JANE PICKERSGILL
Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal
Colin Rowe and Robert Slutsky
Perspecta, vol 8 (1963)
According to the authors dictionary definitions of transparency agree on it being a primarily a description of a physical object possessing qualities of being pervious to light and possibly air. That is to say that light travels through it and so that which is beyond is completely visible.
Thus, transparency is a material condition; one which can be applied (in architecture) to say a glass curtain wall, and in art to the overlapping planes common in cubist paintings.
Increasingly, however, the verb is used to describe an intellectual imperative; rendering clearly some potential facts, or of describing an organizational structure, or personal character attribute; of someone without guile. Thus, the adjective transparent has become loaded with the possibilities of both meaning and of misunderstanding as well as being endowed with high moral overtones.
In this essay, Rowe and Slutzky define these two states as ‘literal’ transparency or ‘phenomenal’ transparency. Referring primarily to texts by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes, they analyse ‘transparency’ with reference to artistic concepts. Beginning with the proposition that literal transparency derives from a ‘machine age aesthetic’ that of the Bauhaus teaching, but also from cubist painting, which merges planes and contains overlapping images in which neither is obliterated by the other.
Phenomenal transparency, they claim, derives from cubist painting alone, and so ‘one is confronted with a contradiction of spatial dimensions’. Ergo the phenomenally transparent is loaded with ambiguities and contradictions – in much the same way as are cubist paintings, which contain areas of both transparent and semi-opaque paint.
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