BUT TODAY WE COLLECT ADS
Alison and Peter Smithson
Traditionally the fine arts depend on the popular arts for
their vitality, and the popular arts depend on the fine arts for the respectability.
It has
been
said that things hardly "exist" before the fine artist has made use
of them, they are simply part of the unclassified background material against
which we pass our lives. The transformation from everyday object to fine art
manifestation happens in many ways; the object can be discovered - objet trouvé or
I'art brut - the object itself remaining the same; a literary or folk myth can
arise, and again the object itself remains unchanged; or, the object can be used
as a jumping-off point and is itself transformed.
Le Corbusier in Volume I of
his Oeuvre Complete describes how the "architectural
mechanism" of the Maison Citrohan (1920) evolved. Two popular art devices
- the arrangement of a small zinc bar at the rear of the café with a large
window to the street, and the close vertical patent-glazing of the suburban factory
- were combined and transformed into a fine art aesthetic. The same architectural
mechanism produced ultimately the Unité d'Habitation.
The Unité d'Habitation demonstrates the complexity of an art manifestation,
for its genesis involves popular art stimuli, historic art seen as a pattern
of social organization, not as a stylistic source (observed at the Chartreuse
D'Ema, 1907), and ideas of social reform and technical revolution patiently
worked out over forty years, during which time the social and technological
set-up,
partly as a result of his own activities, met le Corbusier half-way.
Why certain folk art objects, historical styles, or industrial artifacts and
methods become important at a particular moment cannot easily be explained.
Gropius
wrote a book on grain silos,
Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes,
And Charlotte Periand brought a new
object to the office every morning,
But today we collect ads.
Advertising has caused a revolution in the popular
art field. Advertising has become respectable in its own right and is beating
the fine arts at their old
game. We cannot ignore the fact that one of the traditional functions of fine
art, the definition of what is fine and desirable for the ruling class, and
therefore ultimately that which is desired by all society, has now been taken
over by the
ad-man.
To understand the advertisements which appear in the New Yorker or Gentry one
must have taken a course in Dublin literature, read a Time popularizing article
on cybernetics, and have majored in Higher Chinese Philosophy and Cosmetics.
Such ads are packed with information - data of a way of life and a standard
of living which they are simultaneously inventing and documenting. Ads which
do
not try to sell you the product except as a natural accessory of a way of life.
They are good "images" and their technical virtuosity is almost magical.
Many have involved as much effort for one page as goes into the building of
a coffee bar. And this transient thing is making a bigger contribution to our
visual
climate than any of the traditionally fine arts.
The fine artist is often unaware
that his patron, or more often his patron's wife who leafs through the magazines,
is living in a different visual world
from his own. The pop art of today, the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and
flower arrangement,
the pictures of second rank of all Renaissance schools, and the plates that
first presented to the public the Wonder of the Machine Age and the New Territories,
is to be found in today's glossies bound up with the throw-away object.
As far
as architecture is concerned, the influence on mass standards and mass aspirations
of advertising is now infinitely stronger than the pace setting
of avant-garde architects, and it is taking over the functions of social reformers
and politicians. Already the mass production industries have revolutionized
half
the house - kitchen, bathroom, utility room, and garage - without the intervention
of the architect, and the curtain wall and the modular prefabricated building
are causing us to revise our attitude to the relationship between architect
and industrial production.
By fine-art standards the modular prefabricated building,
which of its nature can only approximate the ideal shape for which it is intended,
must be a bad
building. Yet, generally speaking, the schools and garages which have been
built with systems or prefabrication lick the pants off the fine-art architects
operating
in the same field. They are especially successful in their modesty. The ease
with which they fit into the built hierarchy of a community.
By the same standards the curtain wall too cannot be successful. With this
system the building is wrapped round with a screen whose dimensions are unrelated
to
its form and organization. But the best postwar office block in London is one
which is virtually all curtain wall. As this building has no other quality
apart from its curtain wall, how is it that it puts to shame other office buildings
which have been elaborately worked over by respected architects and by the
Royal
Fine Arts Commission?
To the architects of the twenties, 'Japan " was the
Japanese house of prints and paintings, the house with its roof off the plane
bound together by thin black
lines. (To quote Gropius, "the whole country looks like one gigantic basic
design course.') In the thirties Japan meant gardens, the garden entering the
house, the tokonoma.
For us it would be the objects on the beaches, the piece
of paper blowing about the street, the throw-away object and the pop-package.
For
today we collect ads.
Ordinary life is receiving powerful impulses from a
new source. Where thirty years ago architects found in the field of the popular
arts techniques
and formal stimuli, today we are being edged out of our traditional role
by the
new phenomenon
of the popular arts advertising.
Mass-production advertising is establishing
our whole pattern of life - principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and standard
of living. We must
somehow get the
measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting
impulses with
our own.
