The Great Totalitarian Architectural System of our Times
Cover. Military History Museum, Dresden, Germany [2011]. Architecture: Daniel Liebeskind.
Preface
This text is replicated from The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism [2012] by poet and essayist Mark Anthony Signorelli and mathematician and polymath Nikos A. Salingaros.
____________________________________________
We who live in the Western world at the present time continue to suffer under the reign of a great tyranny - the tyranny of artistic modernism. The modernist aesthetic, which dominates our age, takes a variety of forms in the respective arts - in architecture, a lack of scale and ornamentation combined with the overwhelming deployment of materials like glass, steel, and brutalist concrete; in the plastic arts, a rejection of natural forms mixed with an unmistakable tendency towards the repulsive or meretricious;* in literature, non-linear narrative, esoteric imagery, and an almost perfect lack of poetic form and diction.
Note 1
Modernism: In the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I. In an era characterized by industrialisation, the nearly global adoption of capitalism, rapid social change, and advances in science and the social sciences [e.g., Freudian theory], Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression.
* meretricious [adj.] 1620s, 'pertaining to harlots,' from Latin meretricius 'of or pertaining to prostitutes'.
Yet common now to the practice of all these arts are certain primal impulses which may be said to form the core of the modernist aesthetic - a hostility and defiance towards all traditional standards of excellence, discovered over millennia of craftsmanship and reflection; a notion of the artist’s freedom as absolute, and entirely divorced from the ends of his art; and, as Roger Scruton has so clearly demonstrated, a refusal to apply the category of beauty to either the creation or the estimation of artwork.
Standing behind this aesthetic is an ideology supported by nearly the entire institutional structure of the Western world - the universities, the publishing houses, the galleries, the journals, the prize committees, the zoning boards. Books that evince a fidelity to modernist principles are the ones that get published. Buildings that conform to the brutal codes of modernism and its derivatives are the ones that get built. Whatever creative efforts spring from other sources of inspiration other than modernist aggression are invariably ignored and dismissed as something antiquated or reactionary.
This is the great totalitarian system of our times - the dictatorship of modernism.
________________________________________
'The level of stylistic violence implicit in modernist architecture is extraordinary: overhangs without obvious supports, leaning buildings, extremely sharp edges sticking out to threaten us, glass floors over heights leading to vertigo, tilted interior walls also leading to vertigo and nausea. Look at the horizontal windows of modernist buildings that violate the vertical axis .... or the 'brutalist' exposed concrete in dangerously rough surfaces - a violence against the tactile environment [and] a sadistic architectural expression.'
_____________________________________
Because contemporary artistic production - whether in the field of literature, architecture, music, or the plastic arts - is so obviously inferior to what has been produced before, proponents of modernism generally aver that modernism per se belongs to the early part of the twentieth century, that the creative world has since moved beyond modernism into a 'post-modernist' phase, then beyond even that, and thus any criticism of contemporary art is irrelevant to the period of 'high modernism'. But this clever strategy pretends to miss the fact that the vast majority of developments since modernism retain its essential negation of complex order. Any evolution of types and forms that has occurred since the period of 'high modernism' have applied merely on a superficial level, but the essential ideological core of artistic practice remains the same. The modernists’ tradition of negation [an act of denial] still rules over us.
We see, for example, that contemporary prize-winning architects slavishly copy the same industrial aesthetic originally approved by the Bauhaus, whose members were working for the German industry to sell the industrial products of that time: steel, plate glass, and concrete. Those buildings perform terribly in all climates and are dysfunctional for most human activities inside and in their immediate external vicinity, yet so-called 'starchitects' continue to emulate the rules embodied in those failed examples. Alleged artists like Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman still recycle basically the same pranks first played on the public by Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists almost a century ago.
Note 2
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp [1887 - 1968]: A French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 [1912], he painted few other pictures. His irreverence [lack of respect] for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists [a nihilistic and antiaesthetic movement in the arts] and in the 1930s he helped to organise Surrealist exhibitions.
As soon as we inquire into the nature of these rules, we discover that they are opposed in almost every way to the principles of artistic creation prevailing in the world prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas earlier traditions of artistic creation embraced symmetry within complexity, modernism has embraced extreme simplicity, dislocation, and imbalance. Whereas earlier traditions sought to bring pleasure to an audience - 'to teach and delight', as Horace’s famous dictum would have it - modern art attempts to 'nauseate' or 'brutalise' an audience [the terms are from Jacques Barzun’s The Use and Abuse of Art]. Whereas pre-modern architecture employed scale and ornament, modern architecture aggressively promotes gigantisms and barrenness.
__________________________________
An artist must settle a thousand stylistic questions in the course of his labour, but to any artist working in our times, the first and most pregnant question which must be answered before a line can be written or a stone can be laid is this: will I respect and celebrate the life-affirming aspects of human nature [as traditional artists do], or will I reject and condemn human nature, and celebrate its most destructive traits [as modernists and their derivatives do]? How an artist chooses to answer this question will depend crucially on what sort of conception he entertains of how human beings are connected to life and the cosmos... There is such a thing as consistency between one’s beliefs and one’s artistic techniques.
Traditional societies produced artifacts and shaped their environment in a way to give maximal sensory and emotional pleasure within the constraints of materials and utility. This action was therapeutic, a means of emotional nourishment akin to and just as necessary as physical nourishment. The order and proportion inhering in these forms demonstrates their creators’ conviction that their work was to be presented to rational creatures, to creatures capable of recognising order, and moreover, irresistibly attracted to order, according to the ineffable but universal phenomenon of beauty. The constant pursuit of beauty in classical art evinces the similarly profound conviction that the human soul is a thing capable of edification, of being drawn more constantly and more thoroughly towards harmony, and that the making of art is unrivaled in its capacity to further such edification.
To the contrary, modern art betrays a pursuit not of harmony, but of domination - domination of nature, of language, of one’s fellow man. The level of stylistic violence implicit in modernist architecture is extraordinary: overhangs without obvious supports, leaning buildings, extremely sharp edges sticking out to threaten us, glass floors over heights leading to vertigo, tilted interior walls also leading to vertigo and nausea. Look at the horizontal windows of modernist buildings that violate the vertical axis defined by gravity, or the 'brutalist' exposed concrete in dangerously rough surfaces - a violence against the tactile environment, often falsely excused as being 'honest' rather than a sadistic architectural expression.
The 'milder' forms of this violence are represented in minimalist environments devoid of all signs of life: totally blank walls, windowless façades, curtain glass walls, buildings as cubes of glass, buildings as cubes of smooth concrete, etc. Indeed, the subtlety that earlier attempted to camouflage this intrinsic violence has finally been abandoned, and buildings are now built as if blown apart, dismembered, and their forms melted. Through this stylistic violence, modernism pursues not an edification of man’s rational nature, but rather an exaltation of his unqualified will. And behind it all is nothing but despair, betrayed by the total absence of beauty, which signifies these artists’ complete inability to imagine any reality transcending the calamitous ugliness of the modern world.
We can see then that modern art embodies and manifests all the worst features of modern thought - the despair, the irrationality, the hostility to tradition, the confusion of scientia with techne, or wisdom with power, the misunderstanding of freedom as liberation from essence rather than perfection of essence. In short, artistic modernism is the nihilism of our epoch made incarnate. Because the practices of modern art emerge from this false conception of human nature, its productions are typically repellent to human nature.
The ordinary response to modern art is not attraction, but nausea or revulsion. This is why the vast institutional structure supporting modernism is necessary, to forcefully maintain the perpetuation of forms of art which, if left to the tastes of people in general, would die off in a day. Only the absolute dominance of the institutions could ever convince the population that a lopsided building or paint splattered across a canvas should qualify as a masterpiece. The public is normally revolted by such artistic violence, which is why its propagandists call out constantly and hysterically for more 'education', by which they mean brainwashing, intended to bully ordinary people into accepting these perversions.
________________________________________
'The ordinary response to modern art is not attraction, but nausea or revulsion. This is why the vast institutional structure supporting modernism is necessary, to forcefully maintain the perpetuation of forms of art which, if left to the tastes of people in general, would die off in a day .... The public is normally revolted by such artistic violence, which is why its propagandists call out constantly and hysterically for more 'education', by which they mean brainwashing, intended to bully ordinary people into accepting these perversions.'
________________________________________
Indeed, the modernists’ almost complete take-over of the schools has been the single most important factor in the triumph of their style; witness the architecture schools, where only a handful of programs in the entire world dare to teach design on traditional principles. Modernism’s project of domination, control, and destruction has naturally attracted persons who crave power, and who master all the techniques for achieving power and dominance over others. It should be no wonder, therefore, that a dominant elite producing and promoting an art of hatred controls the market today.
A 'new normal' has been imposed, according to which the most unnatural - or rather, anti-natural - of styles has been exalted. What is worse, the classical styles have been represented as aberrant; the pursuit of beauty or harmony has become the gravest crime an artist could commit. And what now drives the construction of such anti-art and anti-architecture more than anything else is simply the lust for financial gain. Success in the corporate commercial sector has come to depend upon the ability to find ever more shocking expressions. Contemporary art is no longer about art, and has not been for decades. Instead, we have a vast corporate media machine that produces 'objects', often repulsive ones, as play-pieces in a financial game of manipulative speculation. The commercial value of these objects is artificially inflated via cycles of promotion and sales, and then the end-owner enjoys a tax write off by donating the object to a museum. The paid mercenaries who play this sordid game are then pushed upon the public as great figures, worthy of our admiration and emulation.
This is how the farce of modernism ends, with the anti-bourgeois rebel revealed to be a moneygrubbing little fraud. As with all unscrupulous money-making schemes, the people who engage profitably from selling such art and design to the public are habitual practitioners of deception: the global advertising industry is a vast and willing participant in this game. And throughout the corporate and academic structures supporting this system, otherwise decent people lead a life of continual lying, in order to achieve a level of economic comfort. We live in a time when the art all around us accustoms men to, and insinuates into their souls, the most erroneous and degrading ideas imaginable about themselves and their world. A humane society can hardly be expected to grow out of such an adverse cultural environment.
__________________________________
The prerequisite, then, for restoring sanity to our civilization is an unqualified rejection of artistic modernism. Consequently, the first duty for every true artist at this moment of history is an act of spiritual fidelity to the timeless traditions of artmaking, and an uncompromising, unmitigated hatred towards the dictatorship of modernism. Every true artist should come to his work now with something of the spirit of a liberator fighting an entrenched tyranny.
Just as important for the long term is that people now intimidated by the regime’s hegemony do their part through passive resistance, a Gandhian* refusal to participate in and be manipulated by the corrupt system, and a willingness to mistrust 'experts' who have for years promoted creations that disdain life and human sensibilities. Every true artist will have engraved in his heart and mind the powerful words of Schiller, 'But how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age that besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion.'
* Mahatma Gandhi [1869 - 1948]: an Indian lawyer, politician, social activist, and writer internationally esteemed for his doctrine of non-violent protest [satyagraha] to achieve political and social progress.
Buoyed by this disdain for the professors and the critics, the 'starchitects' and the laureates, who have done so much to wreck the various arts which they pretend to practice and promote, the true artist will turn his gaze away from the disastrous wasteland those individuals have wrought, and return again to the permanent sources of all genuine inspiration - the beauty pulsating throughout the natural world, the capacity for excellence inhering in the human soul, the faint and sporadic glimpses we have of a purposefulness behind the observable chaos of life.
From such springs the great traditions of artistic creation were once nourished; from such springs alone will a renovated culture emerge once more in our times.