Paper
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For architects, designing in digital space is different. Early computer-aided design (CAD) programs—AutoCAD version 1.0 was released in 1982—allowed architects to work on screen, but still much in the manner they had done on paper. Early CAD was basically a form of imitation paper. But the latest 3D drawing tools, which incorporate animation and motion graphic software—known as Building Information Modeling systems—have gone far beyond drawing-board geometry and paper into the complex modeling of space and time. Combined with the use of CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machines for making architectural models, this means that an architecture office potentially has no need for paper, cardboard, scalpels, scissors, or any of the other paper-related paraphernalia of the past few centuries. This clearly has implications: “Is drawing dead?” has become the architectural equivalent of the perennial “Is this the end of paper?” question.
Answer: well, yes, no and maybe.
Greg Lynn, one of the prophets of a postpaper architecture, claims that the modes and methods of the profession are changing for the better, from paper-based design to computer modeling, and from a fixation upon patterns of lines and grids to an attention to fluid surfaces, resulting in new biomorphic building forms. Lynn is credited with coining the term “blob architecture,” or “blobitecture,” as critics of this new style prefer to call it (for obvious examples, think of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, or the bobbly Selfridges building in Birmingham). As these extraordinary new forms seem to suggest, architecture has been liberated from the constraints of paper design. Of course, some architects are staging a rearguard action and resisting the computer and all its blobtastic ways; and not just fuddy-duddies. The great radical architect Yona Friedman, for example, claims to have “decomputerized” as long ago as 1973 because he recognized in computer design a form of dictatorship: “All the pre-fabricated software has implications that are not stated. I am not free to use them as I want. It would be better to simply teach people how to do their own software. Computers give no real choices. With paper, it is different. I can crumple it, I could not do this by computer.” Other defenders of the art and craft of drawing in architecture argue that it develops a particular form of skill and attention, and establishes an important, intimate relationship between hand and eye that is reflected in the human forms and dimensions of buildings themselves, and that computers, for all their capacities, actually distance us from the real world, and that Frank Lloyd Wright, with his colored pencil drawings, and Aalto with his cigarette-pack sketches, bring us closer.
So, the computer may or may not be trumping paper and transforming architecture from the outside in, but what about from the inside out? What of the paper inside our homes—not the books and the bookmarks, or the cards and coupons, but the actual fixtures and fittings, the furniture?
If your home happens to be in Japan, of course, your house may actually be made of paper, with byōbu folding screens and shōji, the wall-like partitions fixed into grooved channels that give the traditional house its peculiar qualities of suffused light. The great Japanese novelist Junichirō Tanizaki wrote a famous essay, “In Praise of Shadows” (1933–34), in which he emphasized the importance of paper in creating the rich variations of shadow that characterize the interiors of traditional Japanese homes. The interiors of modern Japanese homes, it should be admitted, tend to be lit by bright fluorescent lights, while outside all is neon, and even Tanizaki, despite his praise of the depth and subtleties of the half-dark paper home, admitted that “I could never live in a house like that.” In a strange passage in his essay—which makes much of the contrast between a shadowy Asia and a bright, gleaming West—Tanizaki goes so far as to claim some kind of connection and correspondence between the aspects of light through paper and the “slight cloudiness” of the Japanese complexion: “When one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper.” This is perhaps a Japanese version of Jüdischer Selbsthass, and a notion to be resisted, but we might nonetheless be inclined to agree with the rather less controversial contention by the paper historian Sukey Hughes that “A people living in houses divided by sliding paper partitions and windowed with translucent paper screens will behave and think quite differently from a people surrounded by stone walls, stout wooden doors, and glass windows.”
Japanese house with sliding paper screens
For those of us imprisoned by stone walls, and stout wooden doors, and glass windows—which would of course include most Japanese—the closest we come to the soft luminosity of a traditional shōji-paneled Japanese room might be through our giant white moon-shaped paper lamp shades, with their spiral bamboo supporting structures, central metal struts, and thin paper coverings, possibly bought from Habitat in the 1970s, though just as likely from BHS or an out-of-town superstore. Historically, these derive from the ancient folding paper lanterns known in Japan as chōchin, introduced during the fourteenth century from China, widely used during the Edo period (1603–1867), and popularized in the West by the Japanese-American artist and designer Isamu Noguchi in the 1950s, when he began making what he called akari lanterns, having been inspired by a visit to a traditional lantern-making factory in the Japanese town of Gifu. As our ersatz-Gifu lamps cast their limpid glow over our stripped pine floors and ethnic rugs, we might once again contemplate one of the paradoxes of paper; that it can so often be misread: Noguchi’s big round paper lamp shades never really caught on in Japan.
Japonism in the home is also evident in japanning, the imitation lacquerwork derived from methods used in China and Japan, which became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to decorate papier-mâché furniture and fancy goods. Beds, wardrobes, dressing tables, washstands, tea trays and whatnots—at one time, just about anything and everything in the home might have been made of cheap papier-mâché tricked out with inlaid mother-of-pearl, some transfer print floral designs and some good plain black japanning. “Frames for pictures and divers fine pieces of embossed work with other curious movables, may, as trial has informed us, be made of it . . . either painted or overlaid with foliated silver or gold, as the artist pleases,” wrote the inventor and alchemist Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century: papier-mâché was like a base metal ready to be transformed into gold. (Indeed, Tiffany & Co. produced papier-mâché trinkets in the late nineteenth century, though the most curious nonprecious precious object ever made from paper was probably the jewel-encrusted papier-mâché papal tiara made for the coronation of Pope Pius VII in 1800.) The term “papier-mâché,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is used to describe a “substance consisting of paper-pulp or paper reduced to a pulp (often mixed with other substances), and shaped by moulding” (“Not of French origin,” notes the OED, witheringly; the phrase seems to have originated in England, perhaps among paper-chewing paper workers). The technique was used in China, to make helmets, spread to Japan and to Persia, where it was used to make masks, and eventually developed into an industry in England in the eighteenth century, with a Henry Clay—onetime assistant to the typefounder John Baskerville, himself a pioneer of japanning—taking out a patent for pasting together sheets of paper over molds of metal in 1772. Strong, durable and capable of being sawn and planed like timber, Clay’s papier-mâché could be used to make not only snuffboxes and bibelots, but window shutters, dressing tables, and even a sedan chair for Queen Caroline. Developments in Clay’s production process followed, accompanied by ever more elaborate forms of ornamentation: in 1866 the Art Journal decried “these glaring absurdities of colour and pearl shell that manufacturers less intelligent consider to be the absolute requirements of the art.” Modern manufacturers more intelligent—including Dutch-born German designer Mieke Meijer, with her NewspaperWood, and David Stovell, with his Sunday Papers stools, and those numerous others who make variously pleated, plaited and puffy paper chairs—tend to make a virtue of paper as their material. (Frank Gehry, who dabbled with cardboard
furniture back in the early 1970s, remarked that “The nice thing about it is that you can simply tear off a bit and throw it away if you don’t like it.”) In current design practice, paper is to be celebrated: in the nineteenth century the point was to make it look like something else; it was an elegant illusion.
Which brings us, finally, to wallpaper. (We shall draw a veil of decency over other household goods and products that have sometimes been mimed and mimicked by paper, including doilies, curtains, blinds—and carpets. Or at least certainly a carpet, manufactured by Holdship’s Paper Mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that seems, according to an account in the Pittsburgh Statesman in 1829, to have been a large, decorated, varnished piece of paper made for a man with more money than sense.)
Traditions of wall decoration go back at least to the Romans and Egyptians, with their frescoes and friezes, and beyond that to the painted stone slabs in Namibia, the vast murals in the Ajanta caves in India, and the Paleolithic paintings at Lascaux in France. Cloth (“stuff”) and fabric wall hangings came next, with early European wallpapers, dating from the fifteenth century, appearing as fabric substitutes, consisting of small squares of woodblock-printed paper used to decorate movable panels (Louis XI of France liked to take his angel-print wallpaper with him wherever he was traveling). The Chinese were almost certainly producing wallpaper first, but the earliest known wallpaper in England, discovered at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1911, dates back to 1509: disappointingly, it consists merely of a woodblock print on the back of an old proclamation; more like a tatty poster than actual wallpaper. Paper wall hangings became fashionable in England during the seventeenth century: we know they became fashionable because the government imposed a tax on any paper that was “painted, printed or stained to serve as hangings” in 1712, and falsification of wallpaper stamps soon became punishable by death.
Twentieth-century printed wallpaper based on a hand-painted Chinese original
The repeal of the wallpaper tax in 1836, and the development of a surface roller printing machine in 1839–40 meant that by the end of the nineteenth century wallpaper was inescapable. Sugden and Edmondson—not a firm of family lawyers but the authors of a standard history of wallpaper—estimate that in the 1830s around 1.25 million rolls per annum of hand-printed wallpaper were being produced in England. By 1874 this figure had risen to thirty-two million rolls. It got everywhere. When Gustave Flaubert climbed the Great Pyramid in 1849 he was appalled to find an advertisement for wallpaper at the top—“Imbeciles have written their names everywhere: ‘Buffard, 79 Rue Saint-Martin, wallpaper manufacturer,’ in black letters.” Oscar Wilde, in his lonely first-floor room in the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris, was famously reputed to have remarked, “My wallpaper is killing me, one of us must go.” The hotel still stands: the room has been redecorated. Wilde in fact died of cerebral meningitis, but many of his true words were spoken in jest. Nineteenth-century wallpaper really was killing people: the addition of arsenical pigments into paper had been slowly poisoning the many middle-class and poorer families who tried to brighten up their lives with a splash of color. William Morris, one of the century’s most prolific wallpaper designers, dismissed the “arsenic scare” and continued to use the pigments in his swirling botanical creations, though at his own house at Kelmscott he preferred to hang tapestries—the real thing. Wilde, meanwhile, advised others to choose “joyous paper on the wall, full of flowers and pleasing designs,” while for his own London house on Tite Street he chose imitation leather Japanese paper—much rarer, darker and stranger. Do as they say seems to be the lesson of the nineteenth-century aesthetes, not as they do.
Three-color block-printed wallpaper from the William Morris workshops, 1897
Wallpaper, then, is paper at its most deceptive, designed specifically to echo, imitate or allude to other more expensive materials, such as marble or textiles. (In 1912 Georges Braque famously picked up some wood-effect wallpaper in a shop in Avignon and used it for his Bowl of Fruit and Wineglass, the first of his celebrated papiers collés.) It can also transport you elsewhere. William Morris asked his wallpaper-buying public, “Is it not better to be reminded however simply of the close vine trellises which keep out the sun . . . or of the many-flowered meadows of Picardy . . . than having to count day after day a few sham-real boughs and flowers, casting sham-real shadows on your walls, with little hint of anything beyond Covent Garden in them?” Home and away. There is even wallpaper that imitates other wallpaper: mock flock, which imitates the flock wallpaper that was itself designed to imitate velvet wall hangings; wallpaper as infinite regression. “The difficulty of choosing wallpapers is one which has been felt by all those lucky or unlucky enough to have had at any period to face the ordeal of furnishing a house,” mused the Art Journal in 1899. “The variety of styles, colours and designs still further tend to bewilder the chooser.” One might almost prefer the strange but practical wall coverings chosen by Gaffer Hexam in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), whose house is papered with handbills announcing the dead:
Taking up the bottle with the lamp in it, he held it near a paper on the wall, with the police heading, BODY FOUND. The two friends read the handbill as it stuck against the wall, and Gaffer read them as he held the light . . . “Now here,” moving the light to another similar placard, “his pockets was found empty, and turned inside out. And here,” moving the light to another, “her pocket was found empty, and turned inside out. And so was this one’s. And so was that one’s. I can’t read, nor I don’t want to it, for I know ’em by their places on the wall . . . They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know ’em all. I’m scholar enough!”
Here, at least, the integrity and purpose of the paper is acknowledged: Josef Albers would have approved.
8
THE SECRET IS THE PAPER
Drawings are only notes on paper . . . The secret is the paper.
JOHN BERGER, “Drawing on Paper” (2005)
Stencil cutout figures, their shape determined by the fragments of paper holding the sheet together
Poster by Tom Eckersley in cut paper
Of course, not all art takes place on paper. And not all art on paper is paper art. And some paper art may not be everyone’s idea of art at all: anyone for Lucio Fontana’s paper piercings? Or Gordon Matta-Clark’s paper slits and cuts? Joe Goode’s pellet-peppered paper? Martin Creed’s Work No. 88, A sheet of A4 paper, crumpled up into a ball (1994)? Or—my own favorite, a masterpiece of its kind—Tom Friedman’s 1000 Hours of Staring (1992–97), stare on paper, 32½˝ x 32½˝, which is, as you might guess, nothing more than a plain white piece of paper that has been stared at. For a long time. Probably by you, the viewer. (Or more probably by you, the buyer, seeking enlightenment and an answer to the obvious question, “I bought what?”) If not a long hard stare, then at least let us take a quick glance at paper and its role in the history of art.
The phrase “works on paper” in a catalogue raisonné often refers to that part of an artist’s oeuvre that is somehow less achieved and less significant than the rest of the work, the words echoing the idea that something that might look good on paper wouldn’t really work in the real world, when properly translated onto canvas, say, or into bronze or marble. Picasso, works on paper? Meh. What about the proper stuff? The big stuff. The Art. There are of course artists who make capital “A” art mainly in and through paper, rather than merely on paper: Mark Langan, for example, and Annika von Hausswolff, who both make art from corrugated cardboard; and Ron Resch, with his elaborate paper-folding experiments; and Andreas Kocks and Mia Pearlman, who make large-scale paper installations; and Oliver Herring, with his photo-sculptures, in which he builds up multi-colored patches of paper over people’s bodies; and many, many other contemporary artists, in fact, in what one might almost suggest is a worldwide artistic “turn to paper,” so many of them are there; so many that it would seem churlish not to give lots more of them a mention. So: Su Blackwell, Peter Callesen, Thomas Demand, Brian Dettmer, A
my Eisenfeld Genser, Christina Empedocles, Franz Gertsch, Osang Gwon, Anna-Wili Highfield, Bovey Lee, Winifred Lutz, Jade Pegler, Andrew Scott Ross, Simon Schubert, Lu Shengzhong, Ingrid Siliakus, Bert Simons, Karen Stahlecker, Richard Sweeney, Kako Ueda. Paper artists all. But let us begin with artists’ paper.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century all artists’ paper was handmade—because, of course, all paper was handmade. It was therefore expensive. The price of a ream of paper in the seventeenth century was the equivalent of an average week’s wages: apprentice artists tended to use erasable drawing tablets in order to learn their craft, and even established artists were not likely to waste paper on mere sketches and drawings. There are oil paintings on paper by Rembrandt, and Delacroix, and Holbein the Younger, but these were usually pasted to other surfaces, and paper was by no means the first resort as an artists’ material, even in China, where proprietary brands of paper (including the most celebrated, Ch’êng Hsin T’ang, “Mind-clarifying Hall”) were available as early as the tenth century. Naturally, this brings us to an important question, what the great art historian Martin Kemp calls “die Materialfrage,” the materials question: how far does the material available to an artist determine the nature of his or her work?
Paper—unlike, say, a block of marble, or a large wall in a temple or a church—tends to allow artists second, third, fourth, fifth and infinitely further thoughts. Leonardo da Vinci was arguably the first artist to develop a style on paper in the late fifteenth century, through his process of continual, incessant sketching and drawing, creating what E.H. Gombrich calls a “welter of pentimenti.” Is it possible that artists before Leonardo never had second thoughts, asks Gombrich, trying to comprehend the sheer scale and sketchiness of Leonardo’s works on paper. It’s possible that they didn’t, but it seems just as likely that they simply weren’t using a material that allowed them first to express and then to store and keep their second thoughts for us to study. Like a generous grant from the Arts Council, paper provides an artist with both the time and the space to develop his or her ideas. Leonardo probably started keeping his famous notebooks at around the age of thirty-five, and scholars have estimated that he wrote at least one or two pages every day for thirty years: the astonishing six thousand sheets of notes and drawings that were bequeathed to his friend and pupil Francesco Melzi and which survive are thought to represent only about a fifth of what he actually produced. Leonardo didn’t just think on paper: he thought through paper. Paper was not the preliminary to other work: it was the work. On March 22, 1508, he wrote of his own notes, in his famous mirror handwriting, “e questo fia un racolto senza ordine, tratto di molte carte le quali io ho qui copiate sperando poi metterle per ordine alli lochi loro, secondo le materie di che esse tratterano” (“And this is to be a collection without order, taken from many papers which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to subjects of which they may treat”). Paper enabled Leonardo to experiment without restraint and without order: it’s what made him modern.