modernity

Iakov Chernikhov, Cycle of architectural landscapes and other fantasies (1930)

Posted by

2

.

Architectural fantasy stimulates the architect’s activity, it arouses creative thought not only for the artist but it also educates and arouses all those who come in contact with him; it produces new directions, new quests, and opens new horizons.

— Iakov Chernikhov, 1927

Chernikhov is a pioneer, a trail-blazer of new themes in graphic art, and also, in part, of new modes of graphic design.

— Erikh Gollerbakh, 1930

Regular readers of The Charnel-House will know that I’ve already written on the brilliant architect and designer Iakov Chernikhov (1889-1951). Or rather, I’ve posted the excellent introduction Erikh Gollerbakh wrote in 1930 introducing Chernikhov’s The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms, as well as a broader overview of his significance and career by the more recent scholar Dmitrii Khmel’nitskii. Some of my own thoughts about his work as it can be found in a sketch I made relating it  to that of the American Hugh Ferriss, his contemporary. Moreover, Chernikhov receives a brief mention in my broader outline of Russian and Soviet architecture from 1900 to 1953.

I won’t reprise the same summary treatment here. For now, just enjoy these images from Chernikhov’s Cycle of Architectural Landscapes, as well as other assorted fantasies. Anyone who’s into these will likely also want to take a look at Theo van Doesburg’s themes for the Aubette Café in Strasbourg, Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröderhuis in Utrecht, JJP Oud’s Café de Unie in Rotterdam, and Frederick Kiesler’s “City of Space” model, Lazar Khidekel’s cosmist suprematism, Ivan Kudriashev’s dynamic abstractions, László Moholy-Nagy’s paintings and photographs, Charlotte Perriand’s purist furniture designs, and Il’ia Chashnik’s revolutionary suprematism.

Click on any of the pictures to see them in higher resolution, and check out any of the links above if you’re interested in learning more.

Hong Kong high-rise

Posted by

6

.
So lately I’ve been getting into some of the photography and writing that’s been done on Hong Kong, just off mainland China. I know it’s still nominally autonomous, but it’s been moving toward full integration for some time now. Last I checked it was still considered a “special administrative” zone within China proper.

Anyway, the only exposure I’d really had to Hong Kong had come through television and film. First through Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) and then the “White Ghost” (1996) episode of the British police procedural Cracker. Both are great, by the way, so I’d highly encourage you to watch them if you have any interest. Recently, however, I came across the German photographer Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density series (2013). These photographs depict the numerous, eerily colorful high-rises that crowd the skyline of Hong Kong.

You can see a number of them in very high resolution just by clicking on the small icons below. They’ve been assembled from various places around the internet, though the Tumblr blog Architecture of Doom probably deserves special mention.

It took me a while to figure out what made these images so striking. At first I surmised that it was because of the almost total lack of any visible human presence, which is somewhat ironic considering it’s a visual record human population density. The whole city should be (or should at least appear to be, since it in reality is) crawling with people.

But that’s not it. Part of it, no doubt, but not the whole story. Continue reading →

The Rationalist current in Soviet avant-garde architecture

Posted by

2

ASNOVA at VKhUTEMAS

.
Not all of the early Soviet architectural avant-garde was “Constructivist,” strictly speaking. Though this was the title often generically used to describe to all modernist architecture coming out of Russia, only those pieces produced by the architectural group OSA can really be considered constructivist per se. OSA’s self-proclaimed doctrine was constructivism, founded on the principle of the “functional method” of design, as Ginzburg and the Vesnin brothers described it.

Earlier, another avant-garde group — the Association of New Architects, or ASNOVA — had been founded in 1923 by Nikolai Ladovskii, Nikolai Dokuchaev, Vladimir Krinskii, and El Lissitzky (though Lissitzky spent most of his time abroad). This school of architectural thought was deeply informed by the principles of abstract Suprematism in painting, the style invented by Kazimir Malevich some years before. In fact, Lissitzky’s PROUN series led directly into his architectural phase of production.

Project for the “new city”

V. Popov, Diploma project on the theme of the “New City” (1928), studio of Nikolai Ladovskii, housing commune model
V. Popov, Diploma project on the theme of the “New City” (1928), studio of Nikolai Ladovskii, housing commune axonometric view
V. Popov, Diploma project on the theme of the “New City” (1928), studio of Nikolai Ladovskii, administrative building axonometric
V. Popov, Diploma project on the theme of the %22New City%22 (1928), studio of Nikolai Ladovskii, living complex, axonometric and plan
V. Popov, Diploma project on the theme of the “New City” (1928), studio of Nikolai Ladovskii, perspective view of the administrative center
V. Popov, Diploma project on the theme of the “New City” (1928), studio of Nikolai Ladovskii

.
As opposed to the Constructivists in the Society of Modern Architects (OSA), founded two years later, the premise of architectural Rationalism, as it came to be called, was formalistic rather than functional. The members of ASNOVA appealed to evidence gleaned from the study of psychotechnics, a science imported from Germany and America, to claim that certain formal shapes and patterns of design had a direct effect on the psychology of those who viewed the structure of a building. Once these formal principles could be discerned, they could be used to produce a psychological effect, lifting viewers and inhabitants out of false consciousness and inspiring them to participate in the construction of a new society. Continue reading →

Theater at the Bauhaus (1925)

Posted by

10

Oskar Schlemmer

Untitled
Image: Walter Gropius, design for the
“total theater” at the Bauhaus (1926)
untitled2

From a lecture-demonstration at the Bauhaus by Oskar Schlem­mer to the Circle of Friends of the Bauhaus (March 16, 1927).

Before speaking about theater proper at the Bauhaus, we should first take a brief look at the way in which it came about, consider the justification for its existence, and observe its path and its goals. In short, we should review its primary endeavor, which is to approach all our material from a basic and elementary standpoint. It is because of this endeavor that the stage here has became an organic link in the total chain of Bauhaus activity.

It is natural that the aims of the Bauhaus — to seek the union of the artistic-ideal with the craftsmanlike-practical by thoroughly investigating the creative elements, and to understand in all its ramifications the essence of der Bau, creative construction — have valid application to the field of the theater. For, like the concept of Bau itself, the stage is an orchestral complex which comes about only through the cooperation of many different forces. It is the union of the most heterogeneous assortment of creative elements. Not the least of its functions is to serve the metaphysical needs of man by constructing a world of illusion and by creating the transcen­dental on the basis of the rational.

Cover to a more recent edition of Oskar Schlemmer's writings on the theater

Cover to a more recent edition of Oskar
Schlemmer’s writings on the theater

.
From the first day of its existence, the Bauhaus sensed the impulse for creative theater; for from that first day the play instinct [der Spieltrieb] was present. The play instinct, which Schiller in his wonderful and endur­ ing Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, (1795)] calls the source of man’s real creative values, is the un-self-conscious and naIve pleasure in shaping and pro­ ducing, without asking questions about use or uselessness, sense or non­ sense, good or bad. This pleasure through creation was especially strong at the beginning (not to say the infancy) of the Bauhaus
…….in Weimar
and was expressed in our exuberant parties, in improvisations, and in the imaginative masks and costumes which we made.

We might say that during the course of its development, this state of naïveté, which is the womb of the play instinct, is generally followed by a period of reflection, doubt, and criticism, something that in turn can easily bring about the destruction of the original state, unless a second and, as it were, skeptical kind of naIvete tempers this critical phase. Today we have become much more aware of ourselves. A sense for standards and con­stants has arisen out of the unconscious and the chaotic. This, together with concepts such as norm, type, and synthesis, points the way to creative form [Gestaltung].

Costumes

Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus masks. Photo by Erich Consemüller.
Oskar Schlemmer, Stair Joke: A pantomime. Photo by Erich Consemüller.
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Illustration 14: Scene from the Triadic Ballet. Photo by Karl Grill.
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costumes, 1920s
Schlemmer, costumes for the Triadic Ballet (1924)
Golden Sphere Costume

.
It was due only to intense skepticism, for example, that in 1922 Lothar Schreyer’s plan to form a Bauhaus theater failed; at the time there was practically no climate for strong philosophical points of view (Weltan­schauungstendenzen), none at least which could be found in the sacral garb of Expressionism. On the other hand, there was a distinct feeling for satire and parody. It was probably a legacy of the Dadaists to ridicule automatically everything that smacked of solemnity or ethical precepts. And so the grotesque flourished again. It found its nourishment in travesty and in mocking the antiquated forms of the contemporary theater. Though its tendency was fundamentally negative, its evident recognition of the origin, conditions, and laws of theatrical play was a positive feature.

The dance, however, stayed alive throughout this period. During the course of our growth it changed from the crude country dancing of our “youth hostelers” [Rüpeltanz der Wandervögel] to the full-dress fox trot. The same thing happened in music: our concertina metamorphosed into our jazz band (A. Weininger). Group dancing found its image reflected on the stage in the dance of the individual. And from this developed our formalized use of color [das Farbig-Formale], and the Mechanical Ballet (K. Schmidt, Bogler, Teltscher). Experimentation with colored light and shadows became the “Reflectory Light Play” (Schwertfeger and L. Hirschfeld­ Mack). A marionette theater was begun.

While we had no stage of our own in Weimar and had to give our productions on a sort of dubious suburban podium there, since the move
…….to Dessau
we have been in the enviable position of having a “house-stage” of our own in the new Bauhaus building. Although it was originally meant to be a platform for lectures as well as a stage for performances on a limited scale, it is nevertheless well equipped for a serious approach to stage problems.

Architecture

Design for a total theater by Walter Gropius. Drawing by Stefan Sebök (1926-27). Never realized.
Design for a total theater by Walter Gropius (1926).
Design for a total theater by Walter Gropius (1926).
Interior to the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility design by Gropius and outfitted with Breuer chairs (1926). Photo by Erich Consemuller.
Inside the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility, designed by Walter Gropius (1926). Photo by Erich Consemüller.
Interior to the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility design by Gropius and outfitted with Breuer chairs (1926).
Interior to the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility design by Gropius and outfitted with Breuer chairs (1926). Photo by Erich Consemüller.
The building as stage (1927). Photograph by T. Lux Feininger (1925).

.
For us these problems and their solution lie in fundamentals, in elementary matters, in discovering literally the primary meaning of Stage. We are concerned with what makes things typical, with type, with number and measure, with basic law. • • • I scarcely need to say that these concerns have been active, if not necessarily dominant, during all periods of great art; but they could be active only when preconditioned by a state of hypersensitive alertness and tension, that is, when functioning as the regulators of a real feeling of involvement with the world and life. Of many memorable statements which have been made about number, measure, and law in art, I cite only one sentence from Philipp Otto Runge: “It is precisely in the case of those works of art which most truly arise from the imagination and the mystique of our soul, unhampered by externals and unburdened by history, that the strictest regularity is necessary.” Continue reading →

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915)

The many deaths of art

Posted by

1

.
IMAGE: Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square (1915)

.
A moderated panel discussion held by the Platypus Affiliated Society on Sat, 2.23.13 at the New School.

Video from the event

The “death of art” has been a recurring theme within aesthetic and philosophical discourse for over two centuries. At times, this “death” has been proclaimed as an accomplished fact; at others, artists themselves have taken the “death of art” as a goal to be accomplished. So while this widely perceived “death” is lamented by many as a loss, it is celebrated by others as a moment of life renewed. For them, art is all the better for having disburdened itself of the baggage of outmoded modernist ideologies. Insofar as the “death” of longstanding cultural traditions has in the past typically been understood to signal a deeper crisis in society at large, however, the meaning of death necessarily takes on a different aspect today — especially when the tradition in question is modernism, the so-called the “tradition of the new” (Harold Rosenberg). Because the notions of “death” and “crisis” appear to belong to the very edifice of modernity that has just been rejected, these too are are to be jettisoned as part of its conventional yoke. Modernity itself having become passé, even the notion of art’s “death” would seem to have died along with modernism.

We thus ask our panelists not merely whether art is at present “dead,” but also if traditions are even permitted the right to perish in conservative times. If some once held that the persistence of philosophy indicated the persistence of obsolete social conditions, does the persistence of art signal ongoing social conditions that ought to have long ago withered away? If so, what forms of political and artistic practice would be sufficient to realize art, and in what ways would realizing art signal something beyond art? Marx felt that the increasing worldliness of philosophy in his time — heralded by the culmination of philosophy in Hegel — demanded not only the end of philosophy, but also that the world itself become philosophical. If avant-garde movements once declared uncompromising war on art (Aleksei Gan) in order to tear down the barrier between art and life, would the end or overcoming of art not similarly require that the world itself become artistic? Continue reading →

Narkomfin

Video: ДОМ НОВОГО БЫТА (Dom Novogo Byta)

Posted by

1

Re:centering periphery 2 – Moscow

A film by OginoKnauss
Directed by Manuela Conti and Lorenzo Tripodi

With:

Roman Sinitcin as Michail Bulgakov´s reader
Ekaterina Milyutina,
Valentin, Nikita, Zhenia and other residents of the Narkomfin Building
Alexei Senatorov, owner and CEO at MIAN Real Estate
Elena Olshanskaya, Resident of Zhourgaz House and campaigner for the preservation of EL Lissitsky’s Printing Plant.

Script: Lorenzo Tripodi
Cinematography: Manuela Conti
New York assistant: Nicola “Teach” Guarneri
Sound design and recording: Francesca Mizzoni
Editor: Manuela Conti
Moscow executive: Anastasia Volkova
Russian Translation: Liliana Polyanska
Text revision: Paul David Blackmore, Mike James.
Narrator: Lorenzo Tripodi
Voice recording: Gino Roberti / joprec
Software programming and internet application: Sergio Segoloni / k-labo

ДОМ НОВОГО БЫТА
(Dom Novogo Byta)

.
Dom Novogo Byta is a new stage into the investigation led by Ogino:knauss on how Twentieth century’s modernist principles shaped the everyday life of urban dwellers, and what is their heritage in a global urbanization perspective. Invited by the “RKM-save Urban Heritage” campaign for the preservation of constructivist architecture to produce a piece for an art exhibition, the collective landed in Moscow in 2009 to shot a video installation. This film is the diary of our journey chasing the remnants of the extraordinary utopian season of the avant-gards and confronting with the contemporary reality of post-communist Russia. It adopts as a vantage point of the shanty Narkomfin building, hardly surviving today in a central plot of land appealing for real-estate speculators. Designed in 1927 by Moisei Ginzburg this is one of the earlier projects to absorb Le Corbusierian modernist principles. It was a prototype for revolutionary communes to come, aimed at reforming the everyday life of Russian citizens together with their spatial environment, but its utopian aims were soon annihilated by the rise to power of Stalin. From the story of the Narkomfin, the film progressively divagates into the imagined landscapes promoted by propaganda, finally getting lost in the inhuman periphery of the new mass urbanization.

Narkomfin in the construction stage, with builders (1929)
Narkomfin in the construction stage, with Moisei Ginzburg supervising (1929)
Narkomfin upon opening (1930)

“Interview with Anthony Paul Smith on the slow reception of philosopher François Laruelle,” by C. Derick Varn

Posted by

1

Originally posted on The (Dis)Loyal Opposition to Modernity.

Ross Wolfe: When I first began blogging in the summer of 2008, “speculative realism” and “object-oriented ontology” (still as yet largely undifferentiated) was on the rise.  Taylor Adkins contacted me about providing some insight into the German philosophical references used by François Laruelle in his “non-philosophy.”  I provided one brief commentary, having come out of a recent engagement with German Idealism via Dieter Henrich and Brady Bowman.  I’m still very ambivalent about Laruelle’s ideas, insofar as I pretend to understand them, though I find his critique of the common “Greco-Occidentalist” threads in the post-Hegelian “philosophies of difference” intriguing and appreciate Ray Brassier’s contributions that rely on Laruellean concepts.

[C Derick Varn: Anthony Paul Smith is a scholar and blogger for An und für sich. He came to my attention by a web seminar I “attended” on the philosophy of François Laruelle and non-philosophy which I attended.   I have since read his translations of Principles of Non-Philosophy (with  Nicola Rubczak)  and Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy both out with Continuum. While still trying to wrap by head around the implications of Laruelle, I also wondered why Laruelle has taken so long to catch on compared to many of his contemporaries like Badiou, Derrida, and Deleuze. ]

C. Derick Varn: Why do you think Laruelle has been slow to be introduced to the Anglophone world?

Anthony Paul Smith: Regarding your first question, I taught at DePaul University as an adjunct for a year bouncing between the departments of Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Philosophy. During that year Alan D. Schrift came and presented a paper to the philosophy department. You may know that he’s editing a pretty comprehensive history of Continental philosophy and I jokingly asked him about why he hadn’t included Laruelle in his history. After explaining that he didn’t really know anyone who worked on him, it didn’t come to mind and whatever, he did tell me that he thought Laruelle was one of those figures who just fell through the cracks. If things had gone a little differently, he said, or someone had picked up a text to translate in the 70s or 80s, who knows if he would have been picked up. I didn’t get the impression he particularly liked Laruelle or anything, but he did bring out for me the contingency of these sorts of things. I mean, there are lots of brilliant thinkers in the world and some of them are exceedingly smart. But in the same way we pass homeless people and think that there is some perfectly good reason why that’s him and not me, I think as readers of philosophy we just assume that there is a really good reason we all keep talking about Derrida or Deleuze or Badiou or even Meillassoux now (just to stick with some sort of contemporary names). So that is clearly part of it, just an accident of history. At the same time his work and the language he uses to express it are difficult and I think this has put off a number of potential translators. I always wondered why Ray Brassier, for example, never translated one of his works, even one of the shorter ones, considering his own skills in that area. But he has tended to go with relatively more straight forward writers like Badiou and Meillassoux. But that’s the real issue — the lack of anything of his to read unless you’re willing to track down the French and work through it in a language unfamiliar to most Anglophone readers.

C.D.V.: Do you think Laruelle’s linkage to Ray Brassier’s work and also to Badiou has limited his reading in the US and Europe?

A.P.S.: As for Laruelle being linked to Brassier’s work, I don’t know if it has limited his reading. Brassier really was the first person to advocate for him in his Radical Philosophy article. At the same time, I think that Brassier’s own development (which is ongoing as far as I understand) did really color how many younger readers ended up reading him. There was a certain assumption, since many of them weren’t reading the primary sources I don’t think, that Laruelle shared Brassier’s antipathy for the human, for religion, for meaning, even for a vision of science that isn’t itself colored by a certain grimness and darkness. I think with Laruelle’s own texts starting to finally be available in English this is starting to fade away, which means many of those first-generation of readers have moved on from Laruelle finding his work concerned with issues they are not. But, I think we are seeing new readers, many coming from the arts, and I’m looking forward to conversations that do build off of Laruelle’s actual work rather than Brassier’s. I should say, I think Brassier was always quite clear that he had found something  useful in Laruelle, that he wasn’t just explicating him. And I think we see some of the harshest criticism of Laruelle, if respectful, in the chapter of Nihil Unbound where Brassier deals with him. Continue reading →

Chernikhov's dark turn

Iakov Chernikhov’s sepulchral city

Posted by

1

The dark turn in Chernikhov’s late works,
the architectural necropolis
after the onset of Stalinism

Almost gothic.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.  —Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Avant-gardist Iakov Chernikhov, from his dark, Gothic turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Chernikhov’s dark turn after Stalinism
Joseph Beuys teaching

“Beuys’ Concept of Social Sculpture and Relational Art Practices Today,” by Laurie Rojas

Posted by

1

“Best of Chicago Art Magazine” re-post. Originally appeared in Chicago Art Criticism on 2/28/10, and then subsequently on Laurie Rojas’ excellent blog.

German artist Joseph Beuys’s work appears unfathomable: his entire oeuvre engaged drawing, sculpture, performance, pedagogy, and political activism. Art critics and art historians have admitted the difficulty of placing this enigmatic artist within the modern or postmodern lineages of significant postwar artists. In the foreword to Joseph Beuys: The Reader, Arthur Danto argues that Beuys (1921–86), like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, is one of the artists who one must turn to in order to understand contemporary art. Danto believes, however, that unlike Duchamp and Warhol, who are frequently discussed and shown, Beuys has faded from contemporary awareness. This is both true and not true.

Beuys is famously remembered for two things: the theoretical hypothesis of “social sculpture,” and the statement “everybody is an artist.” A close consideration of the relationship between these two concepts reveals Beuys’s program for art and his historically motivated vision for society. Both concepts have influenced participatory, socially engaged, and relational art today and provide a vehicle for unraveling their historical significance, even if they claim to detach themselves from Beuys’s historical moment. Perhaps of even more significance, then, is what aspects of Beuys work seem to have — somewhat suspiciously — faded.

Danto suggests that perhaps the fading interest in Beuys lies in the fact that both the subject of Beuys’s art and his own personal myth are bound up in World War II and the period of German reconstruction. It is possible that the fading of Beuys is due to the inability to digest and resolve the problems his work raised in the aftermath of World War II. Our historical moment, almost five decades later, inherits that history and those desires, even if a certain metaphysical strain of postmodernist thinkers have incessantly argued that such a moment has irretrievably passed. The analysis of the influence of Beuys on contemporary artists, specifically those engaged in relational aesthetics, in this essay is to argue and demonstrate that the moment has not passed, but changed. The difference in our historical moment is that we are less conscious of — and less interested in — the social conditions that produced and re-produces the political disillusionment and aesthetic desires and needs that emerged after WWII. Continue reading →