 |
|
Page 2
I learned about design that linear way, and started to picture myself as
the next slide on the carousel. If you design, you must have too. In thinking
of ourselves this way, we participated in a grand narrative--one that I
listened to and believed in my entire designing life: the perfectionist,
patriarchal, life-ignoring monologue of Modernism.
Tanya and Marinka were born in 1916, a few years before the Bauhaus produced
its radical manifesto. Like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church
door, the Bauhaus nailed up its tenets of what design should be--and to
this day Modernism is our basic design religion. Whatever we think or do
or say today, no matter how carefree we feel with Alias or how nonchalantly
we design with form*Z, no matter how apolitical we think we are or how much
fun we have, we are reacting to or reevaluating or denying or following
a few basic tenets that were set up for us almost 100 years ago.
Modernism--pre, post, or neo--idealizes the cutting edge, the hot, the cool,
the killer. The idea that something is hot means that something else is
tepid. And if something is killer...well, I suppose the opposite would be
"life-affirming." (God forbid.) The concept of one thing
being cooler than another assumes that there is a hierarchy in good design,
and hierarchy is an inherently male idea. (When I say male, I don't mean
manly in the Irish Spring sense. I mean individualistic, intellectual, achieving,
as opposed to the female: communal, chthonic, intuitive, tied to the body.)
Modernism is the great flowering of all that is mythically masculine,
sky cult: it has its roots in Enlightenment thinking, in the cult of the
individual. It is Apollonian, leaning heavily on the Greek ideal of the
"light of the mind," on the idea that the human mind is the apex
of creation's achievement. It depends on intellect, ratios, and percentages--a
borrowed classicism. Modernism is aerodynamic, ascendant, dominant: planes
fly over us; buildings soar above us.
When we idealize the top of the hierarchy, we encourage the perfect and
discourage the real. Apollonian perfectionism leaves out half of human experience.
Its basic intellectual and emotional shortcomings leave us nowhere to be
the complex human beings we are. At the same time, and without our particular
consent, Modernism denies all that is mythically feminine, tribal, clannish,
communal, earth-walking. Westerners are left-brain people; we make no room
for that which is messy, nonlinear, uncontrolled.
Even the postmodern era, which allegedly championed imperfection, did so
only in ways that "perfected" the imperfect, lifting the vernacular
from its lowly low to a lofty if ironic high. Old motel signs, Las Vegas
and roadside duck stands were the outsider art of Modernism. Designers framed
the colored-pencil drawing--laboriously done by the schizophrenic in his
mother's basement--hung it on the wall of our nice clean museum, and called
it art.
Postmodernism depended, as did poststructuralism, on the intellect, on quoting
obscure philosophers, mastering high and low, popular and elite, doctrine
and ideology. In the end theories of decenteredness and meaninglessness
and paradox became paradoxically central and meaningful to academic hierarchies
and tenure-review boards all over the planet. This was the true irony.
Those aging academics who earned their stripes hiding in doorways during
the Paris riots of 1968--who insisted that design be socially conscious
and stole with both hands from the word-hoards of cultural and literary
criticism--did try to break the stranglehold that the International Style
had on us. They tried to show what lay on the other side of the glossy brochure.
We must give them that.
The lovely liquid buildings of today's young architects are merely a repackaging
of good old Modernism. This time there is less verbal posturing involved,
because the decisions have already been coded into the software. The fulmination
is predigested. Your palette may have three million available decisions,
but they are all predetermined for you by the creator of the program.
These architects see their work in the same way those old Modernists saw
their work. "Let's take these new industrial tools," they say,
"see what we can make that is essential, and find in that essentialism
something perfectly beautiful." No literary hoo-ha for us. Perfectly
beautiful; perfectly essential; perfectly award-winning. Perfectly suited
to causing a ruckus at the Venice Biennial. And missing something big.
Modernism is nothing if not adaptable. A hundred years ago it was hammered
into a system that allowed us to ignore the unacademic, irrational, mysterious
parts of ourselves. Fifty years ago it provided corporations with the perfect
masking tool. Thirty years ago it gave young academics something to kick
against. Even ten years ago it allowed us to conceal our greed with the
clean lines of a $3,000 black mahogany table. Now it gives us a place to
hide.
We all watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center tower over and
over on TV. We watched that repeated moment of impact, when the rising sun's
reflection shook on the windows of the huge building and the tower
seemed to absorb the jet whole. Two jets aimed at two identical towers that
stood as a symbol of America's economic power--yes--but towers that also
stood for the Modernist pride of American architecture. They proclaimed
our power through their dominance, facelessness, intellect.
That terrorist collision can be seen as more than the enormous waste of
life the thugs planned. It is a symbol for the repressed power of the ignored--for
the primitive revenge that one side of our communal unconscious can exact
on the other. That day we witnessed the brutal side of human consciousness
strike a horrific blow to the clean, antiseptic, temperature-controlled,
and falsely secure side. Witnessing it has made us different.
Yet we all know people who, after a few shocked days, turned back to
their computer screens and engrossed themselves in creating, say, a nice
liquid building. Design can be so comforting. (Particularly when people
aren't involved.) But this belief in control--that erecting the tallest
tower or making the fastest jet is going to save us from the ugly side
of life...from death, really--is the fundamental lie of
Modernism. And we believe it. We forget about the balance we must find
if we are going to be a whole people. And that's why Modernism has
failed us: it denies the fulfillment of one half of the mind, one half
of experience, one half of consciousness. In its thrall, we've taught
ourselves not to recognize that person over there, waving to us from the
shadows--that person with fingerprints identical to ours--that female
part of the designing mind: our Marinka.
Natalia Ilyin is the author of Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde
Myth in Our Culture and the upcoming Metropolis/DAP book, Perfect.
|
|
|
