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: Witte de With - Participant - Simon Wachsmuth
Simon Wachsmuth, Greenhouses, 1999
Greenhouses1999 Sharp lines inscribe themselves into the shimmering matte surface of the black oil-pastel ground. Only this negative act of carving geometrical forms is able to coax some order from the indifferent homogeneity of the black. A meaningful ordering of the world and the things that exist in it is the fundamental prerequisite for its perceptibility. And just as in this case, where legible form is created by removing something from a whole, meaning in general is formed negatively: only the act of differentiation, which reduces the limitless domain of what can be seen and heard to a world of distinguishable forms and words, renders the subject capable of action.
The limited repertoire of potential thought and expression that shapes our current social sphere of action separates the field of nature from that of culture ? mere existence from political being, which is attributed solely to the intellectual world of reason. The symbolic order of the industrial age also includes the architectural form manifested here. As well as standing for modernity?s domination of nature, it refers, far more fundamentally, to the prototype of domesticated life forms. Far from applying only to industrial urbanism, the serial paradigm reflected here in the modular character of the individual leaves is a constitutive moment for the decentralized organization of society.
