Page 20 - Studio International - September October 1975

say, according to an admirer: and so that whatever was beautiful did not need tabulated form, and the quantities show
elided the problem. (Perret meant to decorate because it was itself decor was some positive result, however dottily
something more like 'dignifies' or extended. It was beautiful because it calculated. Hence the various products of
`gives decorum' than the English word served its purpose most directly. And `systems design' and its even dottier
`decorate'). And, of course, in the therefore that which served its purpose by-products (some of which, such as the
twenties a rather specious distinction most directly could in itself turn into an work of the Ulm school) have even entered
grew up between the work of sculptors object a émouvoir ; the archetype of such the murky penumbra of modern
or painters, 'works of art' used an object was, of course, the technological mythology.
`decoratively' and the repetitive ornament product, which had radically altered the Production is the result of our dialogue
produced by mere craftsmen. Perret did means at the artists' disposal in the with nature: and the process of dialogue
use both, and that in spite of his noble twentieth century. It had been regarded and production is what we call culture.
aphorism. He never wholly abjured the as slave until the middle of the Not an adequate definition perhaps, but
hammered and inlaid ornament of the nineteenth, when it became an enemy. it does something to tie up the diverse
shorn classicism I spoke of - even after As the volume of technological objects dictionary meanings of worship, tillage,
the last war, in the reconstruction of grew, however, so the dialogue with selective breeding, training and
Amiens and Le Havre, he did not machine production altered in tone. The education; and distinguishes it from the
renounce the detached colonnades, the enemy of the nineteenth century became towny, even bourgeois qualities of
apparatus of details derived from the the master, the deus (doubly you might civilization. The truth is that technology
style of 'le grand siècle.' In the say) ex machina. God-created (as against is 'Son of Culture', as they say in the
meanwhile, his old opponent Van de man-created) nature became muted, titles of horror films, but culture has not
Velde had become converted to a similar trivialized. The menace to twentieth- learnt to take account of its vast
creed, if not a similar manner; the belief, century urban man was no longer offspring, at any rate not on a conscious
as he put it, that 'the rational conception drought, storm and flood. The great level. The sad, playful attempts in the
produced the silex or cut onyx tools dangers came from a different nature : forties and fifties of our century to
and weapons . . . (it) is the inexhaustible, from the boom-crisis economy, from the produce a generally acceptable and
and ever-cool source of all that strain, methods of secret persuasion and of machine-based (as well as machine-made)
which - through the ages - has born oppression, and from the omnipresent ornament is a warning of the futility of
witness to the existence and constant destructive forces we have devised : any short -cuts. We are witnessing a
vitality of a style which never ages, which gases, bacteria, nerve-drugs in drinking- similar and equally futile exercise just
is and shall be of every age.' water, the BOMB; or even from the now : the revival of what has been called
It was this ageless modern style which increasing malfunctioning of our the 'Cinema Style' ; the ornamental
Van de Velde was introducing to the ingenuities : pollution, overcrowding, jollities of Odeon cinemas and Lyons'
Paris public by way of comment and jamming, the rising flood of detritus. Corner Houses in this country aping
almost of protest at the time of the Artists were not able to absorb the the majority of twenties and early
decorative art exhibition in Paris in 1925. technological product into their work and thirties skyscrapers in the US. But the
That exhibition was as much the apogee had therefore to account for it by irony : revival raises the problem, which derives
of Art Deco as the 1903 Turin show was naming, indicating and quoting. It from a sub-cultural phenomenon: the
of Art Nouveau. And the whole of what started gently with collage and frottage, shift in the social pattern of taste to a
came to be called the Modern Movement and was speeded up by R. Mutt's famous dictatorship of the working-class, more
was a protest against its pervasive fountain choice - of which so much has specifically the Anglo-Saxon working-
influence. already been said. This attempt to absorb class, which was exemplified by the cult
Now the modern movement eschewed the industrial and exalt it into culture was of the Beatles and the Stones, and the
ornament with the greatest acerbity. But a much more powerful and hazardous graphic style of Alan Aldridge. The style
it did not quite dispense with the more piece of magic than we can now realize. is already past its peak, although its
or less 'decorative' work of art. Mies But the magic wore off (with the war), sources - the film and strip-cartoon - are
van der Rohe, the harshest of the modern and had to be renewed. The efforts a permanent feature of our society, and
movement formalists, not only employed ranged from sollipsist inflatable defiance cater for the same kind of irrational
sculptures by Kolbe and Lehmbruck as to the total immersion of Ulm; from the pleasure as the 'Cinema Style' : the
the only photographable inhabitants of admiring imitations of Tinguely to the pleasure which appeals through the
his building, but also modelled the total immersion of Warhol. The work of medium of a market populism; the
figures in his drawings on Lehmbruck's the artists stood apart from the rational people like it because they buy it, ergo
sculptures. Le Corbusier employed work normality of what was built and it is good in itself because the people are
by Jacques Lipschitz and by Léger, and inhabited. Buildings increasingly became good.
in his later work -faute de mieux images of technical production, from The attitude has its sociological and by
sometimes, as he himself knew - his own which the world of the imagination was implication (as often happens nowadays)
paintings and even sculptures. Of one banished. But while the artist had less its philosophical apologist in the work of
building of that period, the Spanish and less truck with society - and therefore an American sociologist, Herbert Gans,
pavilion at the Paris exhibition of 1937, with rationality - architects and designers whose Levittowners has counterattacked
little is remembered. But the painting strove earnestly to assimilate their the many critics of American suburbia.
which was specially done for it, Picasso's procedure to that of the mechanic. In It concentrated on the life of a
Guernica, has become the best-known the heroic days of De Stijl, of the commercial suburban development, one
single twentieth-century image. It also Russian Constructivists and, to some of a successful chain based on mass-
contained the mysterious painting by extent, in the later years of the Bauhaus, produced, relatively cheap housing
Miró (Rebellious Catalan peasant or the very leap into the realm of quantity (marketed in various styles for the same
The Reaper) and the mercury fountain by was exciting by the desperate nature of house) by a large industrial building
Calder, which stood before it, is fairly well the exercise. Unfortunately, its contractor on the East Coast of the
known. The building itself deserved consequence was anything but States. Levittown - as these suburbs are
better than to become the Sistine chapel exhilarating. The pressing of all called - has became a slogan as well as a
of the twentieth century. But it is entirely imaginative effort into the mould of commercial enterprise. It covers the
dwarfed by the works of art which it pseudo-rationalism (of the particularly range of attitudes which maintains that
sheltered, and which were in part naive positivist brand which went on in everyone has the right to their life-style
commissioned by the architects and the late thirties and immediately after the provided it is within their means and not
sometimes - as was the case with the war) has convinced the architect's most actively anti-social; that no pundit has
mercury fountain - even attributed to important clients, the world's various any right to tell them otherwise. And in
them. Such buildings represent the upper civil services and the boards of the large particular not the planner and
tip of what you might call 'architects' companies, that the answer to their architect, whose real business is to
architecture for the thirties. The minor problems in terms of what is now called provide a suitable packaging for the
masters were, of course, much more `built form' (that is, architecture and given life-style, including the ornamental
thorough in their eschewing of the visual building) will be a good social service patterns which the inhabitant may choose
`irrelevance.' The generalized belief provided that they are presented in for himself.

94