Modular art: Difference between revisions
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Significantly, Smith himself did not manually fabricate the final version of his sculptures. Instead, he outsourced their production to skilled ironworkers in foundries and industrial facilities, who worked off his drawings and models to manufacture the designs. In part this reflects Smith's training as an architect, who customarily designs and documents but does not construct his art. It further reinforces the idea of modular art as a [[generative art|generative system]] in which the arrangement of pre-determined formal units – rather than wholesale imaginative invention – defines the creative act. Finally, it is consistent with the notion implicit in modularity that the supply of modules in a modular system must be infinite, that is, that they be industrially rather than artisinally produced, for the system to be realized. (Bees in a honeycomb are essentially operating as an industrial enterprise insofar as the production of cells is without end.) |
Significantly, Smith himself did not manually fabricate the final version of his sculptures. Instead, he outsourced their production to skilled ironworkers in foundries and industrial facilities, who worked off his drawings and models to manufacture the designs. In part this reflects Smith's training as an architect, who customarily designs and documents but does not construct his art. It further reinforces the idea of modular art as a [[generative art|generative system]] in which the arrangement of pre-determined formal units – rather than wholesale imaginative invention – defines the creative act. Finally, it is consistent with the notion implicit in modularity that the supply of modules in a modular system must be infinite, that is, that they be industrially rather than artisinally produced, for the system to be realized. (Bees in a honeycomb are essentially operating as an industrial enterprise insofar as the production of cells is without end.) |
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The work of Smith and the Minimalist school constitute the most far-ranging exploration of modularity in art before the millennium. However, neither it nor the explorations of movable and alterable art in the preceding centuries synthesized the two central features of |
The work of Smith and the Minimalist school constitute the most far-ranging exploration of modularity in art before the millennium. However, neither it nor the explorations of movable and alterable art in the preceding centuries synthesized the two central features of modular art. Mobiles and other kinetic pieces were not modular, and the modular work of the mid-century Minimalist artists was, with a few exceptions, not changeable. |
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== Modular Art in the 21st Century == |
== Modular Art in the 21st Century == |
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Revision as of 14:51, 14 November 2010
 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for neologisms. (October 2010) |
Modular art is art created by joining together standardized units (modules) to form larger, more complex compositions. In some works the units can be subsequently moved, removed and added to – that is, modulated – to create a new work of art, different from the original or ensuing configurations[1].
Origins
Historically, alterable objects of art have existed since the Renaissance, for example, in the Triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch or in the so-called "alterable altarpieces", such as the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald, or Albrecht Dürer's Paumgartner Altarpiece, where changing motives could be revised in accord with the changing themes of the ecclesiastical calendar.
Modular Art in the 20th Century
Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, a number of contemporary artists sought to incorporate kinetic techniques into their work in an attempt to overcome what they saw as the predominantly static nature of art. Alexander Calder's mobiles are among the most widely-known demonstrations of physical dynamism in the visual arts, in which form has the potential to continually vary through perpetual motion, sometimes even without the agency of the human hand. Jean Tinguely's efforts to create a self-destructive art machine constitute perhaps the ultimate expression of art's mutability, in this case by taking the form of its total eradication. More recently, the notion that visual art need not be conceived solely in terms of perpetually fixed objects is embodied in performance and installation art by virtue of their unfolding and temporary qualities.
Industrial Design
Modularity enters the modern artistic repertory through the disciplines of industrial design and architecture. Belgian architect Louis Herman De Koninck led a team of countrymen in creating one of the first modular product systems in their Cubex kitchen series of 1932. The series consisted of standardized and industrially produced components that could be combined and arrayed in limitless combinations to accommodate almost any size kitchen. New York designer Gilbert Rohde crafted several lines of modular casework for the Herman Miller Corporation in the 1930s and 40s; like De Koninck, Rohde standardized the units in dimensions, materials and configurations to facilitate mass production and interchangeability. His Executive Office Group (EOG) line, launched in 1942, was a similarly ground-breaking systems approach to office furniture. Just a year before Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames had jointly produced a suite of modular domestic furniture for the Red Lion Company, a result of a competition held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1950 Herman Miller brought out the EAS Storage Unit series by Charles and Ray Eames, a very successful modular shelving and wall unit system that remains in production today.
Modular Constructivism
At around the same time architecture and modular sculpture intersected in the work of Norman Carlberg, Erwin Hauer and Malcolm Leland. All three received commissions to design perforated architectural screens built out of repetitive modular motives cast in concrete. Non-structural, the screens were used on building exteriors to divide space, filter light and create visual interest. Their work has come to be described as Modular Constructivism, reflecting both its compositional methodology and its architectural context. Each created stand-alone modular-themed sculptures into the 1960s and after as well.
Modularity in the Fine Arts
There is little of an applied nature in Robert Rauschenberg's "White Painting" of 1951; consisting of just four equal white squares, its geometry of interlocking forms is among the earliest statements of modularity as an autonomous subject of art. Rauschenberg explored this theme that same year in a three- and seven-panel format; the linear array of rectangular panels in these versions suggests their potentially infinite replication.
The cool abstraction of these canvases presages the emergence of modularity as a full-fledged topic of Minimalist art in the 1960s. Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd are among this school's most prolific exponents during the period. In particular, the work of Smith is key to understanding the transformation of modularity from a compositional and production tool into a broadly investigated artistic theme in its own right.
Smith began his career as an architectural designer. To further his education he apprenticed himself on some projects by Frank Lloyd Wright for a couple of years starting in 1938. From Wright he learned to utilize modular systems in generating architectural designs in two-dimensional plans as well as in three-dimensional applications, such as the development of building sections and interior built-ins. As an architect, Wright himself was part of a centuries-old continuum stretching back through Vitruvius to Greco-Roman antiquity in which the module was utilized to proportion built and sculpted form. In the case of Wright, the interest in modular design also may have derived from his familiarity with modular practice in traditional Japanese architecture.
Wright's Hanna House of 1937 is a clear example of the master's facility with modern modular design in multiple dimensions. Its striking angled forms are built up from the individual hexagonal modules that define the floor plan and various vertical elements. Wright's use of the hexagon here is by no means an arbitrary aesthetic choice, but an example of how he rooted his architecture in nature by drawing from its forms and principles – the interlocking hexagonal cells of the bee's honeycomb being nature's most perfect representation of modular design. Not surprisingly, this project is sometimes referred to as the "Honeycomb House".
Smith would employ the hexagon and other elemental geometries in his own architectural practice and again in the sculpture he began to fabricate in the early 1960s. Freed from the programmatic and extensive structural requirements of his architectural work, Smith's sculptures are three-dimensional extrusions of modular form with no ostensible pragmatic purpose beyond aesthetic contemplation.
Significantly, Smith himself did not manually fabricate the final version of his sculptures. Instead, he outsourced their production to skilled ironworkers in foundries and industrial facilities, who worked off his drawings and models to manufacture the designs. In part this reflects Smith's training as an architect, who customarily designs and documents but does not construct his art. It further reinforces the idea of modular art as a generative system in which the arrangement of pre-determined formal units – rather than wholesale imaginative invention – defines the creative act. Finally, it is consistent with the notion implicit in modularity that the supply of modules in a modular system must be infinite, that is, that they be industrially rather than artisinally produced, for the system to be realized. (Bees in a honeycomb are essentially operating as an industrial enterprise insofar as the production of cells is without end.)
The work of Smith and the Minimalist school constitute the most far-ranging exploration of modularity in art before the millennium. However, neither it nor the explorations of movable and alterable art in the preceding centuries synthesized the two central features of modular art. Mobiles and other kinetic pieces were not modular, and the modular work of the mid-century Minimalist artists was, with a few exceptions, not changeable.
Modular Art in the 21st Century
Perhaps the earliest description of the underlying concept of ModulArt in the literature of art came in 1975 in Germany, in a reference to "a form of art […] made by movable elements that – contrary to kinetic art – move not continually but transfer the object into a new state of being by moving their variable parts".[2]
Theory
Change of a work of art is a feature of Arte Povera, which holds that works of art "should not be seen as fixed entities", but as objects of change and movement to "include time and space in a new manner. At stake is the issue of transferring the phenomenology of human experience" into the arts.[3]
The Co-creative Dimension of Modular Art
A school of thought coming out of the United States emphasizes modular art's alignment with the post-industrial character of 21st century culture and its contrast with traditional notions of art.[4] Core characteristics of post-industrialism, as largely defined by the theorist Daniel Bell in his 1973 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, include the emergence of a service economy in place of a manufacturing one; the social and economic pre-eminence of the creative, professional and technical classes; the central place of theoretical knowledge as a font of innovation; the strong influence of technology on daily life; and high levels of urbanization.[5]
Modular art appears to synchronize perfectly with several of these criteria. For example, its manual changeability opens up the possibility of co-creative art, in which the collector or user collaborates with the originating modular artist to jointly determine the appearance of the work of art. This presupposes the existence of creative people capable of and interested in serving such a role – a demographic evolution that was already underway in Bell's time and that has since been studied in works like Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class (2002).[6]
Co-creation is closely associated with mass customization, a production model that combines the opportunity for individual personalization with mass production. Modular art and mass customization share a commonality in their synthesis of two opposing qualities. On the one hand, as previously stated the very concept of modularity implies a limitless supply of identical modules such as only industrial production can provide; on the other hand, the ability of the individual to re-arrange these modules in the work of art based on aesthetic criteria re-injects a subjective and purely human dimension into the creative act.
Mass customization is itself only made possible with the advent of computers and a type of software known as a configurator. A configurator is a software tool used by the buyer to configure a product from the options made available by the vendor. Applied to the purpose of composing a work of modular art onscreen, it can greatly facilitate the design of a modular assembly by allowing the user to study multiple design options more quickly and in far greater depth than by using analog methods. For example, Leda Luss Luyken's work allows for such individualised configurations on her website.[7] Once the design is established a computer file is then sent over the air to a manufacturing facility where robotically controlled equipment produces the object according to its specifications. Not only does this computer-aided-manufacturing (CAM) allow for the customization of mass produced objects, it also enables a much higher level of precision and fit – qualities critical for modules to be physically joined together. Bell's identification of technology as a central axis of post-industrial life is underscored in the intertwining of the digital with the physical realization of modular art.
The De- and Reconstructive Approach in Europe
A circle of artists and critics largely based in Europe and associated with the artist Leda Luss Luyken has discussed modular art primarily in terms of her paintings, which are composed of movable painted panels set in steel frames. Luss Luyken has dubbed her work "ModulArt". Changing the configuration of a ModulArt painting constitutes a form of motion, offering the spectator alternative views and alternative interpretations, and thus aligning the work more closely than a static object to the dynamism of physical human experience.[8] Art historian and theorist Denys Zacharopoulos called this "a new way of motion in painting".[9] For the German painter Georg Baselitz "paintings are created by discarding the old images and by producing what has not yet been imagined".[10] The concept of ModulArt responds directly to this claim by allowing the user to de-compose and to re-compose a painting that is already completed by re-arranging its parts, thus providing numerous possibilities for ever newer pictures not yet imagined.
To the extent that alterable art can yield unpredictable images beyond the realm of normal expectation – what have been termed outliers – there is a connection to molecular and fragmental theories in the natural sciences as well as to transitional theories, such as the Black Swan theory in mathematics and the social sciences.[11] Musical composition and film are still other points of reference for modular art, since these two media share its qualities of motion.
Modular Artists and their Work
Sculptors
Working in the 1950-60s in Manchester (UK), American artist Mitzi Cunliffe developed sculptures consisting of multiple blocks about twelve inches square which she put together in a variety of combinations to give a sculptured effect on a large scale. She referred to them as modular sculptures. The University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) acquired some of these works.[12]
Sculptor and ceramicist Malcolm Leland designed in 1954 a similar modular sculpture system based on a single 23-inch tall module that could be stacked vertically by means of a centering pin; the module has a generally biomorphic, curvilinear outline that yields an undulating silhouette when multiple modules are placed on top of each other. The technique of stacking repetitive elements in the round recalls Brancusi's "Endless Column" of 1938.
Painters
Starting in the 1970s, Leland's contemporary Norman Carlberg produced groups of square framed prints which he placed together on a wall in a tight grid, each print conceived as an independent module. The viewer is then invited to rotate or reposition them to generate new composite images. The abstract quality of the prints enhanced the creative possibilities of their re-orientation insofar as they are non-directional and geometrically inter-related.
Greek-born conceptual artist Leda Luss Luyken, who was initially trained as an architect, produces what she calls 'ModulArt' in Germany in the medium of painting since the 1990s. Standardized canvas panels are mounted as modules onto a steel frame within which they can be moved and rotated. Luyken's ModulArt has been shown in many gallery and museum exhibitions throughout Europe, among them the Grassi Museum in Leipzig (1996); Munich's Haus der Kunst (2001 and 2004) as well as the Stadtmuseum in Weimar (2008).[13]
In the U.S. Moshé Elimelech creates what he has called "Cubic Constructions". These are multiple groupings of approximately three-inch cubes set inside pockets in a framed shadow box. On each cube he applies paint in fields of bright color and abstract pattern with precise, controlled brush strokes. Like Carlsberg, Elimelech then invites the viewer to reposition any or all of the cubes to display one of their six sides, each of which is painted in a different pattern. Exhibiting since the 1980s, Elimelech shows primarily in California galleries, and has work represented in several museum design stores as well.[14]
Another portfolio of interactive modular art comes out of Studio for A.R.T. and Architecture, a New York-based firm headed by Donald Rattner. Rattner has designed modular art in the media of wall sculpture, rotational paintings, tapestries, artist's wallpapers, and artist's books. To bring his work and those of other "modulartists" to the marketplace, in 2008 he and his wife founded A.R.T. (art-rethought), an art storefront focused on co-creative and modular work. In his writings Rattner has emphasized the post-industrial aspect of the most recent trends in Modular art, coining the term "New Industrialism" to denote mass customization, production on demand, open innovation, co-creative design, tele-fabrication, robotics and other computer-driven technologies that are re-defining how things are made in the global marketplace.[15]
Composers
Modularity in music can be seen as bringing two key elements of musical composition and film into the world of painting: variation of a theme and movement of and within a picture. For this very reason the contemporary composer Minas Borboudakis has dedicated the third part of his trilogy ROAI III for piano and electronics to the modular methodology.
Italian composer and arts theoretician Stefano Vagnini has developed a theory of open-source composition based on modular aggregation. [16] The concept of a musical work of art being something closed, limited and immobile disappears in favor of a process of numerous aggregations that allow a composition to become infinite in principle. Several such compositions have been executed and were performed in Italy. The approach is being academically discussed at the University of West Georgia and the Carrollton Cultural Arts Centre in the USA.
Related Art Movements
Films about Modular Art
- Panta rei, Leda Luss-Luyken's ModulArt, by Dagmar Scheibert & Reinhard Eisener, 3'30" film, 15', Berlin, 2005.
- ModulArt, by Roman Angelos Luyken, 2', London, 2008.
- ModulArt by Peider Defilla, TV docu commissioned by BR-alpha TV | ARD, in production, 15', forthcoming 2010
Literature about Modular Art
- Leda Luss Luyken :ModulArt, ed. by Georg von Kap-herr, with contributions by Prof. Paul Schilfgaarde and Dr. Joachim Kaske, English and German, 112 p, Bobingen, 2008.
- The Modular Method in Music, by Stefano Vagnini, English and Italian, 161 pp, Rome: Falcon Valley Music, 2002.
- Wanderjahre, The Collection Kaske 1970-2010, Munich 2010 (forthcoming).
References
- ^ the term ModulArt was first mentioned in 1975 in a German arts encyclopedia as "a form of art […] made by movable elements that […] transfer the object into a new state of being by moving their variable parts" in: Ludewig, Werner (Ed.). Kunst – Literatur – Musik, Daten und Fakten. Lexikon-Institut Bertelsmann, 1975, p. 99
- ^ Ludewig, Werner (Ed.). Kunst – Literatur – Musik, Daten und Fakten. Lexikon-Institut Bertelsmann, 1975, p. 99.
- ^ Interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. See also: Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. Arte Povera (Themes & Movements). New York: Phaidon Press, 2005.
- ^ [Rattner, Donald]. "A Comparison of Conventional and Modular Art" in A.R.T. Catalogue v2.0. New York: lulu.com, 2010. Pp. C-1ff.
- ^ Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974.
- ^ Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life. Basic Books, 2002.
- ^ http://www.studio-l.de/art.html > ModulArt >> play with ModulArt
- ^ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ModulArt
- ^ von Kap-herr, Georg (Ed.). ModulArt. Bobingen (Germany), 2008, pp. 6-25.
- ^ von Kap-herr, Georg (Ed.). ModulArt. Bobingen (Germany), 2008, p.23
- ^ cf. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Penguin, 2007.
- ^ Letter dated 19 December 08 by Prof. E.G. Wedell, Manchester (UK), friend and landlord of Mitzi Cunliffe in Manchester.
- ^ http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Leda+Luss%20Luyken/116822.html
- ^ http://www.mosheart.com/bio/index.html
- ^ http://issuu.com/the_studio_portfolio/docs/studio_portfolio_-_art?viewMode=magazine&mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true. Pp. A-3f.
- ^ Vagnini, Stafano, The Modular Method in Music, English and Italian, 161 pp, Rome: Falcon Valley Music, 2002