S2 EP 1: Ornament, Meaning and Modernism

 

EPISODE 25 - ORNAMENT

Ornament has always had an important meta function within the human psyche. It has been "outlawed" for the past 100 years.

 

RESOURCE LINKS

https://www.gadarchitecture.com/en/ornament-in-architecture

https://www.artforum.com/features/louis-sullivans-ornament-209337/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354067x13515937?journalCode=capa

https://medium.com/the-thinking-of-design/ornament-as-an-abstraction-of-society-853bb29cdf08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmydPmwrKA

https://dreamswork.co.uk/portfolio/how-ornament-is-functional/

https://designmanifestos.org/adolf-loos-ornament-and-crime/

 

AK links:

Four D Design - Organic Architecture, Geometry of Nature

www.fourddesign.com

Star Tile - Multidimensional Ceramics

www.star-tile.com

Star Tile Studio - Joshua Tree, CA

https://g.co/kgs/DUMmCLh

 

Contact:

[email protected]

 

 

WHY DO WE USE ORNAMENT? - SIGNIFIER

Social signaling - and this changes over time!  Example tattoos - British nobility 1900-1920

Historically it was the demarcation of class and status - governments had rules about what colors and types of clothing could be worn, so that people could never be socially mobile-

Ornament on clothing has always been important for the military and in battle, people wore family crests / telling others who they were

The same went for houses - all ornament had meaning that could be learned (this is western)

Heraldry

 

WHY DO WE USE ORNAMENT? - SOCIAL & PSYCHOLOGICAL

Belonging is so important that people will go into debt to buy clothing that lets them fit into a social group, or a car, or jewelry etc - people are wildly craving belonging, and ornament is a way to show your tribe.

 

OTHER REASONS:

Repetition causes peace - relaxation of the nervous system

By creating the ornament, the maker can embody the energy of the thing that might be feared 

Establish historic continuity - memory, legacy.

Spiritual Side of Ornament - Adornment, Defense, Totems, Enhancing Consciousness. META FUNCTION, embodied practice

Adorning parts of us that are vulnerable - defensive and actively stating who we are / calling in our guides.

 

HISTORY OF ORNAMENT

Industrial Revolution - 1851 - now possible to make cheap ornament / mass production

Attempt at standardizing the language - Owen Jones “Grammar of Ornament” - huge interest in revival of styles / what we would now call Cultural Appropriation.. started with Archaeology around 1750, people discovering ruins, Marie Antoinette wearing toile / chinoiserie

In victorian era, people started ascribing a moral judgment to the ornament -

Augustis Pugin:  ornament should be flat if the floor is flat, not 3d etc.. can’t be inappropriate.  He was a CATHOLIC in England - super religious, championed gothic revival because it was faith-based

John Ruskin  - wrote on architecture but also on geology, botany, ornithology etc - polymath

Said that the moral condition of a society could be determined by the ornament - ornament was being incorrectly applied-

Shows what is leading up to the birth of modernism, nothing happens in a vacuum.

 

What Happened - Loos, Modernism and the 1920s

As both Sullivan and Lévi-Strauss indicate, ornament (as well as other factors) becomes a language of social structures, social experience and even social contradictions. It signifies the status and position of the building, which is itself a representation of the importance of its “owners” and users. Here the manipulation of the image, or in architecture the adding of ornamental beauty to a structure, may increase its relative desirability and value. For buildings are models of ourselves and our society, communicating through form and organizational system the character of that society.

 

BUILDINGS REFLECT THE VALUES AND VALUE OF THE OWNER.

 

MODERNISM - WHAT HAPPENED?

Adolf Loos

Ornament and Crime

The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects", Loos proclaimed, thus linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts.^[2] 

"The child is amoral. To us the Papuan is also amoral. The Papuan slaughters his enemies and devours them. He is no criminal. If, however, the modern man slaughters and devours somebody, he is a criminal or a degenerate. The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his oar, in short, everything that is within his reach. He is no criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons where eighty percent of the inmates bear tattoos. Those who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. if a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."

 

Where do we go from here - how do we start?  

(HUMANS ALWAYS START OVER WITH FORMS FROM NATURE)

Architectural adornment or ornament, like cooking—that most basic transformation of nature—is a way of being in and representing the world simultaneously, a world that in Sullivan’s words “procreates man’s own personality, that fits him, that he might feel at home with himself,” a world of natural objects transformed by the hand of man. This is why Sullivan defined the architect’s task in a manner that reveals his belief in man’s transforming power: the architect as the agent who brings nature into community.

 

James Trilling - The Language of Ornament

Harvard-trained art historian, former Textile Museum associate curator, and independent scholar James Trilling expands here on many of the highly original themes that appeared in his The Language of Ornament (2001). He offers intriguing new views of the modernist movement in art and architecture, its puritanical hostility to ornament, and its manifold relationships to the history of technology, science, and industry in the phenomenon known as modernization. Trilling is a passionate advocate of ornament, and he makes a fervent plea for its revival, largely on the grounds that it gives pleasure and "makes people happy" (p. 227).

Ranging widely across cultures, time periods, disciplines, and topics, Ornament: A Modern Perspective is a densely layered book of formidable learning, imagination, and complexity. The argument is deceptively simple and difficult to summarize; as Trilling writes of Comte (p. 177), "it is rarely possible to give the bare bones of a utopian vision without making it sound naive."

Ornament for Trilling is a specific, intricate concept. He spends part 1 of his two-part book explicating this concept, by which he means the use of motifs and patterns by skilled artists/craftsmen, "the art we add to art" (p. xiii), in the creation of one-of-a-kind objects laden with cultural meaning and symbol, esteemed as art by collectors, connoisseurs, and knowledgeable art historians.

In part 2 Trilling traces the links between modernism and the rejection of ornament. Though the focus is on the period since the pivotal Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851, his book includes an impressive intellectual history [End Page 418] of the many ways in which ornament was repudiated as idolatry and artifice in numerous societies long before modernism. But after the triumph of mechanization and the ascendancy of efficiency, materialism, and positivism, the leading theorists of modernism thoroughly devalued and assaulted ornament. The most famous instance was Viennese architect and critic Adolf Loos's 1908 essay that seemingly equated ornament with crime.

Modernism's visionaries instead exalted functionalism and simplicity in architecture and design. They saw ornament as wasteful, inefficient, and, after the Industrial Revolution, as the product of dehumanized, debased workers far removed from the ideal of the skilled artisan/craftsman of the prefactory era. Modernism's subsequent long reign among intellectual and cultural elites (despite the thin, pale revolt of the postmodern movement), Trilling argues, has now all but blinded us to ornament, erased it from our collective memory and from art. Early modernist theorists sought to jettison the wealth of inherited patterns and motifs rather than welcoming their incorporation and reworking, as traditional crafts had done. (Ironically, one of Trilling's most original arguments is that modernism in fact had its own ornamental style, employing materials that had pattern and texture and creating art rooted in indeterminacy, "labile, ambiguous, unpredictable" [p. 217].) Trilling's mission is to restore understanding and appreciation of the rich, lost world of artisanal ornament. His book addresses artists, architects, designers, their clients and collectors, art historians—tastemakers and all who care about taste.