Technological Disobedience, Architecture of necessity, Moral Modulor, Moire house, Objects of Necessity, Generic matter, ...
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Statement of Necessity, Alonso Art in November-December, 2008.
Jenny is part of a series of projects that explore objects that have been taken out of the infrastructures and circulation systems for which they were designed, and have subsequently been employed in unexpected ways. The goal of these projects is to recognize and record the new logics that are applied to these objects, while, at the same time, attempting to push further the productive and re-purposing impulses that underscore them. A text on generic objects was published in E-FLUX JOURNAL 18.
DESIGN AND ETHICS The qualifier “popular” in popular design aims, it seems, to bracket the everyday call-and-response of necessity and ingenuity in order to re-locate an entire field within definitions supported by less pedestrian paradigms. Design, the presence of the qualifier seems to insinuate, is nothing as basic as a practice characterized by gestures through which objects are optimized to respond to immediate needs. We should enhance our definition of the discipline by speaking of it as an autonomous creative field with a clear historical trajectory and stellar practitioners; by recalling the matrix of institutions that legitimize its products; by considering it in relation to markets and mass production; by pumping out reams of text that explain its complex interaction with clients, demographics, and media. We should, in other words, define design exclusively in relation to the shape it has taken as a response to the pressures applied by the material conditions of late capitalism. Anything else would be utopian thinking, academic exegesis, theory, or simply naïveté. Ernesto Oroza came of age as a designer—and as something other than a designer: a meta-designer, a theoretical designer, an ex-designer (as Marti Giuxé says), an artist—in a context in which the material conditions that have shaped design as the global practice that we know and celebrate didn’t exist. Graduating from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Diseño in 1993, he entered the field at a moment when, due to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet subsidies, Cuba was undergoing its most calamitous economic crisis—the Special Period in Times of Peace. This crisis shut down the production of any new objects on the island and nearly eliminated all imports of non-essential foodstuffs and the like. The lesson of this time, Oroza has argued, is that “Cubans understood that they would have to meet their own needs, as they lived in a country where the State owned all productive capabilities. Urgency placed the individual at the center of the country’s survival.”[1] Scarcity marked the moment. And this opened a gulf between emergent needs and the availability of products that responded to these needs. A broken fan couldn’t be replaced by a new one. The possibility of a one-to-one exchange of objects vanished. As the life of things came to an end, there was nothing to take their place. And so aged and broken objects had to be kept in circulation, readjusted and reconfigured to respond to unexpected demands. A broken phone could serve as the base of a fan; a dinner tray became a TV antennae. Oroza has devised a number of terms to describe the processes that characterized this period of massive popular design. He has spoken of technological disobedience as a fundamental aspect of it, and he uses the term to highlight the fact that it became a common practice to reroute objects intended to respond to a particular need so that they could respond to a completely different one—one that was not envisioned in the processes of design and production from which it emerged. The phone-as-fan-base and the dinner-tray-as-TV-antennae serve as paradigmatic examples. Rather than user-end empowerment that digital technologies have opened up, what we have here is need trumping intended function. It’s not picking whatever song you want, but using the iPod as a wedge to hold a doorjamb in place. Not selecting the quality of gasoline at the pump, but using the yellow plastic gas tank as a sign for your taxi. When enough of these “re-formatted” objects begin to appear, enough to significantly change the morphology of a city or a town, it could be said that this popular design has turned into something else: a popular urbanism; a way of irrevocably altering urban texture. In other words, the individual gestures through which objects are synthetically reformatted to respond to emergent needs—that is, the individual gestures of technological disobedience—coalesce into a large collective force that alters the shape of a city. Oroza has called this collectivization and transcendence of individual instances of disobedience familial urbanism. That is, an urbanism that begins with the alterations that take place in each household, responding to the needs of each family. The familial, however, in becoming urbanism is an example of the whole being more than the parts: as urbanism, it becomes a force the effects of which exceed each of the individual instances that comprise it. For over a decade, Oroza has documented and theorized this new logic of popular design, always looking for precise concepts that express its singularity. The form of design that he has dealt with is often thought of in terms of recycling in the West, but surrendering it too quickly in this kind of discourse occludes one of the things that has been central to Oroza’s project: naming the engine that drives this mode of design, rather than naming its effects. Recycling as such is a process. What has interested Oroza is the root cause: the question of necessity; that is, an understanding of the local material conditions that underscore the emergence of this explosion of popular design. It’s a matter of keeping an eye on the context, on the historical moment. He has said: “Necessity has been stigmatized in Western culture. If you find yourself in need, you are considered weak. If you express demands for these needs to be met, you are considered vulgar. Since the 1990s, Cubans have done violence to this stigma. Each object produced or solution discovered has been a statement of principle.”[2] Responding to necessity, then, Oroza considers that each of these objects have an ethical dimension: each is, as he says, a statement of principle and freedom, a response against a plummeting in the quality of living conditions, against a disintegrating social fabric, and, lastly, against an eroding urban texture. This is why Oroza refuses to participate in the discussion of Havana as a ruin. Such a discourse takes a sweeping view of the city, focusing on its dilapidated surfaces, and ignoring the ground-level and “hidden” gestures of its inhabitants, the new behaviors and altered objects that optimize their responses to immediate needs, to pressures that emerge from existing and local material conditions. Behind the crumbling buildings of the city, Oroza argues, there is another interior city, or city of interiorities: one of architectural up-datings and object re-designs that speak the truth of their moment and the ethics of their producers.
[1] Moreno, Gean, “Object as Index: Ernesto Oroza in Conversation with Gean Moreno,” Art Papers, May-June, 2008, p.25 [2] Moreno, Ibid., p.25 Cintas Foundation Finalists Exhibition for the Emilio Sanchez Award in the Visual Arts, Miami, US.
Statement of Necessity 2008 Foreword: Gean Moreno Book documenting the exhibition Statement of Necessity by Ernesto Oroza, at Alonso Art in November-December, 2008. The book features the 20 color photographs exhibited. www.alonsoart.com
Updating City (theorem). Miami, 2008. {slimbox single images/objects/ernesto-oroza-updating-city-theorem-2008.jpg,images/objects/ernesto-oroza-updating-city-theorem-2008.jpg, Updating City (theorem) 2008; images/objects/oroza-sofa-dibujo.jpg,images/objects/oroza-sofa-dibujo.jpg, Updating City (theorem). Drawing 2008} Little Havana Lamp shade. 2008 <<click on the image for more views>> Studio Scrap Stools. Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza. 2008 Studio Scrap Stools are no-top no-bottom stools built out of scrap 2” x 4” studs that have collected in the studio. A zero-point edge is determined for each and the scraps are glue together at whatever lengths they already have. The pattern of the stools is determined by the scraps employed. Only the wood pieces used to determine the height are cut to size.
Object as Index: Ernesto Oroza in conversation with Gean Moreno In Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler’s lop-sided film Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins, 2006, Cuban writer António José Ponte, one of the protagonists, fires up his brain’s associative engine. Eruditely crossfading from Thomas Mann to Georg Simmel to Jean Cocteau, Ponte reveals himself a modem initiate in the ancient discipline of ruinology- like Walter Benjamin and Robert Smithson. One of the most interesting proposals he puts forth-interesting at least for those of us who know fantasy’s edges always cut across the real—is that Havana, the dilapidated Havana of today, is the result of the coming imperialist invasion on which the regime’s rhetoric has pivoted for decades. Waiting for this invasion, the city transformed itself into besieged territory. Haunted by its future destruction, the city destroyed itself. Ernesto Oroza’s work seems to unfold against this kind of sweeping and romantic narrative. Instead of re-editing the establishing shots of a dilapidated Havana that have now become icons around the globe, 0roza is interested in the other Havana- the place that can be discerned in the quotidian textures of popular design and improvisational ingenuity, in the everyday transactions that take place in order to satisfy immediate needs. This Havana exists in the activities of its inhabitants, and functions almost as a foil to the other Havana, which we can no longer disassociate from grand historical trajectories. Coming of age with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet subsidies that kept the island economically afloat, Oroza belongs to a generation of artists who emerged with the Special Period—Cuba's deepest economic crisis. Unlike many of his peers, however, he wasn't brought up through the island's centralized system of art academies. Instead, he was educated as an industrial designer. Oroza eventually found in the artworld an accommodating context, after he shifted his interest from actually producing and designing artifacts to documenting the realities of the island as they manifest themselves in the objects created by lay folk attempting to better their lives. Oroza's background becomes important when one begins to consider the oddity of his project, in comparison to those of his peers in the Cuban artworld. Unlike them, he has never found a need to produce autonomous objects, self-contained sculptures or photographs. On occasion, he has said that he doesn't really know how to put his resume together, considering that what would go in it—exhibitions—is but a small part of what he does, an offshoot of a project that has more to do with collecting and organizing information. He has always approached things with a documentarian’s eye. This is evident in the research projects that he has conducted, in the books that he has published, and in the photographic archives and collections of objects bought in the street that he has amassed. But it is also true of the individual, sculpture-like objects and videos that he often presents in exhibitions. They reproduce the logic of popular design enacted in every household in Cuba in the 199os, taking on an indexical quality, pointing to real socioeconomic conditions. In some ways, he is like the European conceptualists of the 1960s, who sought to develop materialist practices by representing what the world had to offer in order to articulate critical positions on the way things were. In this, a seemingly distant figure like Marcel Broodthaers may be more of a predecessor for Oroza—taking into account obvious contextual differences— than installation artists such as Lázaro Saavedra, Ricardo Brey, José Bédia, and Tonel, who launched a tradition which his peers are carrying on. Gean Moreno: There is a discourse that revolves around Havana as a ruin, as what is left after certain historical processes have run their course. Your work refuses to contribute to this discourse and, instead, proposes that such a reading is applied from the outside, and that the city has its own internal history. Ernesto Oroza: There are really two discourses that connect around the idea of the ruin while they stand ideologically opposed to one another. The first considers it necessary to return the city to its original functional and symbolic values. On one hand, it seems a criticism of the existing political system, whose inefficiency brought about the destruction of Havana. On the other, it is aligned with official interests insofar as it hands the city over to tourism, and reaps the benefits on the way. This is the position of architects and conservators. GM: This widespread phenomenon exists, then, at a quotidian level. Your interest lies in popular design that aims at the immediate betterment of living, responding to real-time needs, without historical pretence or institutional legitimization. E0: Exactly. Let me explain the context. As I was finishing my studies in industrial design, Cuba entered the most profound economic crisis in its history, due to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cubans understood that they would have to meet their own needs, as they lived in a country where the State owned all productive capabilities. Urgency placed the individual at the center of the country's survival. People became aware of their real needs and were freed of prejudices and banalities. As a cultural producer, I wasn't spared those penurious conditions and I felt a part of the productive current that they engendered. I began to document the ideas and techniques that I saw everywhere. The objects produced at the time expressed provisionality, a utopian pragmatism that is quite paradoxical. We all thought that the crisis would end quickly and we decided to make provisional objects. These would substitute the ones that belonged to a time with a higher standard of living. They were objects that would disappear with the conditions that engendered them. I found it important to document them. These objects embody an ethics and a modesty that are the opposite of the ostentatious presumptions of innovation and transcendence that are pushed on us in design school. GM: You said that you found it important to document the objects that were emerging in light of the conditions brought about by the economic crisis. This reminds me of a concept that you've used before: the object-documentary. An object that, like a film documentary, records an existing reality instead of inventing a new one—as traditional art objects presumably do. E0: I became aware of the processes I was using. They became more interesting than any theme. All my recent production has followed one of two processes. The decorative documentary would be the first. I figured out that the placement of a series of collected objects in an art space complicates their documentary function without losing the value of the document altogether. I was attracted by the ambiguity between display and sculpture. A typical work, here, would be Untitled. Decorative Documentary, 2005, made of metal strainers. On the one hand, it is just a cold presentation of collected objects. On the other, it materializes an abstract sculpture that establishes a relationship with the space that houses it. GM: Your de-emphasis of the autonomous art object has allowed you to maintain an open practice. Along with objects and installations for exhibition, your work also consists of a series of researches that find their final forms in books, zines, lectures, photographic archives, and collections of objects. As such, your work is more a discursive field than a group of things. E0: I work with disparate materials and information that I organize into diverse conceptual frameworks, such as books, displays, and even my own drawers. I'm more interested in developing systems to articulate the information that I process than in producing “definitive" works. I neither desire nor need to produce objects with the expected attributes of autonomy, authorship, originality, unity or physical limits, that is, the qualities intrinsic to the traditional artwork. 2008. Moreno, Gean. “Object as Index: Ernesto Oroza in conversation with Gean Moreno” Art Papers, May/June p.24. PROYECTO HABITARSpanish Cultural Center Montevideo. NOWHERE/NOW/HERE Exhibition: Laboral Centro de Arte. Download invitation Curators: Roberto Feo & Rosario Hurtado (El Último Grito), London / Berlin
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