Thinking Ben Nicholson’s Collage Thinking

From the Laurentian Libraryto the Appliance House, Loaf House,

and B-52 Pickup

David Farrell Krell

DePaul University

If it is possible to be a mad Kantian, Ben Nicholson is a mad Kantian.1

Immanuel Kant devoted

most of his intellectual life to ordering and unifying the chaos of sensations that bombard us,

while Nicholson dismantles order and unity, chops it into pieces, then reglues it without so much

as a coherent narrative to justify his interventions. Alvin Boyarsky once remarked that everyone

is waiting for Nicholson’s narra-

tive, his grand narrative, to ex-

plain away his whimsy, to com-

pensate for his caprice. Sartre

once described his unjustified ex-

istence in this grand narrative: he

is a stowaway on a train, a first-

class hobo, he has no ticket, and

when the conductor enters his

compartment and demands to

see his right of passage Sartre

1. Buying tires. When sitting in a waiting room whilst having new tiresfitted, the following conversations occurred simultaneously:

TV: �I love you, Jerry, I know you have the same physical lovesand desires as I do.�Customer: �Steve, have you seen my Bufferin?�Mechanic: �Yeah, it�s gone through, they are doing it now.�

(BN, �Private Life in the Public Realm,� 1995)

1The first version of this response was presented to the School of Architecture and Interior Design of the University of Cincinnation January 30, 1992. Ben Nicholson and I co-presented papers as part of the series entitled „On the Verge.” The series director, DanielFriedman, had centered the 1991-92 lecture series about some themes discussed in my book, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: Onthe Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). I was honored by the series as a whole, and took great pleasure in my meetingswith Daniel Friedman. My gratitude to him for the invitation—and for his reading of On the Verge. And, of course, as always, it was and isa privilege to work with Ben Nicholson—who has now engineered (with Peter’s considerable help) my first publication on CD Rom.

invents a story: he explains to the conductor that he is on a secret mission on which the fate of

France depends. For his part, Ben Nicholson frustrates the conductor: he raids the junkyard of

national fates for bomber parts, flips all the cards in the deck to the floor, and tells no lies.

The theory and practice of collage, both collage thinking and collage doing, amount to

that: the unity of experience deconstructed and reconstructed in such a way that the bits and

bobs do not really hang together, but separately, and when the conductor demands a valid ticket

he won’t even get a narrative. Bacon strips across toilet seats, their frying pans gone to laced

insteps of ankle-high boots or motor parts. Does Nicholson know what sort of damage he is

doing? And not simply to suburbia; no, to epistemology since Kant. Terrorists, careful with that

scalpel! Dismantle the Kantian synthesis, and you are left with Humean skepticism. No, not

human skepticism, Humean skepticism, which is considerably more crippling.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps Nicholson is not the mad scientist, not the cracked

Kantian, not Viktor Frankenstein—but Frankenstein’s monster. For the monster has to piece

together his experience as though by collage or bricolage, with results that are both hilarious and

precarious, both funny and pitiful. Here is how the monster describes his patchwork experience,

in words Mary Shelley puts into the monster ’s mouth in chapter 3 of Volume II:

„It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being: all the

events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of

sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it

was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of

my various senses.”2

The monster has trouble coming up with a sensus communis, which makes him older than medi-

eval. In contrast, his infantile amnesia makes him either a Freudian or a human. No, not Humean,

a human, which is considerably more crippling. He discovers the alternation of sun and moon,

day and night, and like Merleau-Ponty’s Schneider begins haltingly to move his limbs. He „de-

2 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 99; citedhenceforth in my text by page number.

2. Fire. Feel its heat. For several people tosit around. It is possible to sit inside afireplace and turn it into a fireroom.

(BN, �Program Notes for the Loaf House,�)

scends.” He is wretched and undernourished,

has not evolved even to the Cartesian minimum:

„No distinct ideas occupied my mind” (100). He

sticks his hand in the fire and learns what hot

means. He rescues a young girl from drown-

ing and learns the meaning of human gratitude.

He steals off to a typical English cottage located

atypically in the wilds of Germany. By peeking

through a window of the idyllic cottage, and by eavesdropping, he learns the „science of words and

letters,” becomes a grammatologist, leaps from Descartes to Derrida in several harsh lessons.

The collage monster—for „Frankenstein” is himself a Nicholsonian collage, a paste-up of meat and

heat—pieces together in a matter of weeks the experiences that took Mary Shelley almost a life-

time to assemble:

„By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment. I found that these people

possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one an-

other by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes pro-

duced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the

hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become

acquainted with it.” (108)

3. Frankenstein�s monster star tedout and moved forward to culture. Iam walking backward, unscramblingthe pieces as I go, to make culturemore easy to see, exposing thewounds. The houses I think up arethe rests on this journey, before Igo back once again. The architect�slife is one of packing and unpack-ing, as regular as the phases of themoon. Some can unpack with onehand and pack with the other. . .

(BN, Personal Communication,1995)

As he spies on his bucolic cottagers, day after day,

the monster catches Felix in the act of reading. He

soon masters the experience that took Mary Shelley

an entire lifetime, the lifetime of a writer.

„This reading had puzzled me ex-

tremely at first; but, by degrees, I dis-

covered that he uttered many of the

same sounds when he read, as when

he talked. I conjectured, therefore, that

he found on the paper signs for speech

which he understood, and I ardently

longed to comprehend these also; but

how was that possible when I did not

even understand the sounds for which

they stood as signs?” (110)

It is not for nothing that the Greeks had the same word for „elements” and „letters,” letters (what’s

in a name?) as phonic or phonemic signs, στοιχεια; it is not for nothing that from Thales to Plato

and Aristotle they were trying to piece together the world of earth, air, fire, and water as though it

were a text or a collage of chaotic elements.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster (whom we always call „Frankenstein,” precisely

because the monster is the Doppelgönger of his Maker, made in the image and likeness of

Frankenstein, „the modern Prometheus”) goes on to tell us of his political education and his

éducation sentimentale—at the knees of Rousseau. He learns that civilizations rise and fall, and

that „the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty” (116) accounts for the

barbarity of man. He also learns where babies come from:

„Other lessons were impressed upon me even more deeply. I heard of the differ-

ence of sexes; and the birth and growth of children; how the father doted on the

smiles of the infant, and the lively sallies of the older child; how all the life and

cares of the mother were wrapped up in the precious charge; how the mind of

youth expanded and gained knowledge; of brother, sister, and all the various rela-

tionships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds.” (117)

Yet the monster feels all-too-keenly his solitude, his wretched loneliness. Everyone who sees

him turns away in horror. Just so, the monster turns away from himself in revulsion. In the

following scene, Mary Shelley gives us to think about the blessings of narcissism, without which

creatures can only destroy:

„I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and deli-

cate complexions: but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent

pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was re-

flected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the

monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and

mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable

deformity.” (110)

The monster must now undergo the ignominious initiation into Lacan’s „mirror-phase”: the frag-

mented self, stitched together as pieces of flesh suffused with electricity, espies in the mirror the

clear outlines and contours of the self that it can only dream of becoming. Except that in this case

the mirrored self is itself „morselized” and pasted together like a Nicholsonian collage. The

monster’s mirror-image is an image of the human soul. „Who am I?” he asks of his maker and

father. His unuttered question, a question that despairs of an answer, is expressed in his desire

for a monstrous mate: „Who is my (m)other?” In Lacan’s theory, at least, the more egregious the

contrast between morselized perceiver and unified perceived, the more violently the perceiver’s

life is commanded by „the imaginary.” Granted the monster’s severe morselization, and thus the

odd symmetry of monster and mirror-image, the monster in later years is bound to become a

realist, albeit of a fragmentary sort. Himself a collage, he is bound to become a collagist.

Some may find it unkind that my homage to Ben Nicholson’s work begins with references to

4. Garden. Tending plants (and animals) provides a direct touch withthe humility and force of the natural world. It is a form of measurethat sets in context the political discombobulations of daily life. Bee-keeping permits the eating of the hinter land by way of pollen fromflowers set in the most abrasive landscapes in the city. (The poppywas the first flower to bloom on the nature-neutered battlefield of theSomme.) (BN, �Program Notes for the Loaf House,� 1992)

kooky Kantianism and

Frankenstinian monstrosity. But

it explains why I associate

Nicholson with the Kantian pure

forms of intuition. For Nicholson’s

experience of dismantling,

deconstructing, or

discombobulating (that is his

word) experience as such puts him in razor-sharp touch with the fragility of sense and sensibility.

That is why, to tell the the truth, I am not so anxious to extort a grand narrative from Nicholson, to

have the Appliance House explained any better than he has explained it in Appliance House, or

to have the Loaf House explicated any better than he has explicated it in his „Program Notes” or

drawn it in my own margins, or to have „B-52 Pickup” reshuffled into an orderly deck.3

It seems natural that „collage thinking,” which is „disruptive” of ordinary suburban experi-

ence, manipulating its Ockham’s razor as „a logic that disturbs, or negates, the status of the

individual elements” (16), should be asked to respond to the most architectonic of Western phi-

losophers, to wit, Kant. If Nicholson’s job is to „terrorize guilds of knowledge,” then Kant, as

5. Collage thinking: once again I know(that is a word beyond belief!) that ev-ery ar tistic activity is one of making frombits�paper or no paper.

(BN, Personal Communication, 1995)

keeper of the gate, merits Nicholson’s perverse

and precise scrutiny. If every professional acad-

emy, institution, and organization „is vulnerable

to collage,” then the thinking of „Collage Think-

ing” for its part demands inspection. After all, if

„orders of logic are broken apart by the collag-

ist,” one has not a right but an obligation to take

a look at those orders.

Nicholson takes his orders from the Sweets and Sears catalogs, catalogs for building

contractors and consumers, and from Michelangelo. Where precisely Kant fits in I am unsure—

but I believe it is as the mail-order postal clerk, or the policeman, or the Interpol agent who is

trying to keep up with the escapades of Mungo Park, the „knife-toting traveller,” who „splices

together” something like „a map of hunches” (17). Policing is called for, because the bacon strips

are made to creep not merely across the wooden toilet seat cover but out from underneath the

cover. It is one thing to epatay the bourgeois, another to disgust the suburbanites in their fireside-

6. Den. An onomatopoeic word correctly applied to the familiar home of a wild animaland now appropriated by suburbia as the private arena to watch football. It includesa couch: half bed, half room, and half potato. Ideally a place where the parents aresitting in chairs, doing something quiet like reading and the children are on the floorplaying with wooden blocks. Now it is the natural harbor for the television and fire-place, usually placed side by side.(BN, �Program Notes for the Loaf House,� 1992)

3 Ben Nicholson, Appliance House (Chicago: The Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism; distributed by MIT Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), cited by page number in my text.

and-TV dens. Alvin Boyarsky

is not the only one to demand

a grand narrative, an ac-

counting, a train ticket: I re-

call reading an early review of

the Appliance House project

that complained that its

maker did not manifest suffi-

cient social-critical awareness, did not offer a grand social vision. I feel the same about Boris

Yeltsin and Mother Theresa. I am therefore delighted to note John Whiteman’s appreciation of

the modesty of what Nicholson is doing, a modesty or humility on which, as Whiteman suggests,

the future of architecture may well depend:

For me the work of Ben Nicholson is a constant reminder of both the pleasure and

the difficulty of the architectural task: of how in the act of design and specification

the interminable burden of careful execution must be set against a flash of insight,

a quick prospect of the imagination, that elusive moment when the mind lights

upon an object with a glimpse of its potential transfiguration; when a thing is seen

both for what it is and also for what otherwise it might be, and when a course of

painstaking work is initiated from a first and sudden emotion—an emotion which is

remembered merely by a sketch or a remark in a notebook, and which begins to

fade as soon as its presence is registered. In architecture the future of an intuition

lies in the hope of being redrawn. (7)

It was in fact John Whiteman who put me in mind of Kant’s first Critique, because so much

of his language is the same: he pictures Nicholson as the perceiver of „a sensation which is

entirely new and unexpected,” as one who seeks a „reworking of his first intuition”; he even

invokes the imagination, which, for Kant, is the grand synthesizer of experience, „the imagination

as it runs ahead of the world, outstripping the slow time which is demanded by the work of the

hand in drawing.” If indeed Nicholson took four years to collage the initial plans for the Telamon

Cupboard and its Kleptoman Cell, his imagination must have constantly outstripped his snipping

and gluing fingers and outrun his deep-set, shifting eyes. Four years must have been plenty of

time for a confident social vision to fade, for many a slogan to sag and cliché to expire. Let’s face

it, Nicholson’s clock is on the Sistine ceiling, or high on the high altar wall.

I am not accusing Nicholson of religion. However, there is something that modifies the

caprice, tones down the whimsy, and here again Whiteman is right on target. He concentrates on

the „force field” of Nicholson’s collages, on the „energy” they produce, on the „immense force and

inevitability” that belie the crazy juxtapositions of his snippets and gluings. He notes the „feeling

or sensation which is entirely unexpected,” and observes that Nicholson’s collages move beyond

the realm of objects and objectivity. They exhibit „no object of presentation or representation” (8).

7. Expiry date. The sales person at the Library of Congress askedfor a credit card number, and then she said, �And your expirationdate?� �I can�t speak for myself, but my card expires on 1/96.� (Bycalculating age from the moment you expire, rather than the momentyou began, there is more of an incentive to live life to the hilt.)(BN, �Private Life in the Public Realm,� 1995)

Beyond (re)presentation? Beyond ob-

jectivity? Whither? Perhaps to the

domain of judgment, to the realm of

the capricious and the precise. The

latter two words are the words

Whiteman finds for Nicholson, as

though in a catalog; he finds, cuts, and

pastes alongside one another these

words for Nicholson’s work. The hard edges of Nicholson’s bric-a-brac, his gaptoothed breadtags,

his bits of stuff, look like whimsy, but they show the insistence of time. The last words Hölderlin

wrote to his mother were, „Time is precise, down to the letter, and all-merciful.”4

If the reference to Hölderlin’s letter seems to alter the tone of this response of mine, from

good-spirited Kantian kidding to Hölderlinian melancholy, it is only to introduce John Whiteman’s

own astonishing turn. For at the end of his Introduction to Appliance House he says something

utterly indiscreet. Terribly indiscreet, at least as one Englishman to another. And yet, if he cuts

too close to the bone, it is in order to prevent the rest of us from reading Nicholson’s work too

whimsically. The context, once again, is the gap between the velocity of imagination and the

slowness of handicraft, the gap between the quick shock of juxtaposition in Nicholson’s collages

and the hours of cutting and pasting—or, in the case of „B-52 Pickup,” of toting, untwisting, and

reassembling—that make such quick shock possible. It is as though he is asking he how Nicholson

sustains, over long periods of work in the studio, what viewers will instantaneously perceive—and

perhaps laugh off? Viewers like those old farts in Nicholson’s audience who grumble that they „do

not see the discipline” in Nicholson’s work. A painful question, about a painful gap. Perhaps the

archetict (I spell the word advisedly, reverting from τεχνη to τικτειν, from architecnique to archaic

love-making) lives his or her entire life in that gap. No whimsy about it. Destiny. Whiteman

concludes with this:

It seems to me however that Nicholson is somewhat aware that his self-appointed

task cannot ever succeed; that there is indeed an uncertain sadness in the task of

drawing new worlds from fading impressions. In Nicholson’s detailed and drawn

out practices, the long, careful course of each of his drawings or buildings, the

extended distances of memory are set against the forlorn expectations of the ever

new. This contrast can only be managed by sustaining the immediacy of impres-

sion, artificially kept alive in every line of drawing. Thus, in his work the manic care

and surgical skill, which seeks to preserve the ephemerality of life even as it is

destined to die in the drawing, is also a gloss, a mask on a deeper sadness: that

each drawing, like every word, is also an elegy for its own lost moment. Nicholson’s

virtue, as a singular draftsman and architect, is not to give in at the moment of this

realization, but to persist all the more. (8)

•

4 Hölderlin Werke und Briefe, eds. Friedrich Bei§ner and Jochen Schmidt, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1982), 2, 952-53

Nothing I write here will hurt Ben Nicholson or help him more than Whiteman’s words concerning

the elegiac quality of Nicholson’s work—words which, amazingly, are reiterated by Alvin Boyarsky

at the very end of his interview with Nicholson. Like any good interviewer, he is giving Nicholson

a hard time—about his missing narrative, his teleology in tatters, his no-answer to his what-is-it-

all-for? Even though Nicholson admits that his fascination lies with the „state of inward collapse”

in things, that he lusts after „an object that is constantly on the edge of falling over,” Alvin Boyarsky

yearns for something more sustainable, „aside from the analogue with Michelangelo.” (And he is

right about that, even if most of us would be content to be nominated to that sort of company:

there is nothing less sustainable than an analogue with Michelangelo.) Boyarsky yearns for the

narrative that will put it all in perspective, the craftsman’s true-confession. He worries about this

ritual of collage activity, which is admittedly „incredible,” but which cannot be „designed,” espe-

cially if, while performing those snippings and gluings over painful stretches of time, „he were just

musing.” Toward the end of the interview Boyarsky speaks of Nicholson’s Kleptoman Cell as „a

room which is the receptacle, on many levels, of one’s own biography.” I prefer the thought of the

receptacle to that of biography. For Nicholson’s bricolage style of building and his buildings them-

selves are receptacles of clutter, not of a neatly truncated biography calculated from the expirydate. If Nicholson chooses to transfigure a „verifiable ob-

ject” by „tweaking it into something else,” he takes the

mother’s painstaking part rather than the demiurgic father’s.

That is, he does not eyeball the ειδη in order to copy them,

imitate them, mimetize them, botch them with becoming.

He works with his hands but he also spreads his legs, rather

promiscuously if the God’s almighty truth be told, and takes

on all comers. Imagine the Demiurge ransacking a Sears

catalogue, pasting brassieres to hotwaterbottles,

hedgeclippers to houseslippers. Imagine old Kant feeding

8. Faults. . . . A fault is a capital mo-ment: it makes apparent the need forchanges. A fault is easy to see and,even if it is an act of carelessness, it isalways potent.

(BN, �Program Notes for the LoafHouse,� 1992)

Ben Nicholson, Psychosexual Problem,1995. „Once during my misspent daysin London, while visiting a friend in aclinic, I saw a rubber stamp on the ad-missions desk with the words „Psycho-sexual Problem.” The attendant turnedaround and like a fool I did not pick it upand stamp my forehead with it. This isone of the moments of glory that I re-gret not taking advantage of in my life.It would have hit the third eye.”

barbed wire through the portal of space in order to trap time on the inside. Nicholson spreading

them, taking on all comers: that is not a dignified position to be in, although it is the position of

Necessity, Αναγκη. If every joint of the Appliance and Loaf Houses creaks and moves when

anyone enters them, if levers and pulleys keep them jerking and swaying like a mechanical doll; if

the rear wall of the Loaf House blows out over a slab that is „part altar and part ice rink”; it is

because the rooms are soft (despite all those hard edges, all those angles he loves almost as

much as insteps of shoes and tiretreads that möbiustwist to infinity) like the incalculable limits of a

womb. Who can find it strange that at the end of his interview with Alvin Boyarsky he speaks of the

Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, of the thousands of objects that litter that space, and of

the need (as the custodians confirm) of something like a Telamon Cupboard to receive them?

What Nicholson is always describing and forever designing is a kind of columbarium, itself a col-

lage of doves and ashes, elegies and burlesques. Alvin Boyarsky says, at the end, „The only

difficulty in what we are talking about, is what is going to be in the last shelf, and when.”•

Ben Nicholson, The Loaf House, 1995. „In an already complicated world the ecstatic cranks up the volume and suddenly makes it allvisible. The Loaf House will burst out at the back—and beneath the bursting will be a wholly quiet slab—part altar and part ice rink.”

In his conversation with Boyarsky, Nicholson mentions the relationship between painting and

architecture as one of his early fixations, along with the Sweets and Sears catalogs and, of all

things, the concealed pavements of the Laurentian Library. If it is true that the books of the

Cabbalah are hidden behind the main door on the left as one enters the Library, then I may be

forgiven (by a very few, those who still turn left whenever entering rooms for thought) for what I

Ben Nicholson, Desk 44, Laurentian Library. “Desk 44 is behind the door to the left [of entrance].”

have done to The Last Judgment in an unpublished paper called „Infinite Violence,” which is a

kind of naughty slide-show on Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Although he wants to observe the

pavements and their intricate designs and odd measurements („In the room the people come and

go, walking o’er Michelangelo”) against the backdrop of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I myself

still want to observe this great archive of ancient lore in the context of the high altar wall of the

Chapel—and its fresco. (After all, The Last Judgment could be the title of a book by Kant.) As I

look at the figures of The Last Judgment, they seem to me to be elements of a collage, not so

much frescoed onto the wall as cut out from some forbidden book, some piece of apocrypha or

Cabbalah or hermetic scroll, and glued onto the wall in order to scandalize Christendom. Not

merely in order to irritate the Pope and the Cardinals,

though it certainly did that, but to drag the entire king-

dom of heaven down to something on or beneath the

earth. As though eschatology were a rasher of bacon

creeping up and over the oaken toilet seat of history.

If there is somewhat of the collagist or bricolagist about Michelangelo, then Nicholson’s

fascination with the pavements of the Laurentian Library is less remote from the Appliance and

Loaf Houses than some might think. (Indeed, I have seen slides of Nicholson’s that show how

the Laurentian and the Appliance House fit demurely inside one another, but how will I convince

readers or onlookers or onliners of this?) Yet if the inlaid pavements do reflect something of the

Sistine ceiling—down to the calibrated measurements—then I suppose I am trying by way of this

strange response to think along with Nicholson of that alarming collage of s(k)ins that is The Last

Judgment. How distant my grotesquerie must seem from the ceiling or from the Library! How-

ever, I believe that Nicholson’s Laurentian project will show that there is as much grotesquerie in

9. Going to the bathroom. The worstpossible phrase. �I�m going to the bath-room behind a bush.�

(BN, �Program Notes for the LoafHouse,� 1992)

10. Elaborate the imminent collapse of the object: reveal thetruth about a secret that is the size of 16th-century life itself.(BN, Personal Communication, 1995)

the („early”) Library as on the („middle-to-

late”) Sistine wall, or even—to leap away and

ahead—in the Groteschi of Piranesi that

Nicholson loves so well. However, it is in-

discreet of me to be writing anything at all

about the Laurentian Library project, about

which Nicholson so far has been so very silent, working on it as though on his most volatile collage,

taking all the time in the world to elaborate the imminent collapse of the object.5

•

5 Ben Nicholson and I have often brought together our students—the budding philosophers and the buzzing architects—in collec-tive endeavors. One of them involved discussion of the relation of the Laurentian pavements, and the design of the entire library, to the loreof Plato’s Timaeus. On another occasion, I presented my ideas about Michelangelo’s „The Last Judgment” to his studio, and I want to thankhim and his students (as well as my own) who—over the years—have participated in these strange and demanding discussions. It is nevereasy to set aside one’s own academic knee-jerk reactions, reflexes that differ so much, depending on whether philosophy or architecture isthe major source of one’s own professional deformation. Yet I think Ben would agree with me that our students are the ones who mostinsisted that this overcoming of all professionalism occur, so that conversations could begin. I know he joins me in thanking them.

If I now return to the gap between fleet imagination and painstaking hands and eyes, it is less with

a sense of sadness than with admiration for Nicholson’s discipline and persistence and drivenness.

In „Collage Scrutiny,” he observes that be-

cause a collage is constructed of „pieces of

paper that combine an unlimited number of

perspectival angles and scales produced by

the lens of a camera or the hand of the drafts-

man,” the collage object itself becomes a

source of wonder and puzzlement. Both the

disinterested observer (another one of Kant’s

dreams) and the collage maker „will find it

difficult to look at familiar things in quite the

same manner” (19).

11. Collage Vision. I woke up in a house that was notmy own, and found myself staring at a rocking chairfrom my mattress on the floor. I looked through a hole,delineated by the armrest and rocker bar, and saw in itpeculiar par ts of the room juxtaposed together. Theywere the same sorts of juxtapositions as occur in col-lage activity. It is clear that Cubists undoubtedly sawand experienced the world exactly as they painted it.

(BN, �Private Life in the Public Realm,� 1995)

Of the activity and technique of collage making I can of course say nothing. Yet I want to

reiterate my point about Nicholson’s legs, their spread, and what one might call the ticnique

(again, from τικτειν, to make love) of collage making. Collage seems all eye and hand, the

transaction of the writer, as Derrida has analyzed it from Of Grammatology up through Memoirs

of the Blind. (But I can already hear Ben’s anguished response, „This is definitely wrong.”) Yet

12. This is definitely wrong. The amazing thing about fine work is that thewhole body is in the service of the pencil-knife: keeping it at exactly the rightangle, the body has to rotate around the thing it is cutting. Imagine cutting outa circle in a piece of paper without moving the paper and keeping the blade atexactly the same angle-of-tangent: the body has to sit, stand, and, with theagility of a monkey, glide across the work table. Once the body is trained, themost difficult tasks can be performed by the hand. The body both enables andfollows the lead of the hand�as if it were a marionette activated by the hand.

(BN, Personal Communication, 1995)

the legs, spreadeagled,

are involved too. As

Nicholson describes the

madness of the gluing,

which always comes too

early or too late, never

at the right time, with the

to-be-glued always com-

ing to hand in the wrong

order, he writes of a cer-

tain „anarchy,” indeed, of

an anarchy that reminds

me of Luce Irigaray. Be-

cause he is using muci-

lage, he refers to

„muculous anarchy.” My

spell-check will belch

over muculous, but I will

explain to it that

Nicholson is translating Irigaray’s muqueux. I know that the slipperiness she means is anything

but gluey, that it is closer to soggyness (more spell-check troubles), but I suspect that the slippery

way Nicholson uses mucilage explains the relation perfectly lu-

cidly.

Soggyness no doubt leads to slipperiness. The first time

I sat on a jury with Ben Nicholson and Stanley Tigerman,

Tigerman warned me, „Look out for Ben, he’s a slippery charac-

ter!” Just how slippery Nicholson is Tigerman shows in his epi-

13. Soggyness. There are a num-ber of soggy substances in every-day life such as hamburger buns andpadded toilet seats. The dentist usesa transparent material to glue crownsto tooth stumps that is very soggy.Soggyness begins when the localanaesthetic takes effect. Then, whenasked to bite, it is difficult to differ-entiate between the tooth stump, theglue substance, the ar tificial crown,the cotton wadding sculling about inthe back of the mouth, one�s owngum, and the dentists� fingers.

(BN, �Wandering Domesticity,� 1993)

logue or „After-

math” to Appli-

ance House.

There he writes

of both the

„acidity” and the

„fluidity” of „the

idea,” the very

idea of

N i c h o l s o n ’ s

work. Like Whiteman, Tigerman emphasizes the

schism and schiz of the craft of his work and its

strategy of unmasking. If architecture is „the fab-

rication of cultural containers,” Nicholson is instead

causing the fabric of fabrication to fray. In his in-

comparable way, sinful and skinful, Tigerman

modifies the title of the opening section of Appli-

ance House, „What’s in a Name?” to „What Sin a

Name?” The name, of course, is architecture

(spelling it old once again). Stanley Tigerman finds

that Ben Nicholson „is proposing nothing less than

the (dis)mantling of the very discipline under scru-

tiny here” (87).

„Collage Thinking” has „implications be-

yond itself,” and these implications are all about

building. As Nicholson sets about building the Loaf

House with verve these days, I wonder whether it

is not the implications for building that count most

14. Slipperiness, fluidity. I am doing my bestto construct these words, to form an endlessthing that goes around and around but lets theonlooker have very familiar clues to work with�suburbomythical clues. At this point my onlysalvation will be to keep on trying to describethe sor t of slipperiness that I believe in. Inci-dentally, D. H. Lawrence appeals to me morethan James Joyce: the same task, but Lawrencespeaks from the Midlands of England ratherthan from a library. As a kid I knew I was bad.I liked to ridicule the institutions. When weplayed tennis (each family had their own tenniscour t) nothing gave me more pleasure thandeliberately hitting the ball as far out of thecour t as possible�preferably by acceleratingthe ball behind me �by accident.� Tennorist.

(BN, Personal Communication, 1995)

Ben Nicholson, The Loaf House, with paper-digging nib, 1995. „The back will blow out onto slab, and over it. . . . So much paper crudhad formed about the nib that my fountain pen became an ink mop!”

heavily in his work. Not that building

is the „grand narrative,” which is what

it has always been for (the old) archi-

tecture, but that it is, or will be, a flow-

ering of the language of collage think-

ing and collage doing. I would want

to call that flowering archeticture, and

see in it an archaic love of materials

and a love of the arcane. But then,

what skin, a name?

15. Verve: Structure. A place of cause and effect, one thing triggersoff something else, invisible/visible structure. A structure that cel-ebrates and wonders about the skeleton of a building that fulfills themodernists� lament that the frame was the �best bit� and shouldnever have been covered up. Let the structure be visible and engagethe weight of the house. A house weighs a great deal, let us knowthe weight of the house!

(BN, �Program Notes for the Loaf House,� 1992)

Nicholson speaks of „tactile thoughts,” thoughts that linger on as one contemplates the

finished product of collage. Finished, that is to say, for the nonce. This tactility, this palpation,

initiates a kind of kinesthesia that pertains to

archeticture. For the techniques Nicholson employs

are highly charged, as Whiteman reminds us, highly

ticnical, I would say. The object begins to rise and

move, like a point in Hegelian space, timing itself; or

like a point in time, spacing out. Nicholson writes:

16. Verve: Circulation. A good house is onethat you can get lost in, that always has spatialreserves, places that one forgets about, goodfor visitors.(BN, �Program Notes for the Loaf House,�1992)

Collage is an interstitial state: neither flat nor round, neither identifiable nor cha-

otic. When objects snipped from magazines are reformed into an ephemera of

collage they transcend their former pictorial candor. The identity of a frying pan

might be lost but its associated smells still linger. The task of collage is to regurgi-

tate the frying pan enough times so that the metal is worn away but its patina is left

intact. (22)

The acidity of the idea serves its fluidity. As one gazes at the collage one „lifts” it out of its

„flatness.” The collage becomes a „relief.” What a relief! For relief is „the first glimpse of round-

17. Verve: Inside-Out. The ambiguity between inside and outside. Make it so that it isalways difficult to determine whether you are within or without the walls. Where are thewalls? Are there walls? The roof and floor surfaces work in the same way: the floor canhave intarsia so that the apparent flatness is flicked up by what is incised upon it.

(BN, �Program Notes for the Loaf House,� 1992)

ness,” not an

acanthic erection

but a filling-out in

pregnancy, and in it

the plane surface of

drawing becomes

the shadowy solid of

three-dimensional

objects:

Because of the thinness of paper, collage relief also permits translucence. Light is

reflected off a surface that is apparently hidden beneath a covering surface. Thus,

a collage is the first hint at a condition of fullness than can exist after the substance

of artistic intent has removed itself from the flattened surface of the canvas. The

relief created by superimposition can be read as a talisman, as an indication of its

three-dimensional qualities. Were the collage to become an object in space, its

structure would inform the way it is to be built. (22, my emphasis.)

The final paradox: as the collage is recollaged, hacked by „a pungent chopping tech-

nique” that „obfuscates” every once-identifiable object in the first collage, the ecstatic space of

the collage opens up. Every jointure and edge

asserts its importance, as the frying pan be-

comes the shadow of its oval rim or its sullen,

greasy glow, redolent of years of bacon. Ob-

fuscation of the initial object produces what

Heidegger would call „the thing,” in which the

quaternity of earth and sky, mortals and divini-

18. Kitchen. Grind, cut, squeeze, liquify, heat,cool, store, display.

(BN, �Program Notes for the Loaf House,�1992)

ties, is formed—what Irigaray would call the hollow of „place,” or the „envelope.” „By peeling

itself off the paper surface, collage can be brought into relief, the round, the hollow, and on into

the construction of a building” (23). As Stanley Tigerman cries at the end of his „Aftermath,”

apropos of the Appliance House, but every bit as applicable to the Loaf House, if not to „B-52

Pickup,” „It screams out to be built.”

Copyright, David Farrell Krell, 1997