This essay is about grappling with extremes of composition with a "more is more" bent. My goal is to discuss this as a fruitful strategy and a generative tool in itself and not only as a default or minor field of making. There is a potential that I am putting forward as a comparable or greater tool in achieving greater human potential than other modes of art making and the avante-garde past and present. Using examples from primitives to present day media, I will introduce modes of non-linear creation that assemble and enhance pieces of the world rather than from the world of art -> outwards. These examples are meant to illustrate the unique possibilities for organization of information which may be at the root of new 'entropic' media in which people can organize visual space in potentially more radical ways than ever before.
Andreas Gursky, Nha Trang, Vietnam, 2004
In that, I will be arguing from the perspective that the reverse: “less is more” is a more arbitrary creation of clarity to stand outside from the “chaos” of the increasingly modernized world. This comes from a point of asserting that even when successful at creating meaninful art, this can be a flawed and creativity-stunting process in terms of creating something outside of what one expects. To elevate that kind of “clarity” as a prerequisite for high art or design at points in history allowed other processes to be dismissed as "intuitive", fringe, mad, or just plain cluttered and this continues to some degree today. Despite a greater leveling of equality to artistic practices and a wider accepted field than possibly at any time in modern history, This philosophy still penetrates - if not which art is valued - the process of which art is often made. Simply put, filling space can be one way to break out of existing boundaries and uses of materials to create something larger than its parts or references.
Melvin 'Milky' Way, 21st cent.
Thankfully horror vacui - or cenophobia - has been flipped to some degree as a term in current use. Ironically it has become a mere neutral description of what millennia of creators have been participating in, something extra-ordinary. This is an art that is not likely meant to resolve a direct story of the every-day, that is, objects not of worldly clarity. This is not to be confused with chaos.
The Devonshire hunting tapestries, 1430-1450
The literal translation of that term is "fear of space" but more often is characteristic of a conscious (or otherwise) nullification of as much free space as possible - often through an intense process of labor. To understand through logic alone, one may wonder what the motivation or goal of a less 'direct' or crowded space might be. For traditional peoples it may be argued that they see the world with a different perception, that they organized things on their own terms separate from what would be a 'Western' viewpoint. Going back into history it is speculated that the intention of the indigenous or the Greeks was not necessarily to explain to - or even please - humans, but to appease or produce something extra-terra or godly.
The Dipylon Amphora Funerary Urn in Geometric-Style from Kerameikos Necropolis, Athens -c-750-bc
Horror Vacui is a tradition that stretches diverse forms and media from tribal cultures to the ‘Geometric Period’ of Ancient Greece at the beginning of civilization to the present day. What seems to be at least partially 'instinctual' as well as intentional propensities of peoples remains today in contemporary culture. The desire of artists and non-professionals alike - to 'just' fill space.
Book of Kells, c. 8th century
More advanced early precedents are seen in the rich formal awkwardness of organization in medieval manuscripts that seem to embellish indiscriminately throughout the picture plane with symbols, text, and imagery. One individual, Hrabanus Maurus, a ninth century monk, invented a ciphering system for encrypted poems that interacted with the imagery that in turn had smaller poems within, making images that were often complex and yet accessible on some level to those who would search for the deeper meaning.
A Qashqai (Persian) carpet dated 1920
One could dwell quite a bit on all the ornate space filling of ancient and indigenous peoples, but fast forwarding quite a bit to the early 20th century, there existed some lesser known artists engaged in 'visual spiritualism' or 'mediumistic art'. Despite being not well known enough to have directly impacted the art that followed chronologically, these artists deserve notice for a kind of 'rebirth' of extreme spatial eccentricity in the modern Western world of that period. Being what would later be labeled ’outsider artists’, these were people largely untrained in various concepts like negative-space and academic composition. In spite of this they constructed extremely intricate designs and filled endless amounts of that opened up pictorial space. Doing so in ways that mirrored but moved beyond the more generic (yet beautiful) meanderings of primitive art and early object adornment prior. Sometimes these adopted more sophisticated pictographic imagery within those new volumes created and used expanded sources from surrounding medias. In 1908, one such artist - Adolf Wolfli - began a 25,000 page epic-object defying categorization that featured 1,600 illustrations merged with texts and musical notation that in turn spewed a story of blended autobiography and fantasy. Artists like Wolfli and Augustin Lesage created massive projects in scale and scope that mined their own eccentricities and ran with them outwards like a database of Mad Libs.
Augustin Lesage, A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World, 1923
Another example of this information-intensity producing similar 'monuments' of personal vision is found in the work of Achilles G. Rizzoli. Although not exactly 'Horror Vacui' in terms of composition (it remains perspectivaly representational) the spaces are indeed quite detailed and meandering to a beyond baroque level of the eccentric. Possibly the strangest of all 'outsider' American artists, Rizzoli attempted early on to make a living as a writer, and wrote countless books centered around architects trying to achieve utopias, achieving 280 rejections over decades. In his 40's he began his epic series of architectural renderings that symbolically represent individuals as monumental buildings, many to indicate or illustrate a post-human afterlife as these grand permanent structures. This is similar to how some peoples have attributed an afterlife in trees and rocks and things. Rizolli pictured them as fantastic classical structures in heaven. Later in life he attempted to write what would be the third testament to the bible which features a female compliment to Jesus named 'Miss Architecture Made To Entertain'.
AG Rizzoli, The Shaft of Ascension, 1939
On the subject of his own art Rizzoli was verbose:
"We sincerely believe we have delineated the most remarkable and singular impression ever possible of expressing in terms of decorative architecture unique to extremes hardly possible of visualization unless one has actually experienced the oddly intrinsic throbbing ordeal, thereupon we feel we have produced the most picturesque and precious piece of, or at least essayed the initial move in what may be considered a new movement in the history of art. "
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Other than the tendency towards eccentricity, my belief is that 'horror vacui' is not linked necessarily to that of Surrealism, even though some surrealists works certainly qualify. I believe the differnce - particulary in the modern impulse - is an attempt to BUILD without interference of a set language or pictorial convention, not just to unravel and display the acts of the subconscious. Of course particularly with more free-form and expressionist work, from Henri Michaux and Andre Mason to Jackson Pollock there is an element of both. When examining the strongest examples of this type of art as whole however, I believe this is structurally tied to a more analytic tradition of organization and desire to create something outside oneself than randomness.
Kuba peoples, Congo; Prestige Panel, 19th–20th century
The actual organizing principles of ornamental rugs and the like are largely unknown in significance or meaning or reasons for being.The analytical aspect and tendency to self-organize the object in the modern period (either bouncing off of realistic form or working in abstract language) is a bit more apparent and can be sourced in traditional art history. These ‘Modern’ compositional strategies came from using formal techniques of analytic cubism itself and other avant-garde experimentation in new formats such as material collage. These liberally manifested in what I believe to be the first truly American art works by the artist Marsden Hartley.
Marsden Heartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914
In works like Portrait of a German Officer, 1914 and other 'portraits' these defining pieces show a type of painterly design in bricolage that disintegrated and recombined categories of abstract/landscape/portrait/ and still life. Not much later this was picked up by a group of artists labeled the precisionists: Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, and Charles Demuth amongst the most notable. These artists used similar methods to create more specific - although not necessarily more radical - relationships between real things of the world, appropriate ways of representation, and their working methods.
Ralston Crawford, New Orleans Tomb, 1954
Particularly Ralston Crawford in his proto-pop sensibility, tried to convey the complexity of the observed world into an equally complex visual hierarchy. Contrasting this with the exuberant jazz-like emotive compositions of peer Stuart Davis one can see the difference.
Davis couldn't separate completely from the European model where poetry supersedes reference and specificity (although making great energetic compositions nonetheless). Crawford tended to favor a more industrial layout which avoided artificial balance and rather emphasized imperfection (radical asymmetry) with industrial application. Charles Demuth on the other hand made striking visual compositions that seemed to borrow and string together from every artistic movement at that time (Italian Futurism, Orphism, etc... as well as being obsessed with Duchamp’s ‘Bride’ painting) but created something distilled, defined, and well..’pop’. On a side note, many of his paintings are known to have secret layered subject matter on the level of Duchamp.
Charles Demuth, The Figure 5 in Gold, 1928
In Europe at this time there was another major figure: Kurt Schwitters, a German, who was rejected from the DADA movement in Berlin as a member because of his educational background and ties to modern ‘visual’ movements that were looked on with disdain by intellectual radicals. Indeed after rejection he went on to emphasize radical visual experiments in the field of collage – that was currently being used to more obvious political ends by satirical geniuses like Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield. Schwitters’ approach was to create a more coherent sense out the world using cumulative fragments-turned-stories, rather than using collage to juxtapose or illustrate already set ideas and fleeting politics. In addition to his flat work, Schwitters’ most ambitious projects were in his alterations of physical spaces, most notably the Merzbau, which reflected his formal ingenuities back into real physical spaces.
Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933
Although the artists in this section perhaps did not always feature the added or missing gene to pump their compositions to the point of horror, they each contribute greatly to the very mutability and playfulness of the picture plane. They lay the foundation for opened up working process of future artists and they themselves figured out ways to work within the artifacts of the world and create their own meaning honest to the materials and context.
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"I consider myself successful only when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense."
- Robert Rauschenberg
Post-War art is filled with examples of a 'less is more' mentality, informed by Bauhaus severity, minimal/conceptual essentialism, and cutting delivery of prepackaged ideas. This can lead to even more ‘essential’ art of the intentionally banal, or sometimes for the purposes of turning on its head - a mere display of the forms of commerce. This also fits the model already discussed as the respite from the world's complexity via large amounts of 'white space' and desire for limited layers of complexity and simplicity. Despite this, there are examples from minimalism to pop art of artists who bridge the physical and the fantastical through what could be interpreted as filled space. Amongst them are artists as seemingly diverse as Jay Defeo, Lucas Samaras, and Roy Lichtenstein.
Jay Defeo, The Rose, 1958-1966
Out of the Beat Era and process obsessed, Jay Defeo might seem to be the perfect propagator of the 'more is better' axiom. Best known for painting "The Rose", a 11-by-8-foot object weighing 3000 pounds and 11 inches deep in oil paint. Marked by the continuous working through addition and subtraction, building and erasure. These works generally based on templates of basic forms: triangle, spiral, oval etc... Despite that we are clearly dealing with the very basic tenets of horror vacui this mammoth of material seems to aesthetically avoid compositional maximalism or a sense of being overkill. This gives it a unique singularity in what can be seen as an opened field of 'labored' and hand crafted minimal work and separates it quite a bit from what has been discussed so far in terms of a 'complicated' space. Like Crawford, many of her source materials (and thus the sources of empirical form) were gathered through photography and formed into a symbolic language. This ties it to the idea of building meaning through accumulation of little realities instead of forming one step reductions, illustrations or abstractions from the larger world.
On the dedicated (obsessive) aspect, Defeo comments: "When the work is final, I have to feel I have pushed it as far as I possibly can (short of self-destructing) and very important, I can't abide a single mark that strikes me as arbitrary."
"the medium does indeed become the message" - Jay Defeo
Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963
On an even more abstract end of the spectrum, if we look to artists like Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, and Richard Serra, and even John McCracken we can see the propensity of some artists who could be called 'minimalists' to actually be propagating a highly labored and 'filled' space. Being on the far end of the spectrum towards the abstract, these works obviously were not marked by perspectival convention and created new realation to the human gesture, despite being more 'homogeneous' as a finished product than things discussed in this essay.
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
In regards to other art movements, particularly when seen in Warhol, reductive pop seems to be irreconcilable (even more so than certain kinds of minimal art) with filled space. Although in Warhol you do have works where repetition and working/overworking of the surface takes on new and non-linear modes of production as opposed to being purely simple critiques or reproductions of things. Roy Lichtenstein perhaps is seen as a less important figure in terms of having such an affect on culture and subsequent artists, but in terms of visual space was probably much more interesting if not more radical.
Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror #10, 1970
Lichtenstein picked up on and exploited conventions in comics and other print media that were signifiers or stand-ins representing real life. This was a language essentially built in the modern era not one and the same with those of academic art or modernism. Some earlier works were seemingly direct copies (although never were 100%), but he then absorbed those into his own iconography and built with them. Things like "stink-lines", emotional text, explosions, rays of light, reflections in mirrors were things 20th century 2-d cartoonists had to create new visual formulae to depict reality. For those progenitors There was a certain habituation and style to things that are basically loaded with meaning that they do not intrinsically contain, and thus can be played with. Lichenstein's work is marked by this play of these pictorial signs. This is often criticized unfairly as meaningless themselves - compared to Warhol which is seen as having more underling 'message'. Some of Lichenstein's most intriguing works are the painting/objects like the Mirror works. The basic idea already an invention of Jasper Johns, where you are presented with an object that is itself an illusion and a thing. With the mirrors you have a deeper investigation in terms of what symbols make the form recognizable. Bands and dots do not a mirror make, and yet he was able to make a strange dense object in the real world that speaks to this playful zone of perception. Painted mirrors reflecting nothing and yet composed of those signs which we can read as reflection and solidity.
Lucas Samaras, Untitled Box, 1963
Because of such inventions of post-war art, in the 60's and 70's following pop,minimalism and conceptualism, artists had the luxury of playing with a wider array of tools - both formal and conceptual - that pushed even funkier contradictions even while remaining formally rigorous. Lucas Samaras is an American Greek import whose work is marked by fantastical personally obsessive dialog along with a material fetish to repel and attract. He did postgraduate work specializing in Byzantine art at Columbia University. This was probably a influence in his organization and may have also inspired the variations in scale, medium, and approach to materials as components that are always interchangeable and take on exotic hybrid forms. His objects appear formed through a mysterious fashion often embellishing upon existing objects and taking them into territories of the internal surreal, from sensuous to the sinister...often mutilating forms in the process of 'decorating' them.
S. Clay Wilson, The Psychopathic Southside Blade-Freaks Confront Razor Annie and Her Cocaine Chorus of Cutters... (center spread for Thrilling Murder Comics), 1970
Looking even further outside the art-world similar strategies to that being discussed were adopted and integral to the underground comix movement and psychedelic art. This is seen not only with new gestures of expressing things but new ways of organizing the picture plane. A new multifaceted space divorced from the rules of 'window' conventions but not entirely abstract. In the 70’s and 80’s artists like A.R. Penck and Keith Harring would use their subjective ‘automatic’ embellishment to fill spaces with their own pictographic icons.
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Wallace Berman, Untitled (A7-Mushroom, D4-Cross), 1966
One sort of liminal weirdo was Wallace Berman, an archetypal (or anti-archetypal) beatnik who was also involved in the infamous Ferus gallery in California in the late 50’s. He also disseminated work through his self published journal SEMINA (Latin:seed). His personal work comprised almost entirely of serial images done on a Verifax (copier) with the majority featuring a grid of repeated emblematic images of a hand holding a palm-sized transistor radio. The speaker was replaced by a variety of images –themselves iconic – that were then meant to string together to express various ideas (mostly arbitrary, surreal, groovy) which he added to by hand written notes and painted Kabbalistic Hebrew characters. A pioneer of sorts to what would become a photocopy aesthetic, later propagated in punk rocks flyers, zines etc... These would be informed in the same way by constructivism, an unconscious sensitivity to pop as well as classical compositions, along with basic utility and quickness.
MDC flyer, 1980's
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In a more comprehensive essay, many subtopics could follow focusing on a vast array of contemporary artists carving out their unique niche in 'obsessive' art or lengthy accounts of DIY movements with a maximal aesthetic in Providence (My home town) and those that sprawled elsewhere.
Wright is the visionary responsible for pushing the limits of user-customization and play and coining the phrase 'possibility space'. He has claimed that his brainstorming for The SIMS came about after his Northern California house burned down (among many in the Berkley/Oakland fires) and after moving into a new home. In putting back together their life he would arrange things in a completely different way and observe the process. The game had been originally dubbed "Home Tactics: The Experimental Domestic Simulator."
Sim City 3000
Way prior to that, in 1986, Wright and Jones had a daughter, Cassidy, and Jones made Wright promise to share the parenting equally so that she [his wife] could continue painting. “He really did stick to that,” she told me. “He spent a lot of time with Cassidy.” While he was at home with his daughter, Wright began to turn over the idea for a new game, a kind of interactive doll house that adults would like as much as children. “I went around my house looking at all my objects, asking myself, ‘What’s the least number of motives or needs that would justify all this crap in my house?’ There should be some reason for everything in my house. What’s the reason?” [ Game Master, The New Yorker, November 6, 2006]
Sim City 3000
So Wright is pulling from the world as subject matter in his games, however he is also using this critically and creativity to actually produce something that examines and questions everyday experience as well as fantastical experience, which one may equate to function as art. Not only that but that ability is then transferred to anyone who uses what he has made.
generic -> specific, a suitable tool for representation
The Sims - mod
This type of platform allows for a polar opposite format to academic or 'schools' of art and thinking where intention drives a linear path to conception and finish.
For Wright, getting people to focus on their environment - albeit virtual - is a trove of sociological study into how our environments affect our habits and conditions and change behavior. It turns out of course that people will exhibit more 'free reign' in the virtual than otherwise out of more conservative necessity in real life. When given a virtual black hole the impulse isn't always to 'fill space' but perhaps like Defeo to aggressively add and subtract over and over in the virtual. To try out multiple pathways or approaches simultaneously, without as much self-consciousness or even training to be 'creative'. This of course is similar with graphics construction, whose 'undo' marks a significant breakthrough.
Wright has since stated his own think-tank for pertetuating the future of user-customization called Stupid Fun Club. "Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms."
Responsible in some degree for the 9-9-9 tax plan, in his new project Hivemind (yet to be released) he writes:
"If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life. How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it?"
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Minecraft [VG], 2nd decade - 21st cent.
"Less is a bore." - Robert Venturi author of Learning from Las Vegas
"Most Minecraft architecture is merely a reproduction of traditional trends practiced in the real world because designers simply tend to recreate what is familiar to them. However, if the unconventional physics of Minecraft were more often embraced, an entirely different sort of aesthetic would be produced. The Minecraft designer does not actually need to address the laws of gravity or weather that dictate the design of shelter in the real world, and so every use of pitched roofs or support beams and the like is completely unnecessary. An architecture that is specific to the Minecraft world does not need to appear to stand, it should instead appear as if it is floating. Minecraft architecture should appear altogether unique, as there is, with the exception of sand and gravel, no force of gravity for the building materials to resist. A new set to physical laws should produce a new building logic." - from: Manifesto for a New Minecraft Aesthetic
http://mcarchitecture.tumblr.com/post/9022780873/manifesto-for-a-new-minecraft-aesthetic
Lebbeus Woods, Architectural Drawing
Minecraft is an independent open-world or 'free roaming' game that goes above and beyond the terms of freedoms one can create through a built environment and story created by the individual. It was almost single-handedly the creation and distribution of one person: Markus "Notch" Persson. Like other such open-worlds there are many ways to reach an objective but it allows for almost unprecedented free reign in constructing the very environment (at least within a grid of computer mathematics) and independence of game objective.
Despite its popularity and strengths it does seem like the criticisms of the manifesto parallel what might be said of all mediums with a goal maximum creativity. This perhaps is an unfair demand on a game nor is the manifesto written by the creator. Expanding on it however, there does seem to be a pervasive phenomena of redundancy and habit regardless of the medium and regardless of the technology available.
Tanzania , Dar es Salaam , Tingatinga painting .
The style takes its name from Eduardo Saidi Tingatinga born in the 1930s
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True creativity involves the ability and space to rebuild things based on one’s own rules within rules. On the flip side, the redundancy of habituation seems to be the default even as media strive intentionally to foster creativity. While getting people simply to be creative is some feat, using that creativity to actually bridge into something new can be somewhat more of a challange.
So fresh and so clean.
Some theorists in art have almost re-defined the art-practice in term of having to refer or comment on cultural phenomena in order to have relevance to the culture. Problem being is that actual products of the culture - indifferent to such a system of thought - generally have greater effect on people’s perceptions. The actual culture produces the more relevant and pervasive engines of insight into humanity and pleasure. It seems this default self-critically and adherence to rules or correctness is a crutch which prevents tapping into true unknowns. These are unknowns that true experimentation and tools pulled from our basic free zones of expression - from art to games - can tap into.
FASA Corp., Shadowrun [RPG], 1990
"Minecraft players do not require the utility of garages, kitchens, or bathrooms. With that, in-game cities should be composed of buildings that are designed to frame views, house art, and represent ideas. It would be most appropriate for monuments, museums, sky bridges and viewing towers to exist where apartments, restaurants, gas stations and office buildings take up most of the space in the real world. " - from: Manifesto for a New Minecraft Aesthetic
http://mcarchitecture.tumblr.com/post/9022780873/manifesto-for-a-new-minecraft-aesthetic
I think this gets down to the 'message' of the filled up jug or rug or whatever one can imagine and then embellish. The actual creation and its detail is not always a matter of showing things as they are, but creating terms of which to describe new or otherwise indescribable phenomena. This, taken to its limit will likely bring the most fruitful discussion and shape the culture more than a discussion based on the same already preconceived ideas. In addition to the “horror vacui” of the page or vessel, these user filled spaces of 'dis-order' of the present - whether material or technologically - may be the tools (or models for those tools) that will ultimately generate the next wave of non-mainstream thought and wonder.
