171 Patterns SPLITTERWERK, 2004 - 2005

"Every era has its style, yet our era is to be denied a style? Style used to mean the ornament. But I said: cry not. See, that is what makes our times so great, that they are not capable of producing a new ornament. We have overcome the ornament, we have brought ourselves to abandon the ornament. See, the times are nearing, deliverance awaits. Soon the streets of the cities will shine as white walls! As Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then deliverance will be ours." (Adolf Loos, 1908)

Ornament and Abstraction Ornaments and patterns were originally used as signs and symbols, for decoration and surface design in architecture and design. In all cultures, everyday objects such as furniture, jugs, bowls, glasses, cutlery, tools, weapons and jewelry were decorated with ornaments. The variety of depictions ranged from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek meanders, plant and animal motifs all the way to arabesques arising from the Islamic ban on images. In occidental antiquity, we could differentiate between lotus and papyrus capitals, Dorian, Ionian and Corinthian columns, and Greek temples were decorated with friezes, consisting of metopes and triglyphs, or even entire works of sculpture such as figure friezes, lion's heads as waterspouts and gable sculptures. Every culture, every era and every style had its own ornaments, its own little history of patterns. However, they had to be subordinate to the main work, according to Vitruvius. In Europe and a little later in the USA, the turn of the century and 172 the movement known as the Secession style in Austria marked the last rebellion in favor of the ornament's significance in contemporary architecture - best documented in the cooperation between Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt on the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Starting with modernism, the ornament in architecture was frowned upon throughout the entire 20th century. In painting, on the other hand, the development process of abstraction can be interpreted as a continuous movement towards the ornament, even if to the great pioneers of abstract art such as Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian, that claim would have amounted to a mockery of their work. Did the lack of ornaments in architecture trigger the initial breakthrough of the ornament in modern painting?

In Austria, it was Koloman Moser, along with the already mentioned Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt, who created their approach to abstraction from the spirit of the ornament. In the famous 14th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, Klimt's painting turned to geometric abstraction in his monumental Beethoven Frieze, and Hoffmann anticipated cubism and the geometric art of Mondrian in his abstract-constructivist stucco relief Sopra la porta. In this context, it was not without justification that Markus Brijderlin put the year 1902 up for discussion as the birth year of abstract art in his exhibition Ornament and Abstraction (Beyeler Foundation, 2001), although the official date coincides with the allegedly first non-representational water color by Wassily Kandinsky in 1911/12, and as having paved the way for the appearance of the Fauves at the Paris Salon 1905. Liberated from cubism, IVIondrian dedicated himself to a typically ornamental task in his pier and ocean drawings: eliminating the difference between figure and background. Starting from these 173 coal drawings, he developed compositions with pure planes of color, which he later framed in grey lines, and then carried these chessboard-type images, together with the observation of the diagonal and the suspension of square picture planes as rhombs, to his mature style. The elimination or integration of the frame exemplifies the question of the limits of a worl< of art, resurrected in the period for the first time since the introduction of the panel painting. In Vienna, the Secessionists replied by artistic integration of the frame into the tableau, which in the end led them from the space of the image to the artistic conquest of architectural space. Piet Mondrian intersected lines apparently outside the boundaries of his paintings and placed the red triangle in his Rhombic Composition With Eight Lines And Red as if it ought to be completed as a square of indeterminate size beyond the painting's borders. It was only logical that the representatives of the De StijI movement, which he embraced, would deny the panel painting a right to continued existence, and conquer predominantly architectural elements such as glass panes, walls, and in the end entire buildings, including the furniture.

The line of painters on the road to abstraction and influenced by ornaments may be continued nearly indefinitely by Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Josef and Anni Albers, Ad Reinhardt or Max Bill, Walter Obholzer or Peter Kogler. Though this did not yet apply to Henri IVIatisse during his fauve period, it became all the more perceptible when the painter of color cautiously approached his motifs ever more closely, until the patterns of arabesques on tablecloths, curtains, wallpaper and clothes became the motifs proper of his interiors and still-lives, blurred and dissolved the 174 space depicted in the painting, only to finally leave the painting in his stage backdrops and architectures. The influence of Henri Matisse on American artists after the Second World War is considered as generally evident. We shall venture no opinion as to whether or not Jackson Pollock's Drippings, wandering beyond the boundaries of the painting and back, can be interpreted as a continuation of the arabesque, but it stands to reason that the idea of a form which expansively occupies the surface of the painting, developed by Matisse in 1909-10 in La danse, and the Acanthes he created in 1953, can be compared to Pollock's Out of the Web: Number 7.

However, the ornament not only accompanied artists on their road to abstraction, but also, in the case of minimal artist Frank Stella and concept artist Sol Le Witt, back to opulent ornamental depictions from the 1970s on, which - similar to later abstract art of the 1980s and 1990s - could not be discussed without the concepts of the ornament. It may be daring, but cannot be completely denied, that a reference to the ornament can even be established 30 years earlier for Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Besides exhibiting political irony, cannot Johns' painting of the American flag be considered an intelligently chosen readymade of a pattern, and at the same time the first icon of a new movement in art, pop art? Similarly, the grid points of the abstraction of subjects caused by reproduction techniques meticulously copied by Lichtenstein are periodic works of arts dissolved into patterns and determined by patterns. And what of the oeuvre of the pop art giant Andy Warhol in this context? 175 In contrast to Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol used the very aesthetics of silk-screen printing and its grids, which he often applied in multiple superimpositions and consciously induced imprecision. Besides his deliberate choice of motifs from the imagery of the media and consumer society, what made Warhol famous and also popular were in particular the series of portraits of celebrities in the movie and music industries, politics or science. Beginning with his overprints e.g. of self-portraits, his later oeuvre featured the works of the so-called Camouflage series, in which Warhol began to use patterns - borrowed from the army's camouflage colors and materials - to print over paintings such as The Last Supper. In further steps of artistic production, these initially borrowed patterns were produced in the most diverse color combinations, and combined as large- scale, abstract panel paintings. As with his earlier Wallpapers, these patterns were also produced as wallpaper, and entire exhibition spaces were covered by them. Typically for Warhol, additional panel paintings with the same or similar themes were superimposed on the spatial installations thus created.

The ornament has abandoned its initial origin, in this case the (amazingly) purely utilitarian function of camouflaging army personnel and machinery. As an overprint, it became the decisive element both of the theme and the appearance of panel paintings, it occupied the panel painting, only to finally leave the tableau and invade the surrounding space. Such is the space- encompassing ornamentation which emerged during an era when minimalism in architecture began its triumphant progress around the world, starting from Switzerland and camouflaged in unadorned reduction true to the principles of Adolf Loos. An art 176 form which has not been accepted as such without reservations by art historians to this day. As Stefan Tolksdorf writes, "The ornamental line remains a neglected child of the history of art, perhaps because it is so intangible as lotus, palmetto, acanthus, rocaille and arabesque, and at times proliferated devoid of meaning through the eras, but more likely because the anathema of the fathers of modernism still weighs heavily on it: the ornament as a surface phenomenon, a pretty pretence, the downfall of abstraction." (Stefan Tolksdorf, 2001)

Cannot ornaments and patterns be considered today as an opportunity for a new paradigm shift in architecture? In the process, ornaments and patterns replace the issue of the proportions, cubature and rhythm of facades. As in the aesthetic concepts of Gottfried Sempers, the logic of the constructive, material substance is no longer the essence of architecture, but has simply become a scaffold, reinterpreted as an instrument. What is of interest, then, is not the comprehensibility of construction and function, the visualization of planes, lines and penetrations, or the harmony and contrast of different materials, but the surface itself. According to Andreas Spiegl and Christian Teckert, construction and materials act above all in support of ornamentation and painting in Semper's work, and - moreover - "the idea of space is the sole product of surfaces". From this viewpoint, "the mask is not an instrument to dissimulate the contents, but merely an evident expression of the fact that the contents will reappear where they originated: from the surface" (Buro fur kognitiven Urbanismus [Office for cognitive urbanism], 2003). Accordingly, patterns and the rules for their creation have risen to become the point of departure and the 177 constant companion of the design process in architecture, both for planning strategies in the post-urban cityscape, and for the deformed and penetrated building of the post-information age. The agglomeration as a detached part of a pattern - the building hybrid as a built ornament taken to the third dimension. Here, the building shell coincides with the surface, the ornament, becomes a mask which no longer refers to what is behind it, but solely to its own significance. The contents are not hidden beneath a surface or a mask, they are enshrined in the shell, the surface itself. The contents have become surfaces, and conversely, the surfaces have become contents. As little as the ornament tells of the mask's construction and materials, as consistently it avoids expressing the meaning of the inner function or representing it symbolically. In this context, the position of the ornament in architecture departs from the viewpoint of Gottfried Semper and Robert Venturi, and experiences a further process of abstraction which reaches far beyond modernism and could also have repercussions in other areas of the fine arts.