucracies, whether in the corporation, government, or university. It is a world also characterized by the commodification and quantification of all aspects of human activity – where one can put a number or a dollar sign on any human activity.
But, most importantly, with this new order comes the idea of the supremacy of the model over specific reality in both the arenas of analysis and production. This is a crucial point that really comes from the work of Jean Baudrillard. As an example, nowadays in Europe or the United States, if you want to open a restaurant, you don’t say to yourself, “Well, what should a restaurant look like, or what would be the most interesting kind of restaurant?” You just sign up with McDonald’s, and they give you the perfect model for the restaurant. Of course, this is also the idea behind mass production – that the model is created and then successive specific examples are made. This idea of the ascendancy of the model over the specific is additionally important because it applies not only to the issue of industrial material production but also to the realm of intellectual activity. Whether in the social sciences, the physical sciences, or in psychology, we have to have a model of how things behave before we can think about them.
I have also come to believe that this world of the technocratic and the rationalized has become self-enclosed and totalized. We have reached the state in which this ideology has become so dominant that it is inescapable. There are important symptoms of this all around. First of all, the symbolic and the technical have become the same. In the nineteenth century, we still had the image of the priest and that of the doctor, one filling the spiritual role and the other the technical. In our culture today, the doctor has basically won. The doctor becomes the priest, as does the scientist or the psychologist.
We have also seen Western technical thought reach an unprecedented state of hegemony across the planet. This process has accelerated dramatically in the last twenty or thirty years, with technocratic thought coming to dominate the cultures of Asia as well as those of Europe and the Americas.
Today we also have the phenomenon of nuclear physics and nuclear destruction. This is a very important issue because, with our faith in nuclear physics, we believe that the most basic and powerful forces of nature can be subject to abstract analysis and redeployed. Similarly, with genetic engineering we have become convinced that our basic understanding of what life is can be apprehended by means of a linguistic code.
And lastly, we have the hegemony of the computer. This is something that has very much concerned me on an experiential level. Almost all knowledge is stored in computers nowadays, and almost all communication is mediated through the computer. However, I think we are totally unaware of the impact of this level of mediation in our lives. Further, the computer represents a final concrete realization of Cartesian thought – it is abstract thought made “real.” The Cartesian universe of duality, zero and one, and of horizontal and vertical axes, which had until mid-century been only an abstract notion, is today made real and is physicalized in the computer.
In light of these ideas, I also began to look at the art of the 1970s as also reflecting this increasingly totalized situation. During the ’70s, many people saw Conceptual and Performance Art as representing the beginning of an era in which the individual could act freely beyond the restraints of commodification and alienated labor. The work of Richard Serra, for example, was intended to transcend the art object as a commodity and present an alternative to the alienation of industrial work. But I have come increasingly to believe that the ’70s did not represent the beginning of a new freedom of consciousness; rather, it was the last fluorescent moment of the Enlightenment idea that the individual could act in a free field.
I would like to make one last point. In my own work as an artist, I have tried to develop a position in which I am conscious of the class function of the art that I, as well as others, make. What has struck me is that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, art became much more hermetically coded, such as in Cubism and Constructivism, for example. A new kind of specialized, coded knowledge was needed by the viewer in order to decipher it. It seems that this shift to increased specialization and codedness took place precisely at the moment when the dynamics of capitalism were becoming a dominant factor in social relations, and class identity in Europe and the United States was becoming more fluid. People began to move between classes within their lifetimes much more than they used to in either stratified aristocratic society or even in the relatively slow-moving mercantile culture of the nineteenth century.
I began to view modern art as a way in which the managerial and professional classes – comprised of lawyers, doctors, architects, planners, entrepreneurs, and university professors who control the decision-making processes in Western societies – could create a mechanism of class self-identification. I see their identification with Modernism and modern art as a way of creating a class gateway, a means of constructing a barrier between the petite bourgeoisie and the haute bourgeoisie, to use traditional terms. Thus, if we identify the high level of coding in twentieth-century art with this kind of class function, we are compelled to take a self-critical look at it. We cannot simply be complacent with our own privileged entry into this realm of coded knowledge.
That is one reason that an interest in geometry in painting can still be viable – because geometry is also the language of that managerial-professional class. It is the language of the corporation and of flow-charts; it is the language of urban planning and of communications. If we can look at geometry in Modernist art critically, I think we can begin to critically analyze our assumptions about our own language as members of a certain class, rather than simply trying to critique the language of other classes and subgroups in our society.