YUCK!

It looks like a bunch of broken up pieces. There’s no harmony. Are they going to build that?

Amen…I honestly don’t see what God has to do with it though. Did He prescribe a certain sort of architecture? The building design here is simply hideous.

[Note by LA: See my reply to Gracián’s question at:
http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001630.html ]

The war against the transcendent involves assaults on the objectively true, the objectively good, and the objectively beautiful. The current subject raises the issue of objective beauty in particular, or at least approaches the war from the modality of beauty. Much of modern and postmodern art (Picasso’s cubism is just one example) is specifically created in order to attack the idea of objective beauty. The more modern art becomes the more directly it attacks objective truth, good, and beauty. The original Twin Towers were architecturally an expression of inhuman rationalism, specifically designed so that you couldn’t tell from the outside where the actual people were inside — in short, a clear expression of 20th century inhuman rationalist capitalism. If the modern is a state partially at war with objective truth, good, and beauty then the postmodern is complete all-out war. I think Mr. Auster is right to call this current design postmodern, and its affront to God is manifest.

“This freaky postmodern monstrosity is an object lesson in what happens when man turns away from God, the transcendent, and tradition. It must be stopped.”

Having an excessive proportion of this kind of stuff in a city at the expense of edifices of a more traditional, transcendent style also encourages the turning-away from the transcendent, from tradition and, indirectly, from God, by that city’s people — or at any rate, does nothing to help the inhabitants to see the transcendent aspect of reality.

So, the ill-effects go both ways (turning away from tradition leads to an excess of this stuff, and an excess of this stuff leads to turning away from tradition), and the effects in each direction feed off one another. This is none other than the classic “vicious cycle,” whence the appropriateness of Mr. Auster’s suggestion that “It must be stopped”: Wherever a classic vicious-cycle situation has been set up, there is only one solution — break the cycle.

City planners ought to have more sense and taste than to permit an excessive preponderance of this kind of cold, impersonal, ugly architecture. A little of it would be fine. And yes, there were those Parisians who similarly criticised the newly-built Eiffel Tower. But Paris never went overboard with Eiffel-Tower-like structures to the neglect of traditional ones. If it had, no one today would consider Paris a beautiful city.

To elaborate on my previous post a bit:

This particular design seems to have been chosen to look as unnatural as possible. Specifically it looks like it can only be a product of the human will. That seems to be the point to modern art. Rather than attempting to reveal the objective beauty of God’s creation modern art attempts to shout “God is dead!” and create a new uber-beauty that is purely the product of man’s will-to-power.

Postmoderns and liberals pat themselves on the back for not being Nietszchean nazis, but from where I stand they all look the same.

the design is not post-modern. post-modernism is 1/2 modern and 1/2 something else. the something else is usually a traditional or a regional language.

graves is post-modern, venturi is post-modern, stern is post-modern in the neo-classicism school, to name three you might be familiar with. moore’s piazza d’italia is a paradigm example of post-modern architecture.

that design might be called ultra-modern; or better yet, call it kitsch trash; or better still, call it 3d white nationalism, they all mean the same thing you know

Abby’s concept of postmodernism seems nominalist to me. My understanding of postmodernism is that you start with rationalist modernism and then add in the basic epistemic understanding that truth isn’t a positivist deduction from empirical facts — that instead discursive knowledge always involves explicit discourse combined with tradition and an authoritative magisterium. Like all modern thought postmodernism rejects tradition, so it is left with the arbitrary will of human authorities juxtaposed to empty text. Since this is inherently unequal and enslaving, and seemingly arbitrary, postmodernism works to subvert interpretive authority. Postmodernism is simply the natural extenstion of modernism’s emancipatory narrative.

What all that implies to art school types I don’t know and couldn’t care less. As I said, it all represents an assault on objective truth, good, and beauty; with the substitute of human-willed versions of those things by the free and equal ubermenschen as its goal.

Matt wrote:

“This particular design seems to have been chosen to look as unnatural as possible. Specifically it looks like it can only be a product of the human will. That seems to be the point to modern art. Rather than attempting to reveal the objective beauty of God’s creation modern art attempts to shout ‘God is dead!’ and create a new uber-beauty that is purely the product of man’s will-to-power.”

I think Matt’s account perfectly captures the intent and meaning of this design, especially his notion of “über-beauty.”

It’s odd but I rather like the design as trash science fiction. Or maybe as a surrealist painting. As a place for human beings it’s absurd.

PoMo is patently not a mixture of the modern and the traditional or regional, by the way. Arbitrary misappropriation of themes is not mixture.

abby does suggest an interesting point though — if modernism thought you could deduct pure form, and postmodernism rejects the idea and makes do with willful misappropriation, and this design is postmodern, what does it misappropriate? Old Amazing Stories covers I suppose.

Regarding the Twin Towers replacement, when L. Auster said “This freaky monstrosity is…what happens when man turns away from God..,” in my inner vision there appeared spontaneously an image of Michael Jackson’s face.

“when man turns away from God, the transcendent, and tradition” Can you provide examples of buildings that are what you would like to see?

matt, your definition of post-modernism may fit the kitsch trash design for the world trade center, but it doesn’t fit either the modern movement or post-modern.

tradition in architecture are the rules, just like in poetry, and every good architect knows them and applies them. these rules are symmetry and balance, additive and subtractive, repetitive to unique, plan to section, proportion, configuration of the path, path space relationships, organization of elements and spaces, parti, and so forth.

lots of architecture is inhuman, because of incompetence, a lack of understanding of human nature, or because the building wasn’t designed first as human habitation; but the post-modernists, like venturi, moore and stern address this inhumaness, both in thier writing and in their design.

oh yes, i’m not a post-modernist because i rejected the modern movement from the outset, but i do tend towards the neo-classical school of the post-modernists. in case you were wondering.

I’m with those who think it looks appalling

” ‘when man turns away from God, the transcendent, and tradition’ Can you provide examples of buildings that are what you would like to see?” — Stephen

Yeah, I can. Let’s start with the Parthenon, or something as beautiful, and work our way forward in time to the same principles but expressed in a modern way. Or how about ideas based on, inspired by, and flowing from the monumental Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (a Roman, not a Muslim, building, by the way, as most people know, the four mosque minaret towers on the corners having been added after the Muslims conquered that city)? How about something in the spirit of hybid Roman-Greek structures like the Pantheon in Rome and the whole range of neo-classical architecture which graces D.C.? How about any of Sir Christopher Wren’s buildings in London? How about St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, whereof I believe Michaelangelo designed the dome? How about drawing inspiration from a version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa but without the “lean” (that structure easily, by the way, rivals the Parthenon and the Taj Majal for sheer perfection and I think it’s INSANITY that successive Italian governments of the modern “touristy” era have seen fit only to try to reinforce its “lean” so that it won’t tip over altogether, instead of finally putting it upright — upright, where it would be an even more important tourist attraction than it has been ridiculously leaning to one side, kept that way because know-nothing mid-Western American tourists with more money than taste or brains like it that way). What about any of the traditional buildings of the city of Florence? Not to your taste? OK — Venice then? I can deal with Venice — I can go with that … . How about the Palace of Versailles? If it’s “kitsch” they find appealing, how about a sort of kitsch that links us to our spiritual past, like mad King Ludwig of Bavaria’s castle, Neuschwanstein? Not appropriate to the sky-scraper mode? Fine. Kitsch then, like the 1930s trend among NYC skyscraper designers of giving a bit of gothic-gargoyle flavor to their buildings, like the Chrysler building, so at least New Yorkers can be reminded of Victor Hugo’s novel “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” if they happen to glance up at it while walking by on the street, or see it in a Batman movie, and feel proud that the Old World isn’t the only place on the planet where architecture can be found that has a heart and soul. Why does the only architectural kitsch New Yorkers ever get link to the nearest garbage dumpster? I mean, the list goes on … My favorite castle in Belgium is Reinhardstein in the German-speaking Eastern Cantons. Whenever I passed by it while driving through the countryside there, I thought of the Prisoner of Zenda. Can’t some of the principles of that structure be expressed in some modernized idiom which will inspire and uplift New York?

My vote for the world’s worst architecture? The monstrosities that were put up in the 60s in the city of Brasilia, in Brazil. I think of that as “Neo-1950s-and-1960s-U.S.-International-Airport-Attempt-at-being-Modern-Kitsch.” A city’s architecture should have at least a touch of the eternal about it. Some buildings of course possess much more than a touch of that precious commodity. If they haven’t got at least a touch of it, they’ll be hated ten years after they’re put up, exactly as any ten-year-old fashions of Parisian haute couture are hated.

Abby writes:
“matt, your definition of post-modernism may fit the kitsch trash design for the world trade center, but it doesn’t fit either the modern movement or post-modern.”

Every abstract characterization of something actual is of course a simplification, but I think my simplification works pretty well descriptively. Both modernism and postmodernism reject God and envision a new world of free and equal supermen. Modernism builds its intellectual foundation (and specifically its epistemology) on rational deduction from empirical facts. When it realizes that this doesn’t result in a new world of free and equal supermen and in any event is self refuting (even within mathematics itself — see Godel) then it doesn’t repent and sin no more; rather it becomes postmodern as I described.

I’m not much of an artist at least in the conventional sense, but I do understand modernism and postmodernism. The new WTC site design is so clearly an expression of the latter that attempts to deny it, while perhaps genuine in intent, appear as parody. I expect that might even be pleasing to the architect; but that is well down the path of wild conjecture of course.

“Both modernism and postmodernism reject God and envision a new world of free and equal supermen.”

Is Matt aware that Bernard Shaw—or at least his protaganist John Tanner in Man and Superman (1903)—envisioned “a democracy of supermen”? This is from Tanner’s Revolutionist’s Handbook, which Shaw attached to the published version of the play:

” … the whole political business goes to smash; and presently we have Ruins of Empires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, and so forth.

“To that recurrent catastrophe we shall certainly come again unless we can have a Democracy of Supermen; and the production of such a Democracy is the only change that is now hopeful enough to nerve us to the effort that Revolution demands.”

I must admit the phrase “Democracy of Supermen” strongly appealed to me when I first read it in my twenties. But, after all, as Shaw/Tanner say in the same pamphlet: “Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.”

Thanks to Mr. Auster for the additional material. I never had an attachment to theater when I was younger, and of course now I don’t have the patience for Shaw’s particular brand of it. (It isn’t that I’m a right wing elitist as much as that I am terribly uncultured and have little or no artistic talent in the usual sense).

There is a tendency to think that “free and equal” and “supermen” represent fundamentally different ideologies, so for example the nazis in that view would have more in common with the traditional right than with liberal modernism. But even diet coke liberalism envisions the elimination of the racist, misogynistic homophobic man of the past in favor of the new free and equal man. Equality represents an attempt to construct charity without God, and as a result it requires as prerequisite for man to become God.

I admit, with Mr. Kalb, that there is a kind of attractiveness in the model—all those rich colors, the sculptural qualities of it and so on. From one point of view it’s quite striking and visionary. Libeskind obviously has a kind of talent.

But it’s still a monstrosity. Matt’s “über-beauty” says it all.

To understand the idea of über-beauty we need to understand Nietzsche’s idea of the übermensch. The übermensch comes into being in response to man’s deepest experience of the death of God. To endure existence devoid of inherent meaning, and not only to endure it, but to endure it over and over again in the Eternal Return, and yet to rise above all the meaninglessness and pain of such an existence and to experience joy and thus, in joy, to affirm an eternity of meaninglessness, this is what makes the übermensch.

Similarly, über-beauty is the beauty that comes into being as a result of the death of beauty, the denial of any inherent standards of beauty. The more the world is conceived as lacking in inherent beauty, and thus the more free the artist’s work becomes from anything outside the will of the artist, and thus the more objectively disordered and hideous and anti-human the work becomes, the more it attains the condition of über-beauty.

I agree that the design is ugly, but

“This freaky postmodern monstrosity is an object lesson in what happens when man turns away from God, the transcendent, and tradition.”

is one of the silliest things I have read since I stopped reading the ravings of the lunatics on FreeRepublic.com

rick jordon,

read the theory behind deconstructivism; and the only part of the quote you will find silly is pegging libeskind and his design as post-modern

Not being an artistic type I used to think much the same way as Mr. Jordan; but to my chagrin as a hillbilly technologist I’ve become convinced that lex orandi lex credendi is a pervasive principle. (Besides, you don’t have to infer it — many modern and postmodern artists will tell you outright that the meaning of their work is rebellion against traditionalism, which they view as the height of virtue).

As for Abby’s objection that the design isn’t postmodern: I concede that I haven’t the faintest idea what categories professional architects would use to describe it, and that professional architects might find the label “postmodern” inapt in their professional context. I am not using architectural jargon though; I am observing that the design asserts postmodern modes of thought (as I described in prior posts), just as the original twin towers asserted modern modes of thought.

You should see Libeskind’s design for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum! It is an indescribable form, and the caption of the picture in the March Smithsonian, p.83, tells all, “His solution (in this *computer rendering*) is a six story labyrinth of links to existing galleries.”

Libeskind does a more angular Gehery. Eisenman does a more tongue in cheek quasi intellectual Gehery, who is more the laid back California innocent who, I think, honestly pursues designs which give him ‘pleasure’. A fellow classmate of mine worked in Eisenman’s office on the DAAP addition at the University of Cincinnati, my alma mater. The DAAP addition has so many arbitrary angles and planes, the steel cost was *way* over budget, which resulted in drywall and glue down carpet as major interior finishes. One’s feeling, inside, is of being in a cheap maze. Art and Architecture students are tough on glue down carpet and drywall.

The Wexner Center, one of Eisenman’s media star buildings, is undergoing a very quiet $10 million renovation ten years after its bursting on the scene as a ‘statement’ building. Its white steel frame was rusty after 3 years, and all the tortured angles created many opportunities for leaks. The art curator politely said that hanging shows there was ‘a challenge’ (the same word Eisenman uses to describe what ‘leaks’ are…), and we are assured that after the renovation, done with our tax dollars, hanging art there will be less of a problem.

These buildings are now only possible because of computer capabilities to map points accurately in space. Gehery takes rudimentary cardboard models, bent and curved into his signature ‘blooming building’ style, and then when they come up to snuff, they are painstakingly digitized, and then mapped into ‘architectual form’.

But is *art* produced by machines? Is the pencil just a ‘rudimentary machine’ in which the human element predominates, simply because so seeming irrational forms *can’t* be rationalized, because they take so much human touch to replicate? Read Christopher Alexander’s ‘pattern language’ pattern on ‘1/2” trim’. The charm of this is that under Alexander’s technical regime, everything done by owner builders at that time, the tool and the human element produced a standardized trim with much human personality, because the tool couldn’t rationalize the product.

Now, we are sending these digitized ‘models’ over DSL lines to stone cutting shops in Italy with mega million dollar computer guided machines replicating every curve *exactly*. When you look at the Guggenheim at Bilbao, you see a space alien, nothing like anything sired by the architectural traditions which are its context. And I think, like Libeskind’s production, inasmuch as computers generate and control the production of the building components and rationalize and replicate their construction, we have an enviromnent for machines, and not for men.

I don’t know if you call all the verbiage that goes into the public explainations of what these things are and mean ‘postmodernism’ or ‘the absence of God’. I heard, in my formative years, Eisenman talk about the ‘meaning of his houses’ in an architectual lecture series…basically, he described these ‘experiments in space’ as challenges to the avante guard folks who came to him to be experimented on. It was the ‘architect with no clothes…he produced for each house a series of increasingly complex ‘axonometric’ sketches, based on arbitrary formal rules he’d simply pick out of the air, and then after 20 or so of these exercises, would stop, glaze the north south east west surfaces and roof the top surface. Many of his clients would move out soon after moving in. When something is ‘non functional’, you see, in the new lexicon, it is a ‘challenge’ to one’s traditional assumptions about space, and whatever, are they Euclidian, paradigms? Sounds good at least…we can go toe to toe in the critique room.

Even if they raise the money for this thing, it takes craftsmen to put together, and trust that they hijack pieces of it and control their tools to make something of beauty, rather than becoming enthralled with what their tools can do, and then trying desperately to ‘find meaning’ in it.

Dear Abby:

obviously you do not comprehend the fact that I was referring to the crap about “god” in the part that I had quoted.

Mr. Auster:

You write that “This freaky postmodern monstrosity is an object lesson in what happens when man turns away from God, the transcendent, and tradition. It must be stopped.”

What man lives without God, the transcendent, tradition? He may think he does, but does he really? Hasn’t the ‘tradition’ you and I are part of given birth to these particular symbols and aren’t they self conscious strivings for transcendence?

The most attractive feature of Libeskind’s design is that on September 11, at exactly the time the first tower was hit, sun suddenly emerges from behind one of the towers, and illuminates the WTC memorial. At exactly the time the second tower fell, the sun is blocked by another tower.

If you look at all of the proposed designs, you see mega-feats of technics which are only possible in this digitized age. They may be skinned in something which ‘appears’ ugly today, but you can bet there is the highest possible rationalized structural system, environmental system, security system, fire prevention system, contained in the packages’ guts. And here we are, dutifully hold forth for a sort of pre-enlightenment golden age on the very tool, the computer, which makes the production of these arresting symbols possible. If we keep on, I submit that one day we will redefine our conventions of ‘beauty’ and these productions will achieve ‘objective beauty’.

“It has to be stopped!”? Stopped? Really? You suppose we could start an email campaign? You suppose we could all jump in a jet and ride the subeay to the WTC site and demonstrate? Would we schedule our appearance for notice by evening news crews? Our doing such is a participation in the culture which lives by these symbols (like Libeskinds!) of its ascendency and dominace. Shouldn’t we rather hitchhike on Amish buggies to new lives in the 18th century, smack in the heart of Ohio?

Give nature a chance. It only took a mere ten years of ‘wear’ and entropy to erase 10 million dollars of value from a 42 million dollar work of genius! (so said the critics then!) now gracing the OSU campus! How much money can be continuously raised to erect quasi architectural symbols to look nature in the face and effectually spit in her eye, and dare her to wear them down?

You can see that the institutions who ‘commission’ these things - nobody is getting anything foisted ON them, they are *asking* for these things…they express and satisfy a very strong emotional yearning in their patrons - don’t buy the official explanations of the significance of what they have received for their dollars. If these works are works of ‘deconstruction’, then there is no doctrine about them and their care which establishes that they mean anything or are worth anything. Why flush another 10 million down the drain? Let the deconstructivist symbols deconstruct already!! That these symbols are ‘maintained’ falsifies the so-called doctrines which guide their conception and design, unless the doctrines are only cheap salesmanship, and the symbols are symbols of something else altogether.

If they are built symbols of a literary post-modernism, then to argue about ‘what they mean’ is meaningless. They mean nothing and everything. One cannot talk. But still the patrons of these things do!

They are our culture’s expression of the very thing which led to ‘the fall’- the desire to ‘be AS God’. Every culture exhibits this hubris. Which one doesn’t? The one that can ‘stop’ this? We build an increasingly complex technical gordion knot world and raise up the symbols to convict and persuade ourselves that Buck Rogers vehicles and environments will allow us to ‘fly Mother Nature’s silver seeds to new homes in the sun.’ A spaceship disintegrating on reentry causes us to pause, but only for a moment because,
we will do better! We will! We must! We cannot remain animated in spirit if there are no ‘new frontiers’ for us to seem to be conquering!

Otherwise, wouldn’t we all subscribe to Plain Magazine and join the Yellow Pencil society? I mean, even if you’re a New Yorker and can go without a car, do you manage without air conditioning, modern finance, traffic signals, medicine, electricity, and on and on? I think the ones who wanted to “stop” this already tried…they come from a culture whose god *commands* them to do such things, as much as it is politically incorrect to say so.. we are putting back an ‘updated’ version of what was there before. It is an older brother to the little brother now gone.

That said, do Quakers and Catholics worship the same God? If they both drive Hondas and fly Delta and have Citibank cards and watch CNN and shop at WalMart and have Sprint cell phones do they worship the same God? Even if they worship in the shelter of vastly different sets of architectural symbols?

Carl Jahnes

“Which one doesn’t? The one that can ‘stop’ this? We build an increasingly complex technical gordion knot world and raise up the symbols to convict and persuade ourselves that Buck Rogers vehicles and environments will allow us to ‘fly Mother Nature’s silver seeds to new homes in the sun.’ A spaceship disintegrating on reentry causes us to pause, but only for a moment because,
we will do better! We will! We must! We cannot remain animated in spirit if there are no ‘new frontiers’ for us to seem to be conquering!” -
Carl

This is very similar too:
“We aeronauts of the spirit!?All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance—it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face—and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop […] it will be the same with you and me! Other birds will fly farther! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea!?And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the sums of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India—but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Or??quot;

Niezsche, Dawn 575.

Mr. Jahnes seems to have an interesting thesis, but he goes on at such length that I can’t understand what he’s saying except that we are a part of this postmodern high-tech culture and therefore it is meaningless for us to criticize any of its works.

If that’s what he’s saying, then it seems little more than a high fallutin version of “you can’t stop progress, you must accept whatever is.” Is that what he’s saying? (And I ask him to please answer succinctly; my entire original article was 53 words; Mr. Jahnes’s disagreement with it is 811 words.)

Mr. Jahnes writes, “What man lives without God, the transcendent, tradition?”

French revolutionary Jacobin man does, Communist man does, and so does deconstructed post-modern man.

“He may think he does, but does he really? Hasn’t the ‘tradition’ you and I are part of given birth to these particular symbols and aren’t they self conscious strivings for transcendence?”

That’s the problem. “The tradition we are part of” has given birth to perversions as well as to wholesome expressions. The French Reign of Terror, Marxism, Nazism, and the Ku Klux Klan are not necessarily things we applaud, even though they all are products of Western thought in one form or another.

“The most attractive feature of Libeskind’s design is that on September 11, at exactly the time the first tower was hit, sun suddenly emerges from behind one of the towers, and illuminates the WTC memorial. At exactly the time the second tower fell, the sun is blocked by another tower.”

I’m sorry — that cute little hat trick is clever, and I could jot down a dozen other ideas like that for a building, in as many minutes. But hat tricks aren’t what make buildings great. That trick of sunlight and shadow doesn’t redeem this architectural failure.

“If you look at all of the proposed designs, you see mega-feats of technics which are only possible in this digitized age. They may be skinned in something which ‘appears’ ugly today, but you can bet there is the highest possible rationalized structural system, environmental system, security system, fire prevention system, contained in the packages’ guts.”

So what? The domed ceiling and roof of the Pantheon in Rome, let’s say, or the Hagia Sophia, or just about any European cathedral, or the Statue of Liberty, also had “the highest possible rationalized structural system” of their day. But they were not “skinned in something which appeared ugly” in their day, but managed instead to be outwardly beautiful and uplifting, partly through their incorporation of elements of the transcendent. I’m sure these Libeskind guys did their *technical,* *structural* homework — that’s the LEAST which is required of an architectural firm. But again, none of that redeems the building.

“[It has to be ] stopped? Really? You suppose we could start an email campaign? You suppose we could all jump in a jet and ride the subway to the WTC site and demonstrate?”

Are you saying archictetural styles never change? Are you saying the pendulum never swings? And when it does — when styles do change — who is to say what all the forces were which finally made it swing?

“Give nature a chance.”

I’d like to, but post-modernism denies human nature. This proposed plan doesn’t reflect human nature. I’m not hard to please. Give me the principles of the Grand’ Place in Bruxelles; of the Old City of Prague; of the center of Luxembourg ville. Or just give me doors … I’m not difficult … just a pair of doors ……. those of the Duomo Baptistry in Florence, by Ghiberti (known as “The Gates of Paradise”)……

Can the principles that led to the creation of those miraculous doors, I wonder, be summoned to give New York City a beautiful building?

Mr. Auster would like me to be brief.

1. Libeskind has created a symbol of transcendence. His forms obviously are symbols of material trying to defy ‘all the rules.’ Exactly what John Wayne did, the hardy pioneer did, the Ellis Island immigrant does. Securely in the ‘American Tradition.’ We will transcend terrorism.

2. It is by one’s religious faith one judges forms to be ‘objective’ and ‘beautiful’.

3. The faiths mentioned by Undorned, the faith in the General Will coupled with the duty of the Legislator to force people to be good, Communist faith in the dictatorship of the proletariat causing the withering away of the state into a libertarian paradise, the Nazi variant on this, adding the value of ‘racial purity’, along with the American Experiment, are all splinters off Chistendom with roots in medieval chiliasm, Christian revolutionary movements, which seek to create their own heavens on earth without God.

4. Deconstructivism (the broad class of urges informing Libeskind’s productions) is the newest symbol of the coming kingdom of heaven on earth by means of human strivings.

5. We swim in the same water of symbols, nearly invisible to us, which convict and persuade our compatriots, and which *will* convict and persuade our fellow citizens, that Libeskind is a visionary genius, and that (like we experience modern art…we don’t ‘understand’ it…it seems a con game)even if we don’t *get* it, look at what WE can do!

6. If you want the Duomo Baptistry doors, give me back Medici Florence.

7. Architecture is not ‘principles’ only. It is the creation of a complex social system. Art now is mis conceived as ‘fine art’, or ‘what an artist produces’. Artists are seen as conduits of the divine, and the practice of art is described as ‘experimentation’ and ‘exploration’ The artist, then, is the ‘priest’ of this order.

8. If you want medieval Luxembourg, then buy a plot at Seaside or Celebration. Note that these places have that fascist invention called ‘covenants’ ruled by neighbors who rat each other out if they hang their clothes out in the sun to dry on the wrong side of the house. If you want the Hagia Sofia, then tell me if you wan the Muslim decorative scheme or the Orthodox decorative scheme. It is not ‘pure structure’ or ‘pure form’. It is also two different standards of ‘objective beauty’.

9. I don’t think we have an established Church here in the USA. I think we commonly hear that we are a ‘post Christian’ order. Dawson shows clearly in ‘Progress and Religion’, that of course you can’t stop progress, if your religion evaluates everything by that standard. I know nothing of anybody’s religion here but my own, but I do know that the unity in every ism which is an offshoot of Christianity is the belief that by its doctrines man can create a heaven on earth without God. And so, I believe our social order will continue give birth to the urges which call forth symbols which confirm it its belief that it can transcend the ‘flawed human order of sin and death’. It will call these things ‘beautiful.’

It’s fine to say they’re ugly (they are) but you cannot ‘stop’ them when it is the milieu you swim in which calls them forth.

I’ll hail the next Amish buggy that drives by for you!

Carl Jahnes

To the extent that Mr. Jahnes is making an intelligible point, it’s that all cultural artifacts are equally transcendent and equally deconstructivist. “Libeskind has created a symbol of transcendence. His forms obviously are symbols of material trying to defy ‘all the rules.’ Exactly what John Wayne did, the hardy pioneer did, the Ellis Island immigrant does.” This sounds like the typical propaganda line in the New York Times, celebrating the idea that our culture consists of nothing but “breaking boundaries,” “defying inherited rules,” “transgressing norms.” From which it follows that the latest perversion, from vampirism (which the Times has described as just another contemporary life style), to the “culture” of car thieves (which the Times presented as the equivalent of the “culture” of the police), to an art work showing the Virgin Mary smeared in dung, to the latest architectural atrocity, is an equally valid cultural or artistic expression. Libeskind’s design is thus a continuation of this supposed well established American tradition.

It’s all a lie. For example, John Wayne characters did not “defy all the rules,” as Mr. Jahnes claims, but brought justice and order to the frontier, which required the use of force (and at times, in a world in which there was not yet a fully settled society, as in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” going a bit outside the rules to bring about law and order). Since modern liberals regard any use of force as illegitimate, they naturally see John Wayne as a mere barbarian. But as liberalism has turned postmodern, the liberals now seek to legitimize their own cultural barbarism by appropriating John Wayne as their antecedent. And they do the same to the pioneer (who did not “defy all the rules” but wrested civilization out of the wilderness) and the Ellis Island immigrant (who did not “defy all the rules” but learned to adjust to a new society, albeit with many improvisations along the way).

The imperialism of modern liberalism consists in simultaneously seizing possession of the entire past as a mere antecedent to modern liberalism, and seizing possession of the entire future as the inevitable outgrowth of modern liberalism, so that it becomes literally impossible to criticize or resist the liberal agenda. The ideological misappropriation of the past and the future is thus central to the liberal project.

These are the assumptions that underlie Mr. Jahnes’s idea that it’s futile to oppose the Libeskind design, since it is, after all, just another expression of our culture.

“It’s fine to say they’re ugly (they are) but you cannot ‘stop’ them when it is the milieu you swim in which calls them forth.”

Mr. Jahnes seems to be saying that we can rise above our milieu enough to judge its productions as ugly, but not enough to make practical opposition to them even meaningful. I don’t understand that.

To me it seems that since man necessarily lives by reference to something that transcends him, and since it is false that “man can create a heaven on earth without God,” an attempt to base social order on auto-theosis will produce a social order that is radically incoherent. Such an order would oppose fundamental and inescapable human urges.

In such a social order everything will be up for grabs, so everything can be and will be contested. Whether the contesting is meaningful depends on whether there is meaning not wholly dependent on the surrounding social order. If there isn’t then nothing else will be meaningful either, if only because of social incoherence.

It is hard to imagine better confirmation of Mr. Auster’s premeses, and my additions to them, than Mr. Jahnes posts. A quick Google turns up a Carl Jahnes as a professional architect. If it is the same person as our interlocutor here then we have (unintended, to be sure) confirmation of our understanding direct from the profession.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&client=lgtech-kb&q=%22carl+jahnes%22&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.newarkadvocate.com/news/stories/20020113/localnews/1464712.html

http://www.tmci.net/cocoa/Detail.asp?ID=126

The relevant points from Mr. Jahnes latest post:

“Libeskind has created a symbol of transcendence.”

“Deconstructivism (the broad class of urges informing Libeskind’s productions) is the newest symbol of the coming kingdom of heaven on earth by means of human strivings.”

So the word “transcendence” is coopted by postmodernism (that is what postmodernism does — instead of opposing directly it ‘deconstructs’ by coopting and corrupting concepts to its own emancipatory ends) and redefined to mean the human creation of heaven on earth rather than a reference to actual transcendence. Postmodernism empties transcendence of meaning and fills it with the human will to power, and the Libeskind design for the new WTC is “informed” by the latest “urges” of postmodernism.

QED.

By the way, I wanted to thank Stephen for posting the Nietzsche quote side by side with Mr. Jahnes’ paragraph on the space shuttle. Just taken in itself that was a fascinating little exchange.

I wrote:
“If it is the same person as our interlocutor here then we have (unintended, to be sure) confirmation …”

I retract my parenthetical, actually. I am not at all sure what Mr. Jahnes intends beyond calling into question the prudence of resisting the new WTC design. From my perspective sometimes it is best to resist liberalism, and sometimes it is best to stand aside and let it self-destruct. Mr. Jahnes may not be advocating either, of course — what he advocates only he can say, and I haven’t been able to extract it from his posts. But allowing the PoMo’s to build this monstrosity in lower Manhattan might be a sort of social-political chemotherapy; or at least it is not ludicrous to consider the possibility.

Let’s be patient!

To say that “Libeskind has created a symbol of transcendence” is not to say that one agrees that this symbol is appropriate, good, or desirable.

To say that his forms ‘defy all rules’ is not to advocate arts which are inhuman and immoral. I only make an observation, given that Mr. Auster exhorts us that “This is what happens when man turns away from God, the transcendent and tradition.” If God = ‘the transcendent”, then Mr. Auster has a point. However he didn’t capitalize Transcendent, nor did he equate God with it. Mr. Libeskind perhaps has personally turned away from God, perhaps he hasn’t. I don’t know, and I don’t know how Mr. Auster knows.

To say ‘his forms defy all rules’ is not to say, “It is GOOD that his forms defy all rules.” Or that by defying the ‘rules’ as his forms do, he has created a symbol which ought to stand for what *we* do when a cultural Icon is attacked and wantonly destroyed.

To hastily conclude that saying ‘his forms defy all rules’ validates every latest artistic perversion, is to have glossed over my statement that ‘It is by one’s religious faith one judges forms to be ‘objective’ and ‘beautiful’.’ I think a necessary prelude to this sweeping conclusion would be to ask me what my religion *is*. Don’t you think?

I offered John Wayne, Immigrants as those who follow in the traditions of the Puritans, the Utopians (New Harmony, Shakertown) who go to the pristine wilderness, shake off the rotten and encrusted barnacles of civilization like noble savages, and recreate themselves into a community of virtue. John Wayne is a *movie character*. Movies are *symbolic*. John Wayne, going into the chaos of the lawless frontier and personally bringing order with his own fists operates *as a symbol* in the same way Libeskind’s production tries to operate. John Wayne is no city sissy. He breaks through the mediating barnacles of slow and tenative civilized justice and brings his
own direct personal justice. His movies satisfy the cravings the New Harmonyites felt in seeking to build, right now, heaven on earth.

Libeskind’s buildings, in my opinion, seek to transcend their limit as material objects. They seek to defy gravity, tradition, structure, proportion, color, etc. As such, they become almost ‘non buildings’ or as I read Eisenman say once, “They seek to signify the presence of absence.” They become symbols of a Gnostic spirituality. I don’t think such a symbol is appropriate for the WTC. But to be gracious to the spirit of Mr. Libeskind’s effort, I can only imagine he thinks that his offering is a symbol of breaking free of war and terror, and into a realm of reflection and peace. I don’t think his building will achieve this, because as I said before, Eisenman’s Wexner Center is of this same species of building…deconstructivism…and it is only 10 years old and it is necessary to spend $10 million now to *fix* it. Buildings which seek to defy gravity and the second law of thermodynamics don’t age well.

It took a very complicated social process to “pick” this design as the winner. It took many folks many many years to reach the point where they were ‘qualified’ in the view of those politicos who picked the judges. Notice that all but 1 of 7 presenters were mainly Media Star Architects. Note that there are certain sociological and ideological requirements necessary to *become* a media star architect.

All the entries, when looked at against the NY skyline, modelled so in computer mockups, look like alien spaceships hovering over the south end of Manhattan. One doesn’t…it was by a firm, I forget the name now, who sized their design in more human scale, and less as a transcendent statement.

But it didn’t get picked. They didn’t ask Mr. Auster or me what we preferred. I won’t be able to stop it, and neither will Mr. Auster.

“His movies satisfy the cravings the New Harmonyites felt in seeking to build, right now, heaven on earth.”

I think that is an exaggeration of John Wayne. I think it is right to see John Wayne as a symbol of justice, and even as a sign that justice cannot always be found in the formal aspects of things. How that gets to “heaven on earth” is beyond me though.

“But to be gracious to the spirit of Mr. Libeskind’s effort, I can only imagine he thinks that his offering is a symbol of breaking free of war and terror, and into a realm of reflection and peace.”

That may be his intent. Lots of good liberals join Amnesty International with good intentions. Objectively the thing is an abomination as a place for human beings, though, and an advancement of dialectical tyranny-as-emancipation.

“Libeskind’s buildings, in my opinion, seek to transcend their limit as material objects.”

Right. They attempt to respond in a Nietzchean fashion to the death of God, to assert uber-beauty. This ambition can be expressed as a desire to transcend the immanent if one wants to put a positive spin on it, leaving off “through an assertion of the will-to-power of the herrenvolk” so as not to openly confess its true name. But in the end the radical denial of the immanent, and the attempt to replace the transcendent with the actually immanent, results in an active pursuit of the Nothing as the highest good.

If the modern represents an attempt to comprehensively master the immanent, then the postmodern represents an attempt to comprehensively rebel against an immanence that refuses to be mastered. I’m not a fan of John Wayne movies but as a sign it seems to me he points toward justice in harmony with nature, while both the modern and the postmodern insist on different modes of justice disconnected from nature.

Of course I find parsing Mr. Jahnes posts somewhat difficult, so the best I can do is respond to what I think I see. Part of the problem with attempting to build a tower to heaven to be like God is that when the tower gets tall enough it is no longer possible to talk to each other.

“It took a very complicated social process to “pick” this design as the winner. It took many folks many many years to reach the point where they were ‘qualified’ in the view of those politicos who picked the judges. Notice that all but 1 of 7 presenters were mainly Media Star Architects. Note that there are certain sociological and ideological requirements necessary to *become* a media star architect.”

Good points all.

“I won’t be able to stop it, and neither will Mr. Auster.”

In all likelihood we won’t stop massive third world immigration or the creation of world government either. That doesn’t itself warrant an objection when someone says that those things must be stopped, though.

We’ve seen comments thus…”I am not at all sure what Mr. Jahnes intends beyond calling into question the prudence of resisting the new WTC design.” Thank you!

“It must be stopped!”, is the conculsion of the lead off comment. Then there’s a comment that…

“City planners ought to have more sense and taste than to permit an excessive preponderance of this kind of cold, impersonal, ugly architecture,” which is preceeded by the comment that…

“Wherever a classic vicious-cycle situation has been set up, there is only one solution — break the cycle.”

Interesting sentiments. I went to “The Second Luddite Congress” a few years back and met a correspondent to a German Business Magazine who had come to cover it. He was amused by American earnestness. Together, we heard Kirkpatrick Sale talk about the hegemony of high technology, that it was ruining our culture. He said he typed his talk on his laptop while jetting here from some meeting the day before on the other side of the world. I suppose, radical and revolutionary neo luddite that he is, he actually is paid up on his utility bills!

Mary Douglas in ‘Natural Symbols’ believes that the cultural revolution of the 60’s was partly engendered by the conflict in minds of the young of reconciling the emotional pull of America’s frontier myth, that we can each go out into the wilderness and remake ourselves, and the emotional stress and anxiety of a more highly regimented technological man made environment. So, in order to ‘feel’ free and authentic, hippies don rags and patched cast offs, and grow long hair. They array themselves with symbols that mirror back to them what they want to see…someone totally free of ‘the system’ free of regimentation, and yet they become slavish conformists…because these symbols become the medicine by which they can cope in this scheduled technical environment and believe that they are pioneering some new thing, their own ‘authenticity’. They endure numbing technological work, and come home and see a ‘free spirit’ in the mirror. They use symbols to blind themselves to their serfdom, and to make themselves believe they are experiencing freedom.

Unadorned thinks ‘city planners should know better.’ So they should coerce designers based on some standard of aesthetics? Who ‘judges’ aesthetic appropriateness? He or she can join voluntary communities which have draconian deed restrictions, homeowner covenants, to keep their villagescapes free of modern technological architectural fragmentation, and live out what is practically the same as living in a communist state, complete with informants as to whether one is working on his car in the garage (not allowed), or whether that is real or fake stone on his/her fake chimney. What are the social conditions which call forth ‘city planners who can give permits based on aesthetic appropriateness?’ Is this means appropriate in a conservative traditionalist order?

Undorned counsels us to ‘break the cycle’ when an excess of this stuff leads to the turning away from tradition.’ Well, *which* tradition is being referred to? And what is the meaning of ‘break the cycle’ if it is more than just an emotional release to write it, and see it in print on the Internet? Does this acheive the same emotional release as seeing the long haired patched clothes person in the mirror of the office of suited automatons?

The words, ‘…turns away from God, the transcendent, tradition’, are used in a general, not particular sense. *Which* God, *which* transcendent, *which* tradition? There is no turning away from these such that one lives without them. One can only trade one God, transcendent, tradition for another.

As a general assertion about the design, that the design is a turning away from God, transcendence, tradition, it fails. The design clearly wants to achieve transcendence. It’s simply a question of how it seeks to do this, what it seeks to transcend, and does its efforts fall within the architectural vocabulary of form we Americans understand that symbolize these particular setimnents? The design is clearly of a tradition. Deconstructivism is preceeded by Modern Architecture. Modern Architecture is preceeded by the High Art of Architecture. That the design is a ‘turning away from God’ is just conjecture, unless the poster has some personal knowledge from the designer that he has turned from God, and intends his project to symbolize that.

Post-modernism in architecture is not the same a philosophical post-modernism. Post modern architecture is simply the wrenching of a ‘style’ out of its historical context and using it as a means of ‘decoration’. When the high art of architecture is displaced by Modern Architecture, what happens is that architecture is trying to recast itself as a ‘fine’ art, and not an historic art. It is seeking to ‘reveal reality’ as a scientist or a priest would, rather than do the traditional things art has done; perform social functions like illustration, conviction and persuasion, substitute imagery or beautification.

Libeskind’s architecture is a part of the ‘tradition’ of modern art, which makes of its products a private expression. Libeskind here has help in ‘imposing’ an almost fascist aesthetic vision as a self appointed prophet, but his imposing is made possible *by means of the process* and institution that chooses him and funds him. This is a ‘political’ process, developed for a monster city of many ethnicities, religions, traditions. The judges are those who the political process presumes know what they need to know to identify what the political entity prefers of 7 architectural proposals. Where in the specs did it say one had to be accepted if none of them were appropriate? The process gives the architect no charge to engage real people in a real community in explorations to understand the language of forms that the community speaks and hears; it doesn’t charge the architect to build a symbol of the *community’s highest aspirations and ideals* in that language. It gives him a month, two? to come up with an Inspired Vision as if it springs from the head of Zeus! Like a Jackson Pollack painting. Empty the self and let the forces of the Universe Speak in the forms created by the random drips of paint. What truth will come through this secular priest’s ministrations?

Basically, the charge to the architect is to ‘put us back on the map!’ This is exactly how Eisenman was chosen to design Wexner on the OSU campus and the Columbus Convention Center. It is interesting, when you read that one intent of these designs is to symbolize the ‘presence of absence’ that as civic symbols, they don’t give one confidence in civic institutions. A king confident of his power designs a path to his throne such that petitioners can ‘experience’ his grandeur, and the grandeur of his kingdom. Our instutitons can only afford jaggedy drywall and patterned carpet! No marble, slate, molded plaster, inlays, brass, gold leaf.

“In all likelihood we won’t stop massive third world immigration or the creation of world government either. That doesn’t itself warrant an objection when someone says that those things must be stopped, though.”

Maybe not, but it does warrant the question “How? **How** should it be stopped? How do you intend to ‘stop’ it? Who do you propose to be the judge its merits or lack of merit? What will be the standard? Are squares bad and circles good? Shall we have a committee with the character of Howard Roark, who, once the asethetic tradition of the community is transgressed, head for the dynamite and the fuses?

Stopping this is completely different than stopping immigration. The comparison is like comparing apples and oranges. The first involves putting up a fence to keep people on one side of a large space. It is effected by a political entity. The goal is to force physical bodies to do something they don’t want to do. The second ‘stopping’ must objectify an emotion, felt in different intensities by different people who encounter the emotion forming architectural symbol, and saying that forms which produce this emotion are evil. But how can the emotion be said to rise ‘objectively’ from contact with the form? Who can judge with certainty when this is happening? Does a Muslim feel the same emotion as the Catholic in the presence of Serranno’s cross immersed in urine? If Christians by their Christian faith obstinately oppose the dawning of Islamic heaven, then how can he feel the same emotion? What political order then judges which aesthetic rule is to be acted on? Which faith subordinates itself to the other to create the peace of a pre-war Yugoslavian federation?

I think this ‘urge’(to stop them!) is entirely in the tradition of the French Revolution, where an elite presume, once they grab power, to know what is good for all the rest, such that they can impose their vision of the good on their subjects via their control of the political system. It is a form of thought control.

I, like I said, would advocate a more permissive attitude, along with a good sense of humor. If those jaggedy curtain walls actually get built, they are going to be horrendously expensive. That usually means a project will go over budget and something has to be cut. So maybe 1/2 or 1/3 of the project gets built.

We have been learing from Las Vegas for years, and no one has taken opportunity here to brand that ugliness as evil!

And in that the building defies nature, gravity, rain, heat, cold, it is more costly to maintain. These things fall apart and the community seeking to symbolize its mastery over nature and over the limits of incarnated flesh, of material existence, its need to acknowledge its mortality, must pour more and more of its resources into a rathole.

When I first saw Gehery’s Microbiology Lab Building at the University of Cincinnati, I laughed. Honest. It looks as if the bulding is a balloon being inflated by an invisible giant, and its seams are in the first stages of bursting! It is as if what you see is straight out of a comic book. I thought, ‘what a frivolous image for such an important function…to do microbiological research!’ It needs a big Mickey Mouse behind it blowing into the inflator!

Libeskind won’t build this thing alone. it will get jostled and shaped along the way by many differend people and institutions. Hope and pray, again, like I said in my first post, that the human hand predominates over the machine in its finishes and presentation. It will take many years, many dollars, much labor to pull the thing off, and there’s lots of time and opportunity for the thing to change. Remember the dictum every architect often heard, “Back to the drawing board!”

It’s fine to say they’re ugly (they are) but you cannot ‘stop’ them when it is the milieu you swim in which calls them forth.

I said this because I believe much of what is expressed in these forums (and from past experience a couple of years ago) is motivated by utopian urges. The exhortations to fix things sound as if they are calls to use the same political means as those who mess things up. Who presumes to be the aesthetic legislator and save us from aesthetic productions that would corrupt us? Be the ‘city planner that would?’

Do I thereby favor transgressive, immoral art? No. I do not favor ‘stopping’ it by political means. This is the Church’s job. That is one reason why the Duomo Baptistry doors cannot be rebuilt. There are too many religions seeing the obvious symbols embedded in that beauty, and they do not like the message. So, a lowest common denominator emerges…an industrialized, ugly universalist plainness, post office modern. Indifference is the result. Libeskind slips in under the indifference mislabeled as the virtue of ‘tolerance’ and a few traditionalist conservatives protest while billions are appropriated for the offensive project.

Again, my sense is that the sentiments posters expressed, ‘it should be stopped’ would be effected by political means. It would mean, then, that there should be a state Church. If not, if so called traditonal conservatives actually want to use the same political means of the Liberals they say they despise to achieve their ends in the same fashion Liberals want to legislate their version of morality, of beauty, then they are part of the milieu which creates the appetite which is satisfied by symbols like Libeskind’s. Either God ushers in the kindgom as a gift to Man, or Man ushers it in by the varieties of political means each modern political religion has sought to employ to achieve it.

Saying what I’ve said is not akin to saying ‘you can’t stop progress! Accept your fate!’ It is to say, ‘This architectural symbol is the food for an appetite which wants to legislate a utopian ideal, a vision of a perfect past, or of a perfect future.’

Carl Jahnes

I’ll attempt to excerpt the salient points here:

“How? **How** should it be stopped? How do you intend to ‘stop’ it? Who do you propose to be the judge its merits or lack of merit?”

“Do I thereby favor transgressive, immoral art? No. I do not favor ‘stopping’ it by political means. This is the Church’s job.”

“…if so called traditonal conservatives actually want to use the same political means of the Liberals they say they despise to achieve their ends in the same fashion Liberals want to legislate their version of morality, of beauty, then they are part of the milieu which creates the appetite which is satisfied by symbols like Libeskind’s.”

“This architectural symbol is the food for an appetite which wants to legislate a utopian ideal…”

—- end of excerpts —-

The best I can do to extract something coherent from this is the following:

1) Yes art can be bad.
2) It is the Church’s not the State’s job to regulate bad art.
3) The Church shouldn’t have any actual authority in such matters though, it should only have the power of persuasion.
4) Any use of coercion as part of the effort to regulate art is by definition utopian (and therefore anathema).

The precise disagreement seems to be on #3 and #4, and ironically is itself a libertarian utopianism. So it seems to me what we have is a very verbose form of reactionary libertarianism that objects to the ultimate use of force, through the rule of law, to regulate public decency generally and art specifically.

“So it seems to me what we have is a very verbose form of reactionary libertarianism that objects to the ultimate use of force, through the rule of law, to regulate public decency generally and art specifically.”

This isn’t what we have. We have the question to you, anyone else here, “How do we ‘stop’ it?” The answer, ‘By the ultimate use of force through rule of law,’ presupposes some political or cultural entity with ‘judging powers’ and with the power to enforce its judgement. I’m simply asking what is that entity, where does it get its power, and how does it have validity such that its judgements become actual policy and and effect real enforcement?

Now, to get the design stopped, a person or group would have to take over NYC government such that they could sack the design jury, and pack it with folks with the proper aesthetic evauative categories. But all our opponents have to do is raise a majority against us, vote us out, and demand that all new civic buildings be designed in the style Libeskind designs in.

Back to Serrano and the crucifix in urine. Now, in NYC, as far as I know, there is no evaluative body which ‘qualifies’ an artwork’s aptness for a show. Qualifications seem to be that an artwork must have ‘shock’ value, because the reigning established liberal faith is that it is Christian tradition and traditional Christian faith which has to be discarded as impediments to a tolerant, peaceful order. But even if traditional conservatism, Christian traditonal conservatism, could achieve power to set up a qualifications board and an entity which could say which symbols were permitted and which were not, that achievement could be voted away in the next election, like Chile did when it elected Allende.

Jim Kalb writes a tenative piece on ‘the establishment of religion.’ This might seem to offer a direction. Suddenly, we narrow down the field to a ‘judging entity’ which can recognize ‘evil art’. Yes. It is evil to a Christian. But the standards are those informed by the aesthetic tradition of ‘the established churches’, non denominational protestant ones, whose aesthetic tradition is somewhat limited.

Another problem with this is that the church, like the Anglican Church in England, becomes a ‘department of state.’ Who appoints the ‘aesthetic judge’? Probably an officer of the state.

Another problem…indifference. In the Episcopal Church, one can hold a reformed view or a Catholic view about the meaning of the Eucharist. These differences, which people died over in the 14th and 15th centuries, now are tolerated in one communion. The result is that people only go so far in discussing which view is actually true. Both cannot be. But the Elisabethian settlement was to fudge doctrinal issues which had been long settled in the Catholic church, so that protestantism could appropriate catholic forms, and could replace the old meanings of the liturgy.

Now, in the Episcopal church (I used to be a member), one can be a committed Bhuddist, and can have allegiance to an Episcopal Church’s liturgical expression, and is free to believe what he wants about what that liturgy means. He can interpret its meaning in Bhuddist categories. What this means is that when an evangelical and anglo catholic and bhuddist try to talk about starting an evangelism committee, they get hung up agreeing on tactics, on what to say…and end up not going further with it. This happens in every effort which relies on the creation of a focussed judgement, focussed understanding, in order to proceed. Many judgements are ‘tolerated,’ and indifference, inaction results.

So, I believe this would happen with an establishment of non denominational Christianity. How woud a catholic and a quaker agree on an asethetic standard? They wouldn’t. You would have the same jostling for the position of ‘aesthetic judge’, and our Mayor would throw up his hands, make his own determination, and indifference results after people see how this actually works. The spiritual entity has no independent power…the state, then, actually would be the definer of aesthetic standards…and that power to do so could be easily corrupted, bought and sold.

I only see one way this stopping such designs could work, and it involves traditional western forms, a spiritual authority and a temporal authority, with seperate powers. However, the spiritual authority must have power over the temporal, and the temporal must not have the ability to change its form, like Nazi Germany did, or like Allende Chile did, via an election. The temporal power must not be able to vote itself out of existence, and change its character into a political religion.

Is this utopian? My better self thinks so. It is the arrangement our secular ‘separation of powers’ comes from, but the problem with our arrangement is, that those powers are not balanced by a competing power independent of the judicial, legislative, executive powers it seeks to balance.

I’ll explain more. But first, please give this question a go. What are the institutional arrangements which make stopping Libeskind’s design possible? What institutions establish the standards by which laws are triggered which must then apply the legitimate use of force to confiscate the presentation boards, throw them in the trash, and start a process to find a more approprate symbol for the reconstruction of the WTC site?

Carl Jahnes

“I only see one way this stopping such designs could work, and it involves traditional western forms, a spiritual authority and a temporal authority, with seperate powers. However, the spiritual authority must have power over the temporal, and the temporal must not have the ability to change its form, like Nazi Germany did, or like Allende Chile did, via an election. The temporal power must not be able to vote itself out of existence, and change its character into a political religion.”

I have no basic objection to any of this.

“But first, please give this question a go. What are the institutional arrangements which make stopping Libeskind’s design possible?”

There aren’t any, as far as I can tell. The options are to either oppose the design publicly, coopting it as a symbol to call people to repentance, or to silently allow it to go forward without objection, the thought being that this accelerates postmodern self-destruction. Mr. Kalb has discussed what to do in this general sense on a number of occasions, e.g.

http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001150.html
http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/000961.html
http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/000752.html
http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/000472.html

Q - But first, please give this question a go. What are the institutional arrangements which make stopping Libeskind’s design possible?

A - “There aren’t any, as far as I can tell. The options are to either oppose the design publicly, coopting it as a symbol to call people to repentance, or to silently allow it to go forward without objection, the thought being that this accelerates postmodern self-destruction. Mr. Kalb has discussed what to do in this general sense on a number of occasions, e.g….”

Yes, there aren’t any. I should have asked, “What institutional arrangements should be created to stop inhuman and immoral art? What are the foundations these instutions rest on?” I wanted to know what you thought…what conditions must exist to stop inhuman public art to go forward?

How does ‘coopting it as a symbol to call people to repentance’ stop it? What is ‘to coopt it as a symbol’? To make a determination that ‘the forms ar evil and inappropriate for a WTC reconstruction?” By what standard? And if, perhaps you say, “By Christian truth and tradition,” what makes this standard rise above any other religious standard, which perhaps, see the forms exactly the opposite of you and me? The only City trying to stop immoral art is Cincinnati, and they’re not having much success. I venture to say its because when it comes to a group trying to define how such art violates ‘community standards’, there are no such standards which can be proven to exist, because there is no community with a unified religious committment.

Silently ‘allowing’ it to go forward? The word ‘allowing’ seems incorrect. It is as if you, we have some power to ‘not allow’ if we ‘allow.’ Nothing of the sort happens, unless we are willing to be John Waynes or Howard Roarks and exact some justice personally by dynamiting it ourselves. But, then, we would be the terrorists, right? Yes, because we live in a polity with no unified religious committment, so one man’s immoral art is another man’s virtuous art. Under our regime, there can be no public moral judgement as to whether art is moral or immoral, because any evaluations as to what is objectively beautiful and objectively ugly has to be rooted in an objective standard of truth. What is true must ultimately find its roots in God, because truth cannot have come to exist by a cosmic accident (evolution), nor can it come to exist by human declaration (might makes right).

What is beautiful can be determined by means of the relationship of the art’s forms to Natural Law, but even ‘law’ must find its roots in God.

So, the question is, ‘From which God does truth issue?’

Answer, from God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

The next question is where is the Authority so designated to bear this God’s truth and incarnate it in history, now?

Answer, the Church, the Catholic Church to be exact.

Our ‘culture’ is a splinter off Christendom, and the ‘American Experiment’ is and can be as much a political religion as are the ‘isms’ Unadorned mentioned in some posts back, Naziism, Communism, the Ku Klux Klan, etc. We are in the grip of Americanism, Liberalism, which will tolerate ‘anything’, and if it doesn’t have the power or will to refuse entry to potential immigrants who, by their religion, would kill pagans who refused to convert to their religion, that is if these immigrants gained power and made their religion the moral standard, our polity will change form, and die. Libeskind’s ‘art’ is the ‘handwriting on the wall’. It has a sort of negative value as a prophecy of the pain to come, but I’d rather not see the gangrene spread…I’d rather it be amputated too.

I as much as said ‘if we use their methods’, if we swim in their milieu, if we primarily use the force of the state to enforce our understanding of truth and virtue, then we are those who believe that man is God or the State is God, and we are acting out utopian behaviors which will beget utopian arts…ugly arts proclaiming the supremacy of man, and even proclaiming that man will ‘self transcend’,perhaps like the people in California who committed mass suicide to be shed of their corrupt bodies so their pure spirits could join the Mother Ship for the next step on the ladder of purification. If we get the state’s power, what is to guarantee our ability to maintain ourselves in power? It would be an evil, if we have access to the truth, to let ourselves be voted out of power by those who don’t have the truth. And so, we would be morally justified, I think, if we gained power, not to let it go. However, if we did this, we would be no better than any other political religion which has come to exist since the Reformation. We would go down in flames, because even *if* we had the truth, we aren’t the ‘authorized power’ to make these kinds of moral judgements. We are only the power, once those judgements are made, to bear the sword and carry them out.

This is why I object to an ‘establishment of the church.’ In Mr. Kalb’s article on establishment of the Church, when he is asked ‘which church is to be established?’, he answers ‘Non Denominational Christianity’. And, there is a clear sense that this is a ‘tenative’ answer, because it is a walking toward truth, and not an ‘arrival’ at the full truth. It would be possible that the polity would progress and place itself under a sovereign Catholic Church, however it could be just as likely it wouldn’t.

Also, the state really controls the Church in this case. This is situation in England with the Anglican Church, nearly a dead church in England. The Queen names the Archbishop of Canterbury. Newman, back in the mid 1800’s called this the ‘Erastian Heresy’. The church is captive to the state, and cannot ‘critique’ her from a position of independence. Thomas More lost his head for just this, as did many other English Saints who wouldn’t transfer their papal loyalties to King Henry. The Church is subordinate to the State, and not vice versa as it should be. Keep in mind, the State can and has been ‘under the Church’ and the Church has had only spiritual power while the state has had military power.

We stop such art when the Church is Sovereign, telling the State, after having carefully and thoughtfully consulted her doctors and artists and theologians about the meaning of the work, the beauty of it, its merits or lack of them, etc. how such art is to be treated. Its Magisterium stamps its impramateur on the work, or it rejects it.

What principles of evaluation does it use to determine the art’s dispositon? Harmony, proportion, texture, color…everything and more mentioned in one of the posts above? As a composition, is it to be ‘arresting’ and ‘jarring’ to those in it, to remind them that they are on special if not holy ground, and perhaps the experience should be one ‘out of the ordinary’ from an ‘ordinary’ New York experience? What if Libeskind had ornamented his forms with some obvious Christian Imagery? What if the site plan had a cross in it, like the basilica plan, and, perhaps on Sept 11, when the sun is at the correct angle, it hits a reflective spot in the ‘walls’ of the WTC remaining, and illumines a ceiling in a special way which makes it glow, as if the heavens are being opened, at Just That Moment? What if the rendering posted to start this discussion, at such small scale, when enlarged, revealled many many spaces for human interraction, and framed views of the surroundings in such spendid ways that it became a metaphor of thankfulness? You see, when you pause, what you can’t when you rush around and are so busy? What if ‘fragmentation’ is presented as an assembly of forms which recalls what happened when the WTC fell and destroyed its immediate neighborhood?

The Church’s evaluating body would have to decide, is this ‘fragmentation’ important such that it should dominate the whole expression? Do the forms express hope and a rising, a resurrection of sorts? Or do they become disorienting, creating an anomie which was present in the immediate aftermath, but which time is healing and replacing with hope? IOW, is the formal expression ‘true’, but only in a subordinate way to a more whole truth which ought to control and inform the expression?
Perhaps in Libeskind’s WTC case, the Church tells the State to maintain a record of the presentation, and to display it somewhere with the other failed proposals, and to explain why these proposals were rejected…an opportunity for teaching.

The Church makes her judgement, and issues a ‘correction letter’…in other words, a list of things to alter to bring it ‘into line’. This is anathema to a fine artist…and if you or anybody is interested, you can read how fine art (a corruption of art) comes out of historic art, in ‘The Restless Art’, ‘The Unchanging Arts’, and ‘Learning to See’ and how it signals a cultural sickness upon us.

If the artist refuses on princple to ‘correct’ his work, then the work cannot proceed. It needs a building permit as much as anything else. If a group manages, on its own to start the uncorrected artwork, the State, the enforcer of the moral judgement of the Church, forcefully stops the work and punishes the guilty.

The State must be of a form that it cannot, by its own power, change itself. It cannot vote to change itself into a communist, socialist state. It must rest on certain truths, foundations, which cannot be questioned, changed. I know this leads to an advocation of monarchy, and perhaps (I don’t know fully yet) this is what I believe we should be…a constitutional monarchy. I’m following Von Kuehneldt Leddihn’s presentation in “Liberty or Equality”, ‘Democracy and Monarchy’, pp 133 and on. In that the Monarchy is handed down by bloodline succession, it represents the unchangeable in the State. However, the Monarch swears allegiance to the Church, and carries out the Church’s judgements.

When will this institutional arrangement come to exist? I don’t know. Now, we suffer the erection of such anti-arts, and know that the second law of thermodynamics can’t be so brazenly opposed.

Carl Jahnes

“How does ‘coopting it as a symbol to call people to repentance’ stop it?”

By that I simply meant opposing it verbally, pointing out its meaning and significance, and using it as an opportunity for conversion of hearts and minds. Most ordinary people have a love-hate relationship with modernism, and a hate-hate relationship with postmodernism. It doesn’t take an army to validate their suspicians intellectually. Whether it is possible to rouse enough rabble to pressure a halt to the project is a big question, of course, and naturally no one event will remake the world.

“The word ‘allowing’ seems incorrect.”

Only if it isn’t modified by “in silence”, as I did in my post. None of us has much in the way of influence beyond what we say. Wealth and power are fleeting things, but word and example have a much longer shelf life.

As to the rest of Mr. Jahnes’ post, I didn’t see anything with which I have major quibbles.

As of April 7, 2003, it appears that 96% of Libeskind’s plan for the World Trade Center is *stopped*.

What stopped it?

Read Architectural Record’s April 2003 Issue, page 89 and 90, commentary by Joseph Giovanni.

Note that Mr. Giovanni feels that the process of winnowing down the competition to 2 finalists ‘contained a trojan horse of commerical developer interests.’ The result will be in Giovanni’s opinion, the same old Same Old…

I think it’s beautiful, innovative and futuristic. It’s aggressive and imposing and memorable. Why does it have to be a statement against God? I don’t think it represents that at all. Things will never be the same again, now that Sept. 11 has happened. To me, it’s a statement that embraces the future, and for me at least, there is no future for America with out God.

Oh ye vipers! Will you not see for the beam in your own eye! Man is a creator! Created in God’s image. If you had been born 200 or 2000 years ago you’d be burning “so called” witches or crusifying Christ. He died for your sins of blindness & judgement against others. I pray that someday your eyes are truly opened and you become a LOVING CHILD OF GOD again. I’ll be praying for you all on the wrong “right” until then. DAS

If you want something harmonious, see this and pass it on

http://staff.washington.edu/justenv/worldpeacememorial.htm

Justen :)

You could have chosen a more interesting rendering of Libeskind’s design. This is but one of many drawings he submitted, and out of context, this angle of elevation seems a bit strange. Overall,I think the plan is quite rich. Like all good architects, he aspires to Plato’s notion of “the form of the good”. It is hardly anti-God, rather it is anti-plebeian. If only the powers-that-be would allow him to build it and not relegate his vision to committee. As usual, we will likely end up with some paper pusher’s ideal; tepid “modernism”, incorporating elements from a variety of design ideas…please, God help us!

Bah. Glass in Manhattan is like minarets in Rome. Put the damned thing in Miami, where it belongs.

See this for an inspiration to peace
www.worldpeacemonument.com

Won’t the folks in St Louis notice their arch is missing?