Page 45 - Studio International - September October 1975

space and objects, achieving a
transformation of the environment to a
point where it is devoid of all historical-
concrete references. At the same time,
Mondrian, in designing the Salon of
Madame B. in 1926, arrived at such a
degree of optical and volumetric
`levitation' that the resulting environment
was without individual connotations and
almost mystically ethereal.
With Mondrian and Pannaggi9, both
influenced by constructivist and
neoplasticist theories, the treatment of
the environment is of a synthetic nature :
each shape, object and colour is adapted
to the whole. But this does not mean that
each entity has to be in relationship with
the whole in order to have an
environmental meaning. There are some
apparently 'secondary' entities which are
capable of having environmental
meaning within themselves. One
example of these is a door, which Jackson Pollock at work in his studio at
contains its own environmental idea: Hampton, N.Y.
Marcel Duchamp Twine installation at the Surrealist Exhibition, N.Y., 1942
the Sumerians used to give a door as environment of leaves and coal-sacks
a wedding present to symbolize newly- full of paper; moving through the
acquired environmental autonomy. exhibition was made precarious and
The door, as a symbolic-functional noisy as well as difficult by the semi- autonomy they had once renounced.
element, was used by Duchamp in 1927 darkness shrouding the exhibition hall.
at 1 t rue Larrey, where he designed a
door which opened and closed Lucio Fontana Ambiente Spaziale 1949
simultaneously. The philosophical and
alchemical meaning of this environmental
work has already been discussed by
Burnham, Schwarz, Linde, Calvesi and
others. Here I am only interested in
pointing out the way in which it makes
use of a total space, no longer in
relation to a field of entities, but to one
point, the door itself, which becomes a
pivot for three rooms : study, bathroom
and bedroom. These rooms revolve
around the door and become relatively
indivisible. There are no contrasting or
different spaces; the house att I rue
Larrey is a 'single body' which has
multiple parts but itself is always part
of the 'whole,' represented by Duchamp
opening and closing the door.
Reference to the user of the field — in
this case the inhabitant of the house — is
a theme which crops up again in other
environmental works by Duchamp.
What interested him in the surrealist
exhibitions of 1938 and 1942 was not so
much the given space, full of objects and
pictures, but the visitors. At the 1938
exhibition they found themselves in an
Visitors to the 1942 exhibition were
presented with another difficulty, this
time physical rather than visual. The
International Surrealist Exhibition was
criss-crossed by ropes, creating an
almost impassable network.
From this brief survey of
environmental experiments we can see
that there is a certain fluctuation between
the social need to create a physical space
with a 'utilitarian' function, and the
individual need to construct a symbolic
environment of a 'monumental' nature.
Both attitudes are valid but obviously the
former places greater restrictions on the
artist. Functional limitations preclude
any stratified formations of personal
symbols and any exploration which
relates only to artistic problems. It is
therefore natural that functional
motivation should have prevailed, in the
examples mentioned, over the desire to
carry out aesthetic and expressive
experiments, expecially since the artistic
movements of that period, from
Futurism to De Stijl, from Constructivism
to Dada, still believed they were an
expression, albeit an indirect one, of
society.
1945-1975
In the post-war years it seemed as
though art had come to the end of a
chapter in its history. Having attempted
a dialogue with society, it now turned its
attention inwards to the problems of the
individual and the meaning of art.
While in earlier years there was a utopian
concern for the fate of a group of
individuals, the crisis of values brought
about by the Second World War had
taken all ideas of social responsibility
away from art and made politics the only
sphere where any action could be carried
out. The artist and his world found
themselves with no other raison d'être
than the need to solve their own
problems of existence and expression;
consequently they reclaimed the
The artist, having been forcibly freed
of social problems, became concerned
119