It looks like an art exhibition. One approaches a large room and can see even at some distance various isolated artifacts: thin towers of glass; a mask in a niche; what look like 20 foot tall synthetic opened chrysalises; and various unclassifiable artifacts and models that suggest poured polymers invoking natural forms. There is nothing that at a glance would seem to challenge the contemporary sensibility’s readiness to classify such artifacts as art. But what sort of art, and under what conception?
This is exhibition of works by the leading designer Neri Oxman, who over the past 15 years has introduced and developed a conception of her field of professional activity as ‘Material Ecology’, characterized by her in the following way: Material Ecology is an “emerging field in design denoting informed relations between products, buildings, systems, and their environments. Defined as the study and design of products and processes integrating environmentally aware computational form-generation and digital fabrication, the field operates at the intersection of biology, material science and engineering, and computer science, with emphasis of environmentally informed digital design and fabrication.” (Antonelli, p. 13) So the term ‘design’ in Oxman’s sense is extraordinarily capacious, including not just the plans and associated mechanisms of fabrication of artifacts, but also relations among artifacts, and most broadly the relations between artifacts and the built and natural environments for which they are destined.
Within this proposed general field, Oxman has staked out a particular practice, first at the Media Lab at MIT, and in the last three years through Oxman Architects in New York City. On a basic conception such as influentially given by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, a practice involves a conception of some aim or aims that the regular exercise of the activities within the practice tends to realize. A practice further includes criteria of quality, that is, something that guides the sense of acting within the practice is relatively better or relatively worse ways, and an array of considerations of variable durability that additionally inform the practice. So, for example, in the practice of shoe-making the aim is to provide shoes to aid people in walking, with various sub-aims specified as kinds of walking, and additionally aesthetic and economic aims of stylishness and price. Oxman’s particular kind of practice includes these basic features, but also incorporates features distinctive of architectural practices, especially the inclusion of a particular client whose commission sets the relevant practical activities in motion, and whose needs, desires, interests, and tastes provide specifications of criteria and considerations guiding the activities. The client sets the practitioner a problem: design and make me such-and-such.
Now Oxman innovates within this standard conception with three startling moves: 1. She conceives of her client not as this or that person or human group, but rather as nature itself. 2. She treats her practice as fundamentally not solving problems but rather seeking and discovering problems. 3. She derives her criteria of quality and other considerations from a particular conception of nature, which she characterizes as nature’s multi-functionality. What sort of practice could embody these conceptions? The answer that suggests itself is that while Oxman’s practice so conceived could have little actuality as a kind of architecture or design, but that it rather is recognizable as a kind of, if not artistic practice, then something sharing characteristics with such practices. This is perhaps clearest with regard to the second characteristic: as Michael Baxandall noted in a detailed comparison between the design and making of a bridge on the one hand, and the making of Cubist painting on the other, a standard design practice treats the problem(s) to be solved as given from outside the practice—the bridge must span such and such points; carry at least a certain load; resist such and such stresses; and much else; whereas the making of an artistic painting typically involves responding to a range of problems that emerge in the very process of making. (This difference is of course not absolute; many artists, even some in the twentieth-century such as Igor Stravinsky or George Balanchine, seem to prefer to create within a field structured by numerous constraints of commissions, genres, and structures stipulated from outside the creative process.) The first characteristic, that the client is nature, gains content in part through what it rejects: there is no precise commission from a human agent, and, given the enormous range of senses that attach to the term ‘nature’ (as Arthur Lovejoy famously observed with regard to its invocation in aesthetics), nature as a client stipulates no determinate directives. What nature as a client does direct, according to Oxman’s third characteristic, is that her works exhibit the multi-functionality of especially certain organic skins and surfaces. Oxman is struck by the ways in which a skin is not simply an enclosure marking the outer edge of an organism and protecting the innards, but also something that helps regulate the organism’s internal temperature, serves as an attractant or repellent of other organisms, and in some cases displays something of the organism’s internal structure. This third characteristic is particularly prominent in the complex color patterns she gives her works, many of which directly register the changes in appearance of various organisms responding to their environments.
For the most part Oxman speaks of her works as instances of design, but in an interview summarized in Arthur I. Miller’s book on science and contemporary art, she is quoted in ways that reinforce the sense that her practice is at least crypto-artistic. Miller quotes her as asserting that ‘design is art’, and that the distinctive role of art is to question ‘a certain reality’. Further, the best way to think of design is as a ‘translation between disciplines’, a formulation that irresistibly evokes the inter-medial character of so much contemporary art, as well as its frequent heteronomy, that is, the willingness of contemporary artists to accept and respond to imperatives from outside the art world. (Miller, p. 104)
One way to see the distinctiveness of Oxman’s artistic practice is to compare her works with those of central figures in contemporary art. ‘Cartesian Wax’ (2007) is a wall-mounted rectangular tile of rubber, resin, and wax. The surface is densely rippled in a quasi-grid of bubbles that for the most part are considerably lighter than the field from which they emerge. The yellowish-brownish field darkens gradually from upper left to lower right, a shift very partially echoed in the reduced size of the protuberances. A structural counter-rhythm arises from some horizontal and vertical rows of relatively unvarying bubbles. This is part of a series that Oxman has described as consisting of types exhibiting “a continuous surface fabricated in response to physical conditions such as light transmission, heat flux, stored energy modulation, and structural support.” (Antonelli, p. 59) The piece’s appearance invites comparison with the latex works of Eva Hesse, whose works likewise exhibit gradations of lightness, thickness, and protuberance. But content and metaphoricity of the two bodies of work could hardly be otherwise more different. Whereas for Oxman the aim of this series of works is to “experiment with light- and heat-sensitive construction techniques specific to any given environment, resulting in structures designed and built to fit organically with their surroundings” (ibid), Hesse’s works aim to present environmental forces in graduated oppositions—light and dark; opaque and transparent; gravity and weightlessness—together with the sense of how these both structure and impinge upon human embodiment. Oxman offers to send her work into the world, where Hesse returns the abstracting gestures of late modernist art to their source in human embodiment. Perhaps something of this consideration of contrasts aids in understanding the sense that there is something cold, something not yet realized in Oxman’s works. They have not yet arrived at their proper destination in an inhabitable future.
References:
Paola Antonelli with Anna Burckhardt, The Neri Oxman Material Ecology Catalogue (2020)
Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (1985)
Arthur Lovejoy, ‘Nature as Aesthetic Norm’, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 42, No. 7 (Nov., 1927)
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)
Arthur I. Miller, Colliding Worlds: how cutting-edge science is redefining contemporary art (2014)