need help on dissertation on architecture and art

Jimmy

the title is:
'art and architecture are practices not sciences. the construction of science aspires to universal application. pictures and buildings need only work where they are' Dave Hickey

Discuss

any1 have any opinions?

DadaKopf

Very interesting topic and very, very broad. I love this kind of stuff. This is kind of what I'd say to myself if I was doing the question....

art and architecture are practices not sciences.

It looks like the first thing you might have to do is closely examine the purpose of science. What is it supposed to achieve? How does it achieve those ends? There's a lot of literature to suggest that science is the enemy of art because it cannot account for things that can't be measured; you should consider aesthetics either a separate or at least special realm of scientific examination.

That said, enough modernist art focused on science or scientific style systematisation - De Stijl, Bauhaus, Futurism; Mondrian, Van Doesburg, van der Rohe. All the same, the aim of art was always to achieve aesthetic harmony which was a realm above mere matter; art was also seen as capable of actually changing the world, creating a utopia - it was scientific exploration (revealing underlying structures) that had the potential to transform life. In a sense, that's art as application. These modernist conceptions of art and architecture were seen as universal rules, one could say scientific rules, that applied to everyone and everything.

However, post-modern art and architecture takes a much more parochial and detached point of view. The same way it views language (totally detached and self-referential and arbitrary), it sees styles and applications as local and deeply embedded in that particular culture - aesthetics has given up on universality. Not just that but art has no real purpose anymore because as far as its function or role goes, it can't change the world, it is entirely composed of plays, puns and parodies of already existing styles - just like language, it's arbitrary and empty. One essay worth reading in this regard is "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" by Frederic Jameson (it's available on the web). Art is novelty and distraction and nothing else.

So, if this is the case, you have to figure out what science is supposed to do, how it actually affects the world and how art interacts with it. If you want good critiques of science from the Enlightenment onwards, check out Theodor Adorno's "Concept of Enlightenment" and "Culture Industry" and Michel Foucault's "The Order of Things" and "Discipline and Punish" I think or anything by him, really. Also anything useful or intelligible you can find by Jacques Derrida and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

the construction of science aspires to universal application

I've always considered science to be a particular strain of exploration and understanding of the world by formalising it using very specific language within a specific methodology. Science isn't application itself; like language, it's only always potential until a human being applies it in some way. Human beings are geographically, temporally and psychologically limited so any application of science (which in itself is limited in the same way) will never be universal. There is no universality, only plurality. Is science universal? Ask a physicist!

However, buildings are human constructs, generally built for human habitation. Buildings are anthropomorphic so there is a certain 'universality' in architecture's application if you consider buildings to be machines. Stairs have to conform to certain dimensions etc. - it's that famous balance between form and function I suppose. Buildings also tend to dehumanise, though (ref. to Jameson).

Anyway, the relation between space and science is brilliantly explored by Gaston Bachelard in "The Poetics of Space".

pictures and buildings need only work where they are

Interesting. It doesn't take a genius to tell that a building can't move. That means it's somehow related to its environment; when the International Style arrived, those huge white buildings were intended to stand out, clean and sharp against the filth and grime of the old ways of living. Today, post-modern buildings speak their place's vernacular but also utilise technology (as always) but now, there's even more of a show made of it. Buildings are both more mobile in style because theres a totalising plurality of aesthetic styles and grounded/fixed in their location.

Art, though, is a different thing. Walter Benjamin wrote a great essay called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" where he took on this technologisation of art. Art is now mobile which means it is suceptible to being ripped out of its socio-historical context - art is losing its 'aura'. Not just that but because of mechanical reproduction (photography, film, lithograph, posters), the original art work is being undermind or cancelled out. But maybe this isn't a bad thing. He assumes that everyone can connect with an art work's aura the same all over the world, regardless of their native culture but this is now generally regarded as incorrect; maybe it's not a bad thing that art is becoming ungrounded. But maybe it is a bad thing - think back to Jameson's declaration that art has no role. But perhaps that's just because it's just in a stage of transition.

So, in the end of the day, you have to consider whether science can handle things it can't measure. There's no doubt that science is an understanding of the world (through experiment) that enables application of certain materials which in turn provide tools to realise certain projects - aesthetic of pragmatic. The messy thing is assessing how much of this process arises out of an autonomous human imagination or how much of it is already determined by sub-dominant linguistic or scientific theoretical structures. The latter is the more modern view.

If I was to express an opinion, I would say that art and architecture are intimately interconnected with science (and the human subject) - one can try to prize apart the two but I think this would be a futile effort. It's not possible to gain a God's-eye-view on the situation - man is intimately connected with his language and his projects. I'm not sure if the relationship could be seen as dialectical, maybe it's purely structural, but the relationship is there all the same.

Hope that's of some help but you probably know most of this already.

Jimmy

thanks a lot
some very interesting points there

unfortunately the dissertation was in for the 12th april, so it's too late to include some of your points

if your interested David Hickey wrote a book called Air Guitar : Essay in Art and Democracy. It's a very good read, though I had to buy it, it's not in the libraries.

Thanks again

DadaKopf

Hehe, no bother, I had fun writing it. Kinda revision for my exams!

Could you email me a copy of your essay? I'd be interested in reading it.