| God Knows I Tried. An experimental approach to orientalism and the practice of writing. (excerpts) |
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At a conference three years ago in New York, architect Peter Eisenman built up his talk in the form of what he called "corsivi". Eisenman was referring to a magazine from the 1930s called Quadrante, edited by Pier Maria Bardi and Massimo Bontempelli, which heíd stumbled upon during a research project with Colin Rowe during the sixties: "What is interesting about this magazine is that there are no essays, there are merely corsivi, that is, a series of points, uno, due, tre, etc." The talk was entitled "Autonomy and the Avant-Garde: The Necessity of an Architectural Avant-Garde in America" (it was held during a pluridisciplinary convention on architecture and design theory), and was basically a harsh and sarcastic critique of his onetime mentor, the illustrious architectural historian Colin Rowe, who had spoken just before him, and had said something rather annoying. Roweís talk was called "The Avant-Garde Revisited", and offered a mocking account of "the four spirits or Geister most active" in the domain of architecture, the Genius Loci, the Volksgeist, the Spirit of the Law, and, most importantly, for the context of the Avant-garde, the Zeitgeist. This was all "convenient equipment to have around", he conceded, but when "retrospective formulations become equipped with prospective capacity, [when_ inevitable Zeitgeist - ever renewing and always comprehensible - becomes a means of ascertaining the future, when the metaphorical becomes literal, then the cheerful exercise of engaging fantasy [becomes] frightening." Ending his talk with an admonition to be wary of zeitgeistian etiquettes when it came to emergent artistic tendencies, Rowe suggested one could stop assuming anyone suspicious of avantgardism were, "ipso facto, a fascist hyena pig". "For some thirty-six years," Eisenman later told the audience, "Colin has been in one way or another railing against the Zeitgeist. What I always find strange about this [is] if, as he says, it doesnít exist, why has he been going on so long about it?" Architectural historians, he continued, could talk extensively about "the color and the texture of a place, such as a city, or even the style of an architecture, in abstract terms, but they are not able to discern the same abstraction about time". Eisenman has his mind on a mission; "the return to the possibility of architecture as a social instrument", for which architecture must return to "its own historical language" as a condition for its autonomy from the "hegemony of western capital", and from the current "social practice that supposedly defines it (shelter, accommodation, symbolism, etc.)". An architectural Avant-garde would continually transgress its own time and place, which mustnít result in cutting-edge originality, but does indeed require a running counter to the Zeitgeist, and a constant preoccupation with just what it presently embodies - and not just a smug, voguish manner of depreciating or ignoring it. "Corsivo" is Italian for cursive script, for a short, polemical piece in a newspaper, and, in typography, for italics. The word has the same root as "cursitation" - "a running or going hither and thither, a perambulation", from the Latin cursitare, "to run" (Oxford English Dictionary) - and also shares the same root with "curse". Writers with a liking for boorish polemics, for controlled idiosyncrasies (an italic bent or slant away from the graphic norm, though not necessarily to the right), and for frantic perambulations in their work, not to mention heightened graphic readability through a series of points, would find corsivi a perfectly natural choice. A "cursive" layout not only accommodates the above inclinations, but also imposes or at least facilitates a corresponding posture, one without which this paper would look very different. It had started out as a mess of topics I could barely connect, or only in a most vague, intuitive fashion, and to which the series of points was supposed to give a certain structure and rhythm. Gradually, however, the function of the corsivi changed, as I started banking on them to work against an unexpected enthropic pull away from the initial complexities and contradictions, and towards something looking more and more like your perfectly boring essay on matters cultural and lettered. |
