'The Fallacy of Composition' by Trudi van den Berg and Jos Steenmeijer
on the Faculty of Economics building
This work by Steenmeijer and Van den Berg was inspired by an economic concept. The work of John M. Keynes led to valuable insights, including the fact that macro-economy – the behaviour of aggregated variables – is very different to micro-economy, or the behaviour of individuals. The whole behaves very differently to the sum of its parts. This is known as ‘the fallacy of composition’. In 1998 the Faculty of Economics celebrated its 50th anniversary and was the focal point of the series of Verbeeldingen (Images).
The artwork is positioned on the dark concrete walls on the east side of the WSN building at the Zernike Complex in Groningen. The building houses the Faculty of Economics, the Faculty of Management & Organization and the Faculty of Spatial Sciences. The artwork consists of three elements: a human figure made of red neon tubes, a pantograph made of green metal ‘meccano’ strips and, above that, a distorted figure in red neon. The pantograph explores the contours of the figure below it, and reproduces it higher up on the wall. The dimensions of the image are approximately 20 x 8 metres.
The artists have interpreted the ‘fallacy of composition’ as follows: ‘Small changes at micro-level can have considerable unexpected – and sometimes opposite – effects at macro-level. There is a relationship between the two, but it is not as direct as we tend to think. The pantograph is the ‘carrying’ element in the design. In the past, pantographs were often used to copy a design to the same scale, or to reduce or enlarge it. By changing the traditional structure of the pantograph, the outcome is rendered unpredictable. Changing the proportions of the arms or the position of the fulcrum produces unexpected mirror images and distortions in the copy of the figure.
