Horological Meandering

You asked for a considered response. This morning I received a newsletter which tangentially addressed this question, while addressing church architecture in particular. The author is Anthony Esolen, a professor, translator of medieval languages and a poet. I know him slightly from an occasional meeting, and from this brief bio you might expect he favors the classical vs modernism. This brief extract from his story today represents his perspective:

Some speak in what I shall call The Language of No: the essential anti-language of modernist art.

I am not condemning that art outright. No one better portrayed the wreckage of the modern West, and with an aching sense of loss and a hope against hope for restoration and recovery, than did T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. I admire, with unease, the half-agnostic and half-eternally seeking poetry of Wallace Stevens. 

Some modernist architecture is eloquent in its simplicity, such as the Gateway Arch, in St. Louis. The crisp piano progressions in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, mingled with strains of jazz and the bustling energy of American folk song, are like nothing written before—it is a work of genius and might.

˜And yet, modernism, as a project, to judge it as a whole and in its animating philosophy, is an enemy to man and to human culture. Why? Modernism, with ways of life it encourages or demands, has gone far to scrub away genuine human culture from the earth. They are speaking, shouting, the Language of No, which says that there shall be no symbols, no language, no shared history, no human devotion to what transcends place and time but what is embodied in both place and time: no culture.

For example, if you look at the government buildings in Brasilia, the modernist capital appropriately set in what had been the middle of nowhere, and if you look at the Catholic cathedral there, the thing that looks as if a mad scientist had irradiated a sea anemone and the creature had grown gigantic and was about to crawl on its tentacles to devour Rio de Janeiro, you are not simply looking at what does not say “Brazil” or “Rome.”

The problem is not that the modernist architecture does not belong where it is but that it can “belong” there and anywhere, indifferent alike to Brazil as to Belgium, to south as to north, to the Spanish and the Indian as to the English and the Irish, or rather equally hostile to each of them, erasing the memory, electrocuting the common languages. Its stones reverberate the Language of No.

I hear the objection: we cannot build baroque forever... Yes, the baroque was sometimes characterized by excessive decoration, but in the main it gave us immortal, humanly powerful, and profoundly dramatic art: think of Caravaggio’s “Conversion of St. Paul,” in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, in Rome; or Bernini’s “St. Teresa in Ecstasy,” in St. Peter’s; or Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew.

We do not need to speak in baroque. But we do need to speak in human language; in specific details of time and place. And that is what modernism prevents. Modernists said that the old forms were exhausted, but that was not true.

The watercolors of Winslow Homer are not the neo-classical oils of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Rodin’s Thinker is deeply indebted to Michelangelo, but Rodin is not the Florentine—he stakes out his own path. We did not need Alban Berg to reduce music to mathematical skitters; the composers at the end of the nineteenth century were working in a wider variety of genres than had ever existed. We sneer at the Victorians as if they were stodgy old prudes, but Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold were all embarking on poetic paths in a dizzying array of forms; they were immensely creative, metrically and musically. There had never been anything like Tennyson’s Lotos-eaters, or Browning’s dying bishop ordering his tomb at Saint Praxed’s, while he floats in and out of coherence and bad conscience.

Look at The Triumph of Religion, the series of murals that the stubborn John Singer Sargent painted for the Boston Public Library. Tell me that it was just a matter of slavish imitation of past forms. Sargent had, in fact, taken those forms, learned from them, and turned them to his purpose, so that it is impossible to suppose that the murals were painted in any other time but his own; and yet those same paintings speak in a language that was alive in Greece 2,500 years ago.

Here ends the opinion piece which I think makes some excellent points, even if I wasn't familiar with all the examples he gives. Personally, I do appreciate some modernism, but on balance I prefer more detail, more color, more connection to time and place.

For example, we have this Alessi tea kettle which I admire from a distance but hate when I use it as the handle gets too hot, the lid falls off when you tip it to get the dregs of hot water, etc. etc. The form precedes and overpowers the (lack of) function. Like your juicer (which a friend of mine has).

Maybe the copper kettle is a better choice -- it whistles, the handle is insulated with wicker, and the whole thing says a Person Made Me to be used (like a Velveteen Rabbit?).

(pardon the tarnish - it's well used)

Cazalea

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