Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines
Curated by Mark Wasiuta
Jewish Museum
1109 5th Avenue and 92nd Street
New York
Through July 28
“We live through correalism. Science, art and philosophy try to make us understand this fact, more and more, deeper and deeper, richer and richer. All our being is conditioned by a consciousness of correalism.” Architect Frederick Kiesler wrote these ethereal words in his 1938 treatise, Correalism Manifesto, a text published relatively not long after Yvan Goll and André Breton released Surrealist Manifesto.
What’s the difference between surrealism and correalism? I asked myself this question after visiting a retrospective indebted to Kiesler at the Jewish Museum in New York’s Upper East Side. Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines was designed by Mark Wasiuta, Farah Alkhoury, and Tigran Kostandyan. It showcases one of the 20th century’s most interesting polymaths whose work spanned architecture, industrial design, theater, Freudian psychology, philosophy, and many, many other “ologies” and “osophies.”
After Kiesler died in 1965, his wife and fellow artist Lillian Kiesler donated his collection to Harvard, Yale, and the Archives of American Art. Sixty years later, Kiesler’s peripatetic ephemera that deeply influenced countless architects like Lebbeus Woods is on view for the public to see.
Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines focuses on the mad scientist’s work from the 1930s and ‘40s at Columbia University. There, Kiesler led the Laboratory for Design Correlation, an experimental architecture studio that bore more of a resemblance to Nikola Tesla’s workshop on Long Island than Le Corbusier’s office at 35 Rue de Sevres in Paris. While at the Laboratory for Design Correlation, Kiesler produced two works, Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine, which took center stage at the Jewish Museum this summer.
The exhibition fits well within its co-curator Mark Wasiuta’s portfolio: The Columbia GSAPP professor has long worked at the intersection of media, environment (in the most expansive sense of the word), and experimental practice. Previously, for instance, Wasiuta’s research with Marcos Sanchez focused on Environmental Communications, a radical media group based in 1960s Venice Beach, California.
“Kiesler is well known to many architects. His work with Peggy Guggenheim is legendary. But one thing I hope people take away from this exhibition is the important role of his research while directing the Columbia laboratory,” Wasiuta told AN.
Before Frederick Met Peggy
Kiesler was born in 1890 into a Jewish family in Czernowitz, a city in present-day Ukraine. Czernowitz was also the hometown of artist Hans Noë, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor that recently had his first retrospective at Manhattan’s National Museum of Mathematics.
Like Kiesler, Noë’s work was highly spiritual—albeit agnostic—and inclined toward mathematics, geometry, and science. Kiesler got his start studying printmaking and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He left Austria in 1923 and moved to Amsterdam where he studied under Constructivist and de Stijl masters by invitation of Theo van Doesburg.
In New York, Kiesler hit his stride. His first gigs included designing storefronts for Saks Fifth Avenue, and Guild Cinema. In 1938, he started the Laboratory for Design Correlation out of Columbia University’s School of Architecture. By then he had also been named director of scenic design at the Juilliard School of Music.
It was around that time when Peggy Guggenheim noticed Kiesler’s talent and cherry picked him to design the Art of This Century gallery. That show opened in 1942, and the gallery that Kiesler designed was described as “surrealist” and “kinetic” upon its opening by critics. Five years later, Kiesler designed the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris by invitation of André Breton and Marcel Duchamp.
That show in Paris, Shumon Basar later wrote, “split the surrealist movement in two” thanks to what’s now called “The Matta Affair”—a fatal love triangle between Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta Echauren, and Gorky’s wife Agnes Maguder.
In 1948, Kiesler found himself in the unfortunate position of being in the middle of the three when he told his friend Arshile that Matta had been sleeping with his wife, Agnes. Arshile committed suicide not long after he heard the news, and the tragic episode divided the surrealist movement between camps. Surrealism fizzled out not long after.
Transmuting Theory into Practice
Columbia University’s Laboratory for Design Correlation gave Kiesler the opportunity to put his head down and introduce students to his original theories about correalism, laid out in his eponymous 1938 treatise. According to Kiesler, correalism was a design philosophy that expresses “the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments.” It employed an approach he called biotechnique, an idea which surely borrowed from Bauhaus principles related to ergonomics.
Biotechnique, said Kiesler, focused on the human body, i.e. its posture, respiration rates, and “image consciousness,” or the relationship between the eye and the mind, and how the eye mediates images and information. It also took into account “dream content” and “dream images,” and how the subconscious influences subjectivity and human sight. This hypersensitivity to physiology and Freud, Kiesler believed, could unlock radical new approaches to architecture and industrial design. What resulted were myriad intriguing projects, including Mobile Home Library and Vision Machine.
Mobile Home Library came in 1939; it experimented with your run-of-the-mill bookshelf. Instead of a rectilinear object, what if it was circular? And what if the bookshelf rotated, and had TV screens, microfilm, and radios peppered between the books? (Kiesler thought this technology would be readily available by 2000.) Lastly, what if the shelf was on wheels, and could easily be moved between rooms, saving time and energy?
Kiesler made his canonical collage representing the object, but Mobile Home Library was never actually built, until now. At the Jewish Museum, Powerhouse Arts Makers reconstructed and fabricated the object.
“All we had to work with was the famous collage by Kiesler, which was based on photos by Ezra Stoller, and a drawing in Architectural Record, when we were reconstructing the Mobile Home Library,” Wasiuta shared. “The show was organized around an interesting conceptual problem. How do you build an icon of 20th century architecture that exists primarily in the form of a collage?”
The show at Jewish Museum however doesn’t just focus on Mobile Home Library. It also features films produced by Kiesler, among other studies. Vision Machine, for instance, is where things really get trippy.
Vision Machine wasn’t a building, or a prototype; it was an actual machine Kiesler envisioned made of neon tubes, glass bulbs filled with gas, lamps, spark balls, and other gizmos that were activated by push buttons. The object was meant to illustrate in real time how human beings see.
Between 1938 and 1941, Kiesler produced hundreds of drawings that represented his interest in dream sequences, hallucinations, and the “flow of sight” to quote Kiesler; or the “puzzle of human vision and visual perception,” curators said. The sketches by Kiesler are evocative: They recall drawings by Franz Kafka that show individuals floating in metaspace, enraptured by the immaterial networks that surround them.
Correalism and Surrealism
Traversing the show at Jewish Museum, and in the days afterward, I couldn’t shake this nagging question: What exactly is correalism? And how does it compare and contrast with surrealism? What’s interesting to me is that neither surrealism nor correalism are ever succinctly defined, but rather what they’re meant to do is how we should derive their meaning.
Franklin Rosemont, a Marxist art historian, wrote that “surrealism aims to reduce, and ultimately to resolve, the contradictions between sleeping and waking, dream and action, reason and madness, the conscious and the unconscious, the individual and society, the subjective and the objective.”
Could correalism be understood as surrealism transmuted into architecture? Maybe, or maybe not. All in all, the show at Jewish Museum expands what we know about Kiesler and reveals just how expansive his imagination and horizon really was, beyond his biggest hits like exhibitions for Peggy Guggenheim and Marcel Duchamp.
“There is certainly a surrealist angle in his work, especially through his exhibition design in the ‘40s, and he was close to the avant-garde emigré scene in New York, but correalism is different I think for a few reasons,” Wasiuta shared.
“Biotechnique and correalism are about the relationship between different ways of thinking about the world and its environment, and the construction of a salubrious space for human activity,” Wasiuta continued. “Kiesler was interested in the relationship between bodies and design objects, instruments, energy, and how spaces of human habitation can be reorganized to adapt to new technologies, new media, and new information systems.”
A book about Kiesler by Mark Wasiuta will be published by MIT Press in April 2025.
