(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 14

Spatial seductions

The everyday interiorities of Marcel Duchamp, Edward Kienholz, and Pepón Osorio

Pablo Meninato

Its surface seems slick, perhaps reflective, often translucent, skin-like, visually viscous; its form appears curved, ballooned, bulging, segmental, warped, and twisted; its structure looks webbed, ribbed, and vaulted; its materials might be synthetic, resinous, metallic, and alloyed; its interior would be cave-like, womb-like, tunneled, burrowed, and furrowed; its furniture and fittings are envisaged as soft, almost porous in texture, cast or injected, molded, and sensitive to heat and light… The techniques of its design are drawn … from animation software that generates its complex forms with the help of digital avatars that work, independently of the architect, to produce multiple iterations of possible combinations.¹

With this somehow lyrical description, Anthony Vidler outlines one of the principal tendencies in contemporary architecture, characterized for its perennial intention of creating new and unprecedented production. A similar survey of an array of recent design magazines reveals multiple images of these sculptural forms with specific regard to interior architecture: carved spaces, undulating ceilings, and patterned fabric surfaces. Referred to as blobs, fabrications, topographies, parametrics, or late modernisms, these projects convey the unlimited possibilities of innovation, whereby only budgetary constraints would pose restrictions to such extraordinary concepts. $^2$

The origins of these emerging interior architectural explorations may be traced to avant-garde theoretical influences of suprematism, constructivism, and de Stijl in the early modern movement. These projects are characterized by their relentless rejection of tradition, search for abstraction, and creation of spatial forms devoid of figurative iconography. As demonstrated in Theo van Doesburg’s manifesto Towards a Plastic Architecture (1924), the Dutch de Stijl group developed what is perhaps the clearest embodiment of similar objectives:

The new architecture possesses no single passive factor. It has overcome the opening (in the wall). With its openness the window plays an active role in opposition to the closedness of the wall surface. Nowhere does an opening or a gap occupy the foreground; everything is strictly determined by contrast. $^3$

In a series of alternatives titled Contra-Construction, Van Doesburg explored many of the ideas introduced in his manifesto. Similar to the modus operandi of interior architecture, his project blurs the distinction between inside and outside spaces, top and bottom, and front, side, and rear elevations. One of its most extreme ideas was the elimination of the most conventional architectural elements, such as doors and windows. The door, for example, rather than being an element in its own right (consisting of a frame and a panel) is conceived as the absence of a wall. Likewise, the

windows are not punctures in the wall, but rather openings that are left between the planes. The project serves as a formal laboratory whose ultimate goal appears to substantiate the claims of the manifesto.

This chapter analyzes the spatial works of Marcel Duchamp, Edward Kienholz, and Pepón Osorio to unpack notions of inheritance, adaptation, reuse, and social agency sharing common motivations with interior architecture. The spatial/object-oriented process of these artists offers a critical lens for the emerging theoretical discourse surrounding the connected disciplines of interior architecture and adaptive reuse.

Duchamp: doors and windows stripped bare

Other artistic endeavors contemporary to these early twentieth century developments manifested an alternate departure from conventional art processes, whose results led away from avant-garde formalism. The works and ideas of Marcel Duchamp represent an alternative avant-garde that dwelled on conceptual and intellectual elaborations rather than formal and visual conditions. Most of Duchamp’s work contradicted the most fundamental notions of modern art, such as the rejection of the past or the search for abstraction, proposing instead a fresh look at existing forms and a reconsideration of the figurative component in art.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Duchamp started exploring the subtle and hidden qualities of everyday objects and artifacts, eventually speculating on the notion of designating some of those objects as works of art. The anecdote in which Duchamp, together with Brancusi and Léger, went to an aviation fair and, while standing in front of an airplane, proposed, “Painting has come to an end. Who can do anything better than this propeller? Can you?” is quite well known. $^4$ Duchamp himself would elaborate the answer to that question with his Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle wheel, 1913). With this work he reiterates his fascination with industrial artifacts, but his attention now resides in the displacement of those objects; the wheel appears unexpectedly installed upside-down and bolted to a stool, therefore removed from its expected function. This seemingly simple effect,

later known as “readymade,” redefined the most fundamental conception of the artistic act, since the artist is no longer the one who produces the work of art; instead, he chooses it.

Unlike other modern artists, Duchamp did not participate in collaborative projects with architects or designers. It should be noted, however, that many of his works display an original consideration of architectural elements. In what could be interpreted as an alternative to Van Doesburg’s experimental Contra-Construction house, several of Duchamp’s works reinterpret the attributes of the most conventional architectural openings, namely doors and windows. With his Fresh Widow (1920), a work he later defined as “semi-readymade,” Duchamp challenges the function of the architectural element, a subject that he would also consider with the conception of his doors.

On its first impression, Fresh Widow appears to be a reduced scale version of traditional French window – hence the pun implied in the title the work. Instead of glass, the panels were made of wood and wrapped with black leather (a clear association with the widow), therefore blocking the views. Fresh Widow could be interpreted as the recreation of one of the most conventional building components, but by removing its expected function to see through, Duchamp deconstructs its meaning, which is to say, the window does not work as it should. The title and the actual artifact constitute a sort of oxymoron: an anti-window. With these operations, Duchamp redefines the parameters that define the notion of the window; deprived of its conventional function it is confirmed as an idea, an abstract and intangible concept susceptible to innumerable variations. In her book Marcel Duchamp, Anne D’Harnoncourt quotes Duchamp’s comments in regards to his considerations of the window as an idea:

I used the idea of the window to take a point of departure, as … I used a brush, or I used a form, a specific form of expression, the way oil paint is, a very specific term, specific conception. See, in other words, I could have made twenty windows with a different

idea in each one, the windows being called “my windows” the way you say “my etchings”.

Another architectural element persistently examined by Duchamp was the door. Similar to his windows, the door is usually considered as a displaced object, with its functions canceled or fundamentally altered. His Porte: 11 Rue Larrey (1927) serves as an example of this tactic, a work that displays a quite distinctive feature: it allows for the panel to be simultaneously open or closed in two adjacent openings. Because of its location and type of hinge, the door opens toward a room while at the same time it closes toward the other. As with most of his oeuvre, the piece doesn’t stand out for its spectacularity, but for its subtle irony. The originality does not lie in the door itself – in fact, it is a standard and conventional element – but in its corner location and its particular swing and operation. With this simple procedure, Duchamp achieved a seemingly impossible condition: a door is that is simultaneously open and closed.

Duchamp’s assemblage Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage [Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946–1966] represents possibly his most famous door. Built in absolute secrecy during the last twenty years of his life (first with his mistress Maria Martins, who served as a model for the sculpture, then with his wife Teeny fulfilling that role), it is certainly his most enigmatic work. Étant donnés has been interpreted as both an art piece that contradicts his earlier works and as the conclusion of his oeuvre. On the one hand, the work can be seen as a denial of the readymade, a departure from nonretinal art, and a retreat from ambiguity; all aspects present in Duchamp’s previous works. On the other, it is a work that, above anything else, interrogates what constitutes a work of art, an ensemble of uncertainties to be unveiled or interpreted by the viewer.

Visiting Étant donnés for the first time can be a strange experience: an old wood door without any indication or sign stands in what seems to be a museum’s cul-de-sac. Only the attentive or informed visitor will notice that the door has two small holes at eye level, so the only possible action is to spy, to satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity and see what is

behind the door. When leaning in to peek through the holes, the surprise of the observer may be overwhelming upon discovery of a hyperrealistic sculpture, where a naked female body appears lying on the grass, her legs splayed wide open while one of her hands holds a gas lamp. Étant donnés is an invitation to a voyeuristic experience, capable of provoking shame, rejection, or allure. We know Duchamp brought the double wood door from Cadaqués, Catalunya; it was displaced into an unexpected context, where it was reassembled and perforated. $^2$ The operation shares some similarities with Porte, 11 Rue Larrey, in both cases, there seems to be a renewal of meaning without the involvement of a formal transformation. A comparison between both of Duchamp’s doors offers a paradox: while Porte surprises because it can be always open, Étant donnés was conceived to be permanently closed. By inserting the gate into a new context and making it inoperable, the architectural element doesn’t make sense. In its renewed function, the door has become a miniature window.

With the notion of the assemblage, Duchamp introduced an alternative approximation to what constitutes the realization of interior space and the ambiguous status of architectural elements, where the emphasis is placed in metaphorical and allegorical associations rather than formal or spatial configurations. In its various iterations, modernism appears to have been fixated on a continuous search for abstraction and an irrepressible will for creating new forms, a position that overlooked themes such as desire, eroticism, or unpredictable associations. One of the artistic avenues that derives from Duchamp’s assemblages was installation art, namely the tableau, which is fundamentally a three-dimensional collage where the space or scene is transformed not by means of formalistic manipulations, but through the disparate displacement and combination of ordinary objects.

Kienholz: postcards from the hospital

An interesting characteristic of the contemporary tableau, particularly those developed in North America, is that for many authors it became a vehicle

that facilitated exposing political or social issues. In the case of Edward Kienholz and Pepón Osorio, two artists who were able to inject allusions to a number of contemporary subjects into their installations in quite different contexts (Kienholz in California, and Osorio in New York City and Philadelphia), including the Vietnam War, racism, cultural displacements, and the different forms of violence present in American society. While Duchamp conceived the assemblage as a medium to convey the absurdities of life and the latent power of the erotic, Kienholz and Osorio utilize similar tactics to expose the apparent or implicit conflicts that pervade our contemporary world.

Two tableaux by Kienholz suggest a number of correspondences with Duchamp’s work, particularly his investigations with the effects provoked by the voyeuristic experience. The State Hospital (1966) is essentially a square, dirty-white metal container; one of its sides has a permanently closed door, and to its left, a grey sign that reads “WARD 19.” The single opening of this quasi-hermetic box is a small barred window placed at eye level at the center of the door. Just like with Étant donnés, the viewer’s only option is to approach the cut in the door and try to spy what is hidden inside the container. In this case, the scene is provocative: a single bulb illuminates two similar creatures lying on metal bunk beds, each shackled with a leather strap to the bed’s frame. Both appear naked, with their genitals exposed, their heads made from illuminated fish bowls (Figure 14.1). The scene conveys immense pain and sadness, perhaps a stripped-bare reconstruction of the sadistic scenes that the artist witnessed himself. Twenty years before the conception of the piece, Kienholz worked in a mental hospital in Lake Medicine, Washington.

If The State Hospital is about an encapsulated, enclosed, and claustrophobic space, Portable War Memorial (1968) is a full-frontal, overexposed tableau (Figure 14.2). The viewer’s first impression is of an uncanny agglomeration of domestic furniture, consumer advertisements, and political posters, all elements coexisting next to a banal and prosaic lounge space. Upon closer inspection, the work denotes two clearly differentiated zones. In the left zone, the attention is drawn to the iconic

image of marines embracing a flagpole, then to an inverted white cross on a black ground, an “Uncle Sam” poster, and the disturbing presence of a dwarfed figure encapsulated in a trash can (the image resembles the 1950s iron lung treatment for polio), whose figure displays just head and legs while a trashcan substitutes the rest of the body. This is the “space of war,” which illustrates the different forms of violence associated with it, including the subliminal glorification of the propaganda tokens. The right zone displays several lounge tables and chairs, an umbrella, a Coca-Cola vending machine, and the grainy image of a smiling couple sitting at a diner with a leashed, expectant dog sitting at their feet. This is the area Kienholz described as “business as usual,” the perverse and perhaps indispensable side of American wars abroad. $^{11}$

Figure 14.1 Edward Kienholz: The State Hospital (1968). Mixed media tableaux (245 × 360 × 295 cm)

Osorio: displacements in the Barrio

Pepón Osorio uses similar artistic tactics to those of Kienholz, although the narratives investigated in each body of work are distinctly different. A fundamental characteristic of Osorio’s work lies in his particular background; born and raised in Puerto Rico, he moved to New York City in his early twenties where he trained and practiced as a social worker. This dual condition of outsider and listener of stories allows Osorio to reflect on the conflicts that emerge within the Latin American diaspora in the United States – an array of bilingual and bicultural communities variously defined by race, ethnicity, prejudice, violence, and displacement.

Operating simultaneously as dioramas, spatial installations, or episodic fragments of interior design, Osorio often refers to his work as “social architecture,” a notion that becomes palpable in his installation Badge of Honor (1995), consisting of two adjacent rooms, each one representing

contrasting realities (Figure 14.3). The first is “the father’s room,” a prison cell characterized by its austere minimalism framed by the black iron bars of the permanently closed prison gate. The other is the “son’s room,” a space saturated with typical teenage belongings and objects, such as a red bicycle, a beach ball, posters, trophies, picture frames, and a Puerto Rican flag. The massive wall that separates the two spaces may be interpreted as both the impediment and the link between both characters. It may be considered as the symbol of this implausible connection, since each side of the partition displays a projection of father and son talking to each other (or to themselves?), sharing their feelings, thoughts, and longings. The title of the piece is disturbingly ironic, referring to the eerie pride evident in some kids whose fathers are incarcerated, a “badge” that ostensibly indicates the courage of those serving time.

Figure 14.3 Pepón Osorio: Badge of Honor. 1995. Mixed media installation.

If Badge of Honor dwells about interiority, and even claustrophobic settings, then Lonely Soul (2008) is about a transient urban structure. According to Osorio, the assembly was inspired after observing an Afro-Caribbean woman selling piraguas (ice cream cones) on a hot summer day in North Philadelphia. The subject is human displacement, a notion translated into dislocating elements and objects whose functions appear altered or removed. While the pushcart may evoke the iconic image of the casita, or children’s house, its tilted position conveys a sense of instability as if it were floating in the waters of the Caribbean. The underarm crutches, instead of helping injured or handicapped people, have become the columns that support a free-standing – though skewed – domestic construction. In what may be interpreted as a subtle homage, the Duchampean bicycle wheel does not appear to turn; instead, it has become a dysfunctional and ornamental element.

These passages of installation art, particularly those associated with the tactics of the tableau, could pose a meaningful influence to the current developments in interior architecture and adaptive reuse. Both Kienholz’s and Osorio’s works demonstrate that the formation of interior space is not necessarily – or exclusive – the gestation of new forms, but that it can also contemplate a range of mimetic tactics such as the displacement, rotation, fragmentation, or dislocation of ordinary objects and elements. It is clear that the listed “interiorizing” tactics are typically developed in a similar terrain as that of interior architecture, where spaces are usually discernible by determined boundaries and meaning is affected by the placement of architectural elements and everyday objects. Conceiving space through scenographic means obliges the viewer to think of interiority as the site of reassembling, whereby the open quality of displacement takes the place of unity.

Edward Kienholz once said, “the self-concept of our society can be inferred from its garbage,” a provocative thought that may also be

interpreted as a reconsideration of the notion of junk, or the range of disposable elements and objects created by our culture. Kienholz’s idea suggests a clear affinity with Robert Venturi’s reassessment of the notion of convention:

An architect should use convention and make it vivid. I mean he should use convention unconventionally… I do not refer to the sophisticated products of industrial design, which are usually beautiful, but to the vast accumulation of standard, anonymously designed products connected with architecture and construction, and also to commercial display elements which are positively banal or vulgar in themselves and are seldom associated with architecture.

What Venturi suggests is essentially what Kienholz and Osorio demonstrate in their work: a full reconsideration of the value of ordinary, disposable, and conventional objects. This position, it could be argued, also conveys the implications of unsustainability. We know the world is saturated with objects; most of them are likely to end up in landfills. Rather than dismissing (throwing away) those things, the challenge is how to discover alternate and poetic meanings in them. Interior architecture, like installation art, offers a spatial platform for the assemblage of elements: walls, ceilings, doors, windows, and furniture.

Installation art demonstrates how the significance of those elements may be altered or modified depending on their placement in relation to the space and to other objects; rather than imposing the necessity of designing new elements, interior architecture and adaptive reuse may also consider strategies of redefining existing elements, assuming tactics such as collage, displacement, fragmentation, or ready-made. Thinking of creative means for reusing and recycling existing objects, elements, and buildings could lead to a reconsideration of interior environments in a more sustainable, suggestive, and poetic manner.

Notes

Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, 1930–1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 178.
Ibid., p. 179.
Theo Van Doesburg, “Towards a Plastic Architecture” (1924), in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrad (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p. 79.
Anecdote quoted in various texts, among them Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: H. Holt, 1996), p. 137.
There is an extensive list of collaborations between artists and architects through the 20th century, certainly starting with the Bauhaus, where Gropius included this idea as one of the school’s main goals. Some of the most well-known pairs of artist-architect collaborations are Amédée Ozenfant and Fernand Léger, Antoni Gaudí, Salvador Dali, Alfonso Iannelli, and Frank Lloyd Wright; and more recently Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg.
For a description of the concept of the “assisted readymade,” see Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), p. 137.
Quoted in Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 295.
In his biography, Tomkins develops an extensive review of the passionate relationship between Duchamp and the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins. See Tomkins, Duchamp, pp. 353–357.
Tomkins reports that Duchamp brought it from the region of Cadaqués, Catalunya. Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 431.
In her review about “The State Hospital,” art critic Shelly Couvrette comments about Kienholz’s experience working in a psychiatric ward in 1947. See www.cat-sidh.net/Writing/Kienholz.html (accessed 22 February 2015).
In a letter to Artforum, Kienholz describes his ideas for this work. See Artforum #7 (Summer 1969): pp. 4–5.
González establishes a correspondence between Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture” and Osorio’s “social architecture,” see Jennifer A. González, Pepón Osorio (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2013), p. xi.
Commented in González, Pepón Osorio, p. xi.

14 The term “passages” refers to the seminal text by Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977).

15 Quoted in Michael Schulze, "The Forming Process of Assemblages and Objects", Leonardo 23, no. 4 (1990): 373.

16 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977; Orig. ed. 1966), p. 42.

17 Probably the most remarkable architectural examples that explore the notion of assemblage of ordinary elements and objects are the “social explorations” of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio in Hale County, Alabama, and Teddy Cruz’s collage-like constructions in the Tijuana-San Diego region.

18 Ellen Dunham-Jones, for example, discusses the opportunities offered by building and site retrofitting in suburbia. See Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).