Noel Clueit - 'Dreamstime'

 

Venturi's Confusion

 

Bruno Zeti 'Towards An Organic Architecture' (1950) was, according to Vincent Scully in the intro of the 1977 reprint of Venturi's book 'Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture', a conscious reply to the austerity of Le Corbusier. 

Venturi sits somewhere between Zeti’s acceptance of the sexy organic and chaotic and the simplified but useful functionality of Modernist dreamers.

‘Venturi is more fragmentary,..his proposals, in their recognition of complexity and their respect for what exists, create the most necessary antidote to the cataclysmic purism of contemporary urban renewal which has presently brought so many cities to the brink of catastrophe, and in which Le Corbusier’s ideas have now found terrifying vulgarization.’ (Scully)

According to Scully the argument goes that if Le Corbusier learnt from the luminous austerity of the Greek temple then Venturi took influence from the ornate facades of Italian buildings - their decorative exterior designs curious flow forming a visual analogy to the parallel inside-outside, outside-inside flow of Italian residents physical movements. 

The self-conscious 'liminality' of the facades functions as a moment of transgressive passage between the communal and the intimate as a psychological / intellectual event congealed in ornate material stuff.

Within a couple pages of his Italian-façade-as-porous-threshold observation Scully confidently states that Venturi is one of the ‘very few architects whose thought parallels that of the Pop painters – and probably the first architect to perceive the usefulness and meaning of their forms’.

So, for Scully, Venturi saw a substantial part of architectures job was to act as a waystation, a valve allowing the action of movement between the outside (of the signage and prompts of popular and Pop Art culture) and the space and structure of an interior space (boiled down to essentials in Modernist architectural dreams).

Hmmm, it seems to be half-sensible, a Pop Art frivolity slathered all over Venturi’s twatting with Modernist tropes but isn’t that, ironically, only true on a lazy surface level? Venturi’s complacency is at a conceptual level rather than a formal or visual one.

It is interesting that within Venturi’s actual text as a model of critical application he indicates the literary criticism of Eliot. In some ways this is very revealing of the internal bifurcation within Venturi's critique of modernist constructions. Venturi is attempting to simultaneously react positively to the ‘natural’ everyday decorative demands of the human animal - bolstering his common-sensical polemic about these needs with an overarching and directive theory - whilst simultaneously locating an essentialist core to human requirements.

Venturi’s text is almost a protracted mission statement for seductively decorative yet functional buildings; that is functional as an ambient salve for the troubled psyche of contemporary urban folk (‘I am for messy vitality over obvious unity.’)

As an arch-ironist, certainly within his practice, it is interesting that Venturi has a swing at ‘… the popularisers who paint ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality’ and suppress most complexities and contradictions inherent in art and experience.’ And yet his love of ‘messy vitality over obvious unity’ rests on a belief that architecture ‘has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality.’ 

However, what happens when the totalising principle of Popular culture is already ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality’?

Whilst criticising the debasement of Mie van der Rohe’s expression ‘less is more’ by inferior architects (where less is just less, so a fair point) he opines: ‘An architecture of complexity and contradiction, however, does not mean picturesqueness or subjective expressionism.’

However, Venturi has a tendency to overlook the fact that when dealing with a surplus of the insubstantial more less is just more less automatically leading to ‘picturesqueness or subjective expressionism.’ 

By suggestively paralleling op art and pop art he shows the hidden confusion in his hand. 

Pop art is primarily a conceptual art, a questioning critical deep dive into the engines which drive our cultural concerns; alternatively, op art is pop art with the difficult bits removed.   

Returning to Vincent Scully’s assessment of Venturi in the intro to the reprint of 'Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture' Venturi ‘…Like all original architects, makes us see the past anew.’ 

This is what Venturi signally fails to do. If anything through Venturi we see the now as a perpetual past.

A studied repetition of familiar populist décor and forms colonizing surfaces and invading interiors may add a temporary nipple of pacification to proceedings but it doesn’t have the weird gravitas of Pop Art’s ironic acceptance and sarcastic undermining of cultural norms and taste. Venturi’s art is basically one of resignation and repetition.

It’s not all bad though, he did have an awareness of the contingent nature of his own argument and, I believe, a real thirst for movement and progression within popular architectural builds.

He does register that ‘though we no longer argue over the primacy of form or function… we cannot ignore their interdependence’ and ‘… the variety inherent in the ambiguity of visual perception must once more be acknowledged and exploited.’

The fact of surface is of primary concern, and indeed the perceptual apprehension of an objective solidity of surface and forms is as important as the objective fact of the solidity of surface and forms.

That’s why I think that, in reality, he would like the possibility of relegating his own Las Vegas / Blackpool populism to a new status as another component option within an architecture of ambient mutating textures, really old school formal solidity and complex shadowplay, all interweaving and interleaving with the emblems and icons of transient popular culture if desired.

A new position for architecture of both playground engagement and analytical distancing which the new interiors/ archi-builds should allow - for practical, economic and moral reasons.

Noel Clueit : Various Artists

Following a twelve month plus Covid-related hiatus, Todmorden’s Studio 2 is showing ‘Various Artists’ by Noel Clueit. Actual stuff. Hanging on walls. In real space. 

The works on display largely the product of the lockdown period, Clueit has sliced-up record sleeves, often ones purchased with a certain indifference to the music sleeved inside, to re-position the resulting areas into new compositions or arrangements. Imagery is ignored. The factory-crisp coloured lines, synthetically pure washes of colour, the decorative embellishments of the covers; in short the playfully abstract design elements, become building blocks for new abstract configurations. 

The Utopian idealism(s) behind early models of international abstraction often had a metaphysical bent but always depended on an effort to bullet-point criteria for formal value judgments. 

And, in reality, there’s an accidental cultural immobility that sticks to the products of this kind of game plan; high art as ultra-tasteful balancing acts of shape and colour which can only really breathe successfully in a controlled and antiseptic environment. Elite, if perfectly enjoyable, décor being the real result. 

To a point this is both inevitable and not necessarily a completely bad thing. Isolating this type of aesthetic experimentation in galleries may be a safer bet than using them as a literal blueprint for social structures. 

And yet, simple molecular fragments of popular taste are equally serviceable for reconstructing effective non-representational compositions. Diagonals, circles, parallel skinny border lines and decorative repetitions, all carefully scalpel cut from 1970s and 80s record sleeves, allow small ‘abstract’ compositions to retain an echo of the material and visual ambience of the printed imagery of the period in which the records were produced. 

So Clueit’s domestic scale parodies of historical models of reductive ‘abstraction’ have no interest in the angsty splashings of Pollock, a form of painterly method acting like Brando stomping around a tasteful set; nor in the cool zen of a Newman stripe, a decorative equivalent to Olivier’s aristocratic aloofness. They are tonally closer to Roger Moore’s sarcastically arched eyebrow, an acknowledgement that artist-producer and viewer-consumer are both inside the game. But enjoying it none-the-less. 

Here, the endpoint of abstractions formal reduction transfers to popular decorative arrangements on the packaging and promotion of everyday products; the covers of records being a perfect playground for this transcriptive urge. The immediately familiar square motif of a vinyl record, thing as a form, area as bounded and bordered, becomes important. 

It is why lines are such an active physical component in Clueit’s works, they echo the boundary line of the rectangle but also control both the pictorial space, dissect it, contradict solidity, but also slow and accelerate the viewer’s pace of address. They take the eye on a looping wander or emphasis the porous, unstable nature of a bounding frame of nothingness. 

When playing a vinyl record the affectionately clumsy, slow spiral of the record players needle sweeps towards an empty centre; the tight spiral of the playback groove, duration and movement, repetitions and echoes are all factors in play. Clueit’s works cumulatively operate in a similar way. 

Significantly, on knowing the compositions source material it is hard not to begin imaginatively dismantling the matt and shiny areas of supporting printed cardboard and to fit them into an imaginary original image or record sleeve. To reconstitute an originating structure. 

The darkness behind the light and bright likeability of these works is the fact that a successful reimagining will not result in a metaphysical blueprint for a better society, it may just congeal into a back-cover from an 80s pop record.