Deconstruction IsIn America: A New Sense of the Political by Anselm Haverkamp & H Dodge

Author:Anselm Haverkamp & H Dodge [Haverkamp, Anselm & Dodge, H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Essays, General
ISBN: 9780814773161
Google: FZ4-AAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 21986340
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 1995-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

Presentness and the “Being-Only-Once” of Architecture

Peter Eisenman

In her book, The Optical Unconscious (1993), Rosalind Krauss discusses a Jackson Pollock painting in relationship to its position in space. She contends that when a Pollock painting is placed in a horizontal position, that is, on the floor as it was painted, it is a “savage work”. But the moment the canvas is taken off of the floor and moved to a vertical position on the wall, Krauss continues, it becomes “naturalized,” reinstitutionalized and reinscribed into the discourse of painting.

All of this is said with an uncharacteristic innocence about the possible effect of the floor or the wall on this change in perception. She assumes that one can lift things up and down, off and on, without any discussion of why the relationship between floor or wall, or, for that matter between the floor or the wall and the painting, could cause this to happen. What is clear in Krauss’s argument is that the contexts provided by architecture, in this case the floor and the wall, do effect how the subject conceptualizes a painting. Yet the issue of how or why such an effect is possible is not discussed. Such an omission is by no means unique to Krauss’s argument. Most of those outside of architecture assume that architectural conventions have a thought to be naturalness with respect to such things as walls and floors. Jacques Derrida even points out that we must be wary of the idea that architecture “is destined for habitation,” that the concept of architecture is “a heritage which comprehends us even before we could submit it to thought.” Walter Benjamin also attempts to explain this idea of “destined for habitation” in a different way. He says in “architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. Architecture cannot be understood by optical means alone, that is by contemplation. It is mastered gradually by habit.” Thus in one sense the wall is already seen in any specific context by habit. This could be responsible for the naturalizing of the Pollock painting, since it is known that all paintings by force of habit are hung on walls and not on floors. Clearly, the question of habit and the habitual is already predetermined when dwellings are called places of habitation as opposed to say places of occupation. But this assumption of habit alone, it will be argued here, is not enough to account for the naturalizing effect of the wall on the Pollock painting. Nor can the ideas of an a priori destiny or naturalness, the assumption that “this is the way things are,” be the only cause of this effect. Clearly something else must be at work. And it is this something else that makes architecture a problematic discourse.

The very conditions that bring about this idea of an a priori destiny or a thought to be naturalness of architecture, and thus what makes architecture problematic, lie initially in the fact that architecture is alone of all the discourses in its particular linking of its iconicity with its instrumentality, its meaning with its objecthood.

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