A Note on Program

In Architecture, the way space is organized is an important concern for architects. The finest architecture considered what spaces are where, and how those juxtapositions create interactions of use-cases which cultivate — if not coerce us into — certain uses of buildings. This is called program. It is the organisation of spaces and/or architectural elements, therefore the organisation of the activities and functions certains spaces are built for, and how this organisation creates patterns of possible use, action and activity in architecture.


Program though, is also a concept we can map onto other functions. In the context of fine art, program has the same ideas of organisation creating function, function in the realm of the symbolic.

Program in art is meaning production, not in the work itself, but in its relationship(s) to other things: other artworks, architecture, weather, time, etc. It demands to see the work as a living performer which interacts with its environment, and seeing that environment and all the elements in it, as potential agents in their own right just as we grant that status to people in communities. Program holds elements as having symbolic function which activates only when in relation to other elements. Some meaning cannot be made in an artwork; some meaning can only be made in the relationships  between works.


I think about Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1554, as a fascinating example of program. Alone, Cellini’s Perseus is supremely well crafted, beautiful, a stirring portrayal of violence that somehow seduces instead of frightening or disgusting me.

However, as is well known, the sculpture was commissioned not as stand alone work, but rather with a specific relationship to other works already in the piazza where Perseus would be placed. The sculpture is set in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, with marble statues to its right, flanking the door to the Palazzo Vecchio; one of which is Miochelangelo’s David (1501-1504) — or rather the replica now in its place — and the other Baccio Bandinelli’s  Hercules and Caucus (1534). Both of these figures — David and Hercules — are symbols of the Republic of Florence for their status as heroes who defeated stronger enemies (Florence saw itself as a small and weak city-state who managed to defeat stronger opponents). Perseus on the other hand is a demi-god — born into power and with the right to rule, what we’d now call privilege — who built upon his previous successes by wielding the power of his vanquished foes, as with his use of Medusa’s head. Further, Perseus was commissioned by the Medici — specifically the duke Cosimo I de’Medici — who, as a family, usurped the democratic Florentine republic to assert their oligarchic authority.

A kind of opposition between Florentine republicanism and Medici oligarchy is set up through the figures of Perseus, David and Hercules, with the Medici as victorious of course. Perseus with the Head of Medusa is placed opposite the David and Hercules and Caucus. The two older sculptures, which are of course static, then have Perseus placed in their line of sight. They are forced to gaze at the head of Medusa Perseus holds up. In effect, the placement of Perseus has created a situation in which the work of the Medici, embodied by Perseus with the Head of Medusa, has turned the Republic, embodied by David and Hercules and Caucus, to stone. The Medici have vanquished the underdog heroes through demi-god power and birthright. And with this narrative extension of Perseus’s use of the head as a weapon, even the material of the works comes into play. Perseus with the Head of Medusa is bronze, the material of dynamic poses, whilst David and Hercules and Caucus are marble, they are stone as if already victims of Medusa’s head, now wielded by Perseus.


Fascinatingly, Cellini’s program is imposed upon the other elements of the piazza, upon David and Hercules. Program — at least in this case — is an imposition, a relationship established by force, which captures and coerceses the environment into a meaning making relationship with the artwork. Artists — just as architects — shape the world to create a programmatic scenario.

Force however, is not necessary to establish a program. Program is certainly always a human (re)organisation or elements and space which functions to create logically bound function, but the logic which binds function into program is not always consciously employed. Logic can be latent, that unacknowledged — or perhaps more accurately, unarticulated — yet still impactful modality of thinking normally referred to as the “intuitive”. Though it is normally spoken of as a nebulous, nearly spiritual height of extra-linguistic thought in the context of art, the “intuitive” is simply unarticulated thinking which finds expression in the phantasmatic (in the kleinian sense) capacities of art. In truth, phantasy is built upon an extensive logic of — persistently subconscious — extra-linguistic psycho-symbolic associations. That is to say that phantasy and the “intuitive” actually organize and inform our conscious thinking and the symbolic gestures contained in art-making. So with this subconscious organizing logic always at play, there is then always potential for the organization of elements and space to create program outside the artist’s conscious attempts at such a production.



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