Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

L’autre moi – a reflection on Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore





Artist talk \ Dialogue \ Q&A
Tuesday 02.07.19
8:00p.m.
Lothringer13 Halle, Munich

After a double nice Vernissage full of tremolo and transpiration, the gates of the Lothringer13 are now open for the two exhibitions in the Halle and in the Nest.
The framework-program launches today with a special anniversary, looking not just 50 years back to Stonewall but to 100 years Claude Cahun: The successful Danish author Kristina Stoltz devotes herself in her freshly printed book "Cahun" to the phenomenon of the artist pseudonym Claude Cahun in a literary way. In her novel, the artists Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe are the central figures, who as a couple and partners playfully broke up gender roles but even more lived out the role of the doubled individual and the shared identity. 
An evening for the "Early Masters of Twinning" about whom Kristina Stoltz in the exhibition booklet writes: „To speak of Claude Cahun leads us as a matter of course into the thematic field of twinship, for barely has one scraped the surface of Cahun’s art and biography before it becomes clear that what is known to us as Claude Cahun’s experimental self-portrait art involved not one person but two.“ 

Kristina Stoltz has been invited to participate into the exhibition at Lothringer13 Halle and we have the wonderful opportunity to welcome her in Munich.
As a specialist into Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s biography and work, she recently published a book, that is written after yearlong research. The novel Cahun is a free interpretation and imagination that leans into the all possible details you can gain in the interesting life of the couple, work relation and sisterhood of Cahun & Moore.
In a close cooperation Kristina Stoltz & Lene Harbo Pedersen selected the most relevant excerpts from the book & photographs for the exhibition. The text excerpts are exclusively translated into English & German and draws upon an observation and strengthen that behind the name ‚Cahun‘ a couple appears, not one but two very special people Lucy Schwob also known as Claude Cahun & Susanne Malherbe with the artist name Marcel Moore. Both with more than one identity, working with multiple genders and during the wartime with multiple voices – and making a very special mark in the history of arts.
The evening will be precious hot hours with Kristina Stoltz talk, a dialogue with the curator and open talk with the audience on twins, twinning and the queer world.
The talk will be held in English
The translation was made possible with a generous support by the Danish Art Foundation.
English by Martin Aitken / German by Peter Urban Halle


https://www.lothringer13.com/veranstaltungen/lautre-moi-a-reflection-on-claude-cahun-marcel-moore/

Monday, February 8, 2016

Guns, class war and a transvestite cat: what a new Beatrix Potter story reveals about the author




A Beatrix Potter story written more than 100 years ago is to be published for the first time, introducing a brand new character: Kitty in Boots. 
The tale, of a gun-toting cat who leads a double life, was found near-complete in an exercise book – and shows Beatrix Potter at her darkest, says Gaby Wood
Doppelgängers and transvestites, guns and gangsters, secret lives: these are not the first things that come to mind when considering the work of Beatrix Potter. Yet the creator of Peter Rabbit and Hunca-Munca once wrote a story that featured all of them. The Tale of Kitty in Boots was written just before the outbreak of the First World War but never published in Potter’s lifetime. Over 100 years later, Penguin Random House will finally release what they describe as Potter’s “24th Tale” – a book that may turn everything we think we know about her on its head.
By Gary Wood

Friday, January 23, 2015

Melt with us


duskin drum, "Exotic fluids for everyday desires," 2013

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Aveux non avenus







Claude Cahun et Marcel Moore, Aveux non avenus. (Unavowed confessions). Paris:Editions du Carrefour, 1929-1930. Book containing 237pp. with text and 10 photogravures.Paris, Ile-de-France, FranceI, illustrated book, photogravures, book (overall) 22.0 h x 17.0 w x 2.4 d cm 


Saturday, July 7, 2012

Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen

A country tries to banish gender.

By most people’s standards, Sweden is a paradise for liberated women. It has the highest proportion of working women in the world, and women earn about two-thirds of all degrees. Standard parental leave runs at 480 days, and 60 of those days are reserved exclusively for dads, causing some to credit the country with forging the way for a new kind of nurturing masculinity. In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world.
But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don't identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.
Activists are lobbying for parents to be able to choose any name for their children (there are currently just 170 legally recognized unisex names in Sweden). The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa. A Swedish children's clothes company has removed the "boys" and "girls" sections in its stores, and the idea of dressing children in a gender-neutral manner has been widely discussed on parenting blogs. This Swedish toy catalog recently decided to switch things around, showing a boy in a Spider-Man costume pushing a pink pram, while a girl in denim rides a yellow tractor.



The Swedish Bowling Association has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments in order to make the sport gender-neutral. Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils' genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as "buddies." So, a teacher would say "good morning, buddies" or "good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack" rather than, "good morning, boys and girls." They believe this fulfills the national curriculum's guideline that preschools should "counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles" and give girls and boys "the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles."
Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a "proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon]."The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites. It was sparked by the publication of Sweden's first ever gender-neutral children's book, Kivi och Monsterhund (Kivi and Monsterdog). It tells the story of Kivi, who wants a dog for "hen's" birthday. The male author, Jesper Lundqvist, introduces several gender-neutral words in the book. For instance the words mammor and pappor (moms and dads) are replaced with mappor and pammor.
The free lifestyle magazine, Nöjesguiden, which is distributed in major Swedish cities and is similar to the Village Voice, recently released an issue using hen throughout. In his column, writer Kawa Zolfagari says, "It can be hard to handle the male ego sometimes. I myself tend to get a stinging feeling when a female friend has had it with sexism or has got hurt because of some guy and desperately blurts out some generalisation about men. Sometimes I think 'Hen knows me, hen knows I am not an idiot, why does hen speak that way of all men?' Nöjesguiden's editor, Margret Atladottir, said hen ought to be included in the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in literature.
Hen was first mentioned by Swedish linguists in the mid-1960s, and then in 1994 the late linguist Hans Karlgren suggested adding hen as a new personal pronoun, mostly for practical reasons. Karlgren was trying to avoid the awkward he/she that gums up writing, and invent a single word "that enables us to speak of a person without specifying their gender. He argued that it could improve the Swedish language and make it more nuanced.
Today's hen champions, however, have a distinctly political agenda. For instance, Lundqvist's book is published by a house named Olika, which means “different or diverse.” Olika only publishes books that "challenge stereotypes and obsolete norms and traditions in the world of literature." Its titles include 100 möjligheter Istället för 2! (“100 possibilities instead of 2!”), a book for adults who "want to give children more opportunities in gender-stereotyped everyday life"; and Det var en gång … en ritbok! (“Once upon a time there was … a drawing book!”), the first "gender-scrutinizing" drawing book for children that "challenges traditional and diminishing conceptions of girls and boys, men and women."
But not everyone is keen on this political meddling with the Swedish language. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as "feminist activists who want to destroy our language." Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, "in-between" gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children's discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that "gender ideologues" have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.
Claeson might have a point. The Swedish school system has wholeheartedly, and probably too quickly and eagerly, embraced this new agenda. Last fall, 200 teachers attended a major government-sponsored conference discussing how to avoid "traditional gender patterns" in schools. At Egalia, one model Stockholm preschool, everything from the decoration to the books and toys are carefully selected to promote a gender-equal perspective and to avoid traditional presentations of gender and parenting roles. The teachers try to expose the pupils to as few "gendered expressions" as possible. At Christmastime, the Egalia staff rewrote a traditional song as "hen bakes cakes all day long." When pupils play house, they are encouraged to include "mommy, daddy, child" in their imaginary families, as well as "daddy, daddy, child"; "mommy, mommy, child"; "daddy, daddy, sister, aunty, child"; or any other modern combination.

To those who feel gender equality or gender neutrality ought to be intrinsic to a modern society, it probably makes sense to argue for instilling such values at an early age. The Green Party has even suggested placing "gender pedagogues" in every preschool in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, who can act as watchdogs. But of course toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do.
Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children's interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying." And so every detail of children's interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children's lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

Text by Nathalie Rothschild
Posted April 11, 2012
Source www.slate.com

Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Great Reynard



The Ventriloquist Entertainer Ed Reynard was also known as Edward Sharpless and The Great Reynard. Famous Routine: Morning in Hicksville. c. 1880s -- United States

Source : www.ventriloquistcentral.com

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Giraffe and Anti-Giraffe: Charles Fourier’s Artistic Thinking

1. After the War

The writings of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) are a glorious fuck you to all that exists. Yet they are neither punk’s provocation nor the apodictic objectivity of Marxian dialectics, but an enculage of civilization through the filigree work of total world reinvention.

Marx complained that Fourier’s utopia was all in his mind, that he was obliged to construct a new society “with elements supplied by his brain” because capitalist production was underdeveloped when he wrote.1 But it is perhaps this appeal to reason rather than history that makes Fourier’s imagination so radical. Even today, it has not been bought and sold: there is still nothing that surpasses Fourier’s projected state of absolute Harmony.

For André Breton, who claimed Fourier for Surrealism in his poem Ode á Charles Fourier (1947), only minds as febrile and immoral as Fourier’s could possess the “extreme freshness” necessary to re-imagine the world in the aftermath of destruction: “Fourier they’ve scoffed but one day they’ll have to try your remedy whether they like it or not …”2 Breton was the first to consult Fourier after World War II, echoing the time when Fourier himself was writing in the early nineteenth century, in a Europe that had similarly collapsed in wars. There was not much available in his historical present that one could appeal to.


Laurent Pelletier, The dreamt Phalanstère of Charles Fourier, 1868. Watercolor on paper.

According to Fourier, the world is cosmically out of whack. He blamed the arrogance of the philosophers and the charlatanism of priests for having systematically repressed the passions, leaving humankind stuck in an incoherent civilized state for 2300 years. Faced with this universal misery, Fourier heralds the triumphant reign of a Harmonian cosmic order based in his science of Passional Attraction—the primordial, ubiquitous force that connects the whole in social series.3 According to this order, government must be based on a consultation of the passions since they essentially characterize the human being and its community. Conversely, a repression of the passions will result in hypocritical social institutions like marriage and the nuclear family, from which Fourier argued that women must be freed—and in fact, Fourier took the proto-feminist view that the measure of happiness was the degree of independence of women in society.

In Harmony, communal living will be the order of the day and will be organized in micro-societies called Phalansteries, founded on collective sensuousness and industry. According to Fourier’s group theory, each Phalanstery would be populated by 1620 people—one male and one female for each of the 810 temperaments Fourier recognized. This combination would enable infinite social, aesthetic, and sexual encounters, through which humankind would regain its equilibrium. It is “schlaraffisch eingerichtet” (Benjamin; “furnished like an El Dorado”), and even pleasures—hunting, fishing, gardening, playing music and theatre, staging operas—are to be rewarded. The children organize themselves in Little Hordes where they raise each other and contribute to the everyday life of the Phalanstery. The social series of temperaments, generations, and divisions of labor describe subgroups and passionate inclinations that work in complex ways across the collectivity, resulting in a communal euphoria, a constant social high. In Fourier’s famous phrase, “the passions are proportional to the destinies.” Forget about genital love: society is erogenous, and Fourier’s scorn for the doubt of the Cartesian subject is endless.4


The Familiestère Godin was constructed between 1856-1859, by the industrial entrepreneur, Jean-Baptiste-André Godin inspired by the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon. As a social experiment, work facilities were linked to a communal settlement, equipped with all the necessary amenities: residential buildings, a pool, cooperative stores, a garden, a nursery, schools and a theatre (the temple of the Familistère community). This experiment lasted in cooperative form until 1968.

Harmony will bring about vast improvements, genetically and socially. In keeping with the redemption of its Harmonian birthright, humankind will mutate and over nine generations will reach an average height of seven feet and a life expectancy of 144 years. There will be plenitude on all levels. The Earth’s original five moons will be restored and its polar tilt corrected, and the oceans will have lemonade flavoring as the poles become ice-free by 1828. Constantinople is set to be the world capital and planet Earth will be crowned by a permanent aurora borealis. Fourier, a theoretical hedonist if there ever was one, also develops an entire gastrosophie that involves the gratification of all of our 810 senses (again 810!), trumping the common understanding that there are only five. Likewise, food is a cosmic vision, a “psychedelic gastronomy!” as the editor of the first Danish translation exults.5

If all this sounds far out, then consider Fourier’s margin of error: all his calculi, he writes in Theory of the Four Movements (1808), are subject to the exception of a fraction of an eighth or a ninth:

This is always to be understood, even when I do no mention it. For instance, if I say as a general thesis, civilised man is very miserable, this means that seven-eights, or eight-ninths of them are reduced to a state of misery and privation, and that only one-eighth escapes the general misfortune and enjoys a lot that can be envied.6

This margin of error can perhaps also be applied to Fourier’s own brand of radical Enlightenment thinking: if he argues in favor of the emancipation of slaves and women, his anti-Semitism, his prejudiced view of the Chinese, and his hatred of the English show the darker sides of his thinking.

Fourier cannot be taken seriously. This is exactly the power of his text against any esprit de sérieux. With his blatant inventions and inconsistencies, his writings are ridiculous, too much. Roland Barthes called Fourier’s science “overmuch,” and considered his work as a kind of literary practice. “Never was a discourse happier,” wrote Barthes, for it describes a new social order articulated on excess, bedazzlement, and, in Fourier’s own words, the “need to protect everything we call vice.”7 Barthes writes with fascination on Fourier’s “vomiting of politics” in a “vast madness which does not end, but which permutates.”8 As Adorno summed it up, “if it can be said about anybody, then these lines apply to Fourier: ‘a fool leaves the world, and it remains stupid’”9 Benjamin, more politely, took a Nietzschean angle: “Fourier is more of an inventor than a savant.”10

2. Love of Lesbians and the Sound of Absolutely Positive Truth

Fourier’s happy discourse also relates to a systematization and practical application of his radical imagination. He was neither a mysticist nor a reformist or a revolutionary. Contrary to his reception by Marx and other socialist thinkers, he did not consider himself a utopian. Harmony does not demand work and sacrifice, but is rather the inevitable outcome of scientifically-adjusted human behavior. His controversial views on the permissive, innovative character of sexual practices—including homosexual, polygamous, extra-marital, manic, and “omnigamous”—were thus a purely scientific appreciation of one way of moving toward new social structures. (Fourier himself was prone to an ambivalent extra-mania he termed “Sapphienisme” whereby he was a lover and protector of lesbians and promoted their wellbeing. He assessed to be among about 26,400 companions worldwide with similar ideas.)

In this sense, the aim of science is simply to harness Passional Attraction as a cosmic source of energy and to bring mankind within the ordered domain of Passional Gravitation. Thus, Fourier’s socialism is not what ought to be (the essence of Marxian socialism, according to Marcuse), but what will be—naturally, rationally, and without revolution—as soon as our passions are realized socially; as soon as we are tuned in correctly, as it were, to a social space that in Fourier is reconfigured and proportioned harmonically.

The optimism of Enlightenment philosophers was often legitimized by utilitarian application. Truth—that in Fourier is “absolutely positive” (Blanchot)—was the practical task of helping humanity to become humanity, through the eradication of illness, poverty, ignorance, and so forth. The Phalanstery thus provided the ground for the commonsensical applicability of Fourier’s argument. Moreover, utilitarianism rejects the ranking of (moral) value according to a priori criteria in favor of the equal validity of each person’s own search for happiness and pleasure. Fourier, to be sure, accepts and celebrates the subjective multi-directionality of vanity, passion, and inclination. To him, one must embrace the delights of contrast, competition, and rivalry on the level of the individual and social series: in Harmony, Industrial Armies roam the world and compete in aesthetic battles to build large-scale engineering projects, cook the most delicious pie, or stage the most impressive opera. Thus Fourier’s anti-conformist God resides over a Combined Order whose permanent social revelation consists in variety and complexity—difference in age, fortune, ability, temperament. In the 1960s, the hippies would sum up such undogmatic tolerance with the slogan “do your own thing.” Let the pleasure principle rule. Don’t moralize, don’t pathologize.

Of course, Fourier also had a theory for the history of the entire world. His cosmogony is a theory of the “ages of happiness,” which explains the progress and decay of civilization in ascending and descending vibrations, together comprising eighty thousand years and thirty-two social metamorphoses, after which humankind will cease to exist. The ascending and descending vibrations serve to “pattern” movements between different stages of individual and historical being, corresponding to the progression from youth to decrepitude in the human life span. The musical analogy is elaborated in the way Fourier organizes the subject’s passions and senses as a keyboard with thirty-two keys. Like the passions are a keyboard, for example, so is the Sun surrounded by a claviature of planets arranged in octaves; thus social change on Earth will influence the entire solar system and affect the planetary orbits positively. This ties in Fourier’s theories with the ancient Pythagorean and Renaissance beliefs in an affinity between natural law and divine law, between the harmony of the passions and the harmony of the spheres.11


Engraving of A Perfumer's Dress

In 1814, Fourier discovers the Aromal Fluid, a medium for the great chain of being, a connection between the Earth and the rest of the universe.12 The Aromal Fluid (or Aromal Movement) is a “system for the distribution of known or unknown aromas, which control men and animals, form the seeds of winds and epidemics, govern the sexual relations of the planets and provide the seeds of created species.”13 He notes that, “if everything is connected in the system of the universe, there must exist a means of communicating between creatures of the other world and this.” This means of communication is the Aromal Fluid, the supersensible exhalation of the planets. It is an exemplary vital matter: a single, all-pervasive, imperceptible substance—a bit like capital in our present cosmogony, we can say; a universal middleman.

In Fourier’s cosmic order, the world is folded in upon itself in analogies mirroring the principles that constitute it (with octaves, harmonies, planetary orbits, and so on). It has no messianic horizon because it is held together by divine, mathematical laws—geometrical principles that contain parcels of all states of being, including their respective polarities and all ambivalent and transitional forms, and that are only complete in the totality of their variety and infinite multiplicity. Every moment in a geometric time-space corresponds to myriad events that are distributed across a plane defined by cycles, scales, and symmetries.

In the few remarks that he made on Fourier, Maurice Blanchot deconstructs the status of desire in the former’s system. To Blanchot, the “strange gift” of Passional Attraction is a “passion without desire.”14 Where desire is that of an individual subject, of a sovereign “I” that affirms the law that it destroys in the consumption of a transgressive desire, a passion without desire—measured, non-erotic, yet obliging the entire universe to modify itself—never coincides with pleasure, even if pleasure is one of its moments. Blanchot’s reading implies that cosmic happiness goes beyond the individual human subject: instead, Passional Attraction becomes a tendency that rises into the non-time of 80,000 years of ascending and descending vibrations toward universal harmony and sympathetic fusion within the given order of the cosmic household.15 Fourier’s harmonial vibration is the cosmic timbre of a higher pattern to which the soul is already attuned.


Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté, 1936. Graphic novel.

3. Fourier as a Way of Life

Fourier’s vision for communal living, liberated sexuality, and cosmic harmony resonated with countercultural, “tribal” emancipation and holistic utopian projects of the 1960s, such as Buckminster Fuller’s “spaceship earth” and Martin Luther King’s “beloved community.”16 After his writings were republished in France in 1966–68, commentaries and new translations sprang up across Europe and his work was almost obligatorily referenced in critical writing at the time, as well as and in architecture, with the Phalanstery being an inspiration for Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (1947­–52). In art and counterculture, Fourier's work had an at least a spectral presence, as in Constant’s New Babylon, the mandatory daily exchange of sex partners in Otto Mühl’s Aktionsanalytische Organisation, or in the name of the Danish student and youth organization Det Ny Samfund (“New Society”). In general, Fourier’s conjoint theorization of labor and love dovetailed with the many post-World War II attempts at thinking Marx and Freud together.

As Fourier’s teachings had been sporadically realized in communes in Europe, North America, and South America in the nineteenth century, so was there also the psychedelic Phalanstery. As members of the San Francisco commune Togetherness explained to Dominique Desanti in the late sixties, “We are Fourierists.”17 Asked whether they have actually read Fourier they reply, “we’ve been told.” Theirs is “Un Fourier par ouï-dire,” infused with elements of Gandhism, concocted in a mix of memory and invention that in itself is quite Fourierian. Still, the members of the commune remain faithful to Fourierian pillars of faith such as the inclusion of children in production, the division of the working day into two-hour shifts, and the integration of male and female tasks. Visitors have told the members of Togetherness that Fourier condoned the use of drugs as an adjuvant or stimulant, and they sell the handicraft of the commune in the Haight-Asbury district: “ex-hippie-capital turned into necropolis, where the bourgeois come to watch the post-hippies, drugged to the point of drifting away, voluntary onlookers, the foam of a broken wave.”18 While Fourier’s nineteenth-century followers tended to underplay or even censor his emphasis on the unrestrained development of desire, it seems that his resurgence in sixties’ collectivism was focused on exactly the Dionysian aspects of his socialism. Accordingly, Togetherness was built on the rule of love, and its denizens embraced Passional Attraction in an amour diffus that included lesbian and gay relationships, and in which orgies, instituted by Fourier as a superior form of love, is an act of principle. In Desanti’s micropolitical turn of phrase, the drop-outs of Togetherness have found “their universal love, a total tolerance of minoritarian and singular tendencies.”19

By 1969, Togetherness suffers a meteoric decline and is dissolved by its members. The former communards choose social revolt as their next endeavor, in factions of post-Proudhonism, post-Marxism, post-Leninism, or “para-Maoism.” Even in its collapse, Fourierism generates difference. Short-lived as it was, the example of Togetherness during the Summer of Love seems to refute Benjamin’s claim that “only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only under its sun, can one conceive of Fourier’s fantasy materialized.”20 Writing in 1969, Roland Barthes predicted the decline of the Fourierist commune,

Could we imagine a way of living that was, if not revolutionary, at least unobstructed? No one since Fourier has produced this image: no figure has yet been able to surmount and go beyond the militant and the hippy. The militant continue to live like a petty bourgeois, and the hippy like an inverted bourgeois; between these two, nothing. The political critique and the cultural critique don’t seem to be able to coincide.21

Similarly, to Herbert Marcuse it is also close but no cigar with Charles Fourier. In his Eros and Civilization (1955) Marcuse notes that, “Fourier comes closer than any other utopian socialist to elucidating the dependence of freedom on non-repressive sublimation.”22 But the nature of Fourier’s idea is based on the repressive elements of “a giant organization and administration,” which for Marcuse risks fascism, for the working communities of the Phalanstery “anticipate ‘strength through joy’ rather than freedom, the beautification of mass culture rather than its abolition.” To accuse Fourier of aestheticizing politics seems to rationalize his work through the historical knowledge of a totalitarian modernity. In the mid-twentieth century, however, it was no doubt inevitable to comment on the fascist connotations of the Phalanstère. (Or maybe it was simply a question of irreconcilable temperaments between Marcuse, the well-intentioned utopianist schoolteacher and Fourier the “delirious cashier,” as Flaubert called him.)

Also other post-World War II thinkers were uncertain as to whether Fourier’s imaginative intoxication could be reclaimed for critical purposes. While his work was eagerly referenced, it remained exotic if not intractable; thus Kenneth White asks whether Fourierism is of “any interest to us in the present historical conjecture, or whether it is to be placed, once and for all, as a particularly grotesque item, for dilettante admiration and curiosity, on the shelf of political antiquities.”23 Fourier never quite fit history, yet his happy discourse is a specter that seems to trans-illuminate any given historical moment as an x-ray of that which is not, but exists anyway because it can be imagined.

Fourier wasn’t read only as a “vomiting of politics,” but also as a regurgitation of psychoanalysis. His philosophy was in a sense already anti-Oedipal, corresponding to Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that desires don’t belong to the realm of the imaginary, and are never transformed through desexualization or sublimation. Once sexuality is conceived as a force of production in its own right (the unconscious as a worker), it escapes restriction into narrow cells of family, couple, person, object. “Sexuality is everywhere,” Deleuze and Guattari wrote, recalling Fourier’s “vibrations and flows” to evoke how libidinal energy proceeds directly to the entire social field:

For the prime evidence points to the fact that desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures—an always nomadic and migrant desire, characterized first of all by its “gigantism”: no one has shown this more clearly than Charles Fourier.24

As a result, and as per Fourier, “we always make love with worlds”—which is, in fact, a good definition of artistic thinking: to make love with worlds—nothing less.


Franscisco Goya, The Witches' Sabbath, 1797-98. Oil on canvas.
4. Giraffe, Reindeer, Dog

Planetary lovemaking makes us recognize strange signs in civilization. According to Fourier, the hieroglyph of truth is the giraffe:

The hieroglyph of truth in the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Since the characteristic of truth is to surmount error, the animal that represents it must be able to raise his head higher than all the others: this the giraffe can do, as it browses on branches 18 feet above the ground. It is, in the words of one ancient author, “a most fine animal, gentle and agreeable to the eye.” Truth is also most fine, but as it is incapable of harmonizing with our customs, its hieroglyph, the giraffe, must be incapable of helping humans in their work; thus God has reduced it to insignificance by giving it an irregular gait which shakes up and damages any burden it might be called upon to bear. As a result we prefer to leave it to inaction, just as nobody will employ a truthful man, whose character runs counter to all accepted customs and desires.25

Fourier reasons that just like truth is only beautiful when it is inactive, so the giraffe is only admirable when it is at rest. With this analogy he proves that God created nothing without a purpose—even the giraffe, which is supremely useless. Thus, if one wishes to know what purposes it will serve in societies other than Civilization, one can study this problem in the “counter-giraffe,” the reindeer. A creature that only lives in hostile climates, the reindeer is “an animal which provides us with every service imaginable: you will see that God has excluded it from those social climates, from which truth will also be excluded for as long as Civilization lasts.”26 Fourier continues,

And when the societary order has enabled us to become adept at the use of truth and the virtues which are excluded from our lives at present, a new creation will provide us, in the anti-giraffe, with a great and magnificent servant whose qualities will far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer, which so excites our envy and arouses our anger at nature for having deprived us of it.27

Fourier’s delirious parable will get us nowhere near objectivity and consensus, yet it in its irreducibility it circumscribes the absence of truth. As we wait for this fantastic animal—the anti-giraffe—to arrive, we can delectate its profoundly aesthetic incongruence with all that exists, its devastating power of counter-actualization. If one wants a social aesthetic, then this is it: all that Fourier’s philosophical system talks about is the social, yet it can never be socialized, never become one with society, never become operational or ameliorative. Power will never be able to use Fourier to heal the miseries it has created. More than 200 years after Fourier wrote his first book, at a time when art is encroached by economy like never before, this fact alone seems more important than ever for the thinking and the making of art.

If we were to consider Fourier’s text a blueprint for a new life-world then we will, melancholically, get sucked back into the Real that we can never master. Just think of the personal misery of Charles, who each day at noon waited for the patron who would sponsor the realization of one of his Phalansteries, but who never arrived; who dreamt of gastronomic orgies but ate bad food his entire life; who was found dead kneeling by his bed in his old frock-coat… Instead, if contemporary life appeals to none of your 810 senses, one can take a hit of the perverse systematic of Fourier’s Harmony to invigorate sensing and speculation. “It was all in the mind,” said Marx of Fourier—but so is any other theory, institution, and discourse that reproduces the world. Most of all, reading Fourier today is a perfect anachrony to capital’s pre-emption of the future through calculated responses in the present. Even (or especially) capital will never catch up to this. It is a text that tops off all the absurdities that we are being served, by economy and politics alike, revealing them not as false and theatrical, but as gnomic and forlorn—incapable of touching Fourier’s divine and unapologetic bullshit that makes you defenseless, lifts you up and sets you free.

Adorno and Horkheimer write that in the culture industry, imagination goes to the dogs. Not so in Fourier. Here we always make love with worlds.

×

Notes
1 Marx quoted from Kenneth White, Introduction to Ode to Charles Fourier by André Breton, trans. Kenneth White (London: Cape Goliard/Grossman, 1969).

2 André Breton: Selections, ed. Mark Polizzotti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 32.

3 In Fourier there are twelve passions common to everybody. The five “luxurious” passions (that correspond to the five senses) tend toward luxury, pleasure, the formation of groups and affective ties. The four cardinal, affective passions—friendship, ambition, love and “familism”—concern relationships with others; and finally the three “distributive or mechanizing” passions, the Cabalist, the Butterfly, and the Composite that have to do with calculation and organization of pleasurable work. The twelve passions combine in a thirteenth super-passion, Unityism, that rules the Destinies for all time. This is the “inclination of the individual to harmonize everything around him and of the whole human race … it is a boundless philanthropy, a universal well-being,” the comprehension of the whole. Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, eds. Gareth Stedman Jones, Ian Patterson (1808; Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1996), 81.

4 Walter Benjamin, “Fourier,” (c.1940), in Das Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Suhrkamp), 792.

5 Michael Helm, introduction to Stammefællesskabet by Charles Fourier (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1972).

6 Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 34.

7 Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 72. To Barthes, Fourier is a “logothet,” the founder of a new discourse whose social inventions are facts of writing. Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 83.

8 Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, 88.

9 Theodor Adorno, forward to Theorie der vier Bewegungen und der allgemeinen Bestimmungen by Charles Fourier, trans. Gertrud von Holzhausen (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 5.

10 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 775.

11 For Joscelyn Godwin, Fourier’s cosmogony is “as traditional as could be” viewed from the point of a Pythagorean tradition. See Joscelyn Godwin, The Harmony of the Spheres. A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music (Rochester, VA: Inner Traditions, 1993), 357. Unlike Godwin, Benjamin holds that “Man muss sich klar machen, dass Fouriers Harmonien auf keiner der überkommenen Zahlenmysterien beruhren, wie dem pythagoräischen oder dem keplerschen. Sie sind gar aus ihm selber herausgesponnen und sie geben der Harmonie etwas Unnahbares und Bewahrtes: sie umgeben die harmoniens gleichsam mit Stacheldraht. Le bonheur du phalanstère es tun bonheur barbelé.” (Das Passagen-Werk, 785–6).

12 Fourier’s Theory of The Four Movements covers the social (or passionate), animal (or instinctive), organic and material movements.

13 Fourier, Theory of The Four Movements, 16.

14 Maurice Blanchot, “En guise d’introduction” Topique, 4–5 (October, 1970), 8.

15 Barthes talks about the domesticity of utopia: “The area of need is Politics, the area of Desire is what Fourier calls Domestics. Fourier has chosen Domestics over Politics, he has constructed a domestic utopia (but can a utopia be otherwise? Can a utopia be political? Isn’t politics: every language less one, that of Desire? … Politics is what forecloses desire, save to achieve it in the form of neurosis: political neurosis or, more exactly: the neurosis of politicizing.” Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, 85.

16 Linda Sargent Wood discusses holistic world views in the postwar era and how their influence peaked in the sixties; apart from Fuller and King, she discusses Rachel Carson, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Esalen Institute. Linda Sargent Wood, A More Perfect Union. Holistic World Views and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

17 “Ex-capitale hippie devenue nécropole oú les bourgeois viennent contempler des post-hippies, drogués á la dérive, figurants volontaires, écume d’une vague brisée” Dominique Desanti, “San Francisco: Des hippies pour Fourier,” Topique, 4–5 (October, 1970), 209.

18 “Leur Love universel, une tolerance totale des tendances minoritaires et des singularités” Ibid., 210.

19 Ibid., 209.

20 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 638.

21 Roland Barthes, “A Case of Cultural Criticism,” in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Michael Carter (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 113.

22 This and the following quotes from Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 217–218.

23 White, Introduction to Ode to Charles Fourier by André Breton

24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 293 and 292.

25 Fourier, Theory of The Four Movements, 283.

26 Ibid., 284.

27 Ibid., 284.

Text by
Lars Bang Larsen
e-flux Journal#26,6 /11

Monday, March 14, 2011

Passages from Why I Became an Architect by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) studied architecture from 1915 to 1919 at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna under Oskar Strnad, a pioneer of social housing design. In 1921 she began working for the municipal housing department of the Commune of Vienna alongside Adolf Loos. In January 1926 she was called to Frankfurt to join Ernst May’s team in the municipal building department (Hochbauamt) implementing the comprehensive program of renovation and social housing known under the generic title Das neue Frankfurt. Her most famous work was the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen, an integrated and prefabricated kitchen designed along rational-space and labor-saving principles which was installed in around 10,000 new homes. Each kitchen came complete with a swivel stool, a gas stove, built-in storage, a fold-down ironing board, an adjustable ceiling light, and a removable garbage drawer. Labeled aluminum storage bins provided tidy organization for staples like sugar and rice as well as easy pouring. Careful thought was given to materials for specific functions, such as oak flour containers (to repel mealworms) and beech cutting surfaces (to resist staining and knife marks).


Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (Austrian, 1897–2000). Frankfurt Kitchen as illustrated in Das neue Frankfurt 5/1926–1927.


In addition to the kitchens, Schütte-Lihotzky was also engaged in designing schools, kindergartens, and student accommodation as part of the city’s wider civic development program. In October 1930 she and her husband Wilhelm Schütte, a fellow architect in the department, joined May’s “Brigade” and embarked for the Soviet Union to work on new industrial cities as part of Stalin’sfirst Five Year Plan (1928–32). May left the Soviet Union in 1933 but Schütte-Lihotzky remained there until 1937 when Stalin’s purges made life intolerable for foreigners. After a brief spell in Paris and London, she moved to Istanbul in August 1938 to teach in the Academy of Fine Arts alongside Bruno Taut. In Istanbul she further developed her interest in the design of schools and nurseries. In 1940 she joined the Austrian Communist Party in exile, and in December returned to Austria to work with the underground resistance. Soon after her arrival, on 22 January 1941, the Gestapo arrested her and, although her accomplices were executed, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Liberated by American troops at the end of April 1945, she resumed her career as an architect, first in Sofia, Bulgaria, and from 1947 in Austria. Her political views—which had hardened because of her war experiences—were an obstacle to receiving major government or civic commissions but she continued to work on small-scale projects and regularly traveled to countries in the Communist bloc where she was engaged as a consultant. As scholars rediscovered her achievements, her reputation began to grow. In 1980 she was awarded the Architecture Prize of the city of Vienna, the first of many awards. In 1985 she published Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand (Memories of the Resistance), a memoir of her political activities.1 In 1990 she advised the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna on the creation of two replicas of the Frankfurt Kitchen, one of which went on permanent display. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky died on 18 January 2000, age 103.
—Juliet Kinchin


Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (Austrian, 1897–2000). Frankfurt Kitchen from the Ginnheim- Höhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 1926–27. Installation view of Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 15, 2010–March 14, 2011. 8'9" x 12'10" x 6'10" (266.7 x 391.2 x 208.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Joan R. Brewster in memory of her husband George W. W. Brewster, by exchange and the Architecture & Design Purchase Fund, 2009. Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar.

Selections from Why I Became an Architect

From pages 105–61. kitchen_1.png
One day, possibly spring 1922 or 1923, the phone rang in the building office of the housing association. Hans Kampffmeyer, head of the Vienna housing department at that time, was on the line.2 Apparently there was an architect from Breslau [now Wrocław, Poland] named May who wanted to see the Vienna settlements.3 Loos did not have time to take him round, and so this was how I ended up taking him to my private studio. . .4 In my romantic little workroom high up above the trees of the castle gardens I had a huge pile of theoretical texts and drawings on the rationalization of housework. May immediately seized upon these and asked if I would write an article for the magazine Das schlesische Heim.5 This was the first article I ever wrote. At that point the Viennese settlements were closely bound up with ideas and discussions about labor-saving in the home, and all the principles were already in place that would be developed five years later in Frankfurt.
[Impressed by the work on the Vienna "gypsy" settlements, and by the functional clarity of Schütte-Lihotzky's designs, May approached her in 1926 to join his team in Frankfurt.]
From pages 113–14
As soon as I arrived I hurried along to see May in the Frankfurt City Hall. The first thing that caught my eye in his office were the large red letters on the wall behind his desk. There it was: "Keep It Short." I was stunned. But in an instant, May—a lean figure with lively Roman features—hurried toward me and shook my hand warmly. He immediately invited me to his home for a meal the following Sunday, a gesture that struck me as the complete antithesis of the writing on his wall. The next Sunday I asked the very sensible Mrs. May what I should make of the writing. We both agreed it gave the wrong impression. But May vigorously defended his "Keep It Short," and the large red letters stayed on his wall until we left Frankfurt together nearly five years later.
From pages 127–30
The central task facing us was house building. At the very first meeting in the main building office, May suggested to me that I focus on standardizing floor plans keeping in mind the rationalization of housework. He introduced me to Eugen Kaufmann, leader of the "T" (for Type forms) section in which all the city housing projects were based.6 Since we wanted to keep housework to a minimum, before we did a stroke on the designs—before we even made any decisions about the basic questions of where to live, where to eat, or where to cook—it all came down to the question of either the "living kitchen" (living room cum kitchen), or the cooking cupboard. Basically, were kitchens for working in, or eating in?
In all the Frankfurt housing—whether low-rise housing estates or apartment blocks—there was gas supplied for cooking. This negated any fuel savings made by cooking and living in one and the same space when using wood and coal, which meant turning away from the "living kitchen." Also, the cooking recess that opened directly onto the living room struck us in Frankfurt as too primitive, on account of the off-putting cooking smells. It was a long time before most people had electric extraction hoods. The eating kitchen that was popular in Sweden in the thirties (I was very taken with them at the time) added at least seven or eight square meters to the living area around the table. We couldn't afford those additional eight square meters without pushing up the cost of the rents even further. We decided therefore to split off the living room leaving the work-only kitchen with the following stipulations:
1. The distance from the stove, countertop, and sink to the eating area was to be no more than 2.75–3 meters.
2. The floor plan was to be organized in such a way that the housewife and mother could keep an eye on children in the living room while she was occupied in the kitchen. This meant that the door opening between kitchen and living room had to be at least ninety centimeters wide, and could be closed off with a sliding door.
3. The kitchen must have direct access to the hall.
4.Lighting during the day was to come through an external window. Artificial lighting was to be positioned so that no shadows fell upon the work areas (stove, preparation surface, sink).
5. Cooking vapors were to be extracted through a hood and ventilation pipe to the roof.
6. The work-only kitchen was to be small enough to make the greatest possible economies of steps and handling, yet big enough so that two people could work alongside one another without getting in each other's way.
7. The kitchens could only make a significant labor-saving impact on housework if they were fitted with all the necessary equipment. These were made ready for people at the same time as the houses. This system had two great advantages. First, constructing kitchens with fittings already built in took up less space. Second, with the money saved it was possible to hand over the homes to tenants with a complete kitchen fitted and arranged according to all the principles of labor-saving housework.
8. When kitchens were included in the building costs, they were financed from public funds. The rental costs in Frankfurt were calculated according to the building costs. The addition of a kitchen raised the rents by one deutsche mark a month, but this was offset by savings made on space, so that ultimately the inhabitants did not have to bear any increase in rent.


Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (Austrian, 1897–2000). Frankfurt Kitchen from the Ginnheim- Höhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 1926–27. Installation view of Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 15, 2010–March 14, 2011. 8'9" x 12'10" x 6'10" (266.7 x 391.2 x 208.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Joan R. Brewster in memory of her husband George W. W. Brewster, by exchange and the Architecture & Design Purchase Fund, 2009. Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar.

These then were the basic considerations that led to the "Frankfurt Kitchen." After much research it was revealed that the most advantageous format for the kitchen was an area 1.9 meters wide by 3.4 meters long—that is, nearly 6.5 square meters—with a 90-centimeter-wide door to the corridor and exterior windows 1.4 meters wide. This conception of the basic kitchen unit was the blueprint for all the other kitchens that were built, regardless of whether they were installed in apartments or row houses. Besides the design for the floor plans, there were a lot of other planning issues concerning the standard kitchen equipment and its installation. . . .
Unfortunately, the construction of many of the apartments was not supervised by the Building Department but by the housing association, who did not oversee the builders and the materials properly, giving the Frankfurt Kitchen a bad name, which still survives to this day. For example, the broad doorway between the kitchen and the living room was often omitted, destroying the essential unity of the kitchen–living room; this was part of the original design of the Frankfurt Kitchen. Small causes but big effects. The mother could no longer supervise the children playing in the living room while working in the kitchen because the distance from the stove, kitchen table, and sink to the dining table had grown from three meters to six meters! Also, in this arrangement two doors had to be opened. And third, the kitchen working space had been reduced to a miserable, confining corridor in which no one could feel at home. As an architect, I would be embarrassed to have designed something like that. Unfortunately, in West Berlin today this is the type of kitchen that is being built, and after fifty years, this nonsense is justified in the name of the Frankfurt Kitchen and its creator!
From pages 145–51
It is completely misleading to suggest that one person in the 1920s thought up the "idea" of the live-in kitchen, which was then followed by everyone else. The form of a dwelling is never achieved through the idea of a single individual . . . So long as burning wood or coal in a stove or oven was the only means of heating a room, a practice that to this day has not completely died out among mountain dwellers in Austria, people were going to eat and live in the space where the single fireplace was to be found. . . .
Austrian city dwellers in the 1920s did not have room for separate eating and living spaces. A single large table set with stools or a corner bench doubled as the living area. In Germany, however, where the workers' standard of living was slightly better than in Austria, the two functions of eating and living began to be separated in small dwellings. The so-called Best Room, where one ate, was located next to the kitchen in working-class housing. It was only heated on special occasions and developed in the direction of "frigid formality," as a showroom for visitors, a cluttered copy of the homes of the rich. . . .
We progressive architects naturally fought this cold formality. . . . The influence of British domestic culture led to the idea that sitting down to eat was something quite different from sitting down to rest during one's free time. Loos gave whole lectures on this topic. He promoted British patterns of living and, in his interior currently on display in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, he naturally had both an eating and a living area: the eating area with a corner bench, the living area with armchairs in which one could sit around the fireplace and stretch out one's legs in comfort. . . .
For housing projects, it struck me as important to distinguish clearly the development and relationship of the three functions of cooking, eating, and living. . . . At that time we resisted the combination of living, cooking, and eating in one space as unsanitary and unacceptably squalid. So in Frankfurt we opted for work-only kitchens. . . . Nowadays—in very different labor-saving, technological, and hygienic conditions—the most desirable form for the majority of people has become a dining-kitchen with a separate living room. But I want to set the record straight at the outset: the Frankfurt Kitchen represented a great step forward at the time. The 10,000 examples that were produced made many people's lives easier and undoubtedly contributed to more women being able to take up a career, to become financially independent from their husbands, and to spend more time on their personal development as well as on their families and the upbringing of their children. Nevertheless, the Frankfurt Kitchen was not developed for current times. It would be a sad comment on life if a design that marked a step forward in the past were still being promoted as progressive today. . . . There are new and urgent problems that need to be addressed in the present. . . .
From all that I have said previously, I should point out that "Frankfurt Kitchen" is a misleading term since it does not just refer to the design of a kitchen with more or less practical arrangements and facilities. As far as I can remember, it was May who came up with the term and used it for promotional purposes. In everything he did and said he repeatedly mentioned the fact that it was no coincidence the Frankfurt Kitchen was designed by a woman for women. This stemmed from the prevalent petit bourgeois perception that women were, by their very nature, meant to work at the domestic stove. It seemed to follow therefore that a woman architect would know best what was important for kitchens. That was good propaganda. But the truth of the matter was that I had never run a household before designing the Frankfurt Kitchen. I had never cooked, and had no idea about cooking. On the other hand, looking back on my life I would say that I have been systematic in every aspect of my professional life, and that it came naturally to me to approach every project systematically. . . .
What were the theoretical foundations and ideals that lay behind the Frankfurt Kitchen that led to its being reproduced in the thousands? For me there were two motives that led to the creation of the Frankfurt Kitchen. The first was the recognition that in the foreseeable future women would have proper paid employment, and would not solely be expected to be on hand to wait upon their husbands. I was convinced that women's struggle for economic independence and personal development meant that the rationalization of housework was an absolute necessity. Foremost in my mind when working on housing projects was the idea that the design and, above all, the layout could save work. . . . Second, I felt the Frankfurt Kitchen—a design so connected to the architectural fabric and to the planning and built-in features of rooms—was only the very first step toward developing a new way of living and at the same time a new kind of housing construction.

• 1 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand, 1938–1945 (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1985).
• 2 Inspired by the “Garden City Movement,” the artist Hans Kampffmeyer (1876–1932) took up town planning and became an advisor on housing to the ducal government of Baden at Karlsruhe. In 1921 he became director of the housing department in Vienna and in 1925 he moved to Frankfurt, where, with Ernst May, he led a pioneering program of house building for the regional government.
• 3 Ernst May (1886–1970) was a modernist architect and city planner whose left-wing politics and experience of the English garden city movement inspired his work in mass housing. As city architect in Frankfurt-am-Main between 1925 and 1930 he implemented one of the most radical and successful civic housing programs of the period. As well as Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, May’s department in Frankfurt included Wolfgang Bangert, Herbert Boehm, Anton Brenner, Max Cetto, Martin Elsässer, Max Frühauf, Eugen Kauffman, Walter Körte, Ferdinand Kramer, Hans Leistikow, Albert Löcher, Rudolph Lodders, Adolf Meyer, C. H. Rudloff, Werner Hebebrand, Wilhelm Schütte (who became Margarete’s husband), Walter Schultz, Walter Schwangenscheidt, Karl Weber, and briefly, Mart Stam. In 1930 he led a group of his staff to the USSR, the so-called May Brigade, where they were engaged in planning new industrial towns in the Moscow region.
• 4 Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was an Austrian architect, designer, and polemicist who made his reputation with a series of bold modernist buildings, interiors, and essays in the period before World War I. Appointed chief architect of the Vienna municipal housing department in 1921, he embarked on a campaign of low-cost, flexible housing designs. Finding himself out of sympathy with the prevailing policy of mass housing in the Vienna council, he resigned in 1924 although he continued to design projects in the city.
• 5 Das schlesische Heim was a Breslau-based journal founded in 1920 and edited by Ernst May for the Schlesische Bund für Heimatschutz (Silesian Federation of Homeland Conservation).
• 6 Eugen Kaufmann (1892–1984) was a German architect engaged by Ernst May in 1925 to work in the municipal housing department at Frankfurt, where he was responsible for several schemes including the workers housing estate at Praunheim, 1927. In 1929 he organized the exhibition Die wohnung für das Existenzminimum (The Minimal Existence Home) in Frankfurt. He followed May to the Soviet Union in 1931, after which he settled in Britain, changing his name to Eugene Kent.

Selected and Translated by Juliet Kinchin
Source:www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, February 9, 2011

This translation is taken with permission from Margarete SchütteLihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde (ed. Karin Zogmayer), © 2004 by Residenz Verlag im Niederösterreichischen Pressehaus, Druck- u. Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, St. Pölten–Salzburg.The manuscript is held in the estate of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, now deposited in the archives of the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Selection and clarification of the manuscripts for the published text in German were undertaken by the editor, Karin Zogmayer.

Supplementary Literature:

Bullock, Nicholas. “First the Kitchen—Then the Façade.” Journal of Design History 1, no. 3/4 (1988): 177–92.
Dreysse, D. W. Ernst May Housing Estates: Architectural Guide to Eight New Frankfort Estates, 1926–1930. Frankfurt: Fricke Verlag, 1988.
Henderson, Susan. “A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the Frankfurt Kitchen,” in Architecture and Feminism, edited by Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson, 221–48. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
Noever, Peter, ed. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Soziale Architektur—Zeitzeugin eines Jahrhunderts. Vienna: Böhlau, 1996.
Introduction to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Friday, December 3, 2010

I Love the White Middle Class


Anton Kannemeyer, I Love the White Middle Class . . . , 2008, acrylic on canvas, 47 x 47”.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Where Are the Great Women Pop Artists?

It's clear that female artists of the '60s were pushed to the margins of art history. But a series of exhibitions showcasing their work reveals how un-Pop many of them were

Western art history has nearly always been constructed as a narrative in which women are viewed through male eyes—as subjects and as objects. From the Venus of Willendorf to Raphael's Madonnas, Rubens's raped Sabines, Picasso's jilted lovers, and de Kooning's man-eating females, the standard gaze was that of the male, and what it gazed upon was the objectified female body.

Suddenly art history (once again) finds itself being turned on its head as another aspect of the past gets unearthed and revised. This time the subject is the supposedly secondary—that is, the unacknowledged, neglected, subservient, auxiliary—role of the women Pop artists who were at work in the pre-Linda Nochlin days, when the textbook-writing ­Jansons and nearly everyone else thought that only men could create masterpieces.

Since the 1960s, when women artists started defining themselves and re-narrating the history, we have slowly become aware of their contributions. Lately museums have gotten into the act. It may be sheer coincidence, but exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Kunsthalle Vienna this autumn both focus on the women artists who were identified with Pop art, while an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York tackles a related subject: painting and feminism (with a bit of Jewishness thrown into the mix). These shows complicate the categories of what's Pop and what's not, opening up a slew of new questions.

Curator Angela Stief, in her catalogue introduction to "Power Up: Female Pop Art," at the Kunsthalle Vienna (through February 20), points out that while female Pop artists resemble their male colleagues, oscillating between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, commodity cult and capitalist critique, they remain "militant, critical, and outstanding in their positions as feminist pioneers."


Martha Rosler's photomontage Vacuuming Pop Art, 1967–72, addresses politics and the male gaze.

If Pop art by women artists was hardly ever simply Pop, what was it? The female artists of those years were, willingly or unwittingly, involved in a major change in content, context, and medium. They were concerned with shifting both the objectifying male gaze and the objectified female gaze. As these exhibitions point out, the women whose art skirted around Pop—and can be somewhat misleadingly called Pop—complicate matters, which isn't a bad thing.

Pop art in the hands and minds of women artists is intricately linked to the rise of feminist art, political and sociological art, art that involves decoration and craft and female sexuality—and thus the subsequent future of 20th-century art. These artists weren't tangential: they were crucial. And what is most interesting about their work can be found in its disparities and divergences from Pop. What women were doing was another kind of art, and to call their work Pop does a disservice to it.

Pop art in the hands of male artists was cartoony, exaggerated, sometimes cynical. Involved with male sexuality, it had to violate something, blowing a cliché so far out of proportion that it could be reconstituted as an aspect of formalism. Pop art was about fast foods, fast babes, fast mechanically reproductive processes such as the silkscreen and the Benday dot, and blatant commercial images and ads. It was about all-American banality. And it was an almost exclusively male movement. Back in the days when Mel Ramos could paint Chiquita Banana pinups, Tom Wesselmann could sex up his still lifes by putting sunburned nudes with pubic hair into them, and Allen Jones could obnoxiously use a lifelike playmate on her knees as a coffee table, Marjorie Strider was making shaped canvases featuring 3-D breasts that were smartly violating the picture plane as if to one-up the men, who never noticed. And Elaine Sturtevant, a few months after Warhol created his first flower paintings in 1964, borrowed Warhol's silkscreens to replicate those paintings and inserted her renditions into group shows—along with her George Segal and Frank Stella look-alikes—to make Pop into something more conceptual, a decade or more before the word "appropriation" would emerge.

Unlike the previous macho AbEx generation, which also counted female artists like Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning, the Pop movement, strictly speaking, did not have high-profile female participation. Marisol, Strider, and Sturtevant were sometimes included in Pop group shows in New York, but they never wholly fit. Pop art was about banality, disaffection, and detachment, and the ideas of the women artists diametrically opposed these themes. Philosophically liberated, they thought for themselves, radicalized their art, and imploded the meaning of Pop.

If Chryssa was Pop because she used neon, does that mean Dan Flavin was too? If Vija Celmins was Pop, wasn't she at the same time a budding photorealist? If Yayoi Kusama was Pop, what do we make of her phallic obsessions and cosmic polka dots? If Niki de Saint Phalle was Pop, where do her big folk-art mamas fit? And if Lee Lozano's pre-conceptual work and Faith Ringgold's pre-quilt paintings can be dragged into the orbit of Pop, we can only throw up our hands and conclude that we desperately need a more descriptive term.

Women's Pop-related art had its own intentions. It could be about obsession, cosmic design, or, in the case of Marisol, folk arts and crafts. Usually it opposed or dissected the male gaze. The male artists may have been content to flirt with post-industrial Minimalism, but back in the days when femininity equaled domesticity, Martha Rosler mailed out a series of narrative recipes. They involved, for example, the dislocations of a Mexican maid who didn't have a clue as to what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was, and pieced together images of suburban kitchens invaded by the horrors of the Vietnam war. On the other hand, Warhol, whose latent political content went unremarked for years, didn't do decorative camouflage painting until the 1980s.

Now "Power Up: Female Pop Art" makes it quite clear that an idea can be about politics as well as about female sexuality. It ­narrows its scope to nine artists, some of whom—such as the Belgian Evelyne Axell—have remained seriously under-known in New York. The star of this exhibition is Sister Corita Kent, the nun who used signs, slogans, and packaging as a form of political protest.

Twenty-five female artists, including Axell and some other unfamiliar Europeans, are in the Brooklyn Museum's "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" (on view through January 9), and it's hard to resist an impertinent question: Would anyone ever dream of titling a show of male Pop artists "Subversive Seducers"? And in an exhibition that includes a number of arguably un-Pop artists, where is Yoko Ono, Lee Bontecou, Carolee Schneemann—or even Colette, who knowingly transformed herself into the objectified object of the male gaze?

The impact of feminist thought permeates works by 27 artists in the Jewish Museum's "Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism" (through January 30). Contributors range from Louise Nevelson, Rosalyn Drexler, and Eva Hesse to Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke, and Nicole Eisenman. Rosler is oddly absent, but then, conceptual photomontage probably doesn't count as painting per se. But kudos to this exhibition for anointing three token males as honorary feminists: Leon Golub, who was always attuned to power, persecution, and victimhood; Robert Kushner, who made the most of feminized pattern and decoration; and Cary Leibowitz, with his self-deprecating gay Jewish humor.

Unacknowledged or under-­acknowledged at the time, relegated to the margins or forgotten by history, the profound female artists of their time inverted the male gaze and anticipated the future while male Pop artists were getting stuck in their own styles. The tenuous thread that ties them all together is linked to feminism and the contemporary art that was still to come. And now, in these exhibitions in which nearly everyone spills out of the arbitrary category of Pop, what at first may seem curatorial weakness becomes great strength. History is again being distorted, manipulated, and revised, for better and worse, but such are its innate fictions. And we have to conclude that the work by these woman artists doesn't seem nearly as dated as that of their male counterparts. Shifting the gaze, indeed.

Text by Kim Levin
Source: ARTnews, November 2010