Martin Szekely

Editions Images Modernes
Ediitons Kreo

2003

 

Stretto Book?

Christian Schlatter

1. This word is not a conceit for a rare lexical item, for that would be in contradiction with the intent of this book: to explain, open up, and define as keenly as possible the forty-six works on view here, taking the “six constructions” from the latest exhibition (2001) as just one. We should not merely expect the dictionary to display the semantic spectrum of words but also to express their tasks. They can be used to declassify – Georges Bataille thus noted that the adjective formless (Fr. informe) has the function of declassifying, thereby requiring that everything have its form. But the task of a word may also be to classify and thus draw the attention to the posture of a task. Stretto book? In a physical sense, stretto is a controlled, progressive tightening or serriedness, this stretto procedure being explicit in the pages devoted to the “dishes for a banquet”; more broadly, it encompasses any proposition that is a progressive and controlled tightening of this work.

This book is neither exhaustive nor chronological. Martin Szekely has chosen every part of it in a special order, indifferent to the time of production; it unfurls like so many moments of special attention and concentration in its subject. Forty-six works, but they are not displayed as images. This book is not a picture book, it is alien to it. Stretto is first and foremost a musical term, defined in Littre as “in fugue, the introduction of two or more subject entries in close succession”. In scores stretto indicates that the tempo must be quickened, becoming more serried and livelier. The reader might begin with the introductions, they are pure and simple immersions in the works of this book from an ergonomic, economic and procedural viewpoint. A work involving the deconstruction of the design object? Yes.

Every time it is necessary to disqualify and refuse in order to redefine and requalify; it is necessary to unlearn, ergo. So many works, so many definitions for today’s uses, the particular terrarium of this work. It is hard to gain access to contemporary strangeness, its uses are carried out unbeknownst to most people. But then the philosophical stretto, that of Nietzsche and Aurora can be advanced: a proposal, a rejoinder, a dialogue? Yes, but of consequence. The challenge here is set from a polemical position: isn’t all furniture a box? The rejoinder leads to the redefinition of the object. Rigorous and arid games? Yes, and to the point of visual disappointments, even the disappearances which these games unfailingly involve, those of where is the object, where is the furniture? To M. Sz’s greatest satisfaction. We should certainly, throughout our perusal of this book, entertain the question: how can design be made today? Posited by a free spirit, this goes hand in hand with the pleasure of demonstrating with just a little, which is the highest claim made by these works.

2. Three sayings
The first is an observation made by Martin Szekely: “Even a bar of soap is used differently from one user to the next.” Don’t the most elementary gestures and the ethos of the individual reveal both those of his culture as well as differences of uses? Second saying, the answer to a question about “the dishes for a banquet”: how to decide unarbitrarily about the successive forms of these dishes? It may seen disconcerting, only “positive forms” are reckoned with. What is special about these positive forms? They are “flat”, dishes, they alone can be legitimately decreed. These two sayings designate the poles of attention of the history of this work; the first applies the assertion to invariably individualized uses by choosing to prove its point a gesture so futile that it is carried out unbeknownst to the person carrying it out.
The second, behind its apparent tautology, spawns a requirement which might well become established as a categorical imperative of this work: the form is contained in the definition of the work and in the use it is meant to make possible. In a more general way, if the form is indeed immanent to the use, it must then be deduced therefrom. The form is nothing other than the requirement prescribed by the use.

So the work is not to consider use and form apart, in other words to forget the use to produce the image, but to know how far it is possible to go via this plunge into the immanence of the object in order to bring back the form for the use, for uses are embodied in forms. The work starts with the establishment of the use/form conjunction, and stops with the erasure of the use/form duality, and, to the uttermost point, this book provides the marks of this, which may lead to the disappearance of the object. Third saying: “I am looking for the straight line.” This is how M. Sz. expresses himself in shorthand. How is this line to be understood? Attention primarily paid to objects? The assignation of the design territory? A posture on its specific objects? What precisely does this search for the straight line mean? A line of thinking applied to design and a recurrent choice about its specific objects; an inquiry focusing on the definition of the object and the requirement of uses. The most brutal consequence to be drawn from this shift of attention? Design understood as an expression of the designer, the stage preceding the object, becomes something arbitrary external to the use and the form which no longer has its raison d’être. It is in this sense that it is possible to advance the idea that, today, the object is no longer drawn and that it is legitimate to talk of a drawingless design. Obviously, Martin Szekely hasn’t drawn any more, since the Perrier glass; nor does he want to clutter the environment with useless objects. He is after the most ergonomic and economic production possible: this water brick? a ball of clay and a gesture which pulls this clay upwards, the potter’s fingers as sole décor, and, colour-wise, the colour of the clay.

The often common point of these objects?

A single material with which the result is directly headed for, here, everything is visible at first glance. One flees for the reception of these propositions, facile seductions, colours, and Baroque or other effects. The choice of the form complies with two criteria; the form must be in agreement with the definition of the object, accommodating and making the use possible; the right form is akin to a gesture, sometimes even less, a simple movement, an elevation, a measurement, a procedure like a pressure, a folding. In this quest, what always recurs is the crucial issue of ergonomics, recognition – going along with the etymology etymology of the term – of the law of the work and the question of economy; the quest for the most elementary means to be implemented in order to reach the object. Be they “perfo” objects, “wardrobes”, “flower bricks”, “dishes”, “table settings”, “m.b. brackets”, for example, it is this same unity making up the object which is there: a sheet of aluminium, a ball of clay, a mass of projected glass, a single material, and a “gesture”, a “unique movement”, leading the proposition to unity. They are never composite, heterogeneous and mechanical objects, they share in common the refusal of assembly and mechanical violence; they do not take part in this common spirit of assembly which is peculiar to objects in general. Objects are restricting, each one has within it its rule for use and with it its definition.

“I wonder”, stresses Martin Sz., “what is the simplest gesture for reaching the object? The answer should be compatible with the definition of the object, the gesture which solves this question is the specific subject of the design.”

A design which keeps a good critical distance from the gaudiness of the spirit of the time, this is neither minimal, nor subscribing to any ethno trend, or zen trend, and what, incidentally, is to be understood by these words for some productions, to conform to this? Nor is it a matter of accrediting the idea that here nobody does anything, but of an attitude with regard to the history of design. M. Sz. does not revisit it, he does not situate things after the heroic gestures which go to make the history of Modernism, he sometimes calls to mind the anonymous history, that of infamous craftsmen, the nameless people abandoned in the sidelines of history, which, for its part, “is always told from the angle of the winners” (W. Benjamin). What is involved here is lighting – in the photographic sense – the intention of a quest to show it with greater clarity: the unity of the object for which the not a jot too much might be the maxim of its procedure. An object is finished when you can no longer subtract from it or add to it without being violent to it. It thus has its most complete individuation, in other words, its unity.

 

3. Interior, installation, furniture

Is nothing today in its place, or doesn’t anything have its place? These days, very few things are in their place, maybe because they no longer have their place, they are displaced in every sense of the word. Why?

The space has become a peeping-tom, it is irregular and with it things have become riffraff, they dispute the laws of the environment, its hierarchies and its reservations. These days, nothing stays in the same place, there’s a need for change, people say, unthinkingly; interiors where nothing moves and nothing is missing at the end of life, “stuffed” interiors, people used to say at the end of the 19th century, no longer seduce, they petrify if one is still capable of such an experience. Our major mode of existence, an avantgarde word of the 20th century names it, is the word installation. Things no longer exist in space, the space of the Kantian order – Adolf Loos notes that before the Critique of Pure Reason, space did not yet exist. Things in an installation are in situ; understanding that things will not go away again the way they arrived, things that have arrived are not the same as those which leave, a bottle-rack in the BHV department store in Paris, a readymade, Marcel Duchamp gives this graphic work, for the Philadelphia museum. We are in the provisional, “beings once and for all ephemeral” (Nietzsche), surrounded by other ephemera, thus installed irremediably in the provisional.

In the pages of this book, much is arranged, you open, you close, you hide, you pose, you dispose, you propose, you share, you exchange, you sit down, you dialogue, you read, work, look, you get your bearings and you get information, you define a work space, you seek, you use, you move, you transport, you interrupt, you are in discontinuity, ruptures and stoppages; you arrange on the sides, you flee the centre like those symmetries of yore. The works presented, a Szekelian feature, are for our today, they are acquainted with his new patterns of behaviour and the uses that go along with them; they make them possible, inform them, encourage them, accommodate them and all in an extreme way, “furniture and extreme objects” if, thereby, we mean to signify that they are hardly visible, and we can wonder at times: is it actually them? Are they just photographable?

 

 

4. Against casualness

What lends this work its character is that it is a lengthy constraint, the opposite, as you will have grasped, of “casualness”, or “laisser-aller”

Understanding this highly demanding work is not easy, so how do we go about it? Through a comparison and an exercise in impersonification: the poet encounters language like an autonomous substance and in no way as the expression of an intentionalness which might become familiar to him, or a tool which he might make use of. The chair is, Martin Szekely does not pretend to present a new chair, he shuns the grotesqueness of such a situation, his posture consists in putting himself in a situation where he meets the object by setting it down like an autonomous subject just having, as the word suggests, its own law of existence and with it its definition, its uses to be fulfilled and a material which is adequate for it; he in no way separates these three parameters, but joins them together in a whole in such a way that the designer does not hide a chair, but that the wardrobe makes you forget its designer. The necessity to let the work (the ergon in ergonomics) be what it is calls for extreme and busy vigilance, a distinctive feature of this work. Vigilance in the definition whose scope exceeds that which derives from the observation of things and the analysis of objects. It is a matter of taking the table, the chair and the wardrobe for what they are and thus ridding them of any author, in other words, of any drawing or design.

It is as free as a bird that he complies with the many different laws which he comes up with whose rigour and precision challenge all general formulations. So what matters above all else, whispers this work, is to comply at length and in a single scene, it involves this murmuring which this book has been keen to draw near to, for want of making it more distinct.