Yale University, School of Architecture

Fame as the Avatar of HistoryAuthor(s): Peter EisenmanReviewed work(s):Source: Perspecta, Vol. 37, Famous (2005), pp. 164-171Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40482252 .Accessed: 28/08/2012 17:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Yale University, School of Architecture and The MIT Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Perspecta.

http://www.jstor.org

AS THE AVATAR OF HISTORY

Peter Eisenmail Lithographic illustrations to Goethe's Faust by Eugène Delacroix, 1828

"NEITHER MALLARMÉ NOR CÉZANNE MAKES US DREAM OF THE ARTIST AS

AN INDIVIDUAL MORE IMPORTANT OR MORE VISIBLE THAN OTHERS. THEY

DO NOT LOOK FOR FAME, THAT BURNING AND SHINING VOID, WITH WHICH AN ARTIST'S HEAD HAD ALWAYS, SINCE THE RENAISSANCE, WISHED TO

WREATHE ITSELF. THEY ARE BOTH MODEST, TURNED NOT TOWARD THEM-

SELVES BUT TOWARD AN OBSCURE QUEST, TOWARD AN ESSENTIAL CONCERN

WHOSE IMPORTANCE IS NOT LINKED TO THE AFFIRMATION OF THEIR PER-

SONS OR TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF MODERN MAN, BUT IS INCOMPREHEN-

SIBLE TO ALMOST EVERYONE, AND YET THEY CLING TO IT WITH A STUB-

BORNNESS AND A METHODICAL FORCE OF WHICH THEIR MODESTY IS ONLY

THE HIDDEN EXPRESSION." - MAURICE BLANCHOT, THE BOOK TO COME

Mephistopheles : I Like to meet the Chief from time to time;

On pleasant terms I take good care to stay.

PETER EISENMAN

part one of Johann Goethe's complex moral tale Faust, God and the devil, Mephistopheles, have an argument over

whether God will allow the devil to seduce the moral and schol- arly Dr. Faust away from his intellectual pursuits and into "the realities of life." God knows Faust to be a moral man but is not certain that Faust knows why. Therefore, God gives the devil the opportunity to tempt Faust, believing that Faust will even- tually see the true path between abstract learning and real experience. While it is somewhat ironic today to see the contrast between abstraction and reality portrayed in the nineteenth century as a difference between good and evil, the devil's argu- ment is not merely constituted by a coming to terms with real- ity, but more specifically engages those aspects of reality, such as fame and fortune, that are considered the devil's domain. When the devil first meets Faust, he tempts him with power and wealth. But Faust wants youth; he says he will do anything for an hour of youthful pleasure. Under these conditions, he enters into a pact with the devil.

The devil's temptations seemingly operate dialectically, as in the case of youth and old age. While one can have both youth and old age, they cannot occur at the same time. The other tempations contain more nuanced relationships, like power and control, fame and fortune. Power and control are often thought to be the same thing, but they are in another sense diametrically opposed: One can have either power or control but rarely both.

For example, it is often said that Bernini was the most pow- erful architect who ever lived because of his relationship with popes Paul V, Urban VIII, and Alexander VII in Rome and with King Louis XIV in Paris. Compared to Borromini, his contem- porary, Bernini had real power. But Borromini had something that Bernini did not have: control of his own destiny, even to the point of taking his own life. Unlike Bernini and most other architects who have made history, Borromini had few commis- sions and built only a handful of buildings. Yet despite his lack of power, his work manifested an architecture of control, of cre- ating in his buildings, among other things, the idea of a continu- ous surface between the discontinuous elements of column and wall. This expression had little to do with external power but rather with a condition that is internal to architecture. Unlike Bernini's work, which catered - like urban perspectivai stage sets - to a subjective judgment, Borromini's work concerned a disciplinary autonomy. It is this autonomy that makes it pos- sible today to teach design students Borromini, to examine his work critically in a way that is not possible with Bernini.

Fame and fortune are another story. Because rock stars and movie stars have shown that it is possible to have both, most people assume that fame and fortune are one and the same thing. But while fortune may bring fame, the reverse is not necessarily true. The question is how to define fame; is it some- thing fleeting - Faust's one hour of happiness - or is it some- thing other that has nothing to do with time present?

A.O. Scott, in his New York Times article "Marshalling His Talent to Battle His Fame," written just after Marlon Brando's death, argues that "being a great actor can make you a movie star, but becoming a movie star can be the unmaking of an actor's greatness." Brando, he says, understood this and repeat- edly sent his talent into battle against his fame. This may also be true for architects, for while talent may or may not lead to

PERSPECTA 37: FAMOUS 166-167

Mephistopheles: Away! Else both of you are Lost! Away! Such useless chatter! Talk, talk and delay! My horses are shivering and shaking! Dawn is breaking!

fame and the winning of many prizes and commissions, fame in architecture is today what brings work. But this fame also has other consequences. Clients will begin to push the architect to produce buildings of the same style or look as those which brought the architect recognition.

An early example of this conundrum is Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1910, Wasmuth Monatshefte, a respected German journal of art and architecture, issued a special number on Wright, the first lavish monograph on his work. It is my contention that Wright, dazzled by the international interest and not understanding what the sudden attention was really about, began after that date to copy himself. He developed a signature style that would condemn his work, save for a few extraordinary late projects, to be a series of uncritical repetitions. While the signature began as a mark of authenticity, the demand for it today produces the opposite effect: a simulacrum of the authentic, a frenetic rush to both mimic oneself and be new at the same time.

A second and more sinister aspect to fame is the role of media in both creating and thriving on fame. The root of the word fame is fama, which means "to report." Without report- ing, without media, there is little chance of fame. The clients for architecture, who are hungry consumers of the media and have, in a way, a desire to be consumed by the media, hire star archi- tects not only because they have a style but also because certain styles produce recognizable imagery that will get published. In this never-ending chicken-and-egg cycle, the more something is published, the more recognizable it becomes, which leads to it being published again. But does being recognizable necessar- ily make it good architecture? The media's search for fantas- tic imagery, as well as precedent set by the "Bilbao effect," per- petuate an ever-increasing need for the spectacular. And since the media also demand the continual staging of the new, the "famous" are forced into creating ever-more spectacular and outrageous images - signatures of their success - lest they be consumed and tossed aside like yesterday's news.

Given this context, what does it mean when a supposedly crit- ical and culturally relevant journal such as Perspecta chooses to devote an entire issue to the subject of fame? Is it because fame is a subject of the currently fashionable "easy"? Or is fame a new category of the so-called postcritical cool and the topic of gossip and cocktail-party chatter? Faced with the elusive subject of fame and confronted with the creeping presence of a theory on the "easy," it is necessary to step back for a moment and ask why fame is important at this precise moment. Is it in some way part of the not-so-subtle erosion of the criti- cal? If one could imagine a serious treatise on fame, could it be treated critically? Could it be framed as something other than a legacy of postmodern irony? Would a central thematic address the problem that the media poses for architecture today? Would such a work outline the evolution of the media and its complicity with cultural institutions? Would it chronicle the changes in sensibility from the so-called serious architecture of the past - found in world expositions, for example - to today's pop-culture icons for theme parks and stage sets for enter- tainment and gaming? In short, would it attempt to articulate the subtle shifts in architecture culture, one where the "easy" and its corollary, the spectacular, provide a whiff of anti-intel- lectualism in which fame is only a residual by-product rather than a generator?

PETER EISENMAN

Does fame allow one the freedom to work independently or, alternatively, does it obligate one to do the work necessary to maintain one's fame? Does one gain access to teaching at presti- gious academies on the basis of one's fame? Or can a more criti- cal question be posed? Is there a relationship between fame and the ongoing evolution of the discipline of architecture as a criti- cal instrument, and more specifically, its history? Is fame com- plicit with history?

Alberti wrote in 1485 that every artistic discipline needed a storia, a history: a baseline against which to record the move- ment of the discipline, its consciousness and progress, and also to provide some basis for judgment. This idea of history created the conditions for the acknowledgment of the human subject and thus the possibility of the "famous artist." At the same time it created an opposing condition, the need for such a history to manifest a consciousness, which was then seen as critical of the previous transcendental metaphysic.

Before the Renaissance, all art was in some way believed to be mediated through God the creator and was thus regarded as an absolute phenomenon. However, during the Renaissance, the idea of history replaced art as an absolute register. With this his- tory came the idea of a subject in relationship to a work, an indi- vidual artist as a "creator," with a name, a signature, and ulti- mately the potential for fame. In his time, Alberti could not have been aware of this eventuality; for him, history merely meant some understanding of the orders, proportion, and essentially aesthetic issues. Yet with De re aediftcatoria, he was the first to articulate the terms for a critical aesthetic, for essentially his book was a critique of Vitruvius's De Architectura Libri Decem. Although Alberti also wrote in the form of a categorical treatise, which would become de rigeur for architecture until the twenti- eth century, he nevertheless was responding to Vitruvius's idea of firmitas. Architecture did not necessarily need to be literally structural, Alberti said, but merely had to look like it was struc- tural. This introduced the ideas of both representation and sign to architecture as well as the idea of the critical, which would become, in the Kantian sense, the possibility of knowledge within knowledge. Thus, the ideas of representation and the critical were introduced into the presence of architecture simul- taneously with the possibility of the "famous" artist.

From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the central medium in architecture was the history of an evolving and immanent metaphysics presented through various treatises. Clearly, what we know as the conventions of this history could be discerned not only from a study of the built artifacts but also from what was written about these works. For example, Palla- dio's famous I Quattro Libri is not a record of his works as they were built but as he intended them to be built. Thus, for Palla- dio, the written record was as important as the built work, both critically and in terms of a received history. But today, what was once a critical work has become a form of publicity. Who would have gone to see Palladio's villas were it not for his books? Like- wise, who would have gone to see the work of Le Corbusier if it had not been for his publication of Vers Une Architecture or the barrage of his Oeuvre Complète books? Many other architects were doing little white houses in pre-war France, yet they never cross the pages of our history books. What may have begun as a treatise is today also a form of media promotion. The relation- ship of architecture to the media is not like it was even fifty

PERSPECTA 37: FAMOUS 168-169

Faust: Those are indeed the eyes of the dead No Loving hand did close! That is the breast which Gretchen yielded me, That the young form I loved so passsionately!

PETER EISENMAN

Siebel: Help! Help! Fire! Help! Hell's on fire!... ...It's witchcraft! Strike!

The fellow's an outlaw! Hit as you like!

PERSPECTA 37: FAMOUS 170-171

years ago. By the time Aldo Rossi's book, A Scientific Autobi- ography, was published in 1982, history and fame had become entangled in an all-pervasive media. Perhaps it was fame, and not the books or the buildings, that caused the Pritzker-win- ning Rossi to say near the end of his career, "Sono stanco di gloria [I am tired of glory]."

As forms of media, what is the difference between the treatise or polemical text of the past and what is seen more commonly in the newspapers, journals, and coffee-table books of today? While the treatise may have led to a certain modicum of fame or notori- ety, it more importantly created an evolving disciplinary history, a history that had only a tangential relationship to fame.

The self-consciousness of the subject and the idea of the crit- ical that emerged during the Renaissance constituted the first link between the idea of fame and history. But when fame and history are elided today in the media's need for the new and immediate, the critical function of history becomes irrelevant. Rather, history becomes a definition of the future present. This may be one reason for the continuous attack on the idea of the critical, an attack that may ultimately signal the subtle complic- ity of theorists and the media.

In an attempt to confront a loss of the critical in the nine- teenth century, Romanticism introduced the idea of a disciplin- ary autonomy to overcome both the absolute nature of history and the idea that art was reified only in the individual artist. According to Maurice Blanchot, this disciplinary autonomy "encloses itself in the affirmation of an inner sovereignty which accepts no law and repudiates all power." With the contamina- tion of fame and history and the identification of the critical with a faltering metaphysics, this autonomy refuses all judg- ments other than its own.

Today, the differences between fame and history have become muddied. First, fame seems to have little to do with the critical. Where previously fame was perhaps a result of a his- tory - the history of a career of work - today history is a result of fame and is thus a mediated history detached from the actual work. Also, fame today is no longer linked to the future of his- tory but to the present of the media. The media has become the metaphysics of the present. While history may no longer be an absolute reference, neither is art. The media not only reports and observes, it creates. This is because to survive, the media must constantly replenish itself - that is its nature. It must create newness, which in itself becomes a strange perpetual history of a tomorrow, not of the present. But what kind of his- tory is media writing? Is it a history of fame, of instant heroes?

Many years ago, Colin Rowe said to me, "Once you have seen one Gothic cathedral, you have seen them all." What he meant by this broad generalization was that there were no ideas in cathedrals that could not be gleaned from a quick look at any single cathedral. If there was any idea, it was in the spec- tacular imagery, in the aesthetic piling up of ever-more slen- der structural elements. This accounts for the "easy" popular- ity of Gothic architecture and its contemporary manifestations in the work of Santiago Calatrava; once you have seen one, you have seen them all. But today there is another context where the "easy" may be found. The "easy" seems to have become a self-serving position, with a generation of critics and archi- tects attempting to pit their theories of a "projective" postcriti- cal position against what they see as an outdated notion of criti-

cality. The postcritical, the cool, and the "easy" are conflated by the critics Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, who basically argue against indexicality and process. They somehow infer that to be critical is to be negative, while to be projective is to be positive as well as influential. Why, they ask, is it necessary to demonstrate how difficult architecture is? Why not make what is in reality not easy - the difficult - look easy?

My concern with this position is twofold. First, it is perhaps not truly postcritical, but merely the critical repackaged for popular consumption. Second, it is too easy to elide and per- haps confuse the truly easy (Calatrava, for example) with the theoretical position of a Somol or a Whiting. In whatever form the "easy" is manifest, it cannot avoid the smell of pandering. When Dave Hickey says that he prefers the real fake to the fake real, is he just offering an updated idea of kitsch? If some- thing is truly difficult, why do we need to sugarcoat it, if not for some form of populist pragmatism? Instead of enfolding the difficult within the "easy," why not question a problem unique to architecture, such as the metaphysics of presence? Ulti- mately, to theorize the "easy" is to espouse an anti-theory, as opposed to a theoretical position of the negative. But "negative thinking," as theorized by Benjamin, Adorno, and others, has often produced positive results. And this is the ultimate irony. The very media that undermines the critical project has been joined by the proponents of the "easy." Once eschewed by that same media, they are now seemingly complicit in catering to a popular voice.

In what has always seemed to be an ironic conclusion of Goethe's story, Dr. Faust supposedly sees the error of his ways for his "one hour of pleasure" and is redeemed by God. The object of his passing affection, however, distraught after being abandoned by Dr. Faust, murders her mother, drowns her own baby, and is led away to her execution.

All of us, Andy Warhol famously said, have the possibility of fifteen minutes of fame, which we may read as the temptation of the Mephistophelian media. But what happens to our amor, the discipline of architecture? Does architecture suffer the same fate as Dr. Faust's lover?

When one rolls the dice with the devil for fame, fortune, and power, the devil always wins. But the one thing that the devil cannot take away is a critical history linked to the autonomy of the discipline. This is not granted by anyone or anything external to architecture but rather is produced by an inter- nal discipline and a control of one's own destiny. It is the pos- sibility of such a history that stands today in the face of the easy temptations of fame.