I've been assigned several manifestos to read this week for my Architectural History & Theory:
- "The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture", Antonio Sant'Elia (1914)
- "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture", Robert Venturi (1965)
- "Junkspace", Rem Koolhaas (2002, republished in the aforementioned Content)
Upon reading and analyzing these the notion of writing a manifesto seems rather quaint, despite the date that the last one was published. Even this is something of an anti-manifesto, a diatribe against the "fallout" from Modernism that never goes so far as to prescribe an alternative. Indeed, both Koolhaas and Venturi are directly responding to the unrealized utopia promised by the era immediately following Sant'Elia's writing.
What I've been observing in this class (and in another on 20th century art) is that this period, roughly 1920-1945, was the last gasp of Movements, and that the full sum of creative work that followed it falls under the vague and enormous umbrella of postmodernism. Broad though that statement is, I think I'm standing on fairly firm ground in making it.
Which leaves us ... where? Here, I guess. Which is everywhere, apparently.
A reading from the art-based class (specifically about painting, but it seems relevant) names the appropriation and combination of various styles Pluralism, and while the author seems to regard this approach as ahistorical and uncritical and its practitioners as dilettantes, to me it seems rather appropriate.
Media today functions like a limitless museum- I'm equally in reach of information about Warhol as I am about Michelangelo. Does the opportunity of Pluralism negate critical engagement? Or is it incumbent upon critics to navigate the field of references laid out by a mixing of styles? Or should I leave my apartment more?
