Forms of Flexibility

“But where danger is, grows the saving power also.” (1)

I.
In the evening of 17 June 1970, the neo-avant-garde architecture group Ant Farm arrived at the week-long International Design Conference in Aspen in their Media Van and erected a transparent inflatable plastic object, Spare Tire Inflatable, which the conference participants could enter and move through. The theme of the conference, ‘Environment and Design’, had brought together American designers, architects, corporate representatives, business leaders, and a French delegation of designers and sociologists for discussions about the new powerful watchword “the environment.” Ant Farm’s soft plastic room functioned as the conference recreation area – or playground – as the delegates moved and played inside the bubble in between keynote presentations, roundtable discussions, and paper sessions. The inflatable room was an object of soft plastic with no other tangible supporting structure. As air filled up the flat-packed room, it transformed the object and it became very close to nothing. Spare Tire Inflatable was an unstable object, a structureless structure almost entirely of air – more interested in becoming than in being.

The inflatable structure explicated an expansion of the understanding of what an object could be, both regarding its formal qualities and the epistemological categories objects usually are ascribed to. First, in both these terms the inflatable room challenged stability. It evoked an unstable temporality, as the room would never stay the same. Ant Farm’s room was always moving, always becoming. As air was blown into the structure and gave it form, the room also became physically and conceptually governed by the environment. Second, Inflatable materialised a presence of intangibility. The material which gave the room its form (air) was the same, inside and outside the object, and the continuum was separated by a layer of soft plastic. The softness of the material and its transparency epitomised that the boundary between the object and the environment softened. The inflatable structure embodies virtues of freedom and flexibility; it was a room not confined to a private, interior space; rather, a movable, transparent form that resisted rigidity, confronted conformity, and rejected history. Third, Inflatable was governed by the notion of play. With its soft structure that never really stabilised, the room opened up a play of endless possibilities.

Ant Farm’s experimental assembly of inflatable plastic objects and performance art partakes in a broader critical and aesthetic practice in counterculture post-war art and architecture discourse.(2) Such inflatable art objects exemplify and participates in a major issue and theme in both art and theory in the early 1970s, namely the relationship between inside/outside, interior/exterior, or, object/context. Aesthetic explorations of this relationship converged on a common critical position, in so far that this practice was deeply immersed in conceptual terms such as connectedness, networks, interactions, semiology, co-operation, feedback loops, and infrastructures. Operational terms such as these were assumed to induce a new conceptual model of the world governed by notions of liberty, free from rigid structures of stable hierarchies.

Ant Farm’s Inflatable played with the limits of what an object could be; it blurred the boundaries between the atmosphere and the object’s internal atmosphere, thus Inflatable, in a sense, became pure context.

II. Design Thinking
Throughout the 20th Century, the notion of flexibility has been widely celebrated by radical artists, systems theorists, architects and interior designers, business managers, and yoga teachers. While radical architecture collectives, such as Ant Farm, operationalized the notion of flexibility as a mode of capitalist critique, interior architects started to design open-space offices that could fit into a more drifting – or nomadic – working lifestyle. Flexibility was an antidote to rigid modernist hierarches, but as with all antidotes, overuse can cause reduction in the effectiveness so that the antidote becomes absorbed by the condition it attacks. Originating in 1970s counter-culture projects of participatory design (for instance Ant Farm’s inflatables), (3) design thinking is a design methodology that understands the designer not as an individual agent, but as operating in a dynamic and participatory manner together with the product or service, expertise from other disciplines, and the end-user. Design thinking offers a holistic approach to the process of design by the means of, for instance, multi-disciplinary teamwork, user-centered services, innovative management models, and solution-focused thinking. Within design thinking, “design” is not understood as giving form to something, but as an abstract process where no individual governs the design process. The design strategy de-centers the notion of the individual mind as the cradle of thoughts and imagery.

Since design thinking first emerged as a term in Peter Rowe’s book Design Thinking from 1987, the strategy has developed into a managerial model for global corporations. As we can read in numerous articles and blogs about business management: “Flexibility is the key to success.” Today, business managers employ design thinking as a management strategy in order to maximize efficiency.

Amazon Prime, The Apple iPhone, Netflix, Tesla, and Airbnb all claim to use design thinking for innovation of products and services. “It’s no longer just for products” the Harvard Business Review wrote on their cover in 2015 (above a black turtleneck sweater – Steve Job’s renowned trademark), “executives are using this approach to device strategy and manage change.” (5) Airbnb repeatedly tells the story of how design thinking helped them revolutionize global tourism. (6) Their approach was to think creatively, and to utilize a “human-centered user strategy” where design not only consisted of giving form to something, but instead became a holistic never-ending process where the user experience was feeding into the process.

In the article “Rethinking Design Thinking,” Lucy Kimbell relates the development of design thinking with the new creative class in which the professional life and personal life blurs, where flexibility and creativity “move across national borders without being anchored to industrial modes of production and consumption.” (7) Concerning the relation between design thinking to capitalism, Kimbell references the more recent critique on the “new spirit” of capitalism (as proposed by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello) (8) that “captures some of the energy in the shift from hierarchies to networks and from bureaucratic discipline to team-work and multi-skilling, as capitalism absorbed its critiques.” (9)

Considering its widespread employment, design thinking now governs our products, our services, and our platforms for communication. Although intangible, and almost unnoticeable, the playful managerial model now governs our environment.

III. Marte Eknæs’ Air Body
In the evening of 10 October 2019, the opening of the first part of Marte Eknæs’ art project “Kunsthall 2025” took place at Kunsthall Stavanger. The project consists of several artworks by Eknæs, amongst them the sculpture Air Body (2019). The sculpture is a strange monument to flexibility. In the form of an elongated cylindrical tube, the soft but thick, PVC plastic functions as a layer of outer skin that can enclose another kind of material inside. The long plastic tube sculpture was planned to be installed in the staircase of Kunsthall Stavanger.

Hegel frequently uses the word plastik in his aesthetics in relation to Greek arts, in particular, to sculpture. For Hegel, the Classical Greek sculpture is considered the highest achievement of artistic expression, since its content is integrally linked to its form. In Classical Greek sculpture, the content is, above all, the Greek gods. Yet as Hegel points out, the Greek gods are not representations of the gods—they are the gods. The Classical Greek sculptures does not give form to anything, but something takes form in them. There is no hidden meaning “inside” the sculptures; they express nothing. In these sculptures there are no separation between form and content and this circumstance makes Hegel evaluate the Classical Greek sculpture as perfect: a pure absoluteness that will never again return.

After the Classical Greek era, there has been an aesthetic division between form and content. The term “form” refers to the style, techniques, media, and materials of the artwork, and the term “content” refers to the representation or mimesis, in other words, that which is displayed or depicted. Eknæs’ Air Body is all throughout plastic, but does not get its form solely from the synthetic material. The cylindrical tube sculpture gets its form from air. The soft sculpture has a nozzle in one end and is made to be blown up by the artist or a museum technician. Air Body radically disrupts the relationship between form and content: it contains its own form. The air gives the sculpture its form, thus form and content are identical. There is no concealed inside, Air Body is what it is in its showing of itself and in a Hegelian sense, the flexible sculpture thereby is absolute flexibility.

When creating the inflatable sculpture, Eknæs utilized participatory strategies affiliated with design thinking. The artist placed the process of production outside herself: creating Air Body was an abstract process where no individual governed the creation process. The form of the sculpture was produced by sending an e-mail to the Norwegian company Somedayboats, that imports and sells custom made inflatable leisure products and boat fenders made in a Chinese factory. Eknæs provided the production facility with measurements and material specifications, and placed an order. Hence, the sculpture is produced in a participatory manner permitted by means of automated processes. Algorithms, Somedayboats, Eknæs, Chinese labour, and FedEx collaborated in the coming-into-being of the sculpture. The artist is radically withdrawn from her artwork. Air Body has surrendered to a multi-disciplinary teamwork co-creation process in all its levels of production.

Yet, in Eknæs’ artistic project, “flexibility is not the key to success.” Eknæs hyperbole flexibility produces strange errors that disturb the notion of flexibility as a culturally-conditioned value. The utterly abstracted creation process opens up for mistakes and miscalculations, and by withdrawing from the production of form, Eknæs allows mistakes in every step of the creation.

Consequently, at the opening of the exhibition, Eknæs’ Air Body was not present. An unknown algorithmic error triggered an interruption in the FedEx delivery from China to Stavanger, causing a major delay. After having left Qingdao in late September 2019, the plastic sculpture assumingly stayed a few days in Shanghai before travelling to Sennan, then to Charles De Gaulle in Paris, and according to the FedEx online tracking system, shipped back again to Shanghai, then flying to Charles De Gaulle once more, before returning to Shanghai. The day after, the nomadic sculpture travelled to Cologne in Germany, before, once again, returning to Shanghai. The day before the opening of Eknæs’ “Kunsthall 2025”, Air Body moved from Shanghai to Grace-Hollogne in Belgium, before coming to a temporary rest “in transit” in Cologne.

Air Body did not arrive in time. In its place, Eknæs exhibited a printed version of another monument to flexibility: the FedEx Tracking System. Yet, the bizarre record of FedEx shipment number 460179755708 breaks the realm of unbridled flexibility. By allowing absolute flexibility to govern both the form and content of the sculpture, Eknæs evokes accidental disruptions, resulting in the strange circumstance that the sculpture was at the wrong place at its own unveiling.