FORMAT FACTORY - The Assemblage : forging connections and editing material
Le Musee Imaginaire
Similar to Aby Warburg, the French cultural theorist Andre Malraux (1901-1976) assembled, disassembled, and reassembled montages of photographic reproductions to create 'Le Musee imaginaire', an imaginary museum. The essay was first published as the first volume of 'La Psychologie de l'art' in 1947. A second expanded edition was published as the first volume of 'Les Voix du silence' in 1951. Finally, a third edition was published in 1965.
Malraux argued for the idea of a ''museum without walls'' which would allow the displacement of the physical art object and the museum by photographic reproduction.
Malraux's project anticipated the digital age and its impacts on artistic production processes. The quantity of content is replaced by the quality of their arrangements. Therefore, the value of the artwork is inseparable from its format.
Project Frameworks
Architecture and art share the image and image formats to communicate ideas. Both are self-driven practices which constantly need to create their own framework in which a method of working can be tested. Architecture can be regarded as the art of building, the art of drawing and the art of the project.
Whilst the physical production is realized through craft, the intellectual practice consists in bringing the fragments of the project together. The many moments of decision making drive the project forward. Therefore architects and artists must face the task of assembling the various arguments which serve as points of orientation toward an overall body of knowledge.
The aim is to trigger critical and partial attitudes towards a study which was comprehensive enough given a certain amount of time. In turn, theories of knowledge lays the foundation by which the architect can take responsibility over his own learning process and by which the audience can understand a project. Hence the creation of a project informs its own culture of production.
Non-linear Assemblage
The acquisition of knowledge relies as much on memory as on technical aids. In everyday life, content is often randomly absorbed through various formats. In many cases, we remember experiencing the way in which content was formatted rather than the content itself. All formats entails an approach to knowledge because they enable access to content by considering the human body as a sensuous apparatus.
The chronological presentation and the seductive representation of content suggests a completed story. A linear series of objects preempts intellectual speculation. Rather than fetishizing the formal attributes of a product, the creative act should be located in the process of assembling, grouping, and displaying works. This process test our approach to case, rule and results mixing different modes of inference. Art and architecture can continue to act as educational practices if the format complements the image as a medium to a message.
''The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars,
but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.''
Andre Malraux,
Les Noyers de l'Altenburg, 1948
''The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.''
Andre Malraux, L'Intemporel, 1957