Contentious Utopias: Martin Beck’s Avant-Garde Art and Design

That Martin Beck’s 2008–09 exhibition title ‘Panel 2 – “Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…”’ quotes Baudrillard’s pithy reproach is characteristic of the artist, whose sculpture, painting, video and writing works pinpoint the fraught ideological stakes of historical discourses on art, design and architecture, among other disciplines. Recycling modern movements, Beck hollows them out, so to speak, exhibiting the ways this is done by the market – a current trend identified by writer David Geers in an observation of neo-formalist work recently published in October.⁰²In his writing, videos and most of all exhibition design, the artist illustrates the sublimation of avant-garde utopianism and ideology into design and décor, and at the same time makes this gesture legible through a discursive framework. For example, in ‘Panel 2’ Beck provides a discursive apparatus for the historical context of the work through supplementary documents and ephemera, while also shutting it down with overly formal displays that flatten and generalise their reference points.

Shown first at Gasworks, London in 2008 and in New York in 2009, ‘Panel 2’ displayed historical background material about the ‘Environment by Design’ conference, such as a mounted monitor playing Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill’s IDCA 1970 (1970), a documentary about its contentious debates between designers and environmental activists.⁰³ It also included Beck’s 24-page takeaway brochure June 14–19 1970 (2008), which reproduced ephemera from the event: Baudrillard’s manifesto, a schedule, conference minutes, orientation guide, list of participants, sponsors, programme events and the director’s diary and notes, among other items. These contextualised Beck’s work in the rest of ‘Panel 2’, which put forward an almost redundant visual pastiche of modernisms in metal sculptures, fabric wall panels and works on paper.

This second part of ‘Panel 2’ included five large and variably sized mirrored stainless steel cubes, comprisingSculpture (2008). Spread across the gallery floor, they evoked both the mass and general appearance of a Donald Judd, though aside from their mathemathical sequence-derived dimensions, contained none of Judd’s signatures – such as serial ordering, spatial play or the tight dialectical tension between a whole and its parts. Sculpture instead was the symbolic stand-in for the point when Minimalism pivoted awkwardly from transcendental autonomy, as defined by modernism’s leading critics, to the gangly contingencies of the ‘here and now’ so typified by Judd and subsequent postmodern practitioners. In the size, placement and objecthood of Sculpture – which evoked the shiny ordered plinths of Judd’s 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (1982–86) – it offered an almost textbook example of theatricality as theorised by Michael Fried,⁰⁴ or of ‘presence’ as defined before him by Clement Greenberg,⁰⁵though in greatly reduced form. Whittled down to the basic building blocks of Minimalist sculpture – essentially, a group of large objects occupying a space, almost like people – Sculpture, even down to its generalised title, withdraws any specific discursive framework and offers, instead, smooth, shiny objects, lacking even screws.

The Minimalists’ use of industrial, non-traditional media nodded to Constructivism and the historical avant-garde’s conjoining of art and ideology to radical, revolutionary purpose; Beck gestures to this legacy with the other dominant visual flourish in the exhibition, Panel (red, yellow, black) (2008), a wide, freestanding fabric panel stretching across much of the space in vivid red, yellow where it overlapped an adjoining wall, and black on the reverse. Like Sculpture, its dimensions were dictated by a mathematical rule – here based on the structure and size of the Aspen leaf, something akin to the golden ratio employed by many Minimalist artists, including Judd and Sol LeWitt. The Aspen leaf also makes a gridded appearance in five framed wall prints, and in the video The Environmental Witch-Hunt(2008), in which sections of Baudrillard’s manifesto are rehearsed and recited in the almost still, rustling lushness of a Colorado Aspen forest. Beck at once highlights and obscures the theorist’s text, emphasising not only the actors – who read the writing haltingly – but also, and more prominently, the Aspen forest, as if the trees themselves had been forgotten in the ideological fray.

Similarly, Panel (red, yellow, black)refers to its historical legacy – this time, of painting – while also confusing it. To some commentators in the recently published exhibition catalogue (The Aspen Complex, Sternberg Press, 2012) the work’s large, blocky swathes of flat colour, in combination with a wide blue square painted on the wall behind the IDCA 1970 monitor (Untitled Square, 2008), evoked Blinky Palermo’s fabric paintings.⁰⁶ Palermo’s practice, in particular his fabric panels-as-space dividers and paint-covered walls, resuscitates Constructivist architectural work such as El Lissitzky’s moving wall panels while denying the work any utopian aims; Palermo’s incursions into public space evoke not collective action but a pictorial dead end. Beck’s fabric panel evokes yet another avant-garde forebear: Aleksandr Rodchenko, whose triptych Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour and Pure Blue Colour (1921), with its tri–partite colour scheme and monochrome flatness, signalled to Rodchenko the end of painting. Although as we know painting never, in fact, ever actually ended; rather, if Palermo is any indication, it just went spatial – a tactic here reiterated by Beck’s fabric panel, another ambiguous formal device. Through his exhibition design, it operates visually like a painting though functionally more like a wall, which cuts off a dark space for the projection of The Environmental Witch-Hunt; its flat colours are so saturated they almost seem to float immaterially, transcending their own painterly associations.

Key to all of this is Beck’s longstanding research interest in the way post-War exhibition design was influenced by advertising, product design and other commercial aims. In his essay ‘Sovereignty and Control’ (2007), published for his solo exhibition at Orchard gallery in New York, the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Road to Victory’ (1942) and ‘Family of Man’ (1955), two landmark exhibitions in exhibition design produced under the New York museum’s director Alfred Barr, are unnamed yet seem to hang in the background of his theorisations. ‘Road to Victory’ was a propagandistic treatment of the US’s role in World War II and its cultural superiority, and the latter an infamous, humanist treatment of the human race and its interconnectedness. ‘Road to Victory’ featured a highly manipulative narrative organised by Edward Steichen and designed by Herbert Bayer that featured dramatically different scales of photography, graphic foregrounding of didactic wall texts and a cohesive architectural design. ‘Family of Man’, meanwhile, touted a custom display system allowing for different levels, layers and scales of suspended photographs and wall partitions. Beck claims they both liberated the viewer’s field of vision and administered it. The essay is prefaced by a quote from critical theorist Sheldon Wolin in which Wolin asserts that ‘design is a professional euphemism for control over people and things, a euphemism that is, for power’.⁰⁷Presenting historical movements and contexts as clean, coordinated, even graphic design cues, Beck’s formalist designs illustrate – through multipurpose objects and architecture – how art, ideology and spectatorship are linked to the machinations of capital.