SUMMER 2023 EDITION
ASPEN ART MUSEUM
39
Aspen Heritage
The Aspen Complex , edited by Martin Beck, draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen, which marked a turning point in design thinking and had a lasting impact on art, architecture, ecology and social movements. In the context of this history, the Aspen Art Museum asks Emily King and Prem Krishnamurthy what it would feel like to bring a global conference to Aspen in the 21st century. THE ASPEN COMPLEX
all these modes and then everyone reacts against them and just wants the exact opposite. PK The TED Talk seems a great example to bring up because it’s the apogee of the lecture form: the pitch- perfect, smoothed-out 15-minute talk. Of course, it’s useful because it can spread important ideas and go viral. But the presentation is so standardized, so unidirectional. This smoothness characterizes so many of our interac- tions today. It’s about fast consumption of ideas. EK Is there a need for a reaction, something that moves us away from that? PK The pandemic made it clear that bumpiness is part of life. In terms of formats: I imagine that a similar conversation was happening 50 years ago, and probably, a similar one in the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and in Black Mountain College in the 1930s. There is a constant cycle of modes. EK Thinking about the IDC in Aspen, if we imagine the model to be a speaker, an audience, and the com- munity at large, is there something in
EMILY KING I wanted to begin by talking about the values that the International Design Conference in Aspen was aspiring to when it began in 1951: the idea, pro- moted by its founder, Walter Paepcke, that the captains of industry were responsible for the cultural life of the USA. These were then pretty com prehensively rejected at the conference in 1970. But how do they sound to you now? PREM KRISHNAMURTHY There’s something idealistic and utopian about them. That moment of 1950s America—the belief that there’s no contradiction between capitalism and consumption and environmental questions. It was of course a very, very different moment from 1970. In the ’70s and ’80s—that’s when the finan- cialization of the world blew up. Reading Alice Twemlow’s essay in Martin Beck’s book about the 1970 Aspen conference, it’s interesting to see how that event prefigures ideas that later end up in culture at large and in the art world in particular. The conflict that happened there between different
modes of presentation and participa- tion—between a frontal, lecture-heavy, informational mode, and a more experi- mental, relational, participatory mode that involved games and workshops—it took a while for those ideas to make it into the art world, for example. Design is often a bit ahead of the curve. EK Having had a conventional history of design education, initially I bought into Aspen just as it was sold—a glorious bringing of good design to commercial corporate activity. When you look at that era of graphic design, it’s very stylish, which seduces you into buying the idea that design could improve corporate America in a really straightforward way. PK I found it really fascinating that the talks delivered at the Aspen conference were published as texts for distribution to attendees beforehand. It’s harder to critique a presentation when you hear it in real time than when you have the chance to review it at your own pace. It takes more presence to be responsive to what’s happening in the room, responsive to what’s happening in the world in the moment. Now, even
though you can often read a transcript of a conversation, it seems we’re becom- ing an oral culture again. We listen to podcasts, to books. EK We were meant to have been a visual culture, but do you think that has shifted? PK I think it’s happening. You still have a lot of visuality—TikTok, Instagram—but life now has become about multitasking. We are so used to trying to compress our time doing multiple things. Listening to a podcast while we run, for example. I’ve been trying to go back to monotasking and spending less time distracted. I’m actually really optimistic about how the pandemic has shifted our modes of interacting with other people. A 50-minute frontal lecture with five minutes for questions at the end already feels like old technology and a format that should be relegated to the past. EK There was also that high point in recent times when suddenly TED Talks were absolutely venerated, but I think everyone’s a little bit over them now. There was even a time when Davos seemed exciting. It’s true for
Opposite Students from Northern Illinois University create a “sculpture” of wrecked cars near the Paepcke Amphitheatre where the 19th International Design Conference is being held, Aspen, June 1969. Courtesy: Denver Post and Getty Images
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