All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
intellectual agenda has remained caught in the avant-garde dream of its ancestors. It thus re-covered much of the ground explored half a century ago, redoubling the received critical discourse with its own metacritical commentary, interpolating another layer of interpretation between the “primary” investigation and its own. The magazine October, for example, the bible of post-modernity (and exemplar for our own theorizing), continues to be held hostage by its obsession with surrealism, as with some lost idyll. And architecture carries on with fresh formalisms of the broken (or the perfect) square.
Try as we might, we haven’t been able to get Oedipus out of our edifices; inherited property still defines us. A false patriarchy continues to structure the discipline and practice of architecture, in which a fraternal order of equals is presided over by a simultaneously dead and obscenely alive father, father Philip, in this instance.
Life in the Past Lane
This stalled fascination with former revolutions is the result of a failure of nerve and of invention. It is also evidence of the ideological and psychological trauma that has beset our attempts to formulate an avant-garde in rebellion against an avant-garde to which we desperately desire to remain faithful. The result has been a kind of fission. One by-product is the hyperconservatism of our melancholy historicists. Another is the would-be radicalism that has produced visually novel buildings and rudimentary bridges to the world of the virtual, but which still clings to dusty desires for legitimacy.
The lesson we have been unable to learn is that it takes a lot more rebellion than we have been able to muster to remain faithful to the heritage of the avant-garde.
Market Share
I am not sure the New York Times Magazine did us any favors with its gossipy, prurient cover story on Rem Koolhaas, our momentary laureate. Depicting him as a kind of edgy Martha Stewart who refuses to judge any endeavor “a good thing,” whose mission is the “mission of no mission,” the Times tried to inscribe his fundamental cynicism into the format of the hero-architect, Fountainhead-style. Of course, the paper went for the Hollywood version. Gary Cooper may have behaved like Frank Lloyd Wright, but the models in the background were strictly Gordon Bunshaft.
Sound familiar? The challenge of collapsing the tastemaker and the ideologue is sure to test one side or the other dramatically. Is it possible to be Paul Auster, Sam Walton, and Kim Il Sung at the same time? Will Rem succeed in branding the generic?
Africa Shops at Prada
Jetting into Harvard to administer his shopping seminar, Rem snags a job designing Prada stores. The press praises his strategy of branding: no design “identity,” instead a space where things happen, “an exciting urban environment that creates a unique Prada experience.” A TV camera in the dressing room will permit you (TV’s Big Brother is another Dutch import) to view yourself from all sides at once. Will thousand-dollar shoes move faster when surveilled from all angles? Will there be an algorithm to airbrush away our worst features? Must we buy this privatization of culture? Does the postmodern critique of the museum, the call for tearing down its walls, do anything but free art for the shopping mall? I’ll take Bilbao, thanks.
The trouble with an age of scholasticism is that you talk yourself into the idea that anything is politics. By the time it’s devolved from direct action to propaganda to critical theory, to the appropriation of theory, to the branding of theory, to the rejection of theory, something is lost. Critique stokes its own fantasy of participation. On the one hand, this produces boutique design as social practice, and, on the other, it segues into the more rarefied reaches of recombination. My Russian colleague, Andrei, has been smoking cheap cigarettes that someone brought him from back home. The bright red pack is emblazoned with a picture of Lenin in high sixties graphic style. The make is “Prima,” the brand “Nostalgia,” the smell appalling. What’s next? Lenin Lites and Trotsky 100s? Must we succumb to the speed of this? Can’t we slow the whole thing down?
Nostalgie de la Boue
This new nostalgia (the nostalgia for packaged nostalgia) is everywhere. Now that my generation rules the media, part of us keep busy looting our experience for the rudest forms of exploitation. If you’ve turned on your TV lately, you might have seen That Seventies Show, a slick package of affects, the decade as a set of tics and styles. The expropriation continues to the limits of corporate memory. Advertising nowadays is lush with 1960s themes as fiftyish account executives preside over the wholesale trashing of the culture that nourished them. “I Feel Good”—a laxative. “Forever Young”—invidious irony—incontinence diapers. On Survivor, flaming torches turn the game-show paradise island into Trader Vic’s.
Nostalgic for 1950s and 1960s styles, yet too hip not to be troubled by the accumulated political baggage of the project, this cadre of media masters offers a stance of almost pure cynicism. “I am saying this, but I don’t actually believe it; In fact, I don’t actually believe anything, because it is no longer possible to do so.” With Niemayer or Lapidus or Harrison as the soundtrack (and the Stones, perhaps, playing on the answering machine), they seem to want to suspend indefinitely the moment when they would be obliged to take a position.
A micro-generational conflict now exists among those for whom the 1960s represents a source of anxiety, those for whom the decade still represents possibility, and those for whom it is simply ancient history. Most invested in the middle alternative, I grapple with this legacy, but the particulars grow vague (the feeling stays evergreen).
That Vision Thing
Our fantasies did have vision—the product, mainly, of the working out of certain congruent themes of prior modernisms. Those domes and inflatables and garbage housing were not just technologically and environmentally prescient; they also figured—whether in civil rights or Woodstock variants—in political ideas about the extension, openness, and spontaneity of spaces of assembly. And the canny melding of technological control with an “anti”-technological ideology gave birth to appropriate technology.
The alternative visuality of the 1960s, however, has had only the most marginal impact on architecture. (Many breathe a sigh of relief.) The psychedelic style that included Fillmore posters, the Merry Pranksters bus, and Sgt Pepperesque couture required a certain lag before becoming appropriatable by architecture. We liberated the 1970s supreme Soviet—Venturi, Stern, Moore, Graves, et al.—from the kitsch closet and made it permissible for them to love Vegas and the roadside. But they always had to rationalize their love, to capture it for their outmoded agendas and fantasies of control. We responded with disengagement and irony, as usual.
The “appropriated” art of so many artists of my generation was a typically limp response, immediately gobbled up by the art machine. Having bought into a critical history that denigrated intentions, we then bought into our own ironical reappropriation of intentionality via obsessive proceduralisms and poetic trances. Too late. Narcissism is not the same as self-confidence. Even Seinfeld has been cancelled.
Vive la Différence!
The Whole Earth Catalogue and Our Bodies, Ourselves are our holy books, good news for a political body and a contested environment both. These really were milestones: we’re all a little more gay now, a little closer to the earth, a little more skeptical about the system’s “choices.” The politicization of the personal (as the formula should have been) demands idiosyncrasy beyond the tonsorial and sartorial. Pity about our architecture. So many interesting sites wasted.
It Isn’t Easy Being Green
We always hear that green architecture “looks bad,” and most of it does. At the end of the day, though, separating your trash is probably a greater contribution to world architecture than Bilbao. Well, maybe not Bilbao.
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Herb’s Content
Does the New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp keep writing about the same things?
