“About 1930 the pictures torn by hand from paper came into being. Human work now seemed to me even less than piece-work … Everything is approximate, less than approximate, for when more closely and sharply examined, the most perfect picture is a warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge, a dismal moon-crater landscape. What arrogance is concealed in perfection. Why struggle for precision, purity, when they can never be attained? The decay that begins immediately on completion of the work was now welcome to me. Dirty man with his dirty fingers points and daubs at a nuance in the picture. This spot is henceforth marked by sweat and grease. He breaks into wild enthusiasm and sprays the picture with spittle. A delicate paper or watercolor is lost. Dust and insects are also efficient in destruction. The light fades the colors. Sun and heat make blisters, disintegrate the paper, crack the paint, disintegrate the paint. The dampness creates mould. The work falls apart, dies. The dying of a picture no longer brought me to despair. I had made my pact with its passing, with its death, and now it was part of the picture for me. […] Form had become un-form, the Finite the Infinite, the Individual the Whole.” 


Hans Arp (1948)


Considerations of the formless or “un-form” suggest a reassessment of the material domain of architectural form, namely the possibility of regarding materiality as something that cannot coalesce into a singular entity, accepting its irresoluteness, and in this sense, weak condition. In order to address such a proposition, one might examine that which is repressed within the material realm of form production, the very other of elevated materiality—the ordinary, inferior, impure, crude, messy, or wasted, that to which no form is attributed in the ideal sense. Sigmund Freud’s assertion that “dirt is matter in the wrong place” could be taken as a point of departure from which to possibly overturn the notions of material rightness or wrongness.



Hans Arp’s reference to the essentially impure material condition of artworks is indicative of such a posture. While creating assemblages with torn paper, he came to realize that the notion of the idealized work in its materially pristine state needed to be questioned. “What arrogance is concealed in perfection,” he writes, “why struggle for precision, purity, when they can never be attained?” Every art object is exposed to a process of decay beginning immediately upon completion of...