Disappearing Through the Skylight

Osborne Bennet Hardison Jr.

1  Science is committed to the universal. A sign of this is that the more successful a science becomes, the broader the agreement about its basic concepts: there is not a separate Chinese or American or Soviet thermodynamics, for example; there is simply thermodynamics. For several decades of the twentieth century there was a Western and a Soviet genetics, the latter associated with Lysenko's theory that environmental stress can produce genetic mutations. Today Lysenko's theory is discredited, and there is now only one genetics.

2 As the corollary of science, technology also exhibits the universalizing tendency. This is why the spread of technology makes the world look ever more homogeneous. Architectural styles, dress styles, musical styles--even eating styles--tend increasingly to be world styles. The world looks more homogeneous because it is more homogeneous. Children who grow up in this world therefore experience it as a sameness rather than a diversity, and because their identities are shaped by this sameness, their sense of differences among cultures and individuals diminishes. As buildings become more alike, the people who inhabit the buildings become more alike. The result is described precisely in a phrase that is already familiar: the disappearance of history.

3 The automobile illustrates the Point With great clarity. A technological innovation like streamlining or all-welded body construction may be rejected initially, but if it is important to the efficiency or economics of automobiles, it will reappear in different ways until it is not only accepted but universally regarded as an asset. Today's automobile is no longer unique to a given company or even to a given national culture, its basic features are found, with variations, in automobiles in general, no matter who makes them.

4  A few years ago the Ford Motor Company came up with the Fiesta, which it called the "World Car." Advertisements showed it surrounded by the flags of all nations. Ford explained that the cylinder block was made in England, the carburetor in Ireland, the transmission in France, the wheels in Belgium, and so forth.

5  The Fiesta appears to have sunk Without a trace. But the idea of a world car was inevitable. It was the automotive equivalent of the International Style. Ten years after the Fiesta, all of the large automakers were international. Americans had Plants in Europe, Asia, and South America, and Europeans and Japanese had plants in America and South America, and in the Soviet Union Fiat Fiat (= Fabbrica Italiana Automobile Torino ) workers refreshed themselves with Pepsi-Cola). In the fullness of time international automakers will have plants in Egypt and India and the People's Republic of China.

6 As in architecture, so in automaking. In a given cost range, the same technology tends to produce the same solutions. The visual evidence for this is as obvious for cars as for buildings. Today, if you choose models in the same price range, you will be hard put at 500 paces to tell one make from another. In other words, the specifically American traits that lingered in American automobiles in the 1960s--traits that linked American cars to American history--are disappearing. Even the Volkswagen Beetle has disappeared and has taken with it the visible evidence of the history of streamlining that extends from D'Arcy Thompson to Carl Breer to Ferdinand Porsche.

7 If man creates machines, machines in turn shape their creators. As the automobile is universalized, it universalizes those who use it. Like the World Car he drives, modern man is becoming universal. No longer quite an individual, no longer quite the product of a unique geography and culture, he moves from one climate-controlled shopping mall to another, from one airport to the next, from one Holiday Inn to its successor three hundred miles down the road; but somehow his location never changes. He is cosmopolitan. The price he pays is that he no longer has a home in the traditional sense of the word. The benefit is that he begins to suspect home in the traditional sense is another name for limitations, and that home in the modern sense is everywhere and always surrounded by neighbors.

8 The universalizing imperative of technology is irresistible. Barring the catastrophe of nuclear war, it will continue to shape both modern culture and the consciousness of those who inhabit that culture.

9 This brings us to art and history again. Reminiscing on the early work of Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, Madame Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia wrote of the discovery of the machine aesthetic in 1949: "I remember a time ... when every artist thought he owed it to himself to turn his back on the Eiffel Tower, as a protest against the architectural blasphemy with which it filled the sky.... The discovery and rehabilitation of ... machines soon generated propositions which evaded all tradition, above all, a mobile, extra human plasticity which was absolutely new....”

10 Art is, in one definition, simply an effort to name the real world. Are machines "the real world" or only its surface? Is the real world that easy to find? Science has shown the in substantiality of the world. It has thus undermined an article of faith: the thingliness of things. At the same time, it has produced images of orders of reality underlying the thingliness of things. Are images of cells or of molecules or of galaxies more or less real than images of machines? Science has also produced images that are pure artifacts. Are images of self-squared dragons more or less real than images of molecules?

11 The skepticism of modern science about the thingliness of things implies a new appreciation of the humanity of art entirely consistent with Kandinsky's observation in On the Spiritual in Art that beautiful art "springs from inner need, which springs from the soul." Modern art opens on a world whose reality is not "out there" in nature defined as things seen from a middle distance but "in here" in the soul or the mind. It is a world radically emptied of history because it is a form of perception rather than a content.

12 The disappearance of history is thus a liberation--what Madame Buffet-Picabia refers to as the discovery of "a mobile extra-human plasticity which [is] absolutely new." Like science, modern art often expresses this feeling of liberation through play--in painting in the playfulness of Picasso and Joan Miro and in poetry in the nonsense of Dada and the mock heroics of a poem like Wallace Stevens's "The Comedian as the Letter C."

13 The playfulness of the modern aesthetic is, finally, its most striking--and also its most serious and, by corollary, its most disturbing--feature. The playfulness imitates the playfulness of science that produces game theory and virtual particles and black holes and that, by introducing human growth genes into cows, forces students of ethics to reexamine the definition of cannibalism. The importance of play in the modern aesthetic should not come as a surprise. It is announced in every city in the developed world by the fantastic and playful buildings of postmodernism and neo-modernism and by the fantastic juxtapositions of architectural styles that typify collage city and urban adhocism.

14 Today modern culture includes the geometries of the International Style, the fantasies of facadism, and the gamesmanship of theme parks and museum villages. It pretends at times to be static but it is really dynamic. Its buildings move and sway and reflect dreamy visions of everything that is going on around them. It surrounds its citizens with the linear sculpture of pipelines and interstate highways and high-tension lines and the delicate virtuosities of the surfaces of the Chrysler Airflow and the Boeing 747 and the lacy weavings of circuits etched on silicon, as well as with the brutal assertiveness of oil tankers and bulldozers and the Tinkertoy complications of trusses and geodesic domes and lunar landers. It abounds in images and sounds and values utterly different from those of the world of natural things seen from a middle distance.

15 It is a human world, but one that is human in ways no one expected. The image it reveals is not the worn and battered face that stares from Leonardo's self-portrait much less the one that stares, bleary and uninspired, every morning from the bathroom mirror. These are the faces of history. It is, rather, the image of an eternally playful and eternally youthful power that makes order whether order is there or not and that having made one order is quite capable of putting it aside and creating an entirely different or the way a child might build one structure from a set of blocks and then without malice and purely in the spirit of play demolish it and begin again. It is an image of the power that made humanity possible in the first place.

16 The banks of the nineteenth century tended to be neoclassic structures of marble or granite faced with ponderous rows of columns. They made a statement" "We are solid. We are permanent. We are as reliable as history. Your money is safe in our vaults."

17 Today's banks are airy structures of steel and glass, or they are store-fronts with slot-machine-like terminals, or trailers parked on the lots of suburban shopping malls.

18 The vaults have been replaced by magnetic tapes. In a computer, money is sequences of digital signals endlessly recorded, erased, processed, and reprocessed, and endlessly modified by other computers. The statement of modern banks is "We are abstract like art and almost invisible like the Crystal Palace. If we exist at all, we exist as an airy medium in which your transactions are completed and your wealth increased."

19 That, perhaps, establishes the logical limit of the modern aesthetic. If so, the limit is a long way ahead, but it can be made out, just barely, through the haze over the road. As surely as nature is being swallowed up by the mind, the banks, you might say, are disappearing through their own skylights. (from Disappearing Through The Skylight )

--------------------------------------------------------------------NOTES

1. Hardison: Osborne Bennet Hardison Jr. was born in San Diego, California in 1928. He was educated at the University of North Carolina and the University of Wisconsin. He has taught at Princeton and the University of North Carolina. He is the author of Lyrics and Elegies (1958), The Enduring Monument (1962), English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance (1964), Toward Freedom and Dignity: The Humanities and the Idea of Humanity (1973), Entering the Maze: Identity and Change in Modern Culture (1981) and Disappearing Through the Skylight (1980).

2. Ford Motor Company: one of the largest car manufacturing companies of America

3. International Style: as its name indicates, an architectural style easily reproduced and accepted by countries throughout the world. These structures use simple geometric forms of straight lines, squares, rectangles, etc., in their designs. It is often criticized as a rubber-stamp method of design. These structures are meant to be simple, practical and cost-effective.

4. Fiat: the biggest Italian car manufacturing company. Fiat is an acronym of the Italian name, Fabbrica Italiana Automobile Torina.

5. Pepsi-Cola: a brand name of an American soft drink. It is a strong competitor of another well-known American soft drink, Coca-Cola.

6. Volkswagen Beetle: model name of a car designed and manufactured by the German car manufacturing company, Volkswagen

7.D'Arcy Thompson: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) placed biology on a mathematical foundation. In his book On Growth and Form. Thompson invented the term Airflow to describe the curvature imposed by water on the body of a fish, The airflow or streamling influenced the future designing of cars and airplanes to increase their speed and reduce air friction.

8. Carl Breer: auto-designer, who designed the Chrysler Airflow of 1934.

9. Ferdinand Porshe: auto-designer of the original Volkswagen；10. Holiday Inn: name adopted by a hotel chain

11. Picabia: Francis Picabia (1878-1953). French painter. After working in an impressionist style, Picabia was influenced by Cubism and later was one of the original exponents of Dada in Europe and the United States.

12.Duchamp: Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), French painter. Duchamp is noted for his cubist-futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, depicting continuous action with a series of overlapping figures. In 1915 he was a cofounder of a Dada group in New York.；13. Madame Gabrille Buffet-Picabia: perhaps wife of Francis Picabia

14. Eiffel Tower: a tower of iron framework in Paris, designed by A.G. Eiffel and erected in the Champ-de-Mars for the Paris exposition of 1889

15. self-squared dragons: a picture of a four-dimensional dragon produced by computer technique

16. Kandinsky: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Russian abstract painter and theorist. He is usually regarded as the originator of abstract art. In 1910 he wrote an important theoretical study, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

17. Picasso: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter and sculptor, who worked in France. His landmark painting Guernica is an impassioned allegorical condemnation of facism and war.

18. Miro: Joan Miro (1893-1983), Spanish surrealist painter. After studying in Barcelona, Miro went to Paris in 1919. In the 1920s he came into contact with cubism and surrealism. His work has been characterized as psychic automatism, an expression of the subconscious in free form.

19. Dada: a movement in art and literature based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values; also the art and literature produced by this movement

20. Stevens: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet, educated at Harvard and the New York University Law School. A master of exquisite verse, Stevens was specifically concerned with creating some shape of order in the "slovenly wilderness" of chaos.

21. game theory: a mathematical theory of transactions developed by John Von Neumann. He called this theory, which has important applications in economic, diplomacy, and national defense, "game theory". Even though they are serious, however, the games are often so intricate and their rules so strange that the game becomes overtly playful.

22. virtual particles: particles that serve all practical purposes though they do not exist in reality

23. black hole: A star in the last phases of gravitational collapse is often referred to as a "black hole". Even light cannot escape the black hole but is turned back by the enormous pull of gravitation. Therefore it can never be observed directly.

24. lunar lander: a vehicle designed to land on the surface of the moon

25. collage city: Collage City (1975) by Colin Rowe. In it he calls for a city that is a rich mixture of styles. It also implies the preservation of many bits and pieces of history. collage: an artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth or wood) glued on a picture surface

26. adhocism: This is a key term used by Charles Jencks in his book. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). The ad hoc city is intended to avoid the horrors of the totally planned city. The ad hoc city clearly shows a fondness for clashing styles and queer postmodern buildings as well as fantastic architectural complexes.

27. facadism: It is a form of mosaic architecture. In mosaic architecture bits and pieces of older buildings are combined with bits and pieces of modern buildings. In facadism fronts of nineteenth-century buildings may be propped up while entirely new buildings are created behind them and often beside and above them.

28. theme parks and museum villages: Such places try to reproduce history certain themes through architectural complexes. For example, Disneyland Anaheim, California, tries to reproduce the main street of a typical nineteenth centutry American town, but everything is stage set and nothing is real.

29. Chrysler Airflow: a car model manufactured by the Chrysler Corporation of America

30. Boeing 747: an airplane model manufactured by the Boeing Company of America

31. Tinkertoy: a trademark for a toy set of wooden dowels, joints, wheels etc., used by children to assemble structures

32. Crystal Palace: building designed by Sir Joseph Paxton and erected in Hyde Park, London, for the great exhibition in 1851. In 1854 it was removed to Sydenham, where, until its damage by fire in 1936, it housed a museum of sculpture, pictures, and architecture and was used for concerts. In 1941 it demolition was completed because it served as a guide to enemy bombing planes. The building was constructed of iron, glass, and laminated wood One of the most significant examples of 19th century proto-modern architecture, it was widely imitated in Europe and America.