Over the last several years, I've done quite a bit of writing for visual artist Matthew Woodward, including grant and exhibition proposals, project outlines, and artist statements and essays. Most recently, I wrote all the materials that accompanied a solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center's Michigan Avenue Galleries, View from the Birth Day, which ran from April 7 to July 15 of this year, and was the result of a successful proposal I also wrote. A medium-length version of the statement appears in the photograph above, which was blown up and mounted on the gallery wall, and an abbreviated version appeared on the Cultural Center's events site. The full body of the essay appears below, for the sake of comparison.
********
Louis Sullivan believed that the psychic
pressures of a particular age were embodied in its buildings. American
architecture, Sullivan thought, suffered from generations of imitative European
colonial forms that lacked the indigenous structures and symbols of an
autonomous architectural school. Because of this, it became his directive to
mark a juncture where American Architecture separated itself from European
classicism, abolishing imitation, and beginning anew with an authentic North
American style. This movement proved to be controversial among Beaux-Arts
traditionalists but wildly influential nonetheless--so influential that it
wasn’t long before an entire industry of facsimile sprang up, dedicated to the
mass production and widespread mail-order distribution of inexpensive,
prefabricated Sullivan-esque architectural embellishments.
This industry of replication eventually put Sullivan out of business completely.
This industry of replication eventually put Sullivan out of business completely.
My new body of work is a reaction to the Chicago
Cultural Center’s 2010 exhibition Louis
Sullivan’s Idea, inspired by these Sullivan-esque designs and the larger
industry of mass-produced architectural embellishment that surrounds them. The
work is crafted using the reductive drawing method, beginning not with blank
paper or canvas but with a dark surface ground created using such materials as
graphite, dirt, grease, and spackle. The light of an object is then applied to
the surface by removing the ground using an eraser or sandpaper, working,
erasing, and re-working the spaces that are created again and again. By using
repurposed construction and industrial materials, the work is an act of
rethinking the material aspects and contextual relevance of the Edifice. The
pieces’ large scale restores to these mass-produced elements the status of
monument native to the Edifice, but, in this context, they become a monument to
the efficiently made, speedily distributed, and uniform--a uniformity which
defies geography, geology, and philosophy, and which defines a nonclassical
American-ness that is completely new and lies outside the classical Edifice.
In Victor Hugo’s 1831 epic The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo famously prophesied that “the book will kill the edifice,” that the machined page would supplant the monumental structure as the great record of human thought. Frank Lloyd Wright in his 1901 treatise The Art and Craft of the Machine acknowledged the power of the machined page, but, unlike Frollo, saw it as a beacon of hope, a weapon that could defeat a meaningless mass-produced repetition of classical ideals and deliver 20th-century architecture from “complete, broadcast degradation of every type and form sacred to the art of old,” a mechanically reproduced and therefore philosophically bereft neoclassicism. That the machine, with its promise of canonizing these new American ideals in print and in steel, would immediately co-opt and syndicate this new American Edifice, just as it had with the European, was not anticipated: Sullivan’s own designs, like the classical designs he and Wright had railed against, were quickly knocked off, mechanically reproduced, and widely disseminated via mail-order architectural distributors.
It appears, then, that Claude Frollo was right: both systems, mechanical reproduction and mail-order distribution, originate with the page. Within the infrastructure of a staggeringly far-flung, publicly funded postal system, replicated architectural embellishments disperse just like the pages of a book--a book that millions now read, a book no longer a singularity, meticulously hand-copied by generation after generation of monks sequestered in a remote abbey. A national postal system serves literacy the way a sacred singularity never could; similarly, a mail-order building contradicts the classical Edifice in every way. The structure is divorced from any mode of deliberation and place on the part of its creator. The deliberation and place become arbitrary, with the user--not the creator--arbitrating design in an act of democratic reclamation. So, just as Sullivan searched for a democratic architecture that rejected empty replication of classical European ideals, he was driven out of business by a democratic mode of consumption.
This raises the questions: Through Sullivan’s loyalty to the architectural singularity, was he relying on outdated classical modes even as he attempted to leave them behind? Was he reaching, but just not far enough? Was the very idea of the Edifice, embodiment of the great spiritual and philosophical pressures of its time, a classical institution in and of itself, now completely irrelevant to American-ness?
It’s possible that the emergence of a mail-order architecture was itself the elusive valve Sullivan sought to turn, behind which the real psychic pressure of a young, industrial America pressed for release: the need to mass-produce and disseminate an independent national identity as cheaply, efficiently, and uniformly as possible. This need lies at the very core of America’s melting-pot ideals--the need for something easy to copy that could help make us all exactly the same. This body of work focuses on this mechanically reproduced architecture and the questions it raises with the intent its producers never brought to its manufacture.
In Victor Hugo’s 1831 epic The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo famously prophesied that “the book will kill the edifice,” that the machined page would supplant the monumental structure as the great record of human thought. Frank Lloyd Wright in his 1901 treatise The Art and Craft of the Machine acknowledged the power of the machined page, but, unlike Frollo, saw it as a beacon of hope, a weapon that could defeat a meaningless mass-produced repetition of classical ideals and deliver 20th-century architecture from “complete, broadcast degradation of every type and form sacred to the art of old,” a mechanically reproduced and therefore philosophically bereft neoclassicism. That the machine, with its promise of canonizing these new American ideals in print and in steel, would immediately co-opt and syndicate this new American Edifice, just as it had with the European, was not anticipated: Sullivan’s own designs, like the classical designs he and Wright had railed against, were quickly knocked off, mechanically reproduced, and widely disseminated via mail-order architectural distributors.
It appears, then, that Claude Frollo was right: both systems, mechanical reproduction and mail-order distribution, originate with the page. Within the infrastructure of a staggeringly far-flung, publicly funded postal system, replicated architectural embellishments disperse just like the pages of a book--a book that millions now read, a book no longer a singularity, meticulously hand-copied by generation after generation of monks sequestered in a remote abbey. A national postal system serves literacy the way a sacred singularity never could; similarly, a mail-order building contradicts the classical Edifice in every way. The structure is divorced from any mode of deliberation and place on the part of its creator. The deliberation and place become arbitrary, with the user--not the creator--arbitrating design in an act of democratic reclamation. So, just as Sullivan searched for a democratic architecture that rejected empty replication of classical European ideals, he was driven out of business by a democratic mode of consumption.
This raises the questions: Through Sullivan’s loyalty to the architectural singularity, was he relying on outdated classical modes even as he attempted to leave them behind? Was he reaching, but just not far enough? Was the very idea of the Edifice, embodiment of the great spiritual and philosophical pressures of its time, a classical institution in and of itself, now completely irrelevant to American-ness?
It’s possible that the emergence of a mail-order architecture was itself the elusive valve Sullivan sought to turn, behind which the real psychic pressure of a young, industrial America pressed for release: the need to mass-produce and disseminate an independent national identity as cheaply, efficiently, and uniformly as possible. This need lies at the very core of America’s melting-pot ideals--the need for something easy to copy that could help make us all exactly the same. This body of work focuses on this mechanically reproduced architecture and the questions it raises with the intent its producers never brought to its manufacture.
No comments:
Post a Comment