To celebrate the centennial of Alvar Aalto’s birth, I made a Pious Odyssey to Finland to savor once more his great architectural achievements. When I overnight in Helsinki, I always take a constitutional before breakfast around his supreme masterpiece Finlandia. To my dismay, I found that all the travertine cladding had been stripped off its walls.
Holy Moly! It was a Sunday and there were no workers around, but I tracked down an engineer in a hard hat and asked what was going on.”Simple,” he replied with a grin. “Aalto loved travertine too much from his Italian journeys. But the grim fact is that such a fragile stone can’t take Finnish winters. Shards were starting to fall on tourists’ heads. Can’t have that!” “So what are you going to do?” I asked plaintively. “Well, the tough-minded have argued that we must simply replace the cladding with granite which can take the cold. But of course we Finns are not tough-minded when it comes to Alvar. In honor of his Centennial, we’re doing it the hard way: thicker travertine and tougher adhesives. It will cost us several more millions down the road. But Aalto is Aalto.”
I went back to my hotel to eat breakfast, admiring the Finns for their sentimental ways when it came to great architecture. Then I hiked to the Finnish Museum of Architecture for a retrospective on his work. The epigraph made me laugh: NEVER FORGET: ARCHITECTS CAN MAKE MISTAKES! ALVAR AALTO: That should be inscribed over the entrances to all architecture schools in the world. And art schools!
The recent supershow on “Dada” that began at the Pompidou, moved to our National Gallery and recently closed at MOMA/NY is built on the complacent assumption that innovative artists have carte blanche to do anything that enters their sometimes empty heads.. It’s called experimentalism, an egregious abuse of the scientific belief that every theory must be tested against evidence. In ART, anything is supposed to go. Let that anti-intellectual fatuity loose in art and architecture schools and you have the esthetic equivalent of a building losing its cladding.
Now I’m not against artists stretching their envelopes From Cave Painting to Comic Strips, the entire history of art is a grand and elevating parade of diversity and innovation. But everything doesn’t go. And just because nineteenth century Academicism often (not always!) led to a kind of intellectual and emotional paralysis is no reason to shrug fatalistically that anything goes. It doesn’t. And mixed in with the admirable masterpieces of the twentieth century are attics full of minipieces. Mainly because what I shall call the Art Museum/Art History/Art Market Complex has authorized this Latitudinarianism, we have lost our way towards making art a civilizing factor in modern Western life.
You might say we have theologized Art in the twentieth century. The Ism Spasm that Modernism engendered has had its chance. Now we’ve got as patrons, curators, and philosophers to think freshly about what Art is for in our techno-happy society. How can we simultaneously have so many “flourishing” Museums and such a coarse and vulgar public life. I think in general the unlimited freedom Modernism bestowed on Artists has corrupted the muddled middle and made felonious the underclasses. Let me begin by analyzing the lightweight way we have regarded DaDa as an artistic manifestation.
I believe it started gradually with Romanticism in the early nineteenth century: as secular science and democratic politics began to erode the certainties that theology and absolutist power inflicted on the general public, artists began to propagandize for their new authority over morals and politics. Chateaubriand, for example, absurdly contended that “ a few lines of poetry greatly surpassed the value of all discovered mathematics.” (Ann L.Mason, The Skeptical Muse: A Study of Güinter Grass’ Conception of the Artist. Bern: Herbert Lang, 1974, p.9.)
Such ex parte piffle would ultimately emerge in the twentieth century as the Two Cultures controversy as monitored by C.P.Snow—under which dispensation humanists could not talk intellectually, or professionally, to scientists. In general, humanists know less about the nature of scientific work than vice versa. For science had in the interim had devised a complex set of theories about reality that they were continuously testing against new evidence.
The arts on the other were self-appointedly autonomous. Whatever they did “experimentally” was de facto legitimate, disciplined only by the whims of the artist in the midst of a creative surge. Dadaism was only the most absurd of those deviations from common sense. Modernism, as we know it today, while having a central tradition of thoughtful innovation, had no internal disciplines as the scientists did to monitor foolishness. Artists often exulted in the sense that they were happy fools, not governed by the quotidien. Da Da at its spasmodic worst became Duh Duh.
In 1924 El Lissitzky published a manual/manifesto in English, French, and German called the “Isms of Art” in which he tracked artistic trends from 1914 to 1925,including Cubism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Purism, Neo-Plasticism and Constructivism, to cite only the most notorious items in this Ism Spasm. (Christopher Wilk, ed., Modernism: Designing a New World (V& A Publications, 2006,p.46.) The self-confidence with which proclaimers declaimed these contradictory formulae is a lifelong counsel on the importance of prudence.
A salient example is the case of DaDa-ism which the esthetic clown Marcel Duchamps introduced by renaming a lowly urinal a high falutin’ “Fountain”. The poet Charles Simic, in reviewing the recent Dada retrospective, cites examples that exemplify the mindlessness of the movement. Tristan Tzara described how to make a Dadaist poem:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
That’s the kind of art the patrons of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. (Lenin, who played chess there with Tzara while waiting for his trip to the Finland station, asked him pitifully what Dada meant. No answer, Vladimir!) One night Janko and Huelsenbeck joined Tzara on the stage to deliver what they called a “simultaneous poem” composed of separate texts in German, French, and English—and read simultaneously. And you thought World War I was crazy. And you were right. (Charles Simic, “Making It New,” The New York Review of Books, August 10, 2006, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19191.)
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