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Caracol Primavera in Chillán, 1982, von • by Rodrigo Mayo Correa Caracol Vip’s in Santiago, 1979, von • by Sepp Michaeli, Ricardo Alegría

ers – even if his claims for the necessary dialectic between mining and land reclamation motion that would force the body to adapt to instability, vertigo, imbalance, and where
came 50 years after the Guggenheims’ own mountain-making in the Atacama. For permanent movement will supersede contemplation. The function of the oblique
Smithson, the artist and the miner had to be conscious of themselves as natural agents, would remove the body from a visual or rather contemplative relationship to the build-
with art becoming the physical resource that mediated between the ecologist and the ing to one tactile in character, based on the Gestalt theory, and about the psychology
industrialist. In this Chilean instance, this would mean retroactively casting the of form and the phenomenology of perception. The fundamental principle of the
Guggenheims not as patrons of the arts but as artists themselves (see: Pedro Ignacio 'oblique' (essentially a psychophysiological experiment) is that of circulation, eliminat-
Alonso, Mountaineering, AA Files 66 (London, 2013), pp. 85-90). ing the idea of the body as a static entity subjected to the conventional notion of stabil-
ity. Not by chance the first project of Parent and Virilio was – like and prior to the Snails
In their function, the snails are more of a mine than a museum - a shopping centre in the city of Sens (1970), structured by a system of ramps, and
which has remained alien to the typological discussion on the Chilean Snails, only
In such capacity, the Snails have more to do with Chuquicamata than New York, as they because our tendency at classifying buildings within purely formal criteria, and the
are the result of a spatial diagram intended only for maximizing business. Still, they inability to understand - as Giulio Carlo Argan did – that the type never exists as an a-
resist to be enrolled in easy genealogies, reassuring fallacies, or the childish exercise priori, but it is always derived from a variety of cases. There is no model, just varia-
that seeks their resemblance in everything and anything we deem spiral in the world, tions. Cristobal Palma’s work goes into understanding this dimension, contributing to
from the Babel Tower to the actual snails, whether from the sea (Tonna Galea) or the reject the conventional meta-historical use of idealized images.
ground (Helix As per sa). Only if we acknowledge that this distribution diagram – the
one based in maximi zing production - rejects formal comparisons, we could enter into Their shape is owed to the maximization of the sales areas
a typological discussion. This, because the notion of 'type' not only means 'model' but
also 'imprint': a distinctive mark or encumbered sign upon something. It makes the This is the relevance of Palma’s register. It doesn’t come to show an existing typology
type something like an invisible, intangible print, a tool for a non-formal description of through the mere gathering of examples. On the contrary, his portraits of the variations
things. Of course, it was Quatremere di Quincy who transformed the idea of the type of the oblique are expedients to actually co-produce the Snail as a typology. His work
from the 'model' (the imitation of ideal elements) to the ‘rules’ (that inform variation reveals almost for the first time the typology, offering accurate views to the intangibles
upon the objects). The type, then, should be seen as a sort of condensed description of imprints that give the Snails their non-formal descriptions. He came to connect fragment-
the key elements of a building and the set of rules from which a particular typology ed and discontinuous events such as ubiquitous swarming of the maximizing surface
emerges. Since the Snails are actually shopping centres, ideal forms - like the spiral – through the oblique function, from Antofagasta to Temuco. Ultimately, it is not one of the
don’t really matter against the more fundamental elements that make the diagram for first functions of art to rend things visible? Under the rigorous format of objectification,
maximizing the available surface for commercial trade. This diagram then works for but in opposition to a search for 'origins', Palma's work falls into the field of art to teach
buildings to be fitted within relatively small sites thanks to a rule so clearly described us the very gradual differences that go from one building to another, in a process of
in 1963 by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, called ‘the oblique function'. They claimed adaptation and selection that was subjected to the different cultural, technical, political,
an 'end to the vertical as an elevation axis,’ and an ‘end to the horizontal as a perma- and aesthetic environmental pressures characteristic of Chile during the 1970s and 80s,
nent surface.’ Instead of the right angle, they openly promoted a continuous and fluid when ruthless neoliberalism was introduced to the country by the military dictatorship.

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