Outsider Physics

By 1981, Fuller was enough of a cultural archetype to collaborate on a series of exquisite screen prints titled “Inventions: Twelve Around One,” celebrating a baker‘s dozen of patents from his long career. Currently on view for the first time in L.A. at Gallery 2211_Solway Jones, the series features the aforementioned dome and crapper, as well as Fuller’s 1938 three-wheeled Dymaxion Car, the famous Wichita house of 1946 and the lift bag--related floating city Submarisle of 1959. Each print consists of the original patent-application diagrams on Mylar, superimposed over a photograph of the most completed version of the invention. The modular geometry and relentless symmetry of Fuller‘s designs guarantee their optical charm, and the Rauschenberg-like layering gains new dimension from the direct correlation between the diagrammatic overlay and its eventual realization.

Ironically, Fuller’s acceptance as a popular-culture figure ultimately gives rise to the same difficulties as Carter‘s anonymity -- permission is granted for the lay viewer to throw up his or her hands and proclaim, “I dunno!” While there is nothing wrong with enjoying Fuller’s or Carter‘s work on a strictly aesthetic level, it is a matter of some urgency (as pointed out so tartly by Alan Sokal’s prank physics paper for Social Text) to excavate some burrows in the no man‘s land that has sprung up between how we make use of our senses and how we make sense of the world. Exhibits like “Lithium Legs” and “Twelve Around One,” which tweak our awareness of these gray areas between the citadel of science and the rest of Western culture, constitute a tunnel in the right direction.

1See my essay “The Aesthetics of Paranoia: On the 20th Anniversary of Jonestown” in The Conscious Reader, Shrodes & Finestone, eds. (Longman, 2000).