The Measures Taken

Modernism- NFT and V&A, London

Three- The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic



‘When the body has completely become an object, a beautiful thing, it can foreshadow a new happiness. In suffering the most extreme reification man triumphs over reification’
Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ (1937)

Of all the anti-modernist critiques that these pieces have been mocking and picking apart, there was one that stood out, not necessarily for its originality or surprise, but in eloquently putting across an old politico-aesthetic rivalry. The piece is by J.G Ballard, but states an objection that was made implicitly and explicitly by Dada’s mutation into the Surrealist International, regardless of the fact Tristan Tzara got Adolf Loos to design his house. The reassertion of the irrational by the dreaming wing of the artistic left, essentially, or more generally the psychoanalytic objection. Though Ballard isn’t as scathing as say, his hero Dali- who, on learning of Le Corbusier’s death in 1967 wrote derisively of a man who ‘wanted us to live in reinforced concrete when we’re sending men into space, who wants to build in reinforced concrete on the moon’ but nonetheless, amid some fairly pointless digressions on German military architecture, hits a few nails on the head.



Specifically- ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camoflage, and I regret that no-one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery. All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, Corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature.’



This last part will, then, try and imagine what happens to the libidinal imaginary when all this is stripped away, what happens without camoflage, and try to argue against this profoundly depressing suggestion that one can only fall in love in buildings of the 18th century- try to imagine instead love among the Siedlungen. Marcuse’s 1937 essay imagines a realisation of such aesthetically loaded terms as beauty and love, via an elimination of its mystificatory character, that which immediately gives the patina of ‘romanticism’ to a dry exercise in Augustan neo-classicism like the National Gallery. Rather than, as Kautsky argues, take up bourgeois culture in toto for the proletariat, or reproduce its values in a new style, ‘such views miss the main point: the abolition of this culture’. This is what made the modernism derided by Ballard so harsh- the need to assert a counter, to create another culture, something the left is at present utterly unwilling to do, endlessly harping on about ‘resistance’, without the slightest notion of victory, let alone what culture should exist after one.



A glib political distinction could be made that while between 1927 and 1934 Constructivism became Stalinist, the Surrealism which set itself up at the same time was Trotskyist. And this can be mapped to some extent onto actual political allegiances, such as Rivera and Kahlo (who mind you lived in impeccably modernist style, in identical Purist boxes next each other) or Andre Breton’s public support for Trotsky and the Fourth International, at a time in which El Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Stepanova were fully paid up propagandists for the Five-Year Plans (as can be seen in the Tate Modern’s utterly ideological choice of their work for the propaganda magazine USSR In Construction to represent the Soviet avant-garde); though without wanting to belittle Breton’s courage here, it was rather easier to be a Trotskyist in Paris than Moscow. But aside from these polarities there is an element of truth, specifically in that the increasingly industrialist, functionalist bent of the modernist avant-garde left out the dream life of the 20th century, that Freud had to be repressed in order to apothesize Lenin.



The exceptions to this, the attempts to close this divide, can actually be seen most interestingly at the most extreme pole of modernism- the avowedly Communist Central European Functionalism that was forcibly expelled from mainstream modernism as it became canonical in the 1930s. CIAM’s early congresses essentially involved the German, Soviet and Czech elements being expunged by Le Corbusier, so that by the time of their manifesto the ‘Athens Charter’, they had de facto been expelled. Corbusier had his own take on the sex appeal of reinforced concrete. During the 1930s his Purist pilotis began quite deliberately taking on the form of a particularly formidable woman’s thigh, his paintings frequently dwelling on the steatopygous: allegedly once trying to hit on a journalist with the line ‘you are very fat. I like my women fat.’ The myth is that while Corbusier was opened up to sensualism, the protagonists of the minimum-wohnung, whether Ernst May, Hannes Meyer, Karel Teige, Bruno Taut, or the many others who headed East rather than West to escape the rise of Nazism, insisted on bracing hard lines- on a refusal to ever be anything other than utterly clear headed.



So it’s interesting then, that two of the more vociferous Czechoslovakian Functionalists, the architect Jiri Kroha and editor, designer and propahaindist Karel Teige, are responsible for some straightforwardly carnal exhibits in the V&A show. Kroha is represented by a photomontage of naked, mostly female bodies, their pulchritude presented as an element of fizkultura, of a rational approach to the human body, free of romantic mystification- something that is totally undercut by qualities that Kroha himself had no control over. Namely that these men with their sharp hairstyles and wiry bodies, the women with flapper haircuts and very early 20th century generous proportions, the sepia tone of the photographs, gives to them an inadvertent fetishistic eroticism- fashion defeating modernism.



A rather cleverer treatment of the line of the female body can be seen meanwhile in Karel Teige’s alphabet montages, where a woman in what could conceivably be a sports constume, a kind of sachlich undergarment or swimwear contorts herself into a new system of language based on angular polarities, physical exertion combined with anti-naturalism. One difference is that Teige’s work deliberately deals with sexual provocation, it suggests that the human body will be able to do new things, that the dream-life of the machine for living in, the libido of the minimum dwelling, will have all manner of possibilites unencumbered by an accepted idea of eroticism- the courting couples at the Louvre so tediously hymned by Ballard in 2006 replaced by the hypersexual geometry of the Ballard of 1969 and his Atrocity Exhibition. The angle between two walls, the spark and friction of man-made surface.



Teige was an incredibly ardent defender of functionalism at it’s most hard-line, his book The Minimum Dwelling being one of the most famous tracts advocating an extreme reductivism for a Communist Architecture. A line could actually be traced from Teige’s micro-houses to the musical Microhouse of a 2000s Central European label like Perlon, which follows like Teige a combination of the mechanoid and the licentous by way of setting extreme limitations on itself- and a Ricardo Villalobos track, with its stripped, entirely man-made pulsions, squelches and dry liquidity would surely be the perfect music for one of the flats hymned by Teige. So his use of a particularly extreme form of Surrealist photomontage from the 1930s onwards need not be seen as a retreat from his Functionalist preoccupations but a representation of their possible dream life, both utopian, quotidian and dystopian. They also of course coincide with his public break with Stalinism, leaving the party in 1937.



A few of these montages are oneirically beautiful titilation, reorganisations of the human body into landscapes with no purpose other than polymorphous perversity, uncoincidentally cocking a snook at the puritanism of the Stalinised USSR. Utopianism transferred to the body itself. Others make sexpol puns reminiscent of the wry photoplastics of Moholy-Nagy, militarism juxtaposed with girlie mags juxtaposed with adverts. Where they become unnerving is when war makes incursions upon them, when their beningly diffuse bodies become forcibly diffused, when actual cruelty and destruction supplants the artistic. Hence it’s instructive to note what happened to Kroha and Teige in the Stalinised Czechoslovakia post-1948. The former became a Socialist Realist almost overnight, presumably in order to keep working- accordingly, he was feted, providing an intellectual justification for the gables and crenellations of Stalinist post-modernism. Interestingly in old age he composed a monograph on Constructivist architecture. Meanwhile, Teige’s sympathy for Trotskyism wasn’t forgotten, and he died young while being regularly hounded by the secret police.



While avant-gardes in the 1980s would celebrate near impossible physical feats, Mapplethorpe’s Lisa Lyon photos encapsulating an elite form of physical discipline, the 20s response was at the level of everyday life, as in the Marcel Breuer photo of a recumbent sportswoman, slightly dumpy but asymmetrically haired, sat by a record player with impeccable cool. Outside of the explicit provocations of Le Corbusier and Teige (in their very different ways) was the more accepted form of confrontation with the non-machinic body. This was what was was called in the USSR Fizkultura, the sports organisations and Spartakiadas which were the alternative to the classicist, capitalist Olympiads- how curious, given the Eastern Bloc’s later obsession with Olympic record-breaking, down to forcible medical attempts to break down gender divisions in order to achieve it.



These festivals of the Labour Movement became an obvious a training ground for protagonists of the man-machine. This can be seen in many of the greatest works of the cinematic montageurs of the 20s and early 30s, bodily leaps and feats reacting dialectically with their own chops and cuts- from the reverse diving boards of Vertov’s Kino-Eye to the sports festival of Kuhle Wampe, all eagerly cannibalised by Riefenstahl. Or in the form of photo-montage, the riotous poster designs by Gustav Klutsis for the 1928 Spartakiada (also in the V&A), tensions encoded in clashing colours and preposterous angles.



That the link between mass sport and the more dubious form of mass politics has been coloured forever by Nazism shouldn’t necessarily lead to its wholesale rejection. The passage in Herbert Marcuse’s essay in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung quoted above talks about the forms of demotic more acceptable to the leftist intellectual, but is nonetheless apposite here: ‘the artistry of the beautiful body, its effortless agility and relaxation, which can be displayed today only in the circus, vaudeville and burlesque, herald the joy to which will attain in being liberated to the ideal, in which man, having become a true subject, succeeds in the mastery of matter.’ This exuberance, when spread on a mass scale has similarities with another Constructivist incursion into mass culture, the flapper dresses of Stepanova and Liubov Popova, where the the reification necessary in the act of becoming an object, a desired object, is prised out of the irrationality of commodity relations. Christina Kiaer writes of these attempts as attempted transfigurations of byt, or everyday life, electrifications of the high street of a fundamentally different order to fashion as we usually understand it.



‘Modernism was never popular in Britain, a little too frank for its repressed natives, except at lidos and at the seaside, where people take their clothes off’, writes Ballard, accurately. And the prototype of these lidos, and another incursion into byt, is in the rather unsympathetic environs of London Zoo, where a guilty conservationalism seems deeply unnerved with the Constructivist legacy left them by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton. The Penguins were unhappy, weren’t producing enough baby little penguins. So the water is replaced with woodchip, a porcupine now sits disgruntled under the impossible swoops and curves of the boards. This is the Ballard’s position, essentially- it looks stunning, but you couldn’t breed in it. Which begs the question- why would you want to? Of all the reductive views of human potential! There’s no country where this orthodoxy is more enforced than Britain, with its ersatz cottages in the middle of inner cities where couples gingerly take their steps on the oh so important housing ladder. The greatest writer on this torpor and the attempt to shock it into the modern world was H.G Wells, early on in a purely destructive manner, choosing in The War of the Worlds a wishlist of places to be levelled by the Martians that even now could do with some extraterrestrial warfare- Woking, Clapham, South Kensington (naturally including the V&A), Primrose Hill.



A kind of hyper-Platonic version of the Minimum-Wohnung serves, with Moholy-Nagy’s assistance, as a vision of the future in Korda and Wells’ 1936 film of Things to Come- all skin-tight white overalls, gleaming lift shafts, rational monochrome and artificial surfaces, lit by bracing light underground while the natural world above is let alone to do its own wholly uninteresting thing. That this (non-ironic) future should come after one of the most terrifying depictions of technologised warfare in all cinema should not be a surprise. Wells, like Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, recognised that technology, modernisation, were the solution as much as they were the problem, a recognition (forgotten by the left at some point, presumably in the 1960s) that the new world would have to harness advanced technology for utopia to be achievable. That this is always undercut by the idiocies of the free market can be seen most pungently in his panoramic proto-Modernist novel Tono-Bungay. Here George Ponderevo, a fantastically intelligent young scientist, socialist and son of a domestic servant, realises that there’s no way he can use these abilites for the benefit of society in its present state- it just wouldn’t pay- so instead he markets with his quack uncle an utterly pointless psuedo-medicinal drink, modelled by Wells on Coca-Cola.



This then enables him to pioneer all manner of inventions, all of which eventually find their way into the service of the class system he loathes. They invent a ‘Machine for Living In’ in the knowledge that it’ll only be used for the rich for their villas. Ponderevo works on flying machines destined eventually for military use. The novel ends with a magnificently bitter blast against London for its pusillanimity, a sweep over the Thames in all its aimless Victorian chaos. ‘Again and again in this book I have written of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration and stupendous accidents of hypertrophy…the vulgarest, most typical exploit of modern England, the sham Gothic carvings to the ironwork of the Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance and conformation of Westminster’s dull pinnacles and tower…Each day one feels that the pressure of commerce and traffic grew insensibly monstrous…this unassailable enormity of traffic…ships bound for the killing of men in unfamiliar lands….’ That this still rings so true (but for the actual industrial activity on the river, replaced with virtual commerce serviced by small armies of migrant cleaners, much as Wells’ Ponderevo comes from the huge Victorian servant class…) should be utterly astonishing nearly a hundred years later.

Which is why, contra Ballard it is now Modernism, rather than Surrealism, which you can see in any postmodern precinct or desultory flick through the channels, that has a truly oneiric quality, like what initially seems the recollection of a fevered dream that you have to remind yourself is actual memory.