Gottfried Semper: Between Poetics and Practical AestheticsAuthor(s): Mari HvattumReviewed work(s):Source: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 64. Bd., H. 4 (2001), pp. 537-546Published by: Deutscher Kunstverlag GmbH Munchen BerlinStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3657236 .Accessed: 19/01/2012 10:41

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MISZELLEN

MARI HVATTUM

Gottfried Semper: Between Poetics and Practical Aesthetics

I. The Assyrian Central Saloon at the British Museum, circa I854. British Museum PD I939-I-I6-I0.

Reprinted in Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, 1800-1939, London I992, I64

In October I848, the British Museum received a remarkable shipment from Constantinople. Aus- ten Henry Layard, adventurer, archaeologist and

diplomat, had started his Middle Eastern excava- tions in November I845, in fierce competition with the French archaeologist Paul Emile Botta. Less than two months later he unearthed a monument last mentioned in the Old Testament:

King Ashurnasirpal II's palace in Calah.' In the

decade that followed, an extraordinary collection was assembled in London, the arrival of which caused both celebration and unease.2 The Assyri-

I Genesis Io: 11-12 2 See e. g. R. D. Barnett and A. Lorenzini, Assyrian

Sculpture in the British Museum, Toronto 1978, 20, and E. Miller, That Noble Cabinet, A History of the British Museum. Athens, Ohio I974, 213-220.

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Fig.2 The Asyrian Stool, Der Stil.

2. Gottfried Semper, >The Assyrian Stool<<, Der Stil, vol. I, 378

an treasure strengthened the status of the British Museum as a seat of ancient art, but it also threatened the >>classical<< principles upon which both the institution itself and its recently inaugu- rated building were based. The event challenged the view of ancient Greece as the autochthonous >cradle of art<<, indicating that Greek classicism -

widely regarded a symbol of the dignity and

superiority of Western culture - had its roots in the >barbarian< East.3 Layard's collection shook

nineteenth-century art history to its foundations, and had a profound effect upon the incredulous audience who witnessed its arrival to Blooms-

bury. Among them was a German architect tem-

porarily stranded in London: Gottfried Semper. Semper must have studied the new acquisi-

tions of the British Museum carefully. Years later, in his magnum opus Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten oder praktische Asthe- tik (1860-1863), the Assyrian collection provid- ed a key example in his innovative theory of the

3 For an account of the debate that ensued, see I. Jen- kins, Archaeologists & Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum I800-I939, London 1992, I51-I70.

4 The notion of ?motif<< [Ger. Motiv] is key in Sem- per's architectural thinking. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as >a distinctive feature or element in a design or composition [...] also, the dominant idea of a work. [...] a leading figure or

origins and development of art. A stool had par- ticularly captured Semper's imagination. In an

ingenious series of analyses, he traced the icono-

graphy of the stool back to its origin in the >>pri- mordial motifs of art<.4 He examined how the stool's stylised joints echo the motif of the seam, and how the mouldings of the legs invoke the motifs of the wreath and the ribbon. For Semper, these textile motifs represented nothing less than the origin of art. They sprang from a universal human desire to imitate the rhythms of nature; the cycles of the sun, the changing of the tide and the seasons. This imitation would first take the form of rituals, for instance the reification of time and movement into dance and musical

expression. In time, these rhythmic patterns were

slowly translated into the domain of art and craft, into the rhythmic movement of weaving and the symbolic gathering performed by the knot. By representing man's >cosmic conditions< in a comprehensible manner, the primordial mo- tifs of art established a human domain amidst a threatening nature. Such a representation was

precisely what Semper located in the Assyrian stool and elaborated in his vivid description of the animal heads flanking its seat, symbolically evoking acts of binding, joining and completing.5 Over time, Semper explained, these motifs had been gradually translated from their origin in textile art, metamorphosing into ceramics, metal- work or masonry, and somewhere along the way finding their >>tectonic<< expression in the stool.6

Semper's little excursus on Assyrian furniture reminds us of why Der Stil, despite its tortuous

prose, was considered one of the most important contributions to the theory of art and architectu- re in the nineteenth century. Through a simple

short phrase, a subject or a theme.< This definition fits - but does not exhaust - Semper's use of the term.

5 Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten oder praktische Asthetik. Ein Handbuch fir Techni- ker, Kiinstler und Kunstfreunde, Vol. I, (i860), Mit- tenwald I977, 383-387.

6 ibid. 38I and 383. ?Tectonic? in this context refers to wooden constructions.

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description of some chair legs, Semper seemed

simultaneously to invoke the history of Middle Eastern civilisation, to present a tale of the origin and development of art, and to put forward a

theory of symbolic form. This theory was noth- ing if not radical. Locating the origins of archi- tecture in the ritual acts of binding, joining and

weaving, Semper overturned the Neo-classical notion of architectural origins as an actual or

imaginary ?primitive hut<.7 Rather than looking for the origin of architecture in architectural form, Semper located it in human action. In one of his late essays, he stated this quite explicitly: ?In a most general way, what is the material and

subject matter of all artistic endeavour?< he asked, and answered: 4I believe it is man in all his relations and connections to the world<<.8

The Poetics of Architecture

Semper rejected the Neo-classical doctrine of imitation for whom architecture was the imita- tion of a real or ideal architectural model. Yet, he still considered architecture and art as a kind of imitation. An imitation not of things or forms but of human action, most notably action as it is reified in the ritual. This definition rings familiar. More than two thousand years earlier, Aristotle had proclaimed precisely this kind of imitation as the end and means of the tragedy: >For tragedy is not an imitation of men but of actions and of life<.9 Semper's rethinking of the origins of archi- tecture had in fact much in common with Aris- totle. Mimesis in the Greek tradition was not a

copying of something already there, but a crea- tive interpretation of reality as a whole. It was an act of ordering, primarily associated with the

7 This point is elaborated by J. Rykwert in >Gottfried Semper and the Conception of Styles, in: A. M. Vogt, C. Reble and M. Frolich (eds.), Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des I9.Jahrhunderts, Basel 1976.

8 ?On Architectural Styles<, Zurich lecture, 1869, in: H. F. Mallgrave and W. Herrmann (eds.), The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, Cam- bridge 1989, 269.

9 Poetics, I45oa.

rhythmic movement of music and dance.'? For

Semper, too, art was an ordering activity. His meticulous analysis of the scrolls and mouldings of the Assyrian stool was intended to reveal this: the ritual ordering of reality and its slow reifica- tion into the motifs of art, craft and architecture. It is through this process of ordering, Semper told his readers, that man captures the creative law of nature >as it gleams through reality in the

rhythmical sequence of space and time move-

ments, is found once more in the wreath, the bead necklace, the scroll, the circular dance and the rhythmic tone that attends it, the beat of an

oar, [...]. These are the beginnings out of which music and architecture grew.?<

This is precisely the kind of mimesis that cha- racterises the poetic work in the Aristotelian sense. Paul Ricoeur calls it a kind of ?emplot- ment<; a gathering of reality into a >plot<< that confers a certain >readability<< to our actions and lives.12 It is, to use Ernesto Grassi's words, an act

of >ordering reality into a world<.13 Embodied in

Semper's musings on some seemingly insignifi- cant chair legs, thus, is a poetics of architecture. A poetics which allows us to understand archi- tecture not as a formal or stylistic phenomenon but as a creative interpretation of human life and action.

Practical Aesthetics

Semper's Assyrian stool can still be seen in the British Museum, in a bas-relief from the North West Palace of Calah.'4 It is not simply a stool but a throne: that of King Ashurnasirpal himself. The king is seated on his throne, surrounded by priests and officials and involved in a ritual of

io See for example L. Golden, Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis, Atlanta, Georgia 1992.

I Prolegomenon to Der Stil, in: Mallgrave/Herrmann (as note 8), 196.

12 Time and Narrative, vol. I, Chicago 1983, 45-5 I

I3 Kunst und Mythos, Hamburg 1957, 115.

14 British Museum No I24564-6. For an iconographical analysis of the relief, see A. Parrot, Nineveh and Babylon, London I96I, 36f.

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3. Gottfried Semper, Wreaths, weaving and rhythmic ornaments, Der Stil, vol. i, I4-20

purification. The relief formed part of a frieze

adorning the walls of Ashurnasirpal's throne room; an elaborate symbolic structure presenting the role of the king in a cosmic and political con- text. Contemplating the eloquent visual narrative of these panels, it becomes clear that the most remarkable feature of Semper's analysis is not so much what it includes as what it leaves out. Pa-

tiently examining the Assyrian stool in minute detail, Semper remained silent about the situation of which it was a part. He was obsessed with the

540 ZEITSCHRIFT FUR KUNSTGESCHICHTE 64. Band / 200I

?.--w~~-?~" u J~-~--" llflWz til ,4-

4. King Ashurnasirpal II on his throne. Bas relief, North West Palace of Calah. British Museum I24564-6

symbolic meaning of the furniture and tried to

identify its religious, social and structural signifi- cance. Yet this symbolism remained strangely immanent, attributed to the chair qua formal

composition, not to its role in the context of

Assyrian kingship. It is as if, for Semper, the po- etic imitation performed by art has been >fro- zen< at a particular point in time, beyond which the work has ossified into a purely formal exist- ence. While the primordial motifs of art - the knot, the bead, the wreath - are indeed mimetic

representations of ritual acts, the artwork as a whole has retreated into an autonomous sphere in which it can become the object of formal ana-

lyses by the scientist-cum-art historian. There were good reasons, of course, why Sem-

per resorted to such aesthetic immanence. His aim, as he repeatedly told his readers, was not

only to identify the origin of art, but also to es- tablish a >method of invention< based on strictly

I5 For a more thorough discussion of the implications of the comparative method for Semper's project, see

my article >Gottfried Semper: Towards a Comparati-

scientific criteria. In fact, his project was to pro- vide nothing less than a complete science of architecture and art, unravelling the secrets of its

conception, its transmission through time, and its future invention. Semper called this science his Practical Aesthetics. It was a project made

necessary by what Semper saw as a deep crisis

haunting the nineteenth century. Decline in taste as well as morals had made architecture and art a display of shameless imitation and mindless invention. And Semper, as a true nineteenth cen-

tury man and a contemporary of Comte, firmly believed that the only way to save architecture from its present confusion was to elevate it into a science proper. More specifically he wanted to elevate it into a comparative science, modelled on the great successes of comparative linguistics and

anatomy. 5

The comparative method, as Foucault has

pointed out, presupposes certain things.'6 It pre-

ve Science of Architecture<<, in: ARQ, Architectural Research Quarterly no i, vol. i, I995.

I6 Jacques Foucault, The Order of Things, an Archaeo- logy of the Human Sciences, London I992, I25-I65.

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5. Galeries d'Anatomie compareee et de paleontologie, Jardin des Plantes, Paris, Edition du Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

supposes that the object of study - whether it be nature, language or architecture - is completely and entirely accessible to the scientist. For exam-

ple, when the French anatomist Georges Cuvier formulated his comparative anatomy in the hope of establishing natural history as a science prop- er, he had to presuppose that nature could in its

entirety be accounted for by scientific explana- tion. This was quite a radical assertion. Up until the late eighteenth century, nature had not been considered accessible for such explanation, as

long as it always included an idea of a final cause, most notably in the guise of God. In order for

17 G. Cuvier, Discourse sur les revolutions de la surface du globe, Paris 1828, in: E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, New Haven 1950, I3of.

18 ?Outline for a System of Comparative Style-Theo- ry<, London lecture, November II, I853, MS 122,

Cuvier's >science of life<< to be possible he had to break with an ancient tradition for thinking about nature. He had to reject the idea that na- ture had a purpose outside itself and presume that it could be understood as an immanent sys- tem, fully available to the explanations and pre- dictions of the natural scientist. For the first time, as Foucault reminds us, the meaning of na- ture resides in nature itself.

Cuvier's radical assertion depended on a philo- sophical shift that had taken place in the late I8th century, a shift expressed for instance in Kant's notion of organic systems. Nature, as it is

fol. 17, in: RES, Journal of Anthropology and Aesthe- tics 6, Autumn I983.

I9 >Practical Art in Metals and hard Materials; its Tech- nology, History and Styles<, Introduction, ? 8. Un- published manuscript in the Victoria & Albert Muse-

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!

S42

encountered in Kant's Critiques, is no longer an emblem of God's creation but a self-sufficient

system, available for man's understanding. Sem-

per's Practical Aesthetics was based on remarkab-

ly similar presuppositions. In order to establish a >science of invention<, Semper had to assume that the work of art was in its entirety accessible for scientific explanation. This meant that all its

aspects, including its highest spiritual and cultu- ral meaning, had to be seen as a property of the work qua work. Cuvier had concluded that for modern comparative anatomy, the overall pur- pose of the animal is >present in its bones<<.'7 Such an immanent significance was precisely what Semper attempted to locate in the struc-

tural-symbolic >organism< of the Assyrian stool.

>Purpose?, as he made clear in his London lec- tures, had become an >>internal coefficient< of the work of art.I8

The Transparency of History: Semper's >Ideal and Universal Collection<

Nowhere is the curious >immanentisation? that takes place in Semper's Practical Aesthetics better

expressed than in his plan for an >Ideal and Uni- versal Collection<. This fictitious collection be- came in Semper's mind a vehicle by which one could understand the principles governing hu- man creativity. It would not be simply another museum but a complete encyclopaedia of human culture: >A Complete and Universal Collection must give, so to speak, the longitudinal Section- the transverse Section and the plan of the entire Science of Culture; it must show how things were done in all times; how they are done at pre- sent in all the Countries of the Earth; and why they were done in one or the other Way, accord-

ing to circumstances; it must give the history, the

ethnography and the philosophy of Culture.<<19

um Library. Semper wrote this text in English, and I have left his erratic use of capital letters intact. Extracts from the introduction to this manuscript is published in MacJournal 4, Glasgow I999, and com- mented on in my article in the same issue: ?The

6. Gottfried Semper: diagrammatic sketch for an ideal museum. From >Practical Art in Metals and hard

Materials; its Technology, History and Styles<, unpu- blished manuscript at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Semper outlined the organisation of such a collection in some detail, the structure of which

anticipates the organisation of Der Stil. The >>universal collection< would form a great com-

parative matrix in which artefacts were arranged according to the four primordial techniques of

making and their corresponding >elements<. The section comprising textile art, for instance, would begin with the simplest wickerwork, ex-

pand to more refined textile products and culmi- nate in the metamorphosed motif of Bekleidung

Order of History: Gottfried Semper and the Great London Exhibition<.

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in its different guises. The other elements of ar- chitecture, similarly, would be traced from their

simplest origins to their most sublimated expres- sions and presented in their development through time and place. In this way, Semper hoped to establish >a good Comparative System of Arrangement<<, >a sort of Index to the History of Culture< that would enable >the Student to see the things in their mutual relations, to ob- serve their mutual affinities and Dissimilarities, and to find out the Laws and Premises, upon which all these mutual positive and negative re- lations depend.<20

Semper's >universal collection? was to allow human culture in all its aspects to be captured and

displayed in the simultaneity of the comparative matrix. By means of this matrix, which would

grant art >a clear insight over its whole province<, the laws of artistic making were to be revealed and a Practical Aesthetics formulated.21 What is

extraordinary about Semper's ambition is not so much its >breadth< as its >depth?. >Universal< collections and >general<< histories were favourite

pursuits of nineteenth-century scholarship. Sem-

per's >ideal and universal collection<, however, was not only supposed to display everything but to explain it, capturing the full meaning and manifold of human creativity in one, universal overview. Its significance was to be guaranteed, not by the particular meaning of the artefacts dis-

played, but by the methodological arrangement itself, displaying human culture and history as an immanent system whose laws are available for

explanation and prediction. Within the laboratory of the comparative matrix the riddles of art and

history were to be solved once and for all.

20 >Practical Art in Metals and hard Materials; its Tech- nology, History and Styles<, Introduction, ? 7-I0.

21 >Outline for a System of Comparative Style-Theo- ry", London lecture, November ii, I853, MS 122, fol. 5, in: RES, Journal of Anthropology and Aesthe- tics 6, Autumn I983.

22 The formula was written U=C(x,y,z,t,v,w....), where U stands for the -result-; the work of art, or more cor- rectly, the style that unites the individual works into a coherent cultural phenomenon. >x,y,z..... are the ma-

The idea of a comparative display of human culture got its theoretical counterpart in Semper's infamous formula for style. This quasi-mathe- matical formula presented the relation between formal laws, cultural praxis and architectural

representation as a mathematical function, in which art is understood as a product of a func- tional relation between verifiable coefficients.22

Any work of art, Semper proclaimed, could be seen as >the uniform result or function of several variable values that unite in certain combinations and form the coefficients of a general equa- tion. <23 The formula for style attempted to de- fine all these >coefficients<< and to account for their interrelation, in order to determine the >correct< or >>incorrect<< correspondence be- tween an art-work and its conditions of be-

coming. With this device Semper could, among other things, >prove< the inadequacy of contem-

porary eclectics, because they had failed to let the

change in the >variables? produce a change in the >final result.<< In other words, they had failed to

let architectural style be the outcome of contem-

porary social, material and spiritual conditions.

Semper had produced a kind of ultimate test for

rating the truth-content of architecture, and was indeed approaching the >fundamental principle for invention< that he had sought for so long.24

Semper never attempted to implement his for- mula for style directly. He saw it as a >crutch<, an idealised expression for the complex reality of art.25 Even on an analogical level, however, the formula reveals an ambitious dream: that of cap- turing the history of art as a system in which all

components are fully accessible to the historian. This dream presupposes a transparency of his-

terial, spiritual and formal coefficients influencing the production of art, while C is the mathematical expres- sion of the relationship between these coefficients. For a discussion of the various interpretations of the formula, see H. F Mallgrave, >Commentary on Sem- per's November Lecture-, in: RES, Journal of An- thropology and Aesthetics 6, Fall 1983, 23-3 I.

23 -The Attributes of Formal Beauty,< in: W. Herrmann (ed.), Gottfried Semper; In Search of Architecture, Cambridge Massachusetts I984, 24I.

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tory and culture, implying that if one only >un- derstands? society well enough, one can >>calcu- late? its artistic expression. And vice versa: from a given style one can deduce the cultural con- ditions that produced it. Art, then, becomes a document of cultural history, ?an account< as

Semper wrote >>of the state of civilisation and of the character of bygone generations, like the fos- sile shells and the coral trees give us an account of the low organisations, which once inhabited them.< 26

Between Poetics and Practical Aesthetics

This brief encounter with Semper's rich and idio-

syncratic musings on the meaning of human

making should be enough to show the deep ten- sion inherent in his work. Responding to an acute sense of crisis in contemporary art and

society alike, Semper's Practical Aesthetics was to save architecture by articulating its immutable laws. Yet he achieved such a >science of inven- tion< only at the cost of abandoning his insights into the poetic capacity of art. From the point of view of his poetics, the work of art is not simply a >result< of certain pre-defined coefficients. Rather, it is the work itself that allows for a par- tial articulation of the concealed horizon of a human world. This articulation is never com-

plete. The particular historicity of art, in which its poetic potential resides, can never be rendered

transparent for a methodical explanation.2 As Karsten Harries puts it: >like a poem, no way of life is given so transparently that it unambi-

guously declares its meaning. There can be no definitive statement of that meaning; it must be

24 H. Semper, Gottfried Semper, ein Bild seines Lebens und Wirkens, Berlin I88o, I2.

25 ?Outline for a System of Comparative Style-Theo- ry<, MS 124, fol. 6.

26 >On Architectural Symbols<, London lecture, au- tumn I854, in: RES, Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 9, Spring I985, fol. 2. Further on Semper's notion of architecture as a >Lapidargeschichte' of society, see for instance Der Stil vol. I, 212 and 406, vol. 2, 3 and Prospectus to Vergleichende Baulehre,

established, ever anew and precariously, in inter-

pretation. All building, and more self-conscious-

ly architecture, participates in this work. Build-

ing is a response interpreting a way of life.<<2 This poetic potential was precisely what Sem-

per recognised in his reflections on the origins of architecture as the mimetic interpretation of human action. In his Practical Aesthetics, how- ever, imitation became calculation and praxis adhered to practice: a verifiable entity, no longer the horizon conditioning our understanding but itself fully available for scientific knowledge. While the poetics takes the opacity of the world as its necessary point of departure, the Practical Aesthetics requires a complete transparency of

history and culture before the act of making can even begin.

This paper began with a desire to understand the curious compression of meaning observed in

Semper's analysis of the Assyrian >stool<. The

compression occurred, I believe, in response to

particular problems involved in modern thinking on art. Semper saw art as an inscrutable source and symbol of meaning, yet at the same time he tried to render this source into a transparent and accessible object for the scientist-historian. Such an operation presupposed that the work of art is

fully autonomous, that its meaning depends on itself alone. The ?immanentisation< of meaning, so conspicuous in Semper's analysis, may thus be understood as a response to a problem haunting not only Semper but modern thinking in general. Habermas describes it as a >flattening< of the realm of reflection; a flattening in which ontolo-

gy is reduced to epistemology and then to a mat- ter of method, supposedly transparent to rea-

in: Mallgrave/Herrmann (as note 8), I7of. See also Semper's late criticism of the potential determinism implied in this view, in ?On Architectural Styles<, Zurich lecture, I869, in: Mallgrave/Herrmann (as note 8), 268.

27 I am relying here on a phenomenological interpreta- tion of poetics, much indebted to Paul Ricoeur and Hans Georg Gadamer.

28 K. Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, Cambridge Massachusetts I996, 149.

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son.29 Semper's Practical Aesthetics testified to this flattening. While he started from a concern for the ontological significance of art - the mean-

ing of art for human existence - he ended with a

purely epistemological construct in which the

question of the meaning of art is overshadowed

by a question of how to gain scientifically legiti- mate knowledge of its production. A reappraisal of Semper can perhaps shed light on both these

aspects, alerting us to the depth of his poetics of architecture as well as to the necessary incomple- tion of his ?science of inventiont.

29 Jiirgen Habermaas, Knowledge and Human Interests. London I972, 3.

Photo credits: I Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, 1800-1939, London I992. - 2, 3 Der Stil, vol. . - 4 British Museum, London. - 5 Musee National d'Histoire

Naturelle, Paris. - 6 Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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