architecture WAS Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[Dave Monroe]

Peter, you DEFINITELY ought to see, read, whatever, Tom Stppard's Arcadia.
Shuttling betwixt the early nineteenth century and the present (as the time of its
writing) day, I suspect that, as Stoppard depicts the shift from, indeed, that
English picturesque tradition in landscaping et al. to the gothic revival (that is
the chronology, right?), he might well be allegorizing the present as well ... that
postmodern predilection (quite like that word now, thank you all ...) for the
ruinous, the fragmentary, indeed, for the allegorical, which, on the
Benjaminian/DeManian reading circulating in, through postmodernism, is preferrable
for its untotalizability, or, at any rate, for its lack of any aspiration toards
totalization, which might, by the way, to differentiate, say, the modernist
fragmentation of, say, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste-Land" or John Dos Passos' The U.S.A.
Trilogy or the collages of  the early cubism of Picasso and Braque or ... which I
think were intended to yet be subsumed under the totalization of the work, vs.,
well, waht would be the postmodernist counterexample here?  Say, Susan Howe's
"Articulation of Sound Forms in Time" or Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 or the
allegorical montages of David Salle or Robert Longo come to mind, but ... but I
guess I'm not up either to setting for the claim in any great detail, much less then
arguing for it, so ... but I think the important aspect are, indeed, that
fragmentation, that nontotalizability, perhaps even a certain melancholia (again,
see Walter Benjamin's The Origins of German Tragic Drama).

--by the way, one of the problems I have posting here is that much of the reading I
might have done on any given subject might well have been done anywhere in (at
LEAST) the last fifteen years, might well have been done casually or incompletely
or, at any rate, was more liklely than not done in a context ("around the text")
where I was NOT held particularly responsible for any of it (which isn't necessarily
to say that I felt particularly responsible for any of the reading I was supposed to
have done in school).  At any rate, I'm certainly not doing any of it to any
professional ends, so, well, please bear with any misattributions or
misreadings--one of my motivations for joining this list was to get me back into
Pynchon and related issues of literary history, theory, aesthetics, what have you
... for starters ... while many of you seem up on everything, fresh in mind or at
your fingers ...

... but, well, on postmodernism and the ruin, the fragment, the allegorical,
whatever, a few references off the top of my head ...

--Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition (and see his essay on postmodern allegory in Brian
Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism as well, though it might be collected in BR)
--Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis (and see as well her The Artificial Kingdom)

However, I'm no so sure that "the postmodern architectural fascination with ruins
is" so much "part of the general re-embracing of history" as it's, on the one hand,
like, say, sampling, emblematic of that postmodern phenomenon of no longer being
able to claim innocence in re: history, it's "all" there, archived, available,
unavoidable, but eminently quotable, iterable, recontextualizable nonetheless, and,
on the other hand, emblematic of a certain exhaustion, resignation in the face of
the aforementioned, a recognition of the weight of history, which has become very
heavy, indeed, post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post- ... well, let me know, still
kinda working all this out, assembling, reassembling, constructing and
deconstructing ...



pporteous at worley.co.nz wrote:

> I haven't been following this thread until now, but it looks interesting.
>
> Regarding the notion of ruins, etc (Doug, I think you are refering to simulacra,
> which is indeed tied up with simulation, and hyper realities, etc - see
> Baudrillard for this stuff), some good subject matter is the "Picturesque"
> English landscape tradition - followed by Capability Brown and the other
> landscape architects of the 1800's. The idea was that you would populate your
> large country estate full of Greek temples, ruined castles, pagodas, pyramids,
> etc,  placed amongst trees, so as not to be viewed all at once. The experience
> of walking the estate would be that of discovery, and the discovery would be all
> the world's cultures, represented architecturally. The estate owners had
> generally done the Grand Tour of greater Europe, as it was called, and the
> garden worked on several levels: it worked as a visual "photo album" memory
> trigger, it showed off to others where the owner had been, but most importantly,
> it symbolised the Victorian ideal of compartmentalising and collecting, and thus
> taming and making safe the . As an aside, these garden estates also had their
> fences concealed in large ditches below general ground level, called mini-hahas
> (yes!). This gave the impression that the owner's land stretched on forever.
>
> The postmodern architectural fascination with ruins is, I think, part of the
> general re-embracing of history. There are many bad examples of post-modern
> facadism, etc, in the commercial world. Of course, architects have always liked
> ruins, maybe because (among other things) the ruin exposes the structure of the
> building, makes seen what was hidden, and allows the imagination to fly in terms
> of what is no longer there!
>
> As far as tying this back to Pynchon, I would have to do some re-reading.
> Postmodern architecture is very grounded in theory and storytelling, and has
> been too theoretical for most (similar to post-modern philosophical writing). Re
> GR, I guess you could apply some generalisations about the chaotic bombed
> post-War architectural landscape reflecting the disparate lawless groups
> traversing the Zone, and the labyrinth-like Rocket City reflecting the
> impenetrable beauracratic structure of that place, but that seems sort of
> simplistic/obvious.
>
> anyway, more later.
>
> peter, typically slightly random