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Appreciation and Appropriation, Art and Architecture

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Appreciation and Appropriation, Art and Architecture 84TH ACSA ANNUAL MEETING THEORY AND CRITICISM 1996 263 Appreciation and Appropriation, Art and Architecture ALEX T. ANDERSON University of Pennsylvania INTRODUCTION journey in this enlightened way must satisfy themselves with 'nutrition' and 'digesting,' the rationalized and limited Architecture differentiates itself from other forms of art by forms of tasting, savoring and incorporation of food. It is demanding a different sort of attention. Rapt concentration difficult for tourists to fully experience the places they visit does not reveal it. Appreciation is not enough. Architecture because they cannot live with them. demands appropriation. This becomes particularly evident when we consider the In this essay I demonstrate that art and architecture difference between tourist's experience of a building and a distinguish thernselves not in their physical constitutions, lived experience of it. "Buildings," according to Benjamin, but according to the relationships they form with those who "are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and percep- observe them. In making a work of architecture, it is crucial tio~rrather by touch and by sight."' The tourist's expe- first to understand these relationships, and then to create a rience of a building is limited because the inevitable brevity field that is capable of sustaining them. of 'touring' precludes tactile appropriation, which, Ben- jamin asserts, "is accomplished not so much by attention as VISUAL EXPERIENCE by habit."4 The true experience of a building involves a In his well-known essay, "Art in the Age of Mechanical gradual incorporatio~notthe "introjection of an 'out- Reproduction" Walter Benjamin disparages "the attentive side"' that Calvino's sophisticated tourist experiences, but concentration of the tourist before a famous building."' He an extended temporal involvement. Buildings are hlly implies by this that there is something almost ludicrous about experienced by living with them, not by merely looking at examining a building in this way, as if it were a work of art them. hung on a gallery wall-for he goes on to say that this is how This assumption, though now widely held, fundamentally one looks at art. His contention opens a fundamental insight rejects tenets that drove architecture from the Renaissance to into the nature of architecture and of art: they must be the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the architec- experienced in radically different ways. While one can, with ture of that period assumed that linear perspective could suitable knowledge and concentration, appreciate art, archi- precisely represent architectural works, and that, in turn, tecture yields itself only to a deeper kind of experience. their configuration could be fully resolved from particular Unlike art, architecture must be appropriated. points of view. Erwin Panofsky notes that this faith in For Benjamin the tourist's appreciation of the world can perspective demonstrates an understanding of the world very only be a limited 'seeing', a vision that is only capable of different from our own, "for," he says, "the structure of an grasping part of reality, no matter how attentive it might be. infinite, unchanging and homogenous space [which perspec- Recognizing this fact, tourists today place increasing de- tive assumes to exist] is quite unlike the structure of mands on themselves in an attempt to 'get a feel' for places, psychophysiological space [as we understand it in the twen- to experience 'local flavor'. As Italo Calvino says, "the true tieth cent~ry]."~As this understanding began to emerge, it journey, as the introjection of an 'outside' different from our became clear that traditional, perspectival seeing could not normal one, implies a complete change of nutrition, a fully apprehend the world. Indeed, architectural theorists of digesting ofthe visited country This is the only kind oftravel the late nineteenth century (e.g. Semper, Ruskin, Morris and that has meaning nowadays, when everything visible you can Viollet-le-duc) asserted that architecture had to present see from your easy o hair."^ Such efforts, though certainly much more than a visual aspect, because no matter how rewarding, are not sufficient to hlly experience a place. In elegantly and precisely construed, a work of architecture the end the tourist is only by great effort extending simple held within it fundamental but ephemeral truths about the seeing into the realms of the other senses. Tourists who nature of its physical constitution, the culture that engen- 264 841H ACSA ANNUAL MEETING THEORY AND CRITICISM 1996 people that lived with it."y the early twentieth century this visual existence. Since the same body sees and touches, notion had helped to drastically alter architecture's scope. visible and tangible belong to the same world."" For example, in 1912 Robert Mallet-Stevens declared, "If a Bergson and Merleau-Ponty demonstrated that perspec- fastidiously drawn scale drawing, of a temple overloaded tival seeing can no longer be considered an adequate means withuseless columns can be mounted on a chassis and served of understanding the world. Because modem architecture up to the public classified as 'architecture', then a living insinuates itself into the world of our experience, perspec- room or kitchen, displayed as they really are, complete with tival seeing cannot form the basis of our experience of it. furniture and utensils, which they can move around in, can In his essay of 19 10, "Architecture," Adolf Loos asserted also be classified as architecture, and as living, animated as much: "the mark," he says, "of a building which is truly architecture, which will captivate and interest the visitor in established is that it remains ineffective in two dimen- another way."' Modem architecture had to be perceived in sions."14 Perspective and photography15 are incapable of action, not merely from a limited point of view. This remains adequately representing Loos' work because, to be under- true of architecture today. Perspectival seeing, like 'the stood, it must be appropriated, as Benjamin might say, by attentive concentration of the tourist,' cannot wholly appro- both "perception and use." According to Loos, an architect priate, nor can it adequately represent a building because it must supply much more than visual effects in a built work. presupposes a strictly limited experience of the world and "The room has to be comfortable," he says, "the house has thus dispenses with the complexities of tactility and the other to look habitable."16 Imbedded in these notions of comfort senses. and habitability is the same principle that underlies the 'tactile appropriation' that Benjamin believes tourists are VISION AND ACTION incapable of experiencing. Indeed what is 'habitability' but, Henri Bergson provides the basic framework for a modem quoting Benjamin, "appropriation accomplished not so much assertion that architecture must be appropriated, not merely by attention as by habit"? If a work of architecture is to be observed, tobe adequately understood. InMatterandMemory habitable it must satisfy vision, but it must also involve itself he demonstrates that no representational system can ad- fully with human actions equately describe reality; no individual sense can fully perceive it, because "there is in matter something more than APPRECIATING ART what is actually gi~en."~Contrary to what traditional per- Art, on the other hand, requires a fundamentally different spective assumes, perception happens not in ourselves, not kind of understanding. It remains separate from human in our eyes, but in a reciprocal relationship that our body action and, unlike architecture, resists appropriation. Ac- maintains with the world.9 "The objects which surround cording to Loos: [one's] body" he says, "reflect its possible action on them."1° Seeing and physical action become part of the same system "The work of art wants to draw people out oftheir state of appropriation. Thus a point of view and the "the distance of comfort. The house has to serve comfort. Man loves which separates [one's] body from an object perceived really everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates every- measures the greater or less imminence of danger, the nearer thing that wants to draw him out of this acquired and or more remote fulfillment of a promise."" Perspectival secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves seeing cannot fully appropriate the world because it fails to the house and hates art. Only a small part of architec- accommodate both vision and action, because it assumes, ture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument."" according to Panofsky, "that we see with a single immobile That people hate art may be questionable, but it is clear eye."I2 that art and architecture place fundamentally different de- Maurice Merleau-Ponty demonstrates the limitations of mands on people, that they require different sorts of attention this kind of seeing even more emphatically in his posthu- to comprehend them. mously published work, The Visible and the Invisible. In it According to Benjamin, a traditional work of art main- he declares: tains an aura about it-a "unique phenomenon of a dis- "[as] every experience of the visible has always been tance."'This distance, for painting at least, enforces purely given to me within the context of the movements of the visual appropriation. Indeed Benjamin asserts that the aura look, the visible spectacle belongs to the touch neither of art can be destroyed by tactile appropriation.I9To handle more nor less
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