The Urban Aesthetics of Modernism

8/4/2019 The Urban Aesthetics of Modernism

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THE URBAN AESTHETICS OFMODERNISM



EXHIBITIONS OF CULTURE AND INDUSTRY

The World’s Columbian Exposition

(also called the Chicago World’sFair ) was held in Chicago in 1893 to

celebrate the 400th anniversary of

Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the

New World. The Fair had a deep

effect on architecture, the arts,

Chicago’s self-image, and American

industrial optimism.

The Exposition Universelle of 1900

was a world’s fair held in Paris,

France, to celebrate the

achievements of the past century and

to accelerate development into the

next. The style universally present at

the Exposition was Art Nouveau.



THE WHITE CITY (1893) and The Gallery of

Machines (1900)

The international exposition (Chicago) was held in a buildingwhich was devoted to electrical exhibits. General ElectricCompany had proposed to power the electric exhibits with directcurrent at the cost of one million dollars.

Atlanta University James Weldon Johnson described it to hisfellow students and the faculty back home: “No one, who has notseen it, can form any idea of the immensity and grandeur of the

exposition; nor can I give any adequate description of it. It hasbeen fitly called the ‘White City,’ and one standing under thePeristyle and looking down the Court of Honor, surrounded bymagnificent buildings with their chaste white columns and gildeddomes glittering in the sunlight…might easily imagine himself in afairy city."

“Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that thesequence of their society could lead no further, while the meresequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was

chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus ithappened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying inthe Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, hishistorical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totallynew.“

Henry Adams, Ch. 25 ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’, from TheEducation of Henry Adams. A Study of Twentieth CenturyMultiplicity (1907)



Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

(1912) and the Machine Aesthetic

Successive superimposedimages, similar to stroboscopicmotion photography

A visual expression of whatHenry Adams called the“twentieth century multiplicity“,showing elements of bothCubist (fragmentation) andFuturist (dynamism) styles

D. first submitted the work toappear in a Cubist show at theSalon des Indépendents, but hewas asked to voluntarilywithdraw the painting, or paintover the initial title and renameit something else

He submitted the painting to the

1913 Armory Show in New YorkCity where Americans,accustomed to naturalistic art,were scandalized. Julian Street,and art critic for The New York Times wrote that the workresembled “an explosion in ashingle factory"



Dada’s Anti-art and cosmopolitanism (1916-

1920) For everything that art stood for, Dada was to

represent the opposite: “Dada has never claimed to have anything to do

with art“ – Max Ernst, 1920 “Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to

be tasted.“ – Max Ernst “Art is dead. Long live Dada.” – Walter Serner “Dada signified nothing, it is nothing, nothing

nothing” – Francis Picabia, 1915 “The true dadas are against Dada.” – First

International Dada Fair Poster, 1919 “In principle I am against manifestos, as I am also

against principles.” – Tristan Tzara, 1919 The signatories of a Dada manifesto “live in

France, America, Spain, Germany, Italy,Switzerland, Belgium, etc. but have no

nationality.” Paris, 12 January, 1921 “The new artist protests: he no longer paints

(symbolic and illusionistic reproduction) butcreates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, rocks, or locomotive structures capable of being spun in alldirections by the limpid wind of the momentarysensation.” – Tristan Tzara, Manifesto, 23 March,1918



The city as Fascination - Stream of

Consciousness; the “One Image Poem” and

Subjective Writing “London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives

me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble,save that of moving my legs through the streets…Towalk alone in London is the greatest rest.” VirginiaWoolf, A Writer’s Diary

“ In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; inthe bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars,omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling andswinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumphand the jingle and the strange high singing of someaeroplane overhead was what she loved; life,London; this moment of June.” Clarissa’s thoughts inMrs. Dalloway (1925)

“ A splendid achievement in its own way, after all,London; the season; civilization.” Peter Walsh’sthoughts in Mrs. Dalloway

“ The apparition of these faces in the crowd:Petals, on a wet, black bough.” EzraPound, “In a Station of the Metro” “In a poem of this sort one is trying to record

the precise instant when a thing outward andobjective transforms itself, or darts into a thinginward and subjective.” Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916



The City as Ungraspable, Protean, Spectral or

Monstrous; the City as a Palimpsest - Fragmentation

“Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one

side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like

upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces

which a second before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her

wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes

bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it

Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.” – Mrs.

Dalloway

“ Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

“What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal”

“You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images”

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins” – T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)



The Flâneur, the Stranger, the Blasé

“They turned back towards Oakley Street. The lamps and the plane-trees, following the line of the

embankment, struck a note of dignity that is rare in English cities. The seats, almost deserted,

were here and there occupied by gentlefolk in evening dress, who had strolled out from the

houses behind to enjoy fresh air and the whisper of the rising tide.” – E. M. Forster, Howards End

(1910)

“Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard concealed himself in

the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy’s office and looked at the people. With feverish eyes he

watched the faces drifting past under the store lights. Thoughts kept coming into his head but he

did not want to think. He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and looked sharply about.” –

Sherwood Anderson, “Sophistication,” in Winesburg, Ohio, 1919

“The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey.” James Joyce, “Araby,” in Dubliners, 1914

“ Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress

goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and

attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket personally, and yet she did not

stop.” – Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900

“The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in theintensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of

outer and inner stimuli. /…/ Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one

another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual

contrasts – all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of

changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the

unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the

metropolis creates.” – Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903



The City – a Blueprint of the Artist’s Mind

“The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked inhim, as always, memories of the girls andwomen in the plays of Gerhart Hauptman; andthe memory of their pale sorrows and thefragrance falling from the wet branches mingledin a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk acrossthe city had begun, and he foreknew that as hepassed the sloblands of Fairview he would thinkof the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman,that as he walked along the North Strand Road,glancing idly at the windows of the provisionshops, he would recall the dark humour of GuidoCvalcanti and smile, that as he went by Baird’sstonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind,a spirit of wayward boyish beauty, and that

passing a grimy marine-dealer’s shop beyondthe Liffey he would repeat the song by BenJonson which begins:

• I was not wearier where I lay.” –James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916



IT HAD TO BE PARIS…

“ I think of an afternoon in Paris to which I owe insights into my life that came in a flash,

with the force of an illumination…I told myself that it had to be in Paris, where the walls

and quays, the places to pause, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and

squares, the arcades and kiosks teach a language so singular”.

Walter Benjamin



ARTIFICIALITY; MASS-PRODUCTION

On Baudelaire’s “Crépuscule du soir”: the big city knows no true eveningtwilight. In any case, the artificial lightning does away with all transition to night.The same state of affairs is responsible for the fact that the stars disappear fromthe sky over the metropolis. Who ever notices when they come out? Kant’s

transcription of the sublime through “the starry heavens above me and the morallaw within me” could never have been conceived in these terms by an inhabitantof the big city”.

Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Mass production is the principal economic cause – and class warfare theprincipal social cause – of the decline of the aura.”


Benjamin used the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe and reverence onepresumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. According toBenjamin, this aura inheres not in the object itself but rather in external attributessuch as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicizedauthenticity, or its cultural value. Aura is thus indicative of art's traditionalassociation with primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power and its further association with magic and (religious or secular) ritual. With the advent of art'smechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) inwhich there is no actual original, the experience of art could be freed from placeand ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience,leading to a shattering of the aura. "For the first time in world history," Benjaminwrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasiticaldependence on ritual."



The Shopping Arcades of Paris – Temples of Commodity

Capital

“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-

panelled extending through whole blocks of buildings , whose proprietors have joinedtogether for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their life

from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in

miniature.”




WALTER BENJAMIN’S THE ARCADES PROJECT

- Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the

Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a

monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years

-Benjamin called it "the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas."

-Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris - glass-roofed rows of

shops that were early centers of consumerism - Benjamin presents a montage

of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources,

arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as

"Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs,"

"Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," "Theory of Progress."

-His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things - a

process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

-The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the

bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate

the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask.

-In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time

is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost

time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.



THE MAN OF THE CROWD

The pleasure of being a in a crowd is a mysterious expression of sensual joy

in the multiplication of number …Number is in all …Ecstasy is a number…

Religious intoxication of great cities”.

Charles Baudelaire quoted by Walter Benjamin

“Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense

reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the

crowd itself ; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to

each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering

grace of all the elements of life. He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-

I”, at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself,which is always unstable and fugitive.”

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1859-1860

On the image of the crowd in Poe: How well can the image of the big city turn out

when the register of its physical dangers – to say nothing of the dangers to which it

itself is exposed – is as incomplete as it is at the time of Poe or Baudelaire? In the

crowd we see a presentiment of these dangers.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project



COMMODIFICATION, MASS SOCIETY, PROSTITUTION

“Baudelaire perceived the significance of the mass-produced article as clearlyas did Balzac. In this, his “Americanism”, of which Laforgue speaks, has itsfirmest foundation. He wanted to create a poncif , a cliché. Lemaître assures himthat he succeeded.


“The labyrinth is the right path for him who always arrives early enough at hisdestination. For the flâneur this destination is the marketplace”.


Baudelaire introduces into the lyric the figure of sexual perversion that seeks itsobjects on the street. What is most characteristic, however, is that he does this

with the phrase “trembling like a fool” in one of his most perfect love poems “A UnePassante”.


“One of the most powerful attractions of prostitution appears only with the rise of the metropolis – namely its operation in the mass and through the masses. It wasthe existence of the masses that first enabled prostitution to overspread large areasof the city, whereas earlier it had been confined, if not to houses, at least to streets.

The masses first made it possible for the sexual object to be reflectedsimultaneously in a hundred different forms of allurement – forms which theobject itself produced. Beyond this, salability itself can become a sexual stimulus;and this attraction increases wherever an abundant supply of womenunderscores their character as commodity. With the exhibition of girls in rigidlyuniform dress at a later period, the music hall review explicitly introduced the mass-produced article into the libidinal life of the big-city dweller”.




HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

“The Irishman is the true cosmopolitan immigrant. All-pervading, heshares his lodging with perfect impartiality with the Italian, the Greek and the“Dutchman,” yielding only to sheer force of numbers, and objects equally tothem all. A map of the city, colored to designate nationalities, would show

more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow.The city on such a map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irishprevailing on the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans onthe East Side. But intermingled with these ground colors would be an oddvariety of tints that would give the whole the appearance of an extraordinarycrazy-quilt.” – Jacob Riis about “the mixed crowd” of New York in How theOther Half Lives, 1890

The tenement is generally a brick building from four to six stories high onthe street, frequently with a store on the first floor which, used for the sale of

liquor, has a side opening for the benefit of the inmates. Four familiesoccupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets,used as bedrooms, with a living room twelve feet by ten. The staircase isoften a dark well in the centre of the house and no direct ventilation ispossible, each family being separated from the other by partition.

“Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for five cents a spot.” -Jacob Riis about the squalid conditions in the 1890’s tenements of New Yorkin How the Other Half Lives

On either side of the narrow entrance to Bandits’ roost is “the Bend.” Abuseis the normal condition of “the Bend”, murder is everyday crop, with thetenants not always the criminals.



Ashcan School During the first decades of the 20th century,

Robert Henri and his circle (also called ‘TheEight’) of Ashcan realists became knownfor their efforts to reconnect art and life.They depicted daily life in the metropolis – street culture, popular entertainments,new immigrants, and the working class.Many Ashcan images revealed conflictingand ambivalent attitudes to the city: theyexposed its darker side but at the sametime portrayed the vitality of urban living.

Eviction by Everett Shinn – 1904

New York by George Bellows -1911

“For them the city was, as John Sloan said,‘a cosmopolitan palette where the spectrumchanged in every side street.’ /../ JohnSloan preferred the seamy side of townover the elegant fifth avenue style. He

enjoyed the ‘drab, shabby, happy, sad andhuman’ life he found there.” Richard Schiff,“Ashcan Scool, America’s First and OnlyNational Movement”



THE ART OF PHOTOGRAPHY – ALFRED

STIEGLITZ

Since art was deemed the productof imagination, skill, and craft, howcould a photograph (made with aninstrument and light-sensitivechemicals instead of brush andpaint) ever be considered itsequivalent? And if its purpose wasto reproduce details precisely, and

from nature, how couldphotographs be acceptable if negatives were “manipulated,” or if photographs were retouched?Because of these questions,amateur photographers formedcasual groups and official societiesto challenge such conceptions of

the medium. They—along withelite art world figures like AlfredStieglitz—promoted the latenineteenth-century style of “artphotography,” and produced low-contrast, warm-toned images likeThe Terminal that highlighted themedium’s potential for originality.



SIMULTANEITY AND SPEED, DESTRUCTION AND

RECONSTRUCTION - PHOTOMONTAGE

Like everyone else, artists wereradically affected byindustrialization, politicalrevolution, trench warfare,airplanes, talking motionpictures, radios, automobiles,and much more—and they

wanted to create art that was asradical and “new” as modern lifeitself. If we consider the work of the Cubists and Futurists, weoften think of their works interms of simultaneity and speed,destruction and reconstruction.Dadaists, too, challenged the

boundaries of traditional art withperformances, poetry,installations, andphotomontage that use thematerials of everyday cultureinstead of paint, ink, canvas, or bronze.



Hannah Höch –Schnitt mit dem Köchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer

Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands

(Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural

Epoch of Germany)

(1919-1920)



DADA PERFORMANCE – HUGO BALL’S

“SOUND POEMS”

In 1906, dadaists

gathered at the Cabaret

Voltaire in Zurich. Hugo

Ball stood before an

irritated crowd in his“obelisk suit” and began

reciting his sound

poems. This moment is

known for its brash

nihilism aimed atfreeing oneself from

history - artistic, political,

etc.



HUGO BALL’S SOUND POEMS – A NEW GENRE

Sound poems are poems without

words or abstract poems. In order

to create them, the language is

divided into its abstract parts

(syllables and individual letters)

and then rearranged to form

meaningless sounds.

An excellent example is Hugo

Ball’s poem “Karawane” (1916)

recited at Cabaret Voltaire.



TRISTAN TZARA’S “CUT-UP POEMS” –

1920s

To make a Dadaist poem:

- take a newspaper and 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

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The Urban Aesthetics of Modernism

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