1989 Chicago Institute for Architecture & Urbanism (CIAU)
Language and Temporality in Contemporary Architecture

Ornament and Time

Early Christian and Late Antique art have long been recognized as being the antecedents of recent art: both comparable in their origin of abstraction and degree of interiority. Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer have made this insight the testing ground for a new theory of style. Abstract art grew out of the new psychology of style. And yet, in recognizing a common experience, a need for unmediated subjective authority that affirms the surface and denies spatial cues and naturalistic devices, they have neglected the temporal dimension that mediates and determines our experience.

If we accept a conception of time as discontinuous, then, criticism of ornament may mean no more than criticism of the superfluous rather than the supplementary. Ornament, which loses its symbolic signification in time appears instead a mere cultural vestige. This reoccurring situation of ornament in architecture has prompted a return to the past, to collective memory, leading sometimes to the rehabilitation of temporal structures constructed as both formal and culturally inherent. Traces are revived in the contemporary repertoire of architecture as a source for complexity and contradiction as much as inspiration for follies and transgressions.

If every system of ornament shares with Adolf Loos’s shoemaker a pattern in time, then in turn, it produces a particular matrix of time. For Loos it is “criminal” for the one who listens to Wagner’s Tannhäuser to go home and draw his own wallpaper, just as it is unjust to deprive the shoemaker of his patent shoe patterns. Such a system of ornament establishes private and collective matrices of time, specific modalities, in so far as they mediate between the intuition of internal time consciousness and a comparable external object of experience. That is to say, a pattern in time that enables us to exteriorize what is internal and internalize what is external, a pattern that can be conceived of only in an ideated form, such as the Christian Liturgies, the Messianic Sabbath, the Gregorian Calendar, or the calendar of the French Revolution.

The crisis of temporality determines a crisis of ornament. Indeed, in theoretical terms, ornament appears to be relative to the historical period that gives rise to it and is therefore detachable. The totalizing project of utopia implies the end of time and thus requires a language without precedent as in Thomas More’s new alphabet or the stricture of Campanella (La città del sole) who prescribed in his utopia capital punishment to women who wore cosmetics. As a result, ornament, which is nothing but the embodiment of a pattern in time can only be inimical to the realization of Utopia whether on “the white walis of Zion” in Loos’s essay “Ornament and Crime” (1908) or in the absence of ornament at the Dessau Bauhaus and the Weissenhofsiedlung (Stuttgart, 1926).

By comparing Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and Adolf Loos’s aversion to ornament as exemplified by the Jugendstil, we are restoring cosmetics to cosmos, ornament to schema, and decoration to habitation. Loos equated the primitive tattoo with contemporary ornament; this equation can be seen to be embodied in the law inscribed in the skin and flesh by Kafka’s penal machine.

When certain elements of decoration and construction are stabilized as time and measure, as ornament, decoration, and construction can no longer be reduced to applied arts. They become moments of expression.

“There are Baroque armchairs,” writes Ernst Bloch, “that are too important for any use and turn the peculiar attitude, the quasi-removed mask of sitting down into something new, somewhat uncanny, like a fairy tale, a most peculiar line. It is not taste anymore, nor is it conscious, painstakingly stylized, self-righteous immanent form, but an offprint from life is in preparation—reaching into a space where only the ultimate of pure art exists—it is already a signifying and descriptive sign, a seal of profundity and of daydream: painted as if the skin of, and carved as if the skeleton of a specter, of a spirit, of an inner figure had been transferred to it.” [1]

The problem of ornament as the central drama of the characters in twentieth-century novels can be seen to unfold through their comparable search for different temporal modalities. Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain begins with an allusion that is an indication of the doubtfulness and peculiar duality of that enigmatic element called time.

But the theme of a “machine for the study of time” had already appeared at the turn of the century in Rabelaisian form in a comic prose piece. Alfred Jarry as Doctor Faustroll published in Mercure de France in 1899 his “Commentaires pour server a la construction de la machine a explorer Ie temps,” the same year as H. G. Wells published Tales of Space and Time. Writing on William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Jean-Paul Sartre showed that Faulkner’s heroes, like Marcel Proust’s, are characterized by an attitude toward time essentially different from that of writers of the nineteenth century. Time does not move. Faulkner’s heroes exist in the time of their memories where there is no linear order of events; even maps become relative to the country (Absalom, Absalom!).

In his essay on Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy illustrating general laws of plot, Victor Shklovsky reconstructed the time device in the construction of Tristram’s subjective time capsule, the arbitrariness of “literary time.” [2]

In contrast with an earlier simplification of the nature of change, more recently we have become also concerned with the possibility of certain types of continuity in time, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s “great time” in which all utterances are linked to all others, both from the primordial past and in the furthest reach of the future.

The paradox of duration, virtual time, as a temporal matrix as opposed to subjective experience of lived time gives rise to the different modalities of temporality. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloom’s Dublin is encapsulated in twenty-four hours. Perhaps more radical still is Hermann Bronch’s The Death of Virgil in which the poet’s last eighteen hours are the matrix of his entire life and work.

At the very beginning of Alice in Wonderland, Alice wonders how a candle’s flame looks after it is blown out, and how the smile of the Cheshire cat appears before him and remains longer than he himself does. It leads to the parable expressed by Osip Mandelstam that perhaps the whisper was before all lips were formed, and when there were no trees at all, yet leaves went whirling; that which we experiment upon acquires features before the experiment.

This approach to time was accomplished dramatically by contemporary cinema and criticism as subjective lived time became a model of consciousness and its mental states. The endless subjective camera shot that ends when our lives end, as Pier Paolo Pasolini put it in La paura del naturalismo, became the creation of the present. From Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo, where Asa Nisi Masa inscribed on the board reminds the hero of his childhood, to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, where the old man relives his life as he travels a summer road, to Alain Resnais’s L’année dernière a Marienbad where a pattern in time reflects the unfathomable geometry of the place, and to Jacques Rivette’s Out One, the presence reigns.

We may conceive of duration as discrete photographic frames or as having no beginning and no end. Martin Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s finite temporalization no doubt did follow Henri Bergson’s in liberating philosophy from the authority of the model of scientific time. Underlying human culture is a desire to overcome death, a desire expressed, in particular, in the accumulation and preservation of knowledge of the past, as much as a desire for the silent language of mute things.

Even if we do not give way to sleep, we do not become a stage for eternity but remain a prisoner of time. We are able to kill collectively but we die individually; we do not live to experience death, but the death of others is an event in our life.

The colossal tombs of ancient Egypt were a means of struggle against death. The very color, green, of their inscriptions, their “text,” their “ornament,” was regarded as the symbol of resurrection. Even in its outward appearance, the color testifies to the fact that this most literary monument of mankind was also the most ancient ornament, a protest against death. The limitation in time and above all the limitation of death, not only predetermined the work and some of its features but also accounted for one of the most significant themes of art: the relationship between time and eternity. The myth of continuous time connects man with what William Burroughs calls that “original nature which imposes itself on any human solution.” He then cites evidence for a theory of a sudden mutation, and ruptures his narratives with “perhaps something as simple as a hiccup of time. Empty room just like that.” Ludwig Wittgenstein felt that “we cannot compare a process with the passage of time—there is no such thing—but only with another process (such as the working of a chronometer). Hence we can describe the laps of time only by relying on some other process.” [3] The present for Wittgenstein is spatial and infinite: “a spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument place).” [4] Perhaps it is a way of resisting change.

Like Wittgenstein, Burroughs deals with short, not necessarily related time spans, and regards time as verbal: “without words there is not time;” there would be “no time if we didn’t say anything.” Wittgenstein is concerned to combat the metaphysical implications of language “or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.” [5] ”If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.” [6]

The character of the axis of time in the development and change of art does permit absorption and restoration of ancient canons, in parts, just as language makes possible the renewed rehabilitation of older words. Coexistence and succession, short- and long-term memory contribute to the character and authenticity of ornament no less than in the life of an individual or cultures. “Today is the great transition from past to present. In the huge pit of forms there lies rubble to which one still clings in part. It furnishes the stuff of abstraction,” wrote Paul Klee in his diary in the first two months of 1915. “I have had this war within me for a long time. Therefore it does affect me internally [. . .] In order to work myself out of my rubble, I had to fly [. . .] And I did fly. In that shattered world I remain only in memory, as one thinks back sometimes. Thus I am ‘abstract with memories.” [7]

Perhaps this desire for ornament that expresses an inner law can no longer be realized in an ideogram of our innermost intensity, of our innermost collective and basic secrets. What is carved, is carved from the inside and it leads increasingly to the outside, away from the expression of the inside, toward the material alien to the self. The inner measures are incorporated into the carving that has risen to the surface and endows life with its shape in time. The inner measures refer to a spiritual a priori of construction, of architecture, they refer to the uselessness of building on earth for the sake of providing access to another world.

If the organization of ornament in a classical culture, in a society that appears to be intact, is not unlike the collective organization of time, then an individual will be always and already capable of conceiving an alternative modality in as much as the organization of ornament is always and inevitably achieved by dismembering, that is discontinuity or montage. Montage does the same thing with film material that death does with life, or as Pasolini puts it, to which only death can give final meaning.

Notes

[1] Ernst Bloch, Art and Utopia, 85.

[2] Victor Shklovsky, Tristram Shandy Sterna i teoriya romana (Petrograd: 1921).

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), 6.3611.

[4] Ibid., 2.0131.

[5] Ibid., 6.4312.

[6] Ibid., 6.4311.

[7] Paul Klee, Tagebucher, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: 1957), entries 951–952.

Publication

Safran, Yehuda. “Ornament and Time.” Ottagono 97 (1990): 3–10.