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Exhibition Review
"Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe." Whitney Museum, New York, N.Y. http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_fuller/about.jsp.
Temporary exhibition, June 26–Sept. 21, 2008. 10,200 sq. ft. K. Michael Hays, adjunct curator of architecture at the Whitney Museum and professor of architectural theory at Harvard University; Dana Miller, associate curator.
Traveling exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Ill., March 14–June 21, 2009. http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/.
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| A quarter century after his death, Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) has finally received serious treatment in a remarkably rich exhibit. Drawing primarily from the forty-five-ton R. Buckminster Fuller Archive at Stanford University, the exhibit covers Fuller's entire life—greatly assisted by Fuller, who obsessively saved correspondence, notes, and sketches, beginning in 1907. The exhibit includes approximately 220 models, videos, photographs, and works on paper. The exhibit's catalog, edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller, is beautifully designed and offers not only a checklist of the items displayed and handsome reproductions of many of them but also a timeline of Fuller's life and pertinent events beyond it; a lengthy bibliography of books, articles, and other writings by and about him; and several excellent essays, including a reprint of Calvin Tomkins' influential 1966 New Yorker profile. |
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The exhibit, however, is not flawless. First, it is a largely uncritical celebration of Fuller rather than the serious scrutiny he deserves. Second, it also fails to place him in sufficient historical perspective and thereby, ironically, reduces his overall importance. (For that missing context, see Hsiao-Yun Chu and Robert G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller [2009].) |
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The title of the exhibit, "Starting with the Universe," comes from Fuller's lifelong commitment to solving problems by investigating the basic order of nature and then utilizing the pertinent patterns uncovered there. The exhibit demonstrates how Fuller fulfilled his personal job description of "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist": an interdisciplinary, forward-looking explorer discovering how to benefit the greatest number of people while expending the fewest natural resources—akin perhaps to Jeremy Bentham. Here as elsewhere Fuller made up terms that were sometimes clear, sometimes irritating. To his great credit, as the exhibit likewise shows, Fuller's emphasis on "spaceship earth"—another of his terms—and on its fragile ecology contributed significantly to the growing post–World War II awareness of a world of integrated parts and people, of complex environmental systems requiring constant care. |
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Interestingly, the exhibit's handout repeats Fuller's oft-cited tale of contemplating suicide on Chicago's lakefront in 1927 at the age of thirty-two. Beset by business failures and the tragic death of his young daughter five years earlier, he allegedly instead resolved to follow an inner voice telling him that his mission to improve humankind had just begun. Yet research in the Fuller Archive suggests that this supposedly pivotal episode never happened; that Fuller was nowhere as suicidal as he later claimed; and that he was far more distressed by the collapse of an extramarital relationship in 1931. Still, that apparently invented incident enabled Fuller to initiate his greatest achievement: inventing himself. (See James Sterngold, "The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller," New York Times, June 15, 2008.) |
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