Obeying the Rules
Let's talk about artistic rules, how they get made, and how tempting it is to abuse them. They get abused when a critic beats an artist over the head with them. They also get abused when a lazy artist applies them mechanically.
In a few days, I may share some musical examples (if I have time to transcribe them) from a recent improvisation session at the piano, which illustrates some rule-making. It may even be of interest to one or two people in the world besides me. Meanwhile, I'll let you nibble on this appetizer from the excellent, short book by John Summerson called The Classical Language of Architecture. It has generally approving things to say about Le Corbusier, a man responsible (as much as an architect can be responsible) for a decent amount of the misery in the world today (and whose buildings look diseased), but in any event, this passage about Le Corbu's Modulor system has great insight generally and expresses, better than I could, something I firmly believe is true:
Le Corbusier threw away this framework [of traditional classicism] and let the industrial forms speak their own, often bizarre, language; but he exercised a more formidable and effective control than the token orders of Behrens and Perret could do by the application of what he has called 'tracés regulateurs' -- lines of control. In doing this, Le Corbusier was re-assuming a kind of control which had never been entirely forgotten but which belongs essentially to the Renaissance and was fundamental to the work both of Alberti and of Palladio.The rules are always created in response to artistic intuition. Artists who follow in the footsteps of the originator must somehow internalize the rules and expand (or even "break") them to avoid becoming trapped in the role of pedant. And nobody likes a pedant.
At the base of this kind of control is the conviction that harmonious relationships in architecture can only be secured if the shapes of rooms and the openings in walls and indeed all elements in a building are made to conform with certain ratios which are related continuously to all other ratios in the building. To what extent rational systems of this kind do produce effects which eye and mind can consciously apprehend I am extremely doubtful. I have a feeling that the real point of such systems is simply that their users (who are mostly their authors) need them; that there are types of extremely fertile, inventive mind which need the tough inexorable discipline of such systems to correct and at the same time stimulate invention. And the fate of these systems seems, on the whole, to confirm this; they rarely survive their authors and users and the next man of fertile genius invents his own. That, however, in no way diminishes their importance.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
3 Comments:
I'd say that Le Corbusier was an engineer rather than an architect. "Machines for living" may be a great sound-bite or conversation starter, but humans, not being machines themselves, just do not live in machines.
Do you think it's totally fair to say that those who merely accept or follow artistic rules are "pedants"? Couldn't they qualify as, say, wonderful-artists-who-aren't-innovators instead? How about those artists who simply use the rules to create beautiful, moving, funny, or otherwise rewarding experiences?
Writing about architecture, Leon Krier has a great quote that goes, "As is the case with all good things in life -- love, good manners, language, cooking -- personal creativity is required only rarely."
But maybe I misunderstand you?
Annonymous:
First of all, let me say, I love your work!
Anyway, you ask an excellent question. Maybe what I'm suggesting is that even non-innovators are manipulating the rules, however subtly.
Nevertheless, I agree: one Wagner per generation is plenty.
Here's a reformulation with which I hope we can all agree: it is possible to create art which perfectly follows some deliberately codified set of rules, the effect of which is, nevertheless, flat as a pancake.
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