Otto Karl Werckmeister
        Otl Aicher’s Ockham Plates


Otl Aicher, a native of the city of Ulm, had contacts with members of the Weisse Rose group during the Second World War. After 1945, he worked together with Inge Scholl at the Adult Education Centre in Ulm and collaborated with her and Hans Werner Richter in developing plans for the creation of an institution of higher learning in Ulm.
Otl Aicher is generally recognised as the designer of the Olympia pictograms. Many remember him as a man who had his doubts about the wisdom of mixing art with design.
We should also not forget that he did his work against the backdrop of a powerful cultural tradition, from which he tried to free himself throughout his career.
Otto Karl Werckmeister is a specialist on in the Middle Ages who studies iconography of the present. Based on this knowledge, he interprets the Ockham Cycle (which is one of his later works and remarkably enough is hardly taken into consideration in Aicher’s monographs) in a very unusual manner. After teaching for many years at the University of California in Los Angeles and Northwestern University in Evenston, Illinois, Otto Karl Werckmeister now lives again in Berlin.


        Designer, Artist, Creator
“Für Ockham ist die Ordnung der Welt nicht vor der Geschichte da, die Geschichte selbst erzeugt Ordnungen. Gottes Schöpfung ist immer neu. Sie ist nicht ein Werden einer im voraus definierten Weltordnung. Mit der Geschichte bestimmt sich die Welt und das Wirken Gottes immer aufs neue.
Ockham versteht Gott nicht als Architekten der Welt. Gott schafft, erhält, trägt diese Welt, wirkt in ihr und durch sie.
Ockham lässt nicht zu, dass Gott in ein Jenseits verschoben wird.
Damit kommt auch den Dingen und der Welt eine neue Bedeutung zu.
Die materiellen konkreten Dinge sind nichts Sekundäres. Sie sind nicht mehr Abbilder eines göttlichen Generalplanes, sie sind selbst der Plan. Die ‘Ideen’ Gottes sind in den Dingen und in der Welt. ”
Otl Aicher, Gabriele Greindl und Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Wilhelm von Ockham: Das Risiko modern zu denken, München 1986, p. 176

In two of his color plates for the volume William of Ockham: The Risk of Modern Thought, published in 1986, Otl Aicher has adapted the full-page miniature in a mid-thirteenth-century Bible moralisÈe representing God as the creator of the world. He juxtaposes the creation completed at the beginning of time according to the Biblical text with the permanent creation process as envisaged by William of Ockham, in order to argue for his concept of design on the basis of Ockhamís philosophical theology. The medieval miniature depicts God firmly treading on the ground and bowing down to the disk of the universe containing heaven and earth, which he holds in his right. With his golden compass he imposes a geometric order on the disk, as the Book of Wisdom, 11:20, describes his creative activity: ìBut you have ordered all according to measure, number, and weight.î Aicher has derived two alternative versions from this picture. One shows God, winged, as if flying in a higher horizontal zone, still holding the compass, after having released the geometrically subdivided circle into the zone below. In the other version God is walking forward, on top and within the creation, symbolized by a four interwoven colored bands as a process of steady development that he guides without compass, with both his hands in motion.


        Ockham’s Modernity
“Ockham ist der Philosoph der menschlichen Freiheit. Er ist überzeugt, dass die absolute Freiheit Gottes die Freiheit der Menschen ermöglicht. Die Menschen können ihr Verhältnis zur Welt, zu den anderen Menschen und zu Gott frei bestimmen. Weil die Menschen frei sind, sind sie moralisch verantwortlich für ihr Handeln. Es kommt auf die wahren Absichten und die ehrliche Gesinnung des Menschen an, nicht auf das äußere, moralische Verhalten.”
Otl Aicher, Gabriele Greindl und Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Wilhelm von Ockham: Das Risiko modern zu denken, München 1986, p. 176

In the texts and illustrative plates he contributed to the book on Ockham Aicher invokes the philosophical tradition of a nominalist world view, backed up by the philosophy historian Wilhelm Vossenkuhl. It is a tradition founded on a pragmatic relation to reality and reaching from Ockham to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Thus he revalidates Christian notions of an ordered universe from the Middle Ages to the present time. This argument telescopes theology, philosophy, and design theory into an ideological short-circuit. Aicher is intent on deriving a structural aesthetics of form from the functional dynamics of objects in the reality of peopleís lives. He argues against an aestheticization of design which imposes on such objects pre-established form ideals of modern art and architecture. It was, however, the sacramental certainty of faith which assured Ockham, the scholastic philosopher, of a sensible world order as the end result of a seemingly unprejudiced observation of reality. In transferring Ockhamís notion of a well-ordered universe onto the functional shaping of complex capitalist production processes, work organization patterns and communication systems, Aicher seems to be oblivious to its Christian backing.


        Gothic Cathedral and Crystal Palace
“dann kommt josef paxton, der als erbauer großer treib- und glashäuser für botanische gärten einen namen hatte, mit einem entwurf für einen glaspalast ungewöhnlicher ausdehnung. er aber strebte nicht die erscheinung an, sondern elementarisiert das bauwerk in seine einzelteile, entwickelt ein system der variationen aus diesen teilen und wird dadurch so flexibel, dass er jedes bauvolumen erstellen könnte. die wenigen konstruktiven teile werden vorfabriziert, in serien hergestellt und an der baustelle nur zusammengesetzt. dies in erstaunlich kurzer zeit.
genau dieses bauprinzip ist das verfahren der gotischen kathedrale. die kathedrale ist das produkt einer höchstentwickelten handwerklichen kultur, die alles, was sie machte, auf den nenner des letztlich richtigen zu bringen hatte. das heutige ingeniöse bauen bemüht sich mit ähnlichem anspruch, das letzte aus den heutigen technischen materialien und fertigungsmethoden herauszuholen...”
Otl Aicher, “die aktualität des mittelalters. beispiel architektur”, in: Wilhelm Vossenkuhl und Rolf Schönberger, ed., Die Gegenwart Ockhams, Weinheim 1990, pp. 383-392, cf. p. 385

Analogous to his projection of a philosophical tradition from the Middle Ages to modernity, Aicher relates 13th-century Gothic cathedrals and Joseph Paxtonís London Crystal Palace of 1853 to one another in one architectural tradition. In both, the aesthetic form of building with minimal mass and maximal transparency is assumed to follow from the adequate application of materials and the technical organization of the working processes as a functional consequence. Aicher insists on deriving the steep Gothic vault from the constructive logic of its materials and labor technology rather than from any religious ideology of striving for the heavens. His extrapolation of the Gothic cathedral into an ideal of design depends nonetheless on a tradition that extends from William Morris to the Bauhaus. Here the cathedral was transfigured into the symbol of a corporative organization of labor under Christian inspiration. This tradition ignored the hierarchical symmetry of medieval architecture as the ceremonial expression of religious power relations. It likewise overlooked the authoritarian, three-tiered organization of cathedral building with one architect of high social standing, a lodge of highly qualified stone masons, and a mass of construction workers subject to their orders.


        Poster and Broadsheet
“Auf Ockham hinzuweisen, lag es also nahe, sich der Sprache des Plakats zu bedienen, nicht der Kunst. Kunst hat eine ästhetische, aber keine semantische Dimension. Sie vermittelt keine Bedeutungen, was so viel heißt, dass sie jede Art von Bedeutung transportiert, nämlich die, welche mir zusagt.
[…]
Man hat ja sein Regelwerk nicht vorher im Kopf wie ein Demiurg. Es wächst während der Arbeit. […] Inzwischen hatte sich ein Kodex herausgebildet, dem jede Tafel gerecht zu werden hatte.
Er bestimmte Ordnungsprinzipien, Felder, Winkelstellungen, Längen und Breiten, so als hätte man ein neues Schachspiel erfunden, die Elemente selbst, die Figuren und ihre Verhaltensregeln entwickelten Kriterien des Richtigen und Falschen.”
Otl Aicher, Gabriele Greindl und Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Wilhelm von Ockham: Das Risiko modern zu denken, München 1986, pp. 14, 17

Aicher labels the series of his full-page illustrations for the book about Ockham ìbroadsheetsî and calls them ìposter-likeî in order to detach their function for the poignant representation of their subject from any aesthetic shaping. He characterizes their elaboration as an analytical development of pictorial structures from maximally simplified forms and signs, devoid of artistic ambition, for purely communicative purposes. But in fact most of these illustrations are derived from the flat compositional forms of medieval book illuminations, stained-glass windows, or tapestries, and are filled with their symbolic motifs. Hence even those plates where Aicher has advanced toward elementary forms and signs insert themselves into the pre-established visual understanding of a medieval illuminated manuscript. The pictorial narrative of a medieval professional career with their kings and popes, churches and towns, ceremonious pageants and liturgical postures, which Aicher admittedly derived from medieval sources, conditions the communicative pictorial structure according to given formulas, rather than following from an analytic, sign-like convergence of subject and form.


        Aesthetics and Functionality
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        Air Photography and Composition
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        The Ordo of the Federal Republic
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        Catholicism and Anarchism

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