The Dead

^aftermath of a vehicular accident, University of Georgia (source)

The opening paragraphs of Karl Ove Knausgaard's 'A Death In The Family'. A thoughtful rumination on our relationship with the just deceased, and its irrational, atavistic infrastructure that forms its own architecture within and under that of the living, as well as motivating instantaneous and universal impulses, actions and rituals that are second nature to us, but which on second glance reveal themselves to be primordial, groundless and strange.

"For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the blood will begin to run towards the body's lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whiter skin , as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain. These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of gentleman’s agreement, to which the representatives of death also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their invasion of the new landscape. By which point, however, the invasion is irrevocable. The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the body's innards cannot be halted. Had they but tried a few hour s earlier, they would have met with immediate resistance: however, everything around them is quiet now, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Haversian canals, the crypts of Lieberkuhn, the islets of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s capsule in the kidneys, Clark’s column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity to which end its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable buckets stretching up the hillside.

The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discreet, inaccessible rooms, even the ways there are concealed, with their own lifts and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what practical purpose this procedure might serve. The uncovered bodies could be wheeled along the hospital corridors, for example, and thence be transported in an ordinary taxi without this posing a particular risk to anyone. The elderly man who dies during a cinema performance might just as well remain in his seat until the film is over, and during the next too for that matter. The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by leaving him where he is until the caretaker has time to attend to him, even though that might not be until some time in the late afternoon or evening. What difference would it make if a bird were to alight on him and take a peck? Would what awaits him in the grave be any better just because it is hidden? As long as the dead are not in the way there is no need for any rush, they cannot die a second time. Cold snaps in the winter should be particularly propitious in such circumstances. The homeless who freeze to death on benches and in doorways, the suicidal who jump off high buildings and bridges, elderly women who fall down staircases, traffic victims trapped in wrecked cars, the young man who, in a drunken stupor, falls into the lake after a night on the town, the small girl who ends up under the wheel of a bus, why all this haste to remove them from the public eye? Decency? What could be more decent than to allow the girl’s mother and father to see her an hour or two later, lying in the snow at the site of the accident, in full view, her crushed head and the rest of her body, her blood-spattered hair and the spotless padded jacket? Visible to the whole world, no secrets, the way she was. But even this one hour in the snow is unthinkable. A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and car parks, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolised by the concealment of our dead.

What exactly it is that is being repressed, however, is not so easy to say. It cannot be death itself, for its presence in society is much too prominent. The number of deaths reported in newspapers or shown on the TV news everyday varies slightly according to circumstances, but the annual average will presumably tend to be constant, and since it is spread over so many channels virtually impossible to avoid. Yet that kind of death does not seem threatening. Quite the contrary, it is something we want and will happily pay to see. Add the enormously high body count in fiction and it becomes even harder to understand the system that keeps death out of sight. If the phenomenon of death does not frighten us, why then this distaste for dead bodies? Either it must mean that there are two kinds of death or that there is a disparity between our conception of death and death as it actually turns out to be, which in effect boils down to the same thing: what is significant here is that our conception of death is so strongly rooted in our consciousness that we are not only shaken when we see that reality deviates from it, but we also try to conceal this with all the means at our disposal. Not as the result of some form of conscious deliberation, as has been the case with rites such as funerals, the form and meaning of which are negotiable nowadays, and thus have shifted from the sphere of the irrational to the rational, from the collective to the individual –no, the way we remove bodies has never been the subject of debate, it has always been just something we have done, out of a necessity for which no one can state a reason but everyone feels: if your father dies on the lawn one windswept Sunday in autumn, you carry him indoors if you can, and if you can’t, you at least cover him with a blanket. This impulse, however, is not the only one we have with regard to the dead. No less conspicuous than our hiding corpses is the fact that we always lower them to ground level as fast as possible. A hospital that transports its bodies upwards, that sites its cold chambers on the upper floors, is practically inconceivable. The dead are stored as close to the ground as possible. And the same applies to the agencies that attend them; an insurance company may well have its offices on the eight floor, but not a funeral parlour. All funeral parlours have their offices as close to street level as possible. Why this should be is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited to storing corpses, and that this principle had been retained in our era of refrigerators and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies upwards in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible. As though we possessed some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us that urges us to move death down to the earth whence it came."

Hedonism

^Titian's Bacchanal, 1523 (source)

Another extract from Arendt's The Human Condition, this time on the foundational nature of Pain as an ultimate referent. She is pointing out here that pleasure isn't, and never was or could be a measurable, quantifiable thing, positively in and of itself (as the Utilitarians and others saw it) which one can pursue and attain, but rather should be seen as the ancients saw it: as the absence of pain, so that hedonism (& stoicism, ascetism, epicurianism) is never the insatiable and accumulative pleasure of the gourmand, but rather the tranquil calm of the hermit.


"The principle of all hedonism, as we saw before, is not pleasure but avoidance of pain, and Hume, who in contradistinction to Bentham was still a philosopher, knew quite well that he who wants to make pleasure the ultimate end of all human action is driven to admit that no pleasure but pain, not desire but fear, are his true guides. "If you... inquire, why [somebody] desires health, he will readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your inquiries further and desire a reason why he hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to by any other object." The reason for this impossibility is that only pain is completely independent of any object, that only one who is in pain really senses nothing but himself; pleasure does not enjoy itself but something besides itself. Pain is the only inner sense found by introspection which can rival in independence from experienced objects the self-evident certainty of logical and arithmetical reasoning."

Polis

^Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends

Two extracts relating to the City (polis) from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, in which she explains how Greeks saw the built fabric -as they saw the structures of the law- as a clearly subservient, enabling framework whose entire reason for existence was exhausted in creating and then protecting the space in which political action, debate, oration, and discussion could occur, spectacularly, notably. The builders and craftsmen who dealt with putting up projects with definable outcomes, forms, and predictable lifespans, men who cut stone, layed-out the buildings on the agora, honed the acoustics in Greek theatres, penned the statute books and wrote down the legal structures of Democracy, these were the hard working but not heroic figures, who were there to build (for the first time in history) a world that was perfectly calibrated and designed for the active citizen-individual to show himself, doing, proposing, initiating, and acting in the public eye. They were backstage craft-caretakers of an environment where each person could be sure that the most highly valued, but most ephemeral of all things a man can bring into the world, namely the heroic act, the split second shining-forth of world-changing agency, the unrepeatable spark of transcendence, was not only given an audience in a built world calibrated for its maximum amplification, but that the built world would also act as its permanent embodiment, an assurance in stone that the intangible and endlessly precious chain of Human acts that make a polis would remain a story perpetually told. The city Homer.

“An outstanding symptom of this prevailing influence is that the Greeks, in distinction from all later developments, did not count legislating among the political activities. In their opinion, the lawmaker was like the builder of the city wall, someone who had to do and finish his work before political activity could begin. He therefore was treated like any other craftsman or architect and could be called from abroad and commissioned without having to be a citizen, whereas the right to be politeuesthai, to engage in the numerous activities which eventually went on in the polis, was entirely restricted to citizens. To them, the laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making. Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the law; legislator and architect belonged in the same category. But these tangible entities themselves were not the content of politics (not Athens, but the Athenians were the polis), and they did not command the same loyalty we know from the Roman type of patriotism.”

“The polis –if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration- gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and future ages. In other words, men’s life together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made “products”, the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable. The organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws –lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition- is a kind of organized remembrance. It assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men, who outside the polis could attend only the short duration of the performance and therefore needed Homer and “others of his craft” in order to be presented to those who were not there.”

Lost Illusions

^ Richard Hamilton "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" 1956

From Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections". The final class of a course in Cultural Studies that one of the characters, Chip, teaches in a private college. After showing the class a 'cutting edge' series of adverts for office equipment, that builds up the story of an office staffed entirely by women, one of whom dies of cancer, but who's plight is turned to positive effect by her colleagues' online campaign to raise breast cancer awareness (via the office equipment bought from W_corp), he intends to complete the term by showing the class how to 'see through' to the cynicism at the heart of even such an apparently well-meaning and cleverly put-together campaign as this. The teacher's loyal but narrow espousals of Baudrillard et al's tail-chasing critiques come crashing down when faced with the incomprehension of a class unable, or more likely entirely unwilling to see past appearances, and the razor sharp contempt of a girl who not only sees through the ads initial appearances, but equally cuts through the flimsiness of Chip's moral condemnation, to the point where it is clearly just a subjective position, one resting entirely on arbitrary -and worse- totally unproductive, soul-sapping, no-end-in-sight, solution-less, critique for the sake of critique (and by implication: university tenures).

..............................................................................

A petite young woman names Hilton, a Chihuahua-like person, offered that it was “brave” and “really interesting” that Chelsea had died of cancer instead of surviving like you might have expected in a commercial.

Chip waited for someone to observe that it was precisely this self-consciously “revolutionary” plot twist that had generated publicity for the ad. Normally Melissa, from her seat in the front row, could be counted on to make a point like this. But today she was sitting by Chad with her cheek on her desk. Normally, when students napped in class, Chip called on them immediately. But today he was reluctant to say Melissa’s name. He was afraid that his voice might shake.

Finally, with a  tight smile, he said, “In case any of you were visiting a different planet last fall, lets review what happened with these ads. Remember Nielsen Media Research took the “revolutionary” step of giving episode six its own weekly rating. The first rating ever given to an ad. And once Nielsen rated it, the campaign was all but guaranteed an enormous audience for its rebroadcast during the November sweeps. Also remember that the Nielsen rating followed a week of print and broadcast news coverage of the ‘revolutionary’ plot twist of Chelsea’s death, plus the Internet rumour about Chelsea’s being a real person who’d really died. Which, incredibly, several hundred thousand people actually believed. Beat Psychology, remember, having fabricated her medical records and her personal history and posted them on the Web. So my question for Hilton would be, how ‘brave’ is it to engineer a sure-fire publicity coup for your ad campaign?”

“It was still a risk,” Hilton said. “I mean, death is a downer. It could have backfired.”

Again Chip waited for someone, anyone, to take his side of the argument. No one did. “So a wholly cynical strategy.” He said, “if there’s a financial risk attached, becomes an act of artistic bravery?”

A brigade of college lawn mowers descended on the lawn outside the classroom, smothering discussion in a blanket of noise. The sunshine was bright.

Chip soldiered on. Did it seem realistic that a small-business owner would spend her own money on special health-care options for an employee?

One student averred that the boss she’d had at her last summer job had been generous and totally great.

Chad was silently fighting off the tickling hand of Melissa while, with his free hand, he counterattacked the naked skin of her midriff.

“Chad?” Chip said.

Chad, impressively, was able to answer the question without having it repeated. “Like, that was just one office,” he said. “Maybe another boss wouldn’t have been so great. But that boss was great. I mean, nobody’s pretending that’s an average office, right?”

Here Chip decided to raise the question of art’s responsibilities vis-à-vis the Typical; but this discussion, too, was DOA.

“So, bottom line,” he said, “we like this campaign. We think these ads are good for the culture and good for the country. Yes?”

There were shrugs and nods in the sun-heated room.

“Melissa,” Chip said. “We haven’t heard from you.”

Melissa raised her head from her desk, shifted her attention from Chad, and looked at Chip with narrowed eyes.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, these ads are good for the culture and good for the country.”

Chip took a deep breath, because this hurt. “Great, OK,” he said. “Thank you for your opinion.”

“As if you care about my opinion,” Melissa said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“As if you care about any of our opinions unless they’re the same as yours.”

“This is not about opinions,” Chip said, “This is about learning to apply critical methods to textual artefacts. Which is what I’m here to teach you.”

“I don’t think it is, though,” Melissa said, “I think you’re here to teach us to hate the same things you hate. I mean, you hate these ads, right? I can hear it in every word you say. You totally hate them.”

The other students were listening raptly now. Melissa’s connection with Chad might have depressed Chad’s stock more than it had raised her own, but she was attacking Chip like an angry equal, not a student, and the class ate it up.

“I do hate these ads’” Chip admitted. “But that’s not …”

“Yes it is,” Melissa said.

“Why do you hate them?” Chad called out.

“Tell us why you hate them,” the little Hilton yipped.

Chip looked at the wall clock. There were six minutes left of the semester. He pushed his hands through his hair and cast his eyes around the room as if he might find an ally somewhere, but the students had him on the run now, and they knew it.

“The W_ Corporation,” he said, “is currently defending three separate lawsuits for antitrust violations. Its revenues last year exceeded the gross domestic product of Italy. And now, to wring dollars out of the one demographic that it doesn’t yet dominate, it’s running a campaign that exploits a woman’s fear of breast cancer and her sympathy with its victims. Yes, Melissa?”

“It’s not cynical.”

“What is it, if not cynical?”

“It’s celebrating women in the workplace,” Melissa said, “It’s raising money for cancer research. It’s encouraging us to do our self-examinations and get the help we need. It’s helping women feel like we own this technology, like it’s not just a guy thing.”

“Ok, good,” Chip said, “But the question is not whether we care about breast cancer, it’s what breast cancer has to do with selling office equipment.”

Chad took up the cudgels for Melissa. “That’s the whole point of the ad, though. That if you have access to information, it can save your life.”

“So if Pizza Hut puts a little sign about testicular self-exams by the hot-pepper flakes, it can advertise itself as part of the glorious and courageous fight against cancer?”

“Why not?” Chad said.

“Does anybody see anything wrong with that?”

Not one student did. Melissa was slouching with her arms crossed and unhappy amusement on her face. Unfairly or not, Chip felt as if she’d destroyed in five minutes a semester’s worth of careful teaching.

“Well, consider,” he said, “that ‘You Go, Girl’ would not have been produced if W_ had not had a product to sell. And consider that the goal of the people who work at W_ is to exercise their stock options and retire at thirty two, and that the goal of the people who own W_ stock” (Chip’s brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Caroline, owned a great deal of W_ stock) “is to build bigger houses and buy bigger SUVs and consume even more of the world’s finite resources.”

“What’s wrong with making a living?” Melissa said. “Why is it inherently evil to make money?”

“Baudrillard might argue,” Chip said, “that the evil of a campaign like ‘You Go, Girl’ consists in the detachment of the signifier from the signified. That a woman weeping no longer just signifies sadness. It now also signifies: ‘Desire office equipment.’ It signifies: ‘Our bosses care about us deeply.’”

The wall clock showed two-thirty. Chip paused and waited for the bell to ring and the semester to end.

“Excuse me,” Melissa said, “but that is just such bullshit.”

“What is bullshit?” Chip said.

“This whole class,” she said. “It’s just bullshit every week. It’s one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever quite say what’s wrong exactly. But they all know it’s evil. They all know ‘corporate’ is a dirty word. And if somebody’s having fun or getting rich –disgusting! Evil! And it’s always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they’re free aren’t ‘really’ free. And people who think they’re happy aren’t ‘really’ happy. And it’s impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what’s so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly. It is so typical and perfect that you hate those ads!” she said to Chip as, throughout Wroth Hall, bells finally rang. “Here things are getting better and better for women and people of colour, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds. Like, the only way you can make something bad out of an ad that’s great for women –which you have to do, because there has to be something wrong with everything- is to say it’s evil to be rich and evil to work for a corporation, and yes, I know the bell rang.” She closed her notebook.

“OK,” Chip said. “On that note, You’ve now satisfied your Cultural Studies core requirement. Have a great summer.”

He was powerless to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

The Plan

^Plan of Victims, Berlin, John Hejduk 1986

Text by John Hejduk from his afterword to Stanley Tigerman's Monograph:

"When I examine his plans it occurs to me that, throughout the history of Architecture, plans have changed the least. This, I think, is a curious phenomenon. It is sometimes stated that the plan is a horizontal section, in relation to the well-known vertical section of architecture. So it may be, but I think architectural plans are something else. I think they are architecture in a state of sleep. Plans are sleeping architecture that, in the extreme, are architecture in death. We tend not to want to disturb architectural plans, for they are so still and so quiet, abstract and awesome. The plan shows the death of the soul of architecture. It is an X-ray of the soul. The plan returns architecture to a state of timelessness. The plan has no need for clothes or ornamentation; it carries with it an inevitability. The plan is sacred and inviolate."

Emilio Ambasz Q&A

LF: Is architecture democratic?

EA: Without a client who is enlightened and establishes a high standard for approximation, you don’t have good architecture. An architect is not enough; you need a client who establishes a high standard. That is why committees usually fail in obtaining good buildings. Lets say architecture is in the domain of royal democracies.

LF: Should Architecture be democratic?

EA: Architecture has to solve a number of social problems, so if the social problems are solved, I don’t know how that makes it more or less democratic. I think that is a misuse of the word democratic. Democratic means a certain minimum common denominator. Even if it were a maximum common denominator, it is still a common denominator –the key word is common. Therefore, if you want to create a new model for changing the present it cannot receive the approval of the majority. It has to be a shock, it has to irritate, it has to be rejected, it has to be resisted if it has any value of invention contained within it. In time, if the innovation is understood, that prototype will become a type, and, with time, the culture that turned it into a type will turn it into a stereotype. And onward and onward. When architecture is architecture, it is a prototype. When it is a building and you can make some money, it is a type. If you can make lots of money, it is a stereotype. The hack architects work with stereotypes, the professionals work with types, and the artists make prototypes.

LF: Spider, bee, or ant. Which is the best architect?

EA: All three are unremarkable as such. A bee that always makes the same thing is a builder, not an architect. The spider that makes a beautiful web is a hunter, not an architect. The ant that keeps on carrying little leaves is an accumulator, but not an architect. Architecture means inventing a new habitat; those three don’t.

LF: Double envelope. Is the inside to be reflected in the outside?

EA: When I was a student I thought so. But I came to realise that it was a surrogate for decision-making. If you don’t  know what to do with the façade, you just project the inside onto the outside. I think that the outside should be one thing, because its outside, and the inside should be another. I am not interested in single-minded images.

LF: Is the blob formal excess or lack of form?

EA: The blob is a form in search of itself. It doesn’t know what it is and so it is constantly changing. It is indecision carried through a state of confirmation, which of course is temporary. The context gives the form a certain meaning, then the context changes and the blob just remains there.

LF: Is architecture hiding behind technology?

EA: Many times technology is presented as architecture. But architecture is both techne and poiesis. If not, it is not architecture.

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The text above is an extract from the article '53 Questions, 265 Answers', by Luca Farinelli, featured in the fall 2011 edition (23) of LOG. The article is a series of interviews with identical questions posed to well known architects, including Bjarke Ingels, Peter Eisenmann, Steven Holl, and Thom Mayne, although Farinelly has interviewed many others in what is an ongoing project....

Rome

What occurs on the scale of the individual building, namely what has been discussed earlier with regard to ruins: the erosion of form, mining and additions of later generations to existing material –also occurs at the scale of the city. Areas are either set down and evolve or are cut‐up, eroded and altered through the centuries –every change adding difference and variation to the spatial continuum of the city’s public urbanity. What in individual buildings is the delightful accretion of various scales, materials and tastes, becomes a powerful display of cultural evolution and its spatial corollaries throughout the ages when expressed at the urban scale. Because in Rome there isn't one definitively dominant attitude structuring the city’s form, but rather a congested layering of various structuring marks from conflicting eras, each area’s streets and squares jostle with each other, under each other, over each other

If one could cast aside historical lineage for a day, and view the city purely as space, colour, form and ideas, then we would have an opportunity to experience Europe in all its breadth and contradictions. By virtue of the sheer overwhelming weight of its physical history, Rome collapses in on itself as an Architectural singularity, it is the epicentre of the continent where the laws of time and space implode. Rome becomes all of history in one point, and because this is rendered spatially, in this place we walk outside of history and its shackles of one‐thing‐comes‐after‐another. We walk through something that more than anywhere else comes close to being the spatial embodiment, in all its time travelling, space defying, taste denying waywardness –of the human mind. Rome negates history.

Genius

^Tower, Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte, Borromini (source)

There are explosive minds of the kind of unstoppable genius that can bring forth whole worlds, that can render the content of their thoughts as communicable, experiential matter. The problem I have with this category of production is that it can only communicate through experience. The observer is offered no manner in which to discern the structure and order of the intellect and ideas that are displayed before him: his only enjoyment is that of an impression, an emotion.

At the other end of the spectrum there are those whose control of the processes of their minds is so complete that their work takes on the form of a spatial summa through which one can wander whilst having principles and orders crisply revealed to you. This type of space can also be phenomenally rewarding in the secondary, consciously intellectual sense, though it is invariably lacking in the rich ambiguity and delight present in the work of geniuses of the first order.

Occasionally one comes across something –a space, a canvas, a façade, a poem- in which there is either the two tendencies reconciled, or else the two in visible conflict. In reconciliation one is offered the chance of seeing both the growth of wild proliferation, the animal fertility of the human mind, and also spelled forth its innate illogic, logic, law or precise form of lawlessness.

In conflict the two can provide a vital and exemplary spectacle of the creative construction, erosion, explosion and containment that occurs over time in the push and pull between the beautiful impetuosity of a wild and fecund wilfulness, and its internal death drive for clarity, communication, abstraction and a wider relevance beyond the baseness of instinct, the latter annihilating the former, and the former the latter, in an endless trauma of the internalised dialectic. From this process fall the most pure artefacts of genius, spaces of tense equilibrium in which the impossible union of the subjective drive and the objective imperative is achieved in the forced and final reconciliation of real space.

Art in the Flatland

Below is an extract from Herber Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society", a book in which the author analyses the mechanisms of technological and social normalization in the west which, while producing the image of choice and plurality through mass media, shopping and democratic histrionics, simultaneously and with clinical psychological efficiency, precludes any possibility for genuine critique and/or radically alternative modes of living. It was first published in 1964 and lays out a very exacting critique of the sort of capitalist realist society whose apotheosis, and greatest crisis we are currently experiencing. And yet still we are finding it impossible to imagine, let alone enact any alternatives, and this is precisely because of the many impoverishments and infantilisms that have atrophied our  critical and imaginative faculties, from the reduction of language into a kind of positive capitalist newspeak (complexity, the non-functional, the un-popular are all excluded from the flatland of our language, whose most recent form is that of the tweet and most enduring that of the news presenter and the advertisement), to the rapid and total absorption of the arts (traditionaly the sanctified place of externality, condoned critique, and realm of the just-possible and imaginary) as functional cogs in the great mechanism of pacification. It is the arts as a place free from the relentless positivism of today's general society, a negative place, negative in the best sense, free from the pressure to do, to act, to produce, to buy, to perform, to tweet, to immediately construct thoughts as facebook status updates, it is the arts as a place where the lie is revealed at the core of everyone else's truth that the extract below touches upon. Obviously for the full force of the argument I recommend reading the whole book.

^Shoppers In Westfield, Shepherd's Bush, London (source)

The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a “higher” order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.

Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction –the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality. Their truth was in the illusion evoked, in the insistence on creating a world in which the terror of life was called up and suspended –mastered by recognition. This is the miracle of the chef d’oeuvre; it is the tragedy, sustained to the last, and the end of tragedy –its impossible solution. To live one’s love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made for man become unconquerable cosmic forces.

The tension between the actual and the possible is transfigured into an insoluble conflict, in which reconciliation is by grace of the oeuvre as form: beauty as the “promesse de Bonheur.” In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. But art has this magic power only as the power of negation. It can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

…

^Arnold Bocklin's Isle of the Dead (+a number)

To be sure, alienation is not the sole characteristic of art. An analysis, and even a statement of the problem is outside the scope of this work, but some suggestions may be offered for clarification. Throughout whole periods of civilization, art appears to be entirely integrated into its society. Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic art are familiar examples; Bach and Mozart are usually also cited as testifying to the “positive” side of art. The place of the work of art in a pre-technological and two-dimensional culture is very different from that in a one-dimensional civilization, but alienation characterizes affirmative as well as negative art.

The decisive distinction is not the psychological one between art created in joy and art created in sorrow, between sanity and neurosis, but that between the artistic and societal reality. The rupture with the latter, the magic or rational transgression, is an essential quality of even the most affirmative art; it is alienated also from the very public to which it is addressed. No matter how close and familiar the temple of cathedral were to the people who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevated contrast to the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan –and perhaps even to that of their masters.

Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal –the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labour where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion.

In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “high culture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera, theatre are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience.

^Kate and Will the Royal Couple depicted in 'Street Art' as Punk Heroes

Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psycho-analyses the prevailing state of affairs. This they become commercials –they sell, comfort, or excite.

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out.

But such assimilation is historically premature; it establishes cultural equality while preserving domination.

…

Now this remoteness has been removed and with it the transgression and the indictment. The text and the tone are still there, but the distance is conquered which made them 'Luft von anderen Planeten'. The artistic alienation has become as functional as the architecture of the new theatres and concert halls in which it is performed. And here too, the rational and the evil are inseparable. Unquestionably the new architecture is better, i.e., more beautiful and more practical than the monstrosities of the Victorian era. But it is also more “integrated” –the cultural centre is becoming a fitting part of the shopping centre, or municipal centre, or government centre. Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. It is good that almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his fingertips, by just turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into the drugstore. In this diffusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine which remakes their content.

3 Masterpieces of Late Twentieth-Century Design Theory

1:  Rossi's Inequality, aka the Architectural Memory Theorem

The minimum meaningful architectural configuration is greater than and irreducible to its geometric constituents.

2:  Hejduk's Inequality, aka the Architectural Poetry Theorem

The minimum poetic architectural configuration is greater than and irreducible to architectural memories.

3:  Eisenmann's Hypothesis, aka the Architectural Calculus Theorem

Minimum geometric, mnemonic and poetic configurations are special cases of a generalized calculus of form.

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Text and images from Jeffrey Kipnis, Late Twentieth Century Design Theory, 1990
via Architecture's Desire, Reading the Late Avant-Garde, K. Michael Hays. MIT Press.

Material & Colour in Memphis

Drawing For a Lamp, Michele De Lucchi, 1981

A few extracts from Memphis' 1982 publication, edited and written by Barbara Radice, in which the group's voracious, vast, and dizzying Iconophagic appetite -which indiscriminately took in symbols, signs and images from Kampala to Tokyo and Calcutta, and materials from anywhere, and of any kind-  was served up as a banquet of exercises in the undermining and transgression of good taste, traditional idealist design values, and the calcified and unproductive relationships between the intellectual, the architect, the designer, fashion, industry, and consumer desire. Memphis claimed the full breadth of the sensual present (from Mc Donalds' plastic seating in Tallahassee, to a neon sign piercing the haze of a Kinshasa side-street) as the rightful property of whoever was without fear of its immense fecundity, and the domain of the feeling body as the legitimate recipient; and it was the designer whom they saw as being destined to orchestrate the intense, fun, colourful and liberatingly orgiastic union of the two.
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"As Sottsass said in an interview, “As we know very well, when you try to define the function of any object, the function slips through your fingers, because function is life itself. Function is not one screw more or one measure less. Function is the final possibility of the relation between an object and life.”"

^Carlton Sideboard, Sottsass 1981 source

Materials

The plastic laminate shock, besides opening up new perspectives in furniture design, paved the way for a series of reflections, revisions, and research into the theme of materials, their quality, their possible combination and matching, their semantic and cultural charge. As a result, materials have begun to be read, chosen and utilised not only as tools or supports of design (important as these may be), but as active protagonists, privileged vehicles of sensory communication, self-sufficient cells that cohabit the design without mixing, each cell with its own personal story to tell. Marco Zanini points out: “Hoffmann often used precious materials like mother-of-pearl to draw lines. They were lines of mother-of-pearl, but they were essentially lines. If we use mother-of-pearl, we use square miles of it, because it’s the mother-of-pearl that tells the story and not the line.” The Memphis designers have worked on materials in two senses: developing and using “aseptic”, freedom-giving materials that have not been consumed by institutionalised cultures, and putting them together with bits or pieces of cultivated materials “to see if something else can be done.” This, as Sottsass explains, is a phenomenon that very often repeats itself in history, for instance when barbarians with their “non-culture” invade civilised zones.

Every institutionalised culture possesses a very precise catalogue of signs, ordered and assembled to represent the most general meaning that can be given to that culture. This catalogue makes it possible to communicate certain situations, to express certain things and not others, and everything is okay as long as a culture is still growing, fermenting and expanding. But when a culture reaches the point of boredom, when one begins to want to say other things, and especially when, according to Sottsass, “one is not able to say the things one thinks must be said,” then a “change of air” is necessary. New supports must be found in the “no-man’s land” of germinal cultures, where signs still have a sexy charge, a bittersweet flavour, and arouse shivers of surprise or pleasure because they still stagger in a kind of prenatal limbo, because no-one has yet charged them with symbols and meanings, because, as De Lucchi says, “you don’t relate them yet to anything or anybody  and you can project new possibilities onto them right away.”

In addition to plain or patterned plastic laminates, the Memphis catalogue of “aseptic” materials includes many other industrial products: printed glass, zinc-plated and textured sheet metals, celluloids, fireflake finishes, industrial paints, neon tubes, coloured lights bulbs, and so on. In the Memphis context these materials lose their high-tech connotations because they are never quoted as technological symbols but as textures, patterns, colour, density, transparency and glitter. They are immediate and directly sensual. Moving in this freedom-giving context, which appeals more to physical qualities than to the intellect, Memphis designers have even succeeded in revitalising cultivated, traditional, and familiar materials. Marble, for instance, is used in irreverent forms that do not correspond to recognised uses of that material, or it is taken out of context by coupling it with aluminium, fiberglass, or fireflake paints.

Many materials have been thrown off balance, stretched, and deformed to the point of becoming unrecognisable. Once a perplexed British journalist, stroking a bookcase in natural polished briar (used alongside a yellow and green snakeskin laminate in the same piece of furniture, Sottsass’ Beverley) sighed, “fantastic, it looks like plastic.”

Actually, the problem isn’t to make one thing look like another, nor to make it look like itself: whether it is marble that looks like plastic, plastic that looks like wood, or plastic that looks like plastic is of little importance. For Memphis designers the problem of truth and authenticity, and vice versa, the problem of fake, doesn’t exist. What matters is the image, the design, the final product, the figurative force, the communication. As with many pupils of Buddha, all Memphis designers seem convinced that “reality” as an absolute doesn’t exist, or if it does exist, it is what is. The free and easy, anarchic, and unrestrained use of unforeseen and unforeseeable materials, the combined use of heterogeneous, cheap and expensive materials, of rough and smooth textures, of opaque and sparkling surfaces, tend in the end to turn a piece of furniture into a complex system of communication. It becomes a small metaphorical novel, a story of volumes and surfaces, of signs and groups of signs, of their different flavours, and of the inner changes they undergo in order to appear in strange, attractive combinations and create new expressive circuits. What’s more, this linguistic earthquake has definitively altered the traditional image of formal coherence and compactness, laying the foundations for a future, more flexible and sophisticated stylistic syntax.

Gabon, Nathalie Du Pasquier, 1982. source

Colour

Prior to Memphis, there was no colour in furniture. With a few exceptions the idea of furniture as a centre of colour didn’t exist in the West. European furniture, on the whole, is made of “matter;” colour comes into play only as a detail in mother-of-pearl, ivory, or bronze inlays, and in marble intarsia works. Even the exceptions are few and far between: the extremely tenuous, lacquered colours of certain eighteenth century Venetian furniture, the black and white lacquers of certain Viennese furniture, tiny details of colour in Jugendstil furniture, and naturally De Stijl, where primary colours alone are used in an ideological manner. In De Stijl, as later in the Bauhaus, colour is chiefly “structural;” it emphasises the way the furniture is built. Rietveld’s “red and blue” chair, when it was designed in 1917, was not red and blue at all; the colour was added after 1919, apparently at Van Doesburg’s suggestion.

In Memphis, colour has never been an ideological vehicle. It does not exemplify building processes, nor does it sink its roots in stories of chromatic symbolism; it may be indirectly provocative, but it is above all a matter of linguistics. Introduced together with decoration in the software of design, colour is one of the active ingredients of the complex messages transmitted by the furniture object. It works as an enzyme to catalyse chemical reactions, it generates nervous impulses that open new doors of logic in the brain, it is a sort of perceptive jogging, an aerobics for lazy or drowsy sensory cells. Like jogging it requires commitment, determination, measure, enthusiasm, faith, and patience, and to serve a purpose, it must be used well.

Colour in Memphis is never “added.” As with decoration it is born with the design, forming an integral part of the structure. It alters the object’s molecules. It works as a mass, as an intrinsic feature of a certain form and volume. It is always a pigment and never a patina. “For this reason,” explains Michele De Lucchi, “there are no dominant colours or background colours in Memphis.” Memphis colour does not work through the set of relations of a chromatic system, but through proximity, as in the East (from India to Persia) or in Matisse (who learned colour from Oriental painting). The juxtapostition of colured masses, amterials, and volumes, like little taps on a tuning fork, make the whole colour vibrate, creating resonances, dissociations, even linguistic reverberations that respond from afar. Sottsass calls them “long distance correspondences.”

Memphis didn’t just bring colour into the game, but made sure to play it as a winning card; Memphis colour isn’t only sensational because it is there but because it is new-made.

Sottsass syas: “Anything that is tamed by culture loses its flavour after a while, its like eating cardboard. You have to put mustard on it or take little pieces of cardboard and eat them with tomatoes and salad. It’s a lot better if you don’t eat cardboard at all.”

At Memphis very little cardboard has been eaten. Memphis colour, especially that of the early days, is devoid of cultural references. It is hard, disjointed, shrill, totally toneless and free of chromatic laxity. It is flat, literal, without suggestions. It doesn’t live on reverberations and depth like most ancient colour, which is almost always allusive; nor is it related to the polished abstractions of De Stijl. Its chromatic quality doesn’t even resemble that of oriental colour, which often is equally intense, sharp and showy, but soft, very soft, sweet and sensual, full of joy and drenched with flavour. Memphis colur is comic-strip colour (De Lucchi, Bedin), plastic coloir, hot dogs, sundaes, artificial raspberry syrup colour (Peter Shire). It is washed-out, cheap gouache colour (Zanini), ridiculous colour (Sottsass), naïve colour (Sowden), third-world colour (Du Pasquier). In any case, whether it is picked up in California, the lower Mediterranean, Africa or Brianza, it is motel colour, suburban colour, five-and-dime colour.

The principle holds true in most cases, almost always. But colur in Memphis follows no fixed pattern or rigid guideline. Instead, as Zanini points out, it is “a changing shade of existence,” and as such even inside Memphis some slight changes have occurred. In three years of experimentations and experience the garish, funny, somewhat childish tones of the early days have been rounded off, harmonised, and classicised, just as the forms have become less ramshackle, less redundant, and simpler, with sharper, more self-assured, crystalline contours. Marble pieces (in coloured, veined, baroque marble) have come into being, and after a while black also appeared –a plastic black with an imitation marble finish, or a black gloss black, used as a dull mass along with shining aluminium, chrome plate glass, and fireflake. The suburbs are making their way into the heart of the city.

Asked about the origins, motives, and goals of this silent metamorphosis, Sottsass sighs and says that you cant go on doing the same things all your life, the explains: “I’ve always looked for nonculturised colour in the colours of children, and I’ve always drawn a blank because nobody understands this way of treating colour. Nobody understood that the problem was to look for colour in areas that no one had worked on. Anyway, that’s the way it was. Now that we have been through that experience and got rid of our inhibitions, so to speak, we can do almost anything we want. We can even allow ourselves a more cultivated, more sophisticated colour, because we know how to use it in a loose, detached way as though it had no links with any culture.”

As always the basic idea in Memphis is to shake off the conditioned routine and recover fresh energy, to follow the logic of the moment, to look at things always from new points of view, and examine every new possibility. Light or dark, pale or saturated, bright or dull, Memphis colour may be a matter of chance or necessity, of work or pleasure, never a problem.


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You can find Memphis, Research, Experiences, Result, Failures and Successess of New Design here.

LIFESTYLE

^Image by Ilona Dorota Sagar

Below is the text for a video collaboration with Ilona Sagar currently showing as part of the Visionary Trading Project in Hackney. The film weaves a quiet montage of constructed and documentary scenes from around London Fields and Broadway Market, together with a voiceover that tells a tale spoken through a collage of buzzwords taken from advertising material for new housing developments in the area.

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I

This is our stage; We are the set; It’s nothing without us.

It’s vibrant when we’re here, and when we’re here we’re buzzing.

We look distinctly contemporary, and each look we get is spectacularly new.

We are dynamic creatives, well-adjusted living, clean, modern, simplicity.

II

We shine, clean and new, breath-taking flagships-of-ourselves,

The bespoke measure of our many, fashionable attributes,

bustling with world-class, real friction.

III

Nostalgic-chic is the vintage-new, and we want unique,

Disconnect of brushed-steel, 24-hour, red-brick- heritage. Plucked and fragrant.

A pure and natural, home-baked-innocence, 

With graceful proportions, and superb specifications.

IV

We have distinctly-dramatic, spectacular- tranquillity,

Superbly packaged identity-specifications, and lush-green dramatic-schemes.

Pioneering bespoke-culture of bright-young- things,

With our bucolic, cosmopolitan-chic. Watch us, watch you.

V

We are energized products of renowned, home-made, elegant cafes,

and i-phone-footage catwalk-parades, in understated, state-of-the-art.

It’s more than a feeling.

VI

We glide dynamically, into edgily-packaged, genuine, cosmopolitan-debt,

featured in urban-village-galleries and ethnic-sweatshop-global-magazines,

from the unrivalled-creative-glamour of emptied traditions.

VII

We are the newly-arcadian-creatives, buzzing with world-class pastoral-technology-specifications, many fashionably homemade café-utopias, radical cosmopolitan-innocence, spectacularly-tranquil avant-garde delights, and brand-new flagship-heritage.

We are quick with the seductive anxiety of non-stop 24-hour-reinvention, and vibrant-contrasting exhaustion, running, endlessly-perfect bright-young-things with the burden of internationally-renowned-bodies, wearing breath-taking, cutting-edge, and distinctly-urban-culture.

We are acting the bespoke-measure of our many trend-setting spontaneous-designer-initiatives, and watching the buzz in urban-village-galleries that multiply our organic-corner-shop bike-repair-innocence, until the dynamic-creative-mechanism is too anxiously-energized with chic lifestyles and each look we get is exhausting and we feel, genuinely feel, spectacularly, really spectacularly, breathtakingly, dramatically   – a u t h e n t I c