Les Immatériaux: Postmodern Feeling and Undefined Spaces

General intention

The exhibition played on five derivations from the Sanskrit root “mat”: ³ matériau (building material, documentation), matière (material/substance, matter), matrice (womb, matrix), maternité (maternity), and matériel (equipment, documentary material). Each of these terms was associated with a particular pole of the communication structure: message support/matériaux, referent/matière, code/matrice, sender/maternité, addressee/matériel. Because of the effects of the techno-sciences on knowledge and communication, the poles of the structure were uncertain and shifting, both in their material form and in their inherent nature. From this shifting state emerged a complexity that Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput questioned in Les Immatériaux:

Along the “maternity” axis: what authority does the sender now have on the message? Along the “matériel” axis: how can the addressee of a message be sure that this message is meant for him? Along the “matrice” axis: how can we be sure that a message is coded in the way the addressee decodes it?⁴

Les Immatériaux did not just give visual form to the impact of the techno-sciences on such diverse areas as architecture, clothing and cooking, but, as the exhibition title indicated, the curators showed a transformation of the material itself. The “immatériau” (immaterials, non-materials) was a new material “that is not the material for a project.”⁵

The five “mat” concepts were five axes and five main questions articulated the space in five zones. These zones horizontally divided up the Grande Galerie, and were subdivided into sites. Visitors moved from site to site in an almost free progression.

An “over-exhibition,” as per Paul Virilio’s concept of “the over-exposed city”⁶

In the minutes of the very first meetings held with Jean-François Lyotard in 1983, well before any precise development, we can observe the desire to conceive an innovative and experimental spatial arrangement. The philosopher speaks of the need to conceive a layout that breaks with the way exhibitions were organised in galleries in the 18th century, regarding which he refers to Denis Diderot.⁷ It is therefore understood that the exhibition will not consist in an education in taste; the visitor is not considered as an eye around which the exhibition display is organised into a definitive, mandatory sequence.

Two dimensions constituted the exhibition design of Les Immatériaux: a spatial arrangement and an arrangement in time. The temporal dimension came from the soundtrack that visitors heard through headphones. However, the time of the exhibition was not linear because each zone was covered by a radio emitter picked up via an infrared signal. The temporality of the exhibition was thus induced by the visitor’s movements.

Lyotard spoke in this regard of an “over-exhibition/exposure” in the sense of the “over-exposed city” concept developed by Paul Virilio.⁸ The influence of new technologies on the city makes it difficult to conceive its limits. As a consequence of a new mobility and flows, spatial unity is now no longer possible without time. Les Immatériaux embodied a reflection on a city without limits, where sites and zones have no defined limit-surface.⁹

Indeed, in the Centre Georges-Pompidou activity report for 1984¹⁰ there is an evocation of image of the city, notably in terms of the rich metaphors that it provides for the conception for spaces: alleyways, arteries and places of contemplation.

An exhibition and manifesto for the future development of the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou

The CCI was created in 1969 by the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. Already, in 1972, it was established as a department of the future Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou, like the Musée National d’Art Moderne.

In July 1984, during the preparation of Les Immatériaux, François Burkhardt was appointed as the new director of the Centre de Création Industrielle.¹¹ This occupied a singular position both nationally and internationally because it focused on the close connections between artist creation, industrial design, technological innovation and cultural evolution.¹² Burkhardt was keen to consolidate the CCI’s position in the fields of architecture and urban design and, shortly after his arrival, an “architecture” unit was set up, directed by Alain Guilheux. At the same time, Jean Maheu, director of the Centre Georges-Pompidou, spoke of the need “to now give design the major position that it warrants.”¹³ So it was that the architect and the designer were essential figures in mediating the general public’s relation to culture and art.

Given that its premise was to show how postmodern materials were impacting art, Les Immatériaux necessarily meant that it was impossible to use a standard exhibition space. Coexisting with Les Immatériaux, and attendant upon it, radical changes occurred in the Centre’s exhibition spaces. In the rooms on the 4th floor, home to the permanent collections of the MNAM, visitor circulation became virtually free and the picture walls were changed. In the mid–1980s at the Centre Georges-Pompidou there was a growing awareness of the way spatial layout generates meaning, leading to recognition of the importance of the designer/architect in that they contribute to the development of a conception that is close to display. By display is meant an arrangement in space, and also in two dimensions, that produces meaning. This is very close to what the curators of Les Immatériaux conceived. The lack of a French equivalent for the term “display” may indicate a relative tardiness in considering the meaning that can emerge from spatial arrangement. Indeed, while the design of Les Immatériaux was seen as experimental and new in France in 1985, a historian of exhibitions could compare it to that of Richard Hamilton’s Growth and Form¹⁴ in 1951. Hamilton’s display left visitors free in their movements, did away with labels, and made thoughtful use of lighting.

Grieving for modernity

Jean-François Lyotard speaks of a certain grief that is inherent in postmodernity. If the modernist project was rooted in the Enlightenment, then the events that followed that period show it to have been severely shaken. The ideal of progress was seriously dented by two world wars; scientific progress became the handmaiden of mass destruction; the idea of a socialist, egalitarian State gave rise to a multitude of totalitarian regimes; the progress expected of industrialisation turned into a market economy that destroyed its own hopes.

Lyotard perceived a cultural and political crisis revealing a counter-figure: that of a humanity which has ceased to master nature. Mankind is unable to maintain that position of dominance because technoscience has put in place a paradigm of interaction.¹⁶ That, indeed, is one of the elements conveyed by the notion of im-matériaux – un-material or in-material: material that eludes thought.

In such a context, postmodernity is bound to bear within it a disillusion for lost ideals. For Jean-François Lyotard, Les Immatériaux was about grieving for modernity; it evoked its many losses.

The loss of metanarratives and postmodern dramaturgy

This grief can be directly observed in the non-playful nature of the exhibition. There was nothing gimmicky about it, nor did it seek to dazzle with displays of technoscientific wizardry. The atmosphere of the layout instilled this grief, notably via the conditions in which the individuals attending it were visible: the numerous metal screens placed around the space meant that visitors were not completely visible. These screens were suspended above the floor, so that people’s feet could be seen below them (Fig. 1), while the rest of the body was simply a grey shadow on a metal surface (Fig. 2). As one newspaper commentator noted: “Some human bodies appear as grey, flesh deprived of all blood.”¹⁷

Lyotard said that he wanted to develop a postmodern dramaturgy. In other words, a dramaturgy taking on board the loss of metanarratives, and therefore without a narrative or hero. Because dramaturgy is the art of writing plays, this shows the importance accorded to the spatial installation, which was envisioned as a staging in which each visitor’s movements set up singular scenes. The theatre was produced on the scale of the individual visitor and it was therefore a spatial installation that induced an experience during the visit; the exhibition was only really effective when being moved through. For example, there was a particular relation to others, characterised by silence and the absence of exchange between visitors. One could therefore argue that this spatial installation was performative, in that the experience of solitude it instituted was the vector for the postmodern feeling.

If one considers the exhibition as a labyrinth or a maze,¹⁸ then this was one that could have no monster or hero, for if there is no Minotaur then there is no saviour either. And it seems to me that this image rather neatly sums up the period and the sensation that this exhibition brought out: it was not a question of immediate danger, but nor was there any perspective of a utopia, and this lack of polarity was reflected in the sensation of wandering that Lyotard wanted to put in place: wandering in a grey atmosphere – grey being chosen by the curators, without further explanation, as the colour of postmodernity. We may suppose that grey fits with the period because, as a colour, it too is non-polarised, being neither white nor black but rather a set of shades that can be both particularly luminous and particularly dark.

We may therefore apprehend a postmodern dramaturgy as a space of wandering and anonymity where grey surfaces de-differentiate between the persons present. Without a defined temporality, this dramaturgy has neither beginning nor end, as is demonstrated by the spatial installation, in which nothing touches the ground (Fig. 3): suspended elements evoked arrested flight: “The sensation we are looking for is that of a landing or take off, arrested.”¹⁹

Uncertainty

What emerged was a feeling of uncertainty. Because Lyotard wanted everything to be sensorial (both artworks and everyday objects), museum codes were overturned. Picture walls disappeared and it was difficult to distinguish between an artwork and an everyday object. The elements on show were marked by uncertainty.

As for the lighting, the devices used were very carefully conceived, as the “site sheets”²⁰ indicate. In these preparatory documents the sixty sites constituting the exhibition were analysed in the course of the various working meetings. These documents covered the soundtrack, the concept, the spatial installation and the equipment required and had an insert for the lighting devices that would need to be fitted. Looking at all sixty-odd site documents together, I saw that darkness played an important role in many of these sites: shadow enhanced the function of the light that there was. This sometimes came from an object, from a luminescent painting, from an open refrigerator, from a screen (Fig. 4). Sometimes a light source was placed next to objects so that the light seemed to be coming out of them (Fig. 5). Light draped the works and objects with its immateriality which, combined with semi-freedom of circulation and the numerous choices this implied, induced a real wandering. “What is this? What’s happening?”²¹ were the two questions that were supposed to obsess visitors as they walked around. Moreover, this ambulation gave rise to successive losses: the loss of hope in modernity was not offset by any gain that modernity might promise. The exhibition showed the apparatuses of technoscience and their impact, but the goal was to manifest an uncertainty with regard to these apparatuses. The true grief here arose from the successive losses of an epoch in which nothing is lost anymore because nothing is acquired anymore.

On the margins

Reading the first minutes of the meetings, dating from 1983,²² in which Lyotard’s conceptual projections were articulated, one has the impression that the staging is being described when in fact it is neither thought nor made. We could therefore say that the display design to a large extent followed the concepts that were put into words, sometimes in a way that is almost obvious. For example, the floor plan breaks the space up into five horizontal parts, reflecting the five “mat” derivations (Fig. 6). And the entrance and exit sites present a low-relief, which is blurred at the exit, like a metaphor of the blurring of materiality by the techno-sciences. Many of the devices used in the spatial installation metaphorically or symbolically evoke a conceptual idea of postmodernity.

However, Lyotard’s idea of postmodernity evokes the end of closed linguistic systems. Something necessarily escapes from these systems. This is why the gaze was drawn to the undefined and desert spaces in the exhibition. The figure of the no-mans’s-land – terrain vague in French – implies something blurred, imprecise. (The word vague implies something ill-defined, that the mind struggles to grasp.) This uncertainty resonates with what we have already said about the absence of polarity.

The exhibition and its undefined areas

Different typologies of undefined spaces emerged from Les Immatériaux. First, by putting in place a free-seeming circulation, the exhibition as a whole gave the sensation of being a shifting, uncertain territory. The space could never be apprehended as a totality; it was not possible to explore it in its entirety, since the plan was conceived in such a way that this seemed redundant. Thus, there was no overall view of the exhibition. We could even say that there was no viewpoint. Secondly, the grey surfaces played an important role in the uncertain and imprecise apprehension of the exhibition. The preparatory documents show how much importance was accorded to the lengths of textile in composing the sites. The curators and Philippe Délis reflected both on the way they surrounded the apparatus, and on the way the sites were visible through transparent surfaces (Fig. 7, Fig. 8 and Fig. 9). Also, Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput were interested in the proximity that the material set up with the sites around them. The variations of light and grey whereby the sites were manifested are striking. This is particularly visible in the photographs of the exhibition spaces, which have been digitised by the Bibliothèque Kandinsky (Fig. 10).

As I see it, Les Immatériaux was envisaged synechdochically; the part must evoke the whole, which necessarily means that some parts are out of the frame because of the ellipses that are created. What is out of view is therefore accompanied by uncertainty; it is in this sense that undefined spaces are characteristic, because nothing there is really certain.

What cannot be conceived

The soundtrack played in the headphones was not synchronised with the elements set out in space. This approach was similar to the principle used by Jean-Luc Godard in order to create discrepancies of meaning. Although most of the sites were equipped with sound-emitting devices, the duration of the soundtrack did not match the time spent visiting its site. This meant that visitors, already isolated by the fact of wearing headphones, were often immersed in silence. Also, the combination of montage and discrepancy gave rise to the interstitial, within which the undefined area took shape.

It is interesting to ask how the interstitial should be conceived and drawn. Is it a matter of design by default? It could be the reverse of what is conceived. The curators were aware of these intermediary spaces, but this seems to have occurred after the event. The undefined territories is mentioned several times in the exhibition catalogue, in terms of the fringes of interference that are the spaces of non-emission between two soundtracks,²³ but also of the drawing of “deserts” around the sites.²⁴

It could also be a matter of pareidolia, with something emerging from a uniform noise. In which regard, we might consider the spaces unthought by the curators as the ones that best convey the postmodern feeling. Indeed, postmodernity is singularised by the impossibility of a closed system and the undefined spaces are very close to this conception: a kind of no man’s land in which every element can be perceived only out of the frame and in ellipses. This space can result only from non-conception. It is within what cannot be conceived that the exhibition finally, and truly touched on what constitutes the feeling of postmodernity.

A manifesto for the crisis of the project, and design

Undifined territory and its involuntary conception are not far away from the issues raised by computer-assisted design (CAD), an innovation contemporaneous with the exhibition.

Indeed, one of Jean-François Lyotard’s intentions was to demonstrate its effect on art. I would argue that CAD induces a more insubstantial relation to form, and a “uchronic,” i.e. non-linear, time,²⁵ but whose principle is iteration. And this constitutes a creative principle particular to the desert and undefined area.

Therefore, Les Immatériaux seem to have ended in an inevitable failure, inherent in the will to materialise a postmodern space. The somewhat facile criticism would be this: “Do these Immatériaux that we are talking about exist outside the consciousness of the exhibitors who ordered them, which would be what allows visitors to perceive them? You do not deny it. They are therefore material. The rest is just words – postmodern literature.”²⁶ But beyond that, the exhibition sometimes struggled to become choate; it could not get away from a modernist conception. There was a bond between form and content. This, I think, recalls a certain functionalism in which the spatial installation completely fits the message. That indeed is why Alain Guilheux speaks of a very classical relation to representation,²⁷ as he notes in a document found in the archives that seems to be the rough draft of a text published in 1985.²⁸ Postmodernity is characteristic of an impossibility of speaking or representing a totality. Thus this perfect adhesion faces another difficulty: accepting the fact that an exhibition cannot contain “everything.” There was at the same time an impossibility of completely materialising what was projected conceptually, but also an incapacity to project through the project what could be materialised – in this instance, the no-man’s-land, or the undefined spaces.

For me, this resonates with the argument put forward by Andrea Branzi regarding the radical movement: in architecture, the project is autonomous; it is not a stage in a process culminating in a material realisation. The project is “pure conceptual energy, closed in on itself, no longer referring to any kind of later production.”²⁹ I would argue, firstly, that Les Immatériaux could only have been more effectual at the project phase. But, in the end, given the undetermined spaces, I would agree that these embody the unfinished character of the project state.

Formally and conceptually, the exhibition recalls Archizoom’s No-Stop City, which, Branzi says, “was a city set free within a big industrial container, which, using climate control and artificial lighting, made it possible to go beyond the natural standards of the traditional city.”³⁰ Is this not ironically similar to Les Immatériaux, which sought to get beyond modernity by the play of light and technological apparatuses?

Writings

s.n. Les Immatériaux (Vol. 1 : Épreuves d’écriture). Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1985.

s.n. Les Immatériaux (Vol. 2 : Album; Inventaire). Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1985.

BRANZI, Andrea. “Le mouvement radical.” In BRAYER, Marie-Ange et Frédéric MIGAYROU (eds.). Architectures expérimentales 1950-2000. Orléans: Hyx, “Collection du Frac Centre,” 2003, p. 33-36.

GALLO, Francesca. Les Immatériaux : un percorso di Jean-Francois Lyotard nell’arte contemporanea. Rome: Aracne, 1996.

GUILHEUX, Alain (ed.). Architecture instantanée : nouvelles acquisitions, Architecture des Immatériaux. Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 2000.

LYOTARD, Jean-François and CHAPUT, Thierry. Petit Journal, “Les Immatériaux,” exposition du 28 mars au 15 juillet 1985. Paris: CNACGP, 1985.

LYOTARD, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. English translation: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984

THÉOFILAKIS, Eli (ed.). Modernes, et après ? Les Immatériaux. Paris: Autrement, 1985.

VENTURI, Robert and Denis SCOTT BROWN. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972.

VIRILIO, Paul. “The Overexposed City” (1984) in BRIDGE, G. and S. WATSON

(eds). The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Articles and publications

Rapport d’activité 1985, Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou. Paris, 1986.

Rapport d’activité 1984, Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou. Paris, 1985.

CHAPUT, Thierry and BIDAINE Philippe. “Les Immatériaux, quand il s’agit d’autre chose.” CNAC Magazine, no. 27, May–June 1985, p. 18-19.

DESCHAMPS, François. “Les Immatériaux, du sanscrit, mât”. CNAC Magazine, no. 25, January–February 1985, p. 28-29.

DAIX, Pierre. “Beaubourg rajeunit son musée d’art moderne.” Le Quotidien, 12 December 1985, p. 24.

LASCAULT, Gilbert. “Tout ce que nous aimons va mourir.” La quinzaine littéraire, 30 April 1985, p. 21.

LE BOT, Marc. “Un fantasme ordinaire.” La Quinzaine Littéraire, 30 April 1985, p. 22.

LYOTARD, Jean-François. “Les Immatériaux, un entretien avec Jean-François Lyotard.” CNAC Magazine, no. 26, mars-avril 1985, p. 13-16.

NOGUEZ, Dominique. “Pendant le festival de Cannes le cinéma continue.” Révolution, 7 June 1985, p. 40.

SÈVE, Lucien. “Immatériaux, un nouvel évanouissement de la matière ?” Révolution, 7–13 June 1985, p. 38-41.

Online articles and books

DÉOTTE, Jean-Louis. “Les Immatériaux de Lyotard (1985) : un programme figural,” 2012. (http://journals.openedition.org/appareil/797) (accessed 12 December 2018)

GALLO, Francesca. “Ce n’est pas une exposition, mais une œuvre d’art. L’exemple des Immatériaux de Jean-François Lyotard,” 2012. http://journals.openedition.org/appareil/860 (accessed 12 December 2018)

GILHEUX, Alain. Architecture dispositif, 2012. https://editionsparentheses.com/IMG/pdf/P273_ARCHITECTURE_DISPOSITIF_EXTRAITS.pdf (accessed 2 January 2019)

VIRILIO, Paul. “Un monde surexposé,” 1997. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1997/08/VIRILIO/4878 (accessed 22 December 2018)

Browsed archives

Archives of the exhibition Les Immatériaux, Archives of the Centre Georges-Pompidou: Press books: RP 99002/07, RP 99000/82

Archives of the exhibition Les Immatériaux, Archives of the Centre Georges-Pompidou: Consulted boxes: 1977001/129, 1977001/130, 94033/223, 94033/224, 94033/227, 94033/228, 94033/233, 94033/234, 94033/666, 94033/667, 94033/668, 94033/669, 95052/026, 95052/027, 95052/028