Acciones de colaboración Universidad-Empresa

The admiration of Henri Rousseau, as well as the very much discussed inspira-tion derived from primitive art, did not serve as real inspirainspira-tion but rather as a confirmation of the Primitivist artist’s own effort. Paul Klee makes this very clear when he says,

If my pictures sometimes make a primitive impression, it is because of my discipline in reducing everything to a few steps. It is only economy, or if you like, the highest professional sensitivity; in fact the precise opposite of the primitive.¹⁹

This statement is a clear illustration of the fundamental difference between primitivism and the primitive. It shows that primitivism is an artificial modern phenomenon, while the primitive is a vague residuum of the Enlightenment

The primitive as modern problem

and Romantic understanding of the past, of the origins and of the elemen-tary. In the final judgement the primitive can be seen as an external under-standing of its own nature, as something to approximate or imitate. The essence of primitivism, on the other hand, is in the creative process, moti-vated by the search for originality and universality. What makes the primitive and primitivism truly primitive are not external characteristics, but the nega-tion of history, inherited tradinega-tion and culture. If we accept this understanding of primitivism, then we can find it in areas of modern art and architecture where it is not apparent or expected, for instance in Malevich, who describes the non-figurative elements of his paintings as ‘the primitive marks on the body of the aboriginal man,²⁰or in some contemporary high-tech structures that follow the principles of elementary growth or movement, for example the work of Calatrava.

A good example illustrating the nature of modern primitivism is the work of Hans Scharoun. In his Berlin ‘Philharmonie’, the main hall was no doubt deeply influenced by the history of music auditoria and yet Scharoun describes the process of its making as a direct dialogue with the nature of music and with the nature of space seen as a landscape. He writes:

The construction follows the pattern of a landscape with the audito-rium seen as a valley and there at its bottom is the orchestra surrounded by a sprawling vineyard climbing the sides of its neigh-bouring hills. The ceiling, resembling a tent, encounters the land-scape like a skyland-scape.²¹

The indeterminate, changing perceptual structure of the concert hall is held together by the constructive imagination of the architect and the musical expe-rience of the audience. It is interesting to see how early Scharoun anticipated the close link between his own imagination and public experience. In one of his drawings for the ‘Glass Chain’, he illustrates the place and the role of the artist among the people, his ability to embody and represent their will and elevate it to the higher level of what he calls a ‘spiritual’ existence.²²The image can be complemented by his statement: ‘Do we reach pure creativity through reflec-tion, through knowledge? No – man is the centre.’²³What is meant by ‘man’

here is, no doubt, the architect himself as a creative genius.

It is a sign of the avant-garde mentality that the architect sees himself as a sole agent, fully responsible for everything related to creativity. This illusion culminates in the belief that the world is essentially his own world.

Everything created under such conditions is bound to be unique and yet claims are often made for a universal validity of the result. This paradox can be sustained only by a self-centred culture, prepared to share this paradox as a norm. The same paradox illustrates the nature of modern primitivism, which is

Dalibor Vesely

closely linked with a subjective mode of creativity, while at the same time it characterizes the common culture of the whole epoch.

The concentration on private experience, imagination and fantasy contradicts the very nature of architecture, which is always open to a shared public culture; and yet in some recent tendencies architecture is created in a way similar to surrealist automatism or to the automatism of action painting. The architects of the Coop Himmelblau Partnership are very much aware of this affinity when they say ‘We conceive of architecture which would engage complicated human proce-dures and psyches and which would represent a personal statement, with all the attendant strengths and weaknesses implied – not unlike the way art is made.’ The main precondition of such an approach is a full emancipation from the historical precedents and the continuity of tradition. In the author’s own words:

It is a kind of release from fixed ideas … and for that reason we never talk about architecture for fear that inhibitions about what is possible functionally or what others have done before us in similar circum-stances will creep in … We have to be self-monitoring, or else we could get side-tracked. We avoid analysis, but remain aware of our bodies and our hearts.²⁴

This highly introverted approach brings us not only to the heart of modern primi-tivism but also to the very essence of surrealism. In surrealism, as we know, creativity is oriented towards the pre-reflective-unconscious reality. The surreal-ists were deeply convinced that man had lost his vital contact with reality, and that his primordial links with nature are as important for his social and cultural life as is a dream for the life of the individual. They also believed that the return of culture to its archaic origins was as crucial for the sanity of mankind as is a return to oneself in a dream. The primordial or primitive side of surrealism is well illustrated in Max Ernst’s The Eye of Silence (Figure 2.4). The landscape in the painting is not a vision of an ordinary human eye but rather, of an insect surrounded by a threatening nature. The latent meaning of the painting is very rich but cryptic. The significance of the single eye refers to the subhuman because it is less than two and, given its location, it alludes to the extra human powers that are in mythology incarnated in Cyclops.

Architecture was not a very critical subject for the surrealists and yet they found some already existing buildings fascinating. One of them was the

‘Palais Ideal’ of the postman Cheval, who became for the surrealists what Henri Rousseau was for the cubists. ‘What has always passionately summoned me in such works’, wrote André Breton, ‘is their explosive disdain, their self-genera-tion entirely outside the cultural line assigned to our epoch’.²⁵In his autobiog-raphy Cheval describes the origins of the idea of the ‘Palais’: ‘I have built a palais, chateau or grottoes in a dream. I can’t express it very well, but it was so pretty,

The primitive as modern problem

picturesque that for ten years it remained ingrained in my memory and I couldn’t shake it off.’²⁶The decision to build the Palais, Cheval describes as being initiated by accident, coming across a bizarre stone on the road:

It was a sculpture of bizarre shape that it would be impossible for man to imitate; it represented all species of animals and all species of caricatures. I said to myself if nature can make sculptures, I could make masonry and architecture, this is my dream.²⁷

The ultimate goal of the surrealists was to grasp the mystery of life revealed through automatism as the spontaneity of desire, and the mystery of the world revealed through objective chance as the spontaneity of nature manifested in crystal. The role of crystal in surrealists’ thinking appears in Breton’s short comment: ‘The great secret of the environment of things and of our own freedom in relation to these things can be discovered in this way: the crystal possesses the key to every liberty.’²⁸The vision of the crystal appears at the end of the surrealist exploration of the human unconscious, at the end of a journey which started with the interpretation of dreams, hallucinations and automatic writing in the interior, went through the city, discovering there objective chance and the poetics of encounters and led finally to the subterranean world of the cave, to discover there the ultimate mystery of creation in the crystal. The crystal became an essence and substitute of everything that can be seen in nature and also an inspiration to move beyond imitation and perception to the level of pure creation.

Dalibor Vesely

2.4

Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence, 1943 Source: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

This brings us back to our earlier discussion of the process of crystal-lization as a paradigm of primitivism and the role of crystal in the art of the twen-tieth century. The vision of the crystal played a decisive role already in art nouveau, later in expressionism, cubism and surrealism, but became most conspicuous in the architecture of expressionism. So far, the less-known begin-nings of expressionist architecture in Prague are, from our point of view, most revealing and interesting. The unusual and in many ways provocatively unique treatment of the architectural body and space – the use of crystalline forms, the geometrical articulation of surfaces and the attempt to reduce spatial problems to the problems of plane or relief – was motivated by the attempt to achieve an emancipation from illusionistic perspectival representation, to overcome hist-oricism and to grasp the ‘truth’ of reality on its most primordial level (Figure 2.5).

The architect Pavel Janak, one of the main protagonists of the movement, outlined the main principles of the new architecture in his seminal text ‘The Prism and the Pyramid’.²⁹The text is based on the assumption, taken mostly from Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy) and other sources, that European architecture is defined by two traditions, one classical in the south, represented by horizontality and verticality exemplified by the prism, the other Christian in the north, represented by forces that challenge the inertia of matter and are exemplified most clearly in gothic and baroque art.³⁰The best example of forces that move matter beyond its natural state is in crystalliza-tion, not influenced by matter and gravity. The oblique, diamond-like shaped planes of the crystal represent a movement that transforms the passive natural reality into an animated, more abstract and thus a spiritual reality. The highest

The primitive as modern problem

2.5

J. Chochol, Villa in Prague-Vysehrad, detail, 1912–13. Source: Dalibor Vesely

form of spiritually abstracted matter is the pyramid. The content of the text illustrates very well the general tendency of primitivism to reduce the whole body of culture to the most elementary generic principles from which, it was believed, the new culture would grow.

It may be interesting, as a final point, to see just visually the spectrum of different forms of primitivism manifested in the phenomenon of crystalliza-tion, from the first romantic precedents through the symbolists and art nouveau examples to its continuity in cubism and expressionism and its reappearance in contemporary deconstructivism and neo-expressionism (Figure 2.6). The language of contemporary authors is very often too obscure and it is necessary therefore to read between the lines to understand their true meaning. Daniel Libeskind has this to say about his own way of thinking and approach:

Architecture is neither on the inside nor the outside. It is not a given nor a physical fact. It has no history and it does not follow fate. What emerges in differentiated experience is architecture as an index of the relationship between what was and what will be. Architecture as nonexistent reality is a symbol, which, in the process of conscious-ness, leaves a trail of hieroglyphs in space and time that touch an equivalent depth of originality.³¹

The depth of originality in the text coincides quite clearly with the depth of contemporary primitivism.

Dalibor Vesely

2.6

Daniel Libeskind, Victoria & Albert Museum, extension, 1998

Conclusion

The primitive in the form of primitivism is not a peripheral or secondary phenomenon. It grew out of the depth of modern culture of which it is the main characteristic. The influence of primitive art and other external influences was only marginal and can be seen more as a confirmation of the already existing tendency rather than as a generative influence. This is illustrated well by Picasso: ‘The African sculptures that hang around my studio are more witnesses than models.’³²The current use and misuse of the term primitive should be seen in terms of its shallow and deep meaning. The shallow meaning refers usually to the origins, return to nature, more elementary, primitive way of life or to the earlier stages of civilization. The deep meaning is what I have tried to outline in this paper. Before we indulge in tracing the shallow manifestations of the primitive, we should remember that such indulgence is not only futile, but could also be dangerous. There is probably nothing more dangerous in our time than a one-dimensional cultivation of the primitive, which sooner or later encounters what has been ignored but cannot be eliminated; that is, the given state of our civilization, its science and technology, its level of cultural develop-ment and general level of rationality. It is certainly not very clever to ignore the emancipatory tendency of the primitive, which leaves behind a large body of culture. The characteristic expressionist motto: ‘I would rather be barbarized than intellectualized’,³³can serve as a sobering reminder of the consequences that we have seen so many times during the last century and can see still today.

We do not as yet understand fully the nature of these consequences, and what is really happening in the cultural space defined by the complementarity of modern primitivism and highly intellectualized culture.

Notes

1 Falcone, La Nuova Vaga et Dilettevole Villa, Brescia 1564, preface, fol. i; in J. S. Ackerman, The Villa, London: Thames & Hudson, 1990, p.113.

2 R. Bentmann and M. Muller, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture, trans. by T. Spence and D.

Cranem, London: Humanities Press, 1992, p. 113, n168.

3 B. Rupprecht, ‘Villa, zur Geschichte eines Ideals’ in Probleme der Kunstwissenschaft, vol. II, Berlin:

Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1966, p. 244.

4 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, London: Macmillan, 1924, p. 68.

5 John Dryden, The conquest of Granada by the Spaniards: in two parts, London: pr. by T. N. for H.

Herringman, 1672.

6 Joseph Banks, Supplément au voyage de M. de Bougainville, ou Journal d’un voyage autour du monde fait par MM. Banks et Solander (Paris 1772).

7 James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh 1774), p. 3.

8 J. R. Constantine, ‘The Ignoble Savage, an Eighteenth Century Stereotype’, Phylon, 27, pp. 171–9.

The primitive as modern problem

9 Philip Thicknesse, Memoirs and Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse: Late Lieutenant Governor of Land Guard Fort, and Unfortunately Father to George Touchet, Baron Audley (London: printed for the author 1788), p. 24.

10 E. Grassi. ‘Ingenium und Scharfsinn’ in Die Macht der Fantasie, Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1984, pp.

65–70.

11 ‘Genius’, in R. G. Saisselin, The Rules of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart, Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970, pp. 89–96; ‘Genie’ in P. E. Knabe, Schlüsselbegriffe des kunsttheoretischen Denkens in Frankreich, Dusseldorf: Verlag L. Schwann, 1972, pp. 204–38.

12 A. K. Wiedmann, Romantic Roots in Modern Art, Old Woking, Surrey: Gesham Books, 1979, p.

155.

13 Alois Riegl in Karl M. Swoboda and Otto Pacht (eds), Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Graz. privately printed 1966), p. 22.

14 Georg Fuchs, ‘Das Zeichen’, in Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst. Die Ausstellung der Künstler-Kolonie in Darmstadt 1901. Festschrift (Munich 1901).

15 Amédée Ozenfant, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, La Peinture Moderne, Paris: Cres, 1925, pp. 137–

8.

16 J. Spiller (ed.) The Thinking Eye. The Notebooks of Paul Klee, R. Mannheim (trans.), London: Lund Humphries, 1961, p. 95.

17 Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kampfe, Berlin: J. Bard, 1931, p. 177.

18 Wassily Kandinsky in Essays uber Künst und Künstler, 2n edn, M. Bill (ed.), Bern-Bumpliz: Benteli-Verlag, 1963, pp. 42–3.

19 Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye, p. 451.

20 Kasimir Malevich, ‘Suprematism’ in Modern Artists on Art, L. Robert (ed.), New Jersey: Herbert, Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 96.

21 Peter Blundell-Jones, Hans Scharoun, London: Academy Editions, 1995, p. 178.

22 E. Janofske, Architektur-Räume, Wiesbaden: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1984, p. 35.

23 Ibid., pp. 137–8.

24 Coop Himmelblau, Blau Box, London: Architectural Association, 1988, p. 16.

25 André Breton, Arcane 17, Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1971, p. 51. Originally written 1944.

26 Dalibor Vesely, ‘Surrealism, Myth and Modernity’, in Architectural Design: 2–3 (Surrealism and Architecture) London: AD Profiles 11, 1978, p. 92.

27 Ibid.

28 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, p. 205.

29 Pavel Janak, ‘Hranol a pyramida’ in Umelecky mesicnik, 1 (1911/12), pp. 162–70.

30 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, Michael Bullock (trans.), London, 1953.

31 Daniel Libeskind, ‘Çountersign’, AD Academy Editions Architectural Monographs 1991, 16: 110.

32 Florent Fels, Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques, 4 August 1923, 42: 2.

33 A. K. Wiedmann, Romantic Roots in Modern Art, p. 245.

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Chapter 3