Architecture and Ugliness

Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture

Wouter Van Acker, Thomas Mical, Wouter Van Acker, Thomas Mical

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350236707
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350068254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture.

This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions – and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime.

This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?

CHAPTER ONE

Ugliness, the anti-aesthetic and appropriation: With some remarks on the architecture of ARM

John Macarthur

Introduction

In a recent essay on Australian architects ARM Architecture (formerly Ashton Raggatt McDougall), Charles Jencks claimed a critical role for ugliness in architecture.¹¹ In doing so he cited the famous essay by John Summerson on the ugliness of the buildings of nineteenth-century architect William Butterfield.² To praise ugliness as an affront to norms of good taste, as a ‘sensuous beastliness’, has much the same meaning today as it did when Summerson wrote in the 1940s, or indeed that it had for Butterfield. A claim is made that a certain kind of aesthetic demandingness can challenge and unsettle norms, with the aim of forcing art and architecture to progress and evolve. In architecture the techniques of mal-proportion, incompleteness, pattern overwhelming form, abrupt changes of scale, appropriations of the vernacular and inelegant detailing are pretty much continuous from the Gothic Revival, through Brutalism to postmodernism, to the more critical architecture of today. But the word ‘ugly’ did not have a place in the postmodernism of the late twentieth century when ugliness, along with beauty and aesthetics as a whole, were under erasure as an uncritical presumption that the essence of human subjectivity could be found in perceptual experience.

This is the time of the ‘anti-aesthetic’ when Jencks’s account of architecture as a popular language, and the journals Oppositions’ and Assemblage’s account of it as a very difficult theoretical one, each assumed that architecture was a matter of meaning, or its impossibility: of critique of architecture’s professional autonomy or, alternatively, a claim that architecture’s formal autonomy could be a critique of instrumental modernity. Either way it was a turn away from thinking of architecture as something found in sensory experience to a matter of meaning or, rather, semiosis, where architecture transmitted, negotiated and critiqued pre-existing culture. An agonistic attitude to aesthetics was a familiar part of the critical stance of postmodernism, because of the identification of aesthetics with the normalization of modernism under capitalism. The kind of universalization of modernist design principles promulgated by institutions such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, or the United Kingdom’s Design Council, opened a space for a critical practice within the arts. Confronting the normalizing program of modernist ‘good taste’ was no longer just a matter of cliché busting within art and design discourse but could claim a wider politics of confronting the vested interests in the promotion of modernity.

Critical postmodernist practice was an aspect of a wider anti- or post-humanist moment in the humanities academy guided by landmarks such as Louis Althusser’s critique of humanist Marxism, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s studies of the construction of subjectivity in texts, and Michel Foucault’s historicizing of the forms of governing persons and populations. By the 1980s, to decry something as being ugly was seen as naïveté, a failure to realize the complexities of subject formation. The epithet ‘ugly’, like beauty, implied that phenomena were experienced at some essential ahistorical level that could be found beneath the social and cultural construction of discourse. Critics of the oppressive regime of essentialism were not interested in ugliness but were instead readers of Hal Foster’s highly influential collection The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture of 1983.³ Alongside essays by the well-known figures of Rosalind Krauss, Jurgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, it contained subsequently influential essays by younger writers; Douglas Crimp’s ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’ and Craig Owen’s ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’. Foster’s introduction, along with Crimp, and Owen’s and Krauss’ other publications from this period produced a loose concept of the ‘anti-aesthetic’ that the title had advertised. Architects, like myself, bought the book in part because it also contained Kenneth Frampton’s essay ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’.⁴ Earnest readers of architectural theory did their best to place architecture in this wide spectrum of postmodern thought where resistance to the architectural hegemony of the metropole was said to be part of a wider critique of the instrumentalization of the enlightenment, and the ‘otherness’ of non-metropolitan architecture could be read as the end of a normative culture of modernism. How these typical themes of architectural postmodernism were related to institutional critique in the visual arts and the ‘othering’ of women artists, and were against ‘aesthetics’, was harder to interpret at the time. With some historical distance it is indeed surprising that anyone thought that critical regionalism was anti-aesthetic.

An anti-aesthetic artist or architect was nevertheless producing things that would once have been called ugly. And the comportment of those who employed these techniques has much in common with Aristotle’s description of the power of the artist to take something ugly and render it pleasing or in post-Romantic terms ‘interesting’ in representation.⁵ But there are also crucial differences, which unfold from the question of whether art can also be ugly. The ugly is the antonym of natural beauty, but it is also the base material that can be transformed by art and which then distinguishes the beauties of art and nature. Ugliness’ difference with beauty starts to come undone in the trichotomy of beauty and ugliness in nature, and an exclusively beautiful art. If we introduce a fourth term, a kind of artistic ugliness, an anti-aesthetic, then a complex matrix opens.

In a common-sense understanding, ‘anti-aesthetic’ might be a true scepticism about the existence of a faculty of aesthetic judgement; in the politics of culture it might be an attempt to raise the value of ‘meaning’ and discursive construction over the sensory; or, third, it could be a negative aesthetics where the previous possibilities are enacted as ploys and feints in a fundamentally aesthetic understanding of the affectivity of the ugly. All these are in fact at play in the late twentieth century and this chapter will attempt to distinguish them as concepts as well as the fact that they have been confused and overlaid, a confusion not resolved in the current return to respectability of ‘aesthetics’. A main task in disentangling ugliness and the anti-aesthetic is to do with the relation of the discourses of architecture and the visual arts in postmodernism; and here also lies the critical potential of re-entangling these terms today. In what follows I claim that the artistic strategy of appropriation adds a further dimension, a new problematic to the other issues of a negative aesthetics and the refusal of aesthetics per se. As historical understanding of postmodernism grows we should also understand that ugliness today has no choice but to admit that, while Butterfield might be an ancestor, it is the child of the anti-aesthetic.

Anti-aesthetic in the visual arts

While ‘the anti-aesthetic’ is not a thing well known in architecture, it is a moderately well-defined term of visual arts discourse. In the introductory essay to the book of that name Foster writes:

‘Anti-aesthetic’ is the sign not of a modern nihilism – which so often transgressed the law only to confirm it – but rather of a critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them. ‘Anti-aesthetic’ also signals that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here: the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without ‘purpose’, all but beyond history, or that art can effect a world at once (inter)subjective, concrete and universal … More locally, ‘anti-aesthetic’ also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic.⁶

In a slightly earlier publication, Owens described what distinguished postmodern practice: ‘Appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization – these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist predecessors.’⁷ Such art was political, either explicitly so by attacking dominant ideologies or implicitly in rejecting modernist claims to art’s autonomy. The affirmation of culture was seen as hiding social distortions and the idea of the subject experiencing their own putative autonomy in aesthetic judgement as a privileging of the bourgeois subject. Foster has recently described what he, Owens, Crimp and other younger writers associated with the journal October were against in their ‘anti-aesthetics’.

What bothered us about aesthetic discourse à la Kant was this: … it did seem to be a space of mediation, but one that was concerned above all with reconciliation – of judgments of fact and judgments of value, in the first instance, but soon enough of other kinds of conflicts and contradictions, too. That’s what bothered us: we construed the aesthetic as a space of resolution – of subjective integration and social consensus – and we wanted to question this conciliatory dimension. Certainly the art practices that had come to interest us were pledged against this kind of reconciliation.⁸

For Foster et al. ‘the aesthetic’ so described was implicit in Clement Greenberg’s ideas of art’s autonomy lying in the specificity of its medium, the telos of which was the formalism of post-war American abstract painting. Here the proposition of a judgement of sensory experience implied a set of formal qualities – of purity, object-c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• FIGURES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION Retracing the ugly and the anti-aesthetic as a productive force in postmodern architecture
• CHAPTER ONE Ugliness, the anti-aesthetic and appropriation: With some remarks on the architecture of ARM
• CHAPTER TWO On ugliness (in architecture)
• PART ONE Ugly and monstrous
• PART TWO Ugly and ordinary
• Index
• Copyright Page