Assemblage at the Level of Method The Conscious Eclecticism of the Designer Michael Cradock Manifesto; The London School of Architecture 4,233 words
2
A note on the text: What you are about to read, I did not write. Instead, this thesis has been drawn from a series of texts to produce what we shall term a composition: a synthesis of a collection of ideas and impressions, illustrative of the manner in which design is, in essence, a collage of recollected images and motifs. In this sense it reflects my understanding of the nature of design, which has, since its inception, consciously involved the acts of imitation, theft and reference; engendering existing imagery with new meaning through the act of critical comparison, something akin to Giedion’s Methodengleiche.i
i Eduard Neuenschwander, Hommage à Giedion: Profile seiner Persönlichkeit, Stuttgard, Birkhäuser, 1971, p. 142.
Originality is an impossible standard. Moreover, in our time, originality can possibly exist. The acclaim attached to originality in modernity should be placed, instead, on designas-composition, embracing the referential, imitative and eclectic methodology. The conceit is that this thesis on the absence of originality is one that evidences its own assertions, for many treatises have contained nothing more than a different arrangement of the same materials,ii and qualifies, to some extent, as a criticism of the legitimacy of the written manifesto as it is traditionally composed: aside from brief hysterical cracklings followed by formidable silences, all writing is rubbish, Artaud told us so, and saying it, he added his own turd to thousands of others.iii Through the acknowledgement of its appropriated sources, this assemblage allows for a reading that is more truthfully academic, without affectation: an exercise in flattery perhaps that intentionally benefits from association with its content; a thesis where the quotations are chosen for as much their lyricism and
ii James Lewis, Original Designs in Architecture: Consisting of Plans Sections and Elevations for Villas, Mansions, Townhouses, etc., London, James Lewis, 1780, p. 1.
iii Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1973, p. 44.
poetry as for their functionality in setting out a case. Plato’s The Republic highlights the importance of developing an appreciation of beauty and criticism in the accumulation of imagery; a temperament for the formulation of architectural ability, if the designer is an artist at composing pre-existing motifs and elements with new majesty and in fresh composition to generate a new eclecticism.
Fig. 1 Annabel’s, London, Martin Brudnizki, 2018.
iv
Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, London, Penguin Classics, 2018, p. 7.
The autobiographical nature of such an endeavour cannot be ignored. As a summary of my own experiences – the sources drawn upon, the settings that colour a sense of aesthetics, the patterns of thought that flow through this thesis – ideas of eclecticism in design and eclecticism of character are conflated. The postmodern phenomenological school articulates a relationship between the self and our understanding of our (built) surroundings that I find compelling, especially when processed in parallel with literary criticism that highlights the influence of personal experience in fiction writing; for example Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron is presented as fiction but, in fact, the distinction between author and creation is completely obscured by the self-infused heroic prototype. There is a necessity for designers to establish a persona out of their experiences and affiliations, and I explore such a concept within design through the lens of a self-consciously fashioned identity. The eclectic personality on which this essay ruminate – one often synonymous with folly and exaggeration, the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance,iv as laid out in Susan Sontag’s essay Notes of ‘Camp’ and Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying – allows for a consideration of the concepts of artifice, extravagance and popularisation essential
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to the romanticism of self-imaging (per consequentiam, in eclectic design as well) and the morality of such an exercise (and, thus, the ethics of such an approach to design). Inherent in such a personal piece, one cannot escape elements of one’s own identity that align with a self-fashioned other, drawing on the experience of queer culture and the pull of the exotic – and the obdurate spectre of (post-)colonialism – that, aesthetically, crystallise as a sensitivity to the visual and the spectacle; Shakespeare shows us through his image-rich scenography – amassed from history, mythology, fantasy and contemporary characters – the importance of personal expression and costume. This thesis evaluates the idea of ownership of ideas, particularly in the context of the marginalised, and the socio-cultural implications of both a self-forming identity politic and a design methodology. Pavan K. Varma has written of how orientalism often provides an all too-seductive source for the Western designer’s eclectic mission. Implicit in this, a conscious nationalist and class element, with an engrained relationship to the colonial, exaggerates a sense that everything reverts to spectacle and exploitation. In this gigantic spectacle, the bourgeoisie directs the spectacle of the proletariat, but it is the proletariat who produces the bourgeoisie and its peculiarisms.v Yet, post-modernist phenomenology proposed a relationship with experience that is less conscious, however, if the phantasmatic produces a large part of our reality, I cannot believe that it occupies it completely, and thus evade its coexistence and ill-known interferences with the biological. Yet all of our research is terribly fragmented,vi but, in the face of fragments, what should be
Fig. 2 South Indian House, India, anon. The ‘gaudy’ architecture of South India inspired the flamboyant furniture and interiors of the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass.
v
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 11.
vi
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 44.
vii
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and
Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 21.
vii
Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.
emphasised is precisely the great compositions created from this state of existence (or reality) and the awareness integral to this method of eclectic composition. The fragmentation can be overcome when assessment of the cultural and aesthetic value of experience and image engages the critical elements of the creative, and the self imaged and the design assembled can form a coherent whole exteriorvii After all, if we are to be a work of artvii as well as to make art, contemporary sensibility and the richness and diversity with which we have to build our practice expects this art to be a complete one.
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6
Fig. 3 The Classicista, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l
a
Anonymous, Andrea Palladio, Italy, 16th Century.
b
Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, Italy, 1530s.
c
Robert Adam, Kedleston Hall, England, 1759.
d
Farrow and Ball, Silvergate, England.
e
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture
f
Lord Burlington, Chiswick House, England, 1729.
g
Robert Adam, Chimneypiece, England.
h
Thomas Chippendale, Table, England.
i
Josiah Wedgwood, Plate, England.
j
Riccardo Bofill, Espaces Abraxas, France, 1978-1983.
k
OMA, Fondazione Prada, Italy, 2015.
l
Karl Friedrich Thiele (after Karl Friedrich Schinkel), Design for Die ZauberflĂśte:
The Hall of Stars in the Palace of the Queen of the Night, Act 1, Scene 6, Germany, 1847–49.
7
8
i. Nothing is original.1 [Therefore,] I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe2
1
Jim Jarmusch
2
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt by Lord Byron, London,
MacMillan and Co. Ltd., 1961 Canto the Third, CLXXVIII. 6-9.
an ensemble of fragments,
3
3
James Cahill, ‘Creative Copying’ in Apollo, July/August 2015 Vol. CLXXXII No.
633, p. 98.
[a] group portrait,4 schizophrenic eclecticism:5
4
Arata Isozaki, ‘1976-1984’ in SD Space Design (January 1984), p. 99
5
Richard Kolshalek, Arata Isozaki: Four Decades of Architecture, New York,
Universe Publishing, 1998, p. 114.
assemblage at the level of method6
6
Amelia Stein, ‘Does architecture need to be original? An in-depth symposium in
New York discussed the vexed question of authenticity in architecture through the lens of copyright law’, The Guardian, 23rd November 2015, https://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/23/architecture-copyright-law-
[provides] an ample field for the unlimited excursions of taste and fancy.7 [Composing] pleasurable objects by linking old ideas in a new way and by presenting forms [in a way that has not] been seen before8, [making] differently beautiful and more perfect9 ironic juxtapositions of high and low cultural references, simultaneously celebrating kitsch, consumer culture, and classicism.10 This way of [creating] at second hand is what is generally meant by culture.11
symposium, (accessed 27th February 2018). 7
Lewis, Original Designs in Architecture, p. 1.
8
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 18.
9
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying: And Other Essays, London, Penguin Classics,
2010, p. 96.
10
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise
of the Postmodern, London, University of Minneapolis Press, 2010, p. xxvi-xxvii. 11
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 18.
12
Cahill, ‘Creative Copying’, p. 98.
13
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 72.
14
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, pp. 70-71.
15
Tara Mayer, ‘Cultural Cross Dressing: Posing and Performance in Orientalist
* The serial ‘copies’ of Hellenistic and Roman eras indicate that creativity resided [not] in . . . radical novelty,12 the work of art [was] simply . . . a starting-point for a new creation.13 With lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim,14 the mimicry (however crude)15
Portraits’ in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd Series, Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2012, p. 288.
drew freely on those preceding examples. Renaissance architects believed the peak
16
16
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. xx.
17
Stein, ‘Does architecture need to be original?’
18
Stein, ‘Does architecture need to be original?’
19
John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Originality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018,
p. 12. 20
Lewis, Original Designs in Architecture, p. 1.
21
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. 139.
22
Stein, ‘Does architecture need to be original?’
23
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 80.
24
Cahill, Creative Copying, p. 98.
of civilisation existed in antiquity, and so imitated ancient ruins.17 Heavy borrowing was not plagiarism but a means through which the architects sought to enter into conversation with ‘the whole canon of architecture’, often in order to address the ‘new’ landscapes made available.18 Shakespeare inhabited a literary culture in which imitation of earlier models was applauded.19 Many treatises have contained nothing more than a different arrangement of the same materials.20 [However,] the strictest code of modernist design [is] that every building must be a totally new expression.21 The commercial and social value of ‘new’ and ‘novel’ and even ‘original’ are, arguably, products of modernity.22 As civilisation progresses,23 [we should] puncture any lingering . . . notions of . . .‘originality’.24 *
25
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 30.
26
Joshua Reynolds, ‘A Discourse Delivered, 11th December 1774’, in Seven
[We have] reached the point where the strangeness and phantasmagorical anomaly of daily life that capitalism has created is fought against even before it is perceived.25 He who borrows an idea . . . and so accommodated it in his own work, that it makes a part of it, with no seam or joining appearing, can hardly be charged with plagiarism . . . But an artist should not be contented with this only; he should enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what he is appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is . . . a perpetual exercise of the mind, a continual invention.26
Discourses Delivered to the Royal Academy by the President, London, T. Cadell, 1778, p. 36. 27
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 56
28
Ibid., p. 70.
[But,] indeed, I fear that the inartistic temperaments27 [neglect the] fine sense of distinction and sure instinct for delicate refinement28 [involved in assembling] fragments diachronically cut from diverse
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10 historical contexts . . . [into a] composite anatomy of recognisable architectural fragments.29
29
Emmanuel Petit, Irony: or, the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture,
London, Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 138-139.
Considered as an instrument of thought,30 a notion of intellectuality based on different standards of competency, including visual proficiency and the ability to grasp the historical essences of buildings experientially,31 [it is akin] the highest criticism . . . more creative than creation.32
30
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 113.
31
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. 100.
32
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 73.
33
Charles Moore, ‘Charles Moore’ in The Yale Seminars on Architecture 2,
ii. I press for a catholicity of image collection. In the absence of any clear knowledge of where images ought not to come from, it’s legitimate to have them come from anywhere.33 [The Kantian] theory of empathy held that architecture was best understood not through abstract mental analytic categories but through direct experiences of the building;34 images, they strike upon that warm living vapour which is in a sense the knot of the soul and body.35 [In the] culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled36 - the social sphere, in any case, is nothing but a chaotic mix of phantasms37 - ‘tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense that we endow With form our fancy, gained as we give The life we image,38 constant only to the principle of beauty in all things.39 Yesterday it was Realism that charmed one. One gained from it nouveau frisson which was its aim to produce,40 but it is not for us, it [is] for those good souls in Arcadia, at a birthday party, who
Newhaven, Yale University Press, 1982, p. 46.
34
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. xx.
35
Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, Vol. 3, Books 9-11, Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 2003, p. 57. 36
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, pp. 9-10.
37
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 44.
38
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third, VI. 1-4.
39
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 98.
40
Ibid., p. 98.
41
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 51.
42
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 98.
43
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 18.
44
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 10.
45
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 27.
46
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 10.
invite the Police Commissioner to the table 11 41 of honour. Today the cry is for Romance, and already the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple hilltops walks Beauty with slim gilded feet.42 The West has instilled in us43 [the rebellious desire to seek] rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation.44 We rebuil[d] the carnival of stars to assemble the next barricades in evening gowns. Theory for the sake of theory collided with madness for the sake of madness, and they both tried to reconcile themselves in the imperialism of youth,45 [it is] to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.46 *
47
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 26.
48
Petit, Irony, p. 139.
49
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 78.
50
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. 132.
51
Pavan K. Varma, Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and
[I] have no personality at all, but simply the possibility of many types.47 [Thus, my own] composite anatomy of recognisable [identity] fragments48 [is my] privilege to make,49 using collage and other techniques, [in order] to communicate,50 impress and awe.51
Identity, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2010, p. 191. 52
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 10.
53
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 51.
54
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. 136.
55
Petit, Irony, p. 76.
56
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 20.
Camp is the answer to the problem52 of [being] colonised by heterosexual imperialism.53 [You see,] pure self-projection . . . [is] authentic modern design:54 [this] kind of idiosyncratic and self-fashioning character [is] a prerequisite to enter the profession of the architect.55 Here we are beyond causes and effects; both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal [‘I’] who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do.56 * Stir in us the nostalgia for our distant past, for an idealised world of the imagination, or a yearning to escape, to shake off the shackles
12 of time and space!57 The historical models that the designer was to search for in the past [are] no longer formal or spatial. Rather,58 the snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scraped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. [Maybe] our historical sense is at fault,59 [but what matters more is the] search for human patterns of experience and to think of them as the historical content of buildings worth retrieving;60 truth content . , . impossible to verify through traditional historiographical means, such as cross-checking against related documents.61
57
Guillard, A Taste for the Exotic, p. 7.
58
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. xxvi.
59
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 58.
60
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. xxvi.
61
Ibid., p. 108.
62
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 31.
63
Ibid., p. 78.
64
Plato, The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett, New York, Anchor Books,
iii. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, [say,] as they are represented to us in art, have any existence?62 Art[,] a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men,63 [as] rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful:64 [for,] the proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.65 The Japanese people are [a] deliberate self-conscious creation.66 All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate;67 Byron [for example,] hardly seems to take the
1980, p. 115. 65
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 18.
66
Ibid., p. 31.
67
Ibid., p. 58.
68
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, pp. ix-x.
trouble to distinguish Harold any longer from himself.68 *
69
Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.
70
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 21.
71
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 143.
72
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 13.
73
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 148.
74
Natasha Eaton, Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765-
1860, London, Duke University Press, 2013, p. 154. 75
Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, p. 82.
76
William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 3, Scene 3, p. 3.
77
Alison Smith, David Blayney Brown and Carol Jacobi, Artist and Empire: Facing
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.69 It is because we are our whole exterior70 [that] costume is . . . a most important, perhaps the most important, sign of [assumed] manners, customs and mode of life.71 Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into . . . personal styles.72 Costume is a means of displaying character without description, and of producing dramatic situations and dramatic effects73 [and to] prevent yourself from becoming a spectacle commonplace.74 The golden calf could say: ‘my power is to emit a golden brilliance, not to distribute power’.75 See, see, King Richard doth himself appear As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the east,76 which highlights the extent to which77
Britain’s Imperial Past, London, Tate Publishing, 2015, p. 127. 78
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 143.
79
Smith, Artist and Empire, p. 127.
80
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 35.
81
Ibid., p. 27.
82
Plato, The Republic, p. 115.
83
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 70.
84
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. 139.
a fondness for gay apparel78 [is] an exercise in individual self fashioning.79 Those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.80 One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence.81 [To be able to] justly blame and hate the bad . . . even before he is able to know the reason why,82 his sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions83 [and] to freely transform [them] . . . into something new.84 *
85
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth, CXXVI. 1.
86
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 153.
87
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 4.
Our life is a false nature.85 All Art [is] to a certain degree a mode of acting86 ([or] beingas-playing-a-role)87 an attempt to realise
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14 one’s own personality on some imaginative plane88 [where] performance . . . [is] key to the picture.89 It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.90 The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate:91 one realises that sincerity [of the self] is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.92 All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice93, reducing [ourselves] to a condition of . . . pose and pastiche;94 indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.95 [So,] lying . . . - extremely popular with the antique world96 - is one way of seeing [our identities] as an aesthetic phenomenon . . . in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation.97 [It is our] false, flute-toned voice98 [that modifies] everything [between] quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’.99
88
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 153.
89
Smith, Artist and Empire, p. 127.
90
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 315.
91
Ibid., p. 315.
92
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 9.
93
Ibid., p. 3.
94
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 304.
95
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 1.
96
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 33-34.
97
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 2.
98
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 35.
99
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 4.
iv. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.100 He had not been seeking in the [mask] to draw his own portrait faithfully[,] rather, he had sketched an imaginary personage.101 To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different to one’s own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.102 Sometimes she was to give herself up entirely to art, turn her drawing room into a studio, and spend two or three days a week at picture galleries or museums. Then she would take to attending
100
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 97.
101
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, p. ix-x.
102
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 98.
103
Ibid., p. 25.
104
Ibid., p. 101.
race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, 15 and talk about nothing but betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics, and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philosophy.103 What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.104 *
105
Ibid., p. 32.
106
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, p. vii.
107
Ibid., Canto the Third, XXVII. 3-9.
108
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. 137.
109
Eaton, Mimesis across Empires, p. 154.
110
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 18.
[An interjection!] Cyril: But modern portraits by English painters, what of them? Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent? Vivian: Quite so. They are so like them that a hundred years from now no one will believe in them.105 We are interested in the . . . loneliness and vanity of his life;106 that thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame, Who woo’d thee once, thy vassal, and became The flatterer of thy fierceness, til thou wert A god unto thyself; nor less the same To the astounded kingdoms all inert, Who deem’d thee for a time whate’er thou didn’t assert,107 [an] outward projection ofthe hero-architect’s inner experiences.108 [So,] expose yourself to the general gaze,109 [but one] can do no more than construct an image; [we] must wait for this image to come to life for other people.110 *
111
Ibid., p. 21.
112
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 28.
We can only see what we are by looking ahead of ourselves, through the lens of our aims, so our life always has the form of a project or of a choice . . . But to say that we are from the start our way of aiming at a particular future would be to say that our project has already stopped with our first ways of being.111 [To] keep on repeating the effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it112 [is to]
16 suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought, or stereotyped mode of looking at things.113 What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic114 [and, vice-versa,] nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.115 I have always been of [the] opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.116 [Having] created an incompatible and unique effect . . . [we must pass] on to other things117 [for] he will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change and constant change alone, he will find his true unity.118
113
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 101.
114
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 8.
115
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 28.
116
Ibid., p. 304.
117
Ibid., p. 28.
118
Ibid., p. 101.
119
Ibid., p. 26.
120
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. xi.
121
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 4.
122
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 111.
123
Ibid., p. 35.
124
Ibid., p. 93.
125
Pavan K. Varma, Ghalib: The Man, the Times, New Delhi, Penguin Books India,
v. [Static] personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle119 [within which] individual experience ha[s] become impoverished.120 [However, our] life is not stylish,121 the subject matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and variety.122 The solid stolid British . . . lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimère, dances round it, and calls to it.123 England [and I] will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions,124 [for] why must you pick up straws out of old, time swept barns while a treasure trove of pearls lies at your feet?125 The hour’s gone by, When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.126 [I depart,] constant only to the principle of
1989, p. 61. 126
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third, I. 8-9.
127
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 98.
beauty in all things . . . looking for fresh impressions, winning from the various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before foreign altars, or smiling . . . at strange new gods!127 *
128
Petit, Irony, p. 136.
129
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth, CXXXVIII. 5-10.
130
Stein, ‘Does architecture need to be original?’
131
Smith, Artist and Empire, p. 127.
132
Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in 18th Century
British Painting, Durham, 1999, p. 82. 133
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 20.
134
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 79.
The struggle to fuse the most extensive diversity of human epistemologies . . . into the finite boundaries of the ‘individual’ is romantic in character and brings to mind the leitmotif of the Bildungsroman.128 Thy haunts are ever where the dead walls rear Their ivy mantles, and the solemn scene Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear That we become a part of what has been, And grow into the spot.129 The etymological root of ‘influence’ is ‘influenza’, suggesting influence can be something that happens to you, a process of permeation, rather than a flagrant and wilful act of rip-off.130 The [eclectic, pan-national] images [accumulated,] are as much a visual résumé as any form of cultural understanding:131 an illusion of Indianness . . . rendered powerless by its incoherence,132 [but] the ‘hereditary traits’, the ‘influences’ . . . are the text which nature gave him to decipher133 [and] interpret the personality and work of others.134 *
135
Mayer, ‘Cultural Cross Dressing’, p. 288.
136
Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, p. 82.
The mimicry (however crude) of foreign forms . . . represent[s] a form of admiration, interest or an effort at flattery, even homage,135 [but, simultaneously, renders I, the PostColonialist, detestably] more powerful by [my] manipulation of the Indian artefacts.136 He had not been seeking . . . to draw his own portrait faithfully. Rather, he had sketched
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18 an imaginary personage who should be the central figure of a series of pictures drawn from his own life and travels.137 Indian photographic portraits [are] often used as the codes of grand manner portraiture . . . being usually overpainted.138 It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon . . . in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation.139 The background was expanded, details and jewels added, and the maharajas beard exuberantly lengthened.140 [But,] it is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race-prejudices.141
137
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, pp. ix-x.
138
Smith, Artist and Empire, p. 127.
139
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 2.
140
Smith, Artist and Empire, p. 127.
141
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 115.
142
Smith, Artist and Empire, p. 207.
143
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 17.
144
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 10.
145
Varma, Becoming Indian, p. 232.
146
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Second, XV. 4-9.
147
Jim Jarmusch
148
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third, CLXXVIII. 6-9.
* Empire cannot be ignored:142 the whole history of these arts in Europe is the record of the struggle between orientalism . . . and our own imitative spirit.143 Taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence:144 culturalasymmetry:145 Thy walls defaced, they mouldering shrines removed By British hands, which had best behoved To guard those relics ne’er to be restored. Curst be thy hour when from their Isle they vowed, And once again thy hapless bosom gored, And snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred.146 * Nothing is original.147 [Therefore,] I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe148 an ensemble of
149
Isozaki, ‘1976-1984’, p. 99
150
Kolshalek, Arata Isozaki, p. 114.
151
Stein, ‘Does architecture need to be original?’
152
Lewis, Original Designs in Architecture, p. 1.
153
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 18.
154
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 96.
155
Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, p. xxvi-xxvii.
156
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 18.
fragments,149 [a] group portrait,150 schizophrenic eclecticism:151 assemblage at the level of method152 [provides] an ample field for the unlimited excursions of taste and fancy.153 [Composing] pleasurable objects by linking old ideas in a new way and by presenting forms [in a way that has not] been seen before,154 [making] differently beautiful and more perfect155 ironic juxtapositions of high and low cultural references, simultaneously celebrating kitsch, consumer culture, and classicism.156
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20 Fig. 4 The Orientalista, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l
a
Luke Edward Hall, Kurta and Pyjamas for Holisaloni, India, 2018.
b
John Nash, Brighton Pavilion, England, 1787-1823.
c
Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, England, c. 1835.
d
Guru Arjan, Sri Harmandir Sahib, India, 1581-.
e
Maharana Jagat Singh II, Jag Niwas, England, 1743-1746.
f
Dimore Studio, Palmador, Italy, 2015.
g
Rugstar, Oxidised, Germany, 21st Century.
h
Edwin Lutyens, Viceroy’s House, India, 1912-1929.
i
Ettore Sottsass, Colonna, Italy, 1998.
j
Hermès, Parures des Maharajas, France, 20th Century.
k
Anon., Kalachakra Temple, India, 1965.
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i. Originality has no historical precedent. Originality, as a symptom of modernity, is born of a neoliberal justification of a profitability and capitalisation of images and ideas, the shrieks of ‘plagiarism!’ from the benches. Creation lies not in the wideeyed, phantasmically new, rather, as a new expression, the novel can emerge from a collection of existing parts: developed, refined, and imbued with new meaning through diachronic juxtaposition or resemblance. It is an act of composition or assemblage beyond formal historicism: it is the dichroismic transfiguration of extant imagery through the lens of emotional connection and developed associations, akin to scene setting. Beyond mere inventing, it is the creative annexation of criticism and the art of dialogue with an original imbued with as much meaning as we wish to ignore or transcend.
ii.
iii.
Through the process of assembling imagery to design, we are imbibing ourselves with personality; consciously moulding our own self-image through the sources we eulogise and so, soon, we become indistinguishable from our eclectic progeny. Art is the true school of the artist, and the wonder with which we have to work with is richer than any quantifiable methodology. Augmenting life with cinematic montage, finding beauty in struggle, reconceptualising our biology and nature. Beauty and aesthetics must be composed in our self-image, before it can transcend into our work.
That this self-imaging must be a conscious is tantamount to the title of artist / architect / designer. Focus aesthetic energy on embodying and externalising our self-image, to foreshadow methodology for design. Assemblage, in this context, is imbibing new meaning, escaping inherited biology (or being critical of it) by contrasting nature with accrued images. Inherent in consciously assembling an identity is an inescapable falsity, nowhere more evident as in the flamboyant campness of queer culture, generating otherness through the nourishment of aestheticism in the self. It is but symptomatic of a pattern through history that places most value on the image: the image gaining aesthetic clarity in modernity, but with a looming superficiality.
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Fig. 5 Two Houses in Trübbach, Switzerland, Peter Märkli & Gody Kühnis, 1982
iv.
v.
One must not be static, complacent, or satisfied: exposure to the new broadens horizons and helps to clarify who we are and what we want to be; no limitation should be placed on the variety of guises, nor their authenticity to one’s character at the time. Fidelity to one single thing can never produce art (at least, not more than once): letting oneself be defined by an overarching impression – both broadcast or received – is limiting; hence nationalism, for example, should be evolved. To be comprehended is fundamental to the success design. The exploitation of the collaged canon, albeit subverted through unexpected connections, illustrates intension through association. Furthermore, with time comes crystallisation, however, awareness of the overall outcome of our eclectic endeavour is of the utmost importance; it is not an organic process.
Become aware of ingrained prejudices. Become aware of unconscious influences; develop a critical edge. Fully comprehend references. For example, post-colonialism must be understood, and one must decide on the validity, the sensitivity, the significance of such as act as incorporating the motifs of the marginalised. To paraphrase Sontag once again, ‘it is not a lamp, but a “lamp”.’ It is a lamp, to the uninitiated, the destructively uninhibited; but it is more than that to another. Thus, be aware that this is not a guilt-free endeavour, as with the moral exercise of artifice mentioned before. Through knowledge-imbued references, though, you can empower assemblage, incorporating acquired meaning as well as the purely aesthetic.
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