You are on page 1of 4

thresholds 41 Spring 2013, 104-109

IN THE BANK REINHOLD MARTIN


The following text was read at Ruins of Modernity: The Failure of Revolutionary Architecture in the Twentieth Century, a panel with Peter Eisenman, Reinhold Martin, Joan Ockman, and Bernard Tschumi, organized by The Platypus Affiliated Society on Thursday, 7 February 2013, at New York University. For more information see http://newyork.platypus1917.org/2-7-2013-the-failure-of-revolutionary-architecture/ As a way of thanking The Platypus Affiliated Society for organizing this much-needed discussion and also marking some common ground, I want to begin by citing a little piece of history that, I suspect, lies somewhere in the background of the questions to which they have asked us to respond. If you go tomorrow to the Museum of Modern Artwhich you mustand spend some time with the beautiful Inventing Abstraction show curated by Leah Dickerman, you will see amongst other ruins of the Soviet avant-gardes a diminutive study by El Lissitzky, executed in gouache, ink, and pencil, for a 1920 project commemorating the assassinated Spartacist leader, Rosa Luxemburg. I deliberately refrain from showing you the drawing since you really must go to the show, but also because I want it to stand as a placeholder for the great double bind of modernist aesthetics, and particularly, of that elusive thing called abstraction as it crosses paths with that other elusive thing called revolution. Suffice it to say that the drawing, which measures about 4 x 4 inches, consists of a deep black square with razor thin white edge, set within (or floating above) a red circle, off center, and surrounded by a concentric array of Suprematist shapes in red, black, white, and speckled gray, which at once appear to be attracted centripetally to the pictures decentered center, and to spin off centrifugally from it, while a larger pair of black and gray bars seems to slip under or behind it. Over (or under) the black-square-inred-circle is written, in half-obscured Cyrillic characters, the name Rosa Luxemburg. There is nothing the least bit original about citing this little piece of modernist esoterica in this way. Most notably, the art historian T.J. Clark has offered a vividly dialectical reading that pits Lissitzkys ambivalent, proto-propagandistic realismcaptured in the half-obscured textagainst the more uncompromising abstraction of his mentor, Kasimir Malevich. Clark, for whom modernism is our antiquity, ultimately judges Malevich the more faithful of the pair to the unbearable contradictions of the already-ruined revolution. Wherein Malevichs original, unmarked black quadrilateral (1915), unenlightened, so to speak, by writing, manifests a kind of constitutive revolutionary darkness.1

104

But tables turn. Which is to say that our problem today may no longer be quite the realism-versus-abstraction problem faced by Lissitzky, Malevich, or their colleagues at UNOVIS, in Proletkult, or in any of the other vanguard cultural-political organizations of that heady time and place. Nor is it simply that the revolutionary or reformist intentions of the European avant-gardes ran tragically aground on the shores of the capitalist international, or even more misleadingly, that they were mysteriously co-opted by very real reactionary aesthetes at the Museum of Modern Art and their corporate sponsors. The problem, instead, is to define the problem. Not accidentally, in the Futurist 0-10 exhibition in Petrograd (1915-1916), Malevich hung his black square (its not quite a square) in the place traditionally reserved for the religious icon in Russian peasant culture. Today, it is not difficult to see that this was not only an act of transgression; it was a premonition. For it is no secret that under neoliberal capital, abstraction itself has become iconic, in a strictly religious sense. So my answer to Platypuss double question, Are we stillwere we everpostmodern? is yes, but only now, because architecture has finally become truly abstract. This is important not because it gives fresh impetus to the never-ending style wars, but because it redefines our categories. Again, I am not saying anything original in associating postmodernism with abstraction. Among others, Fredric Jameson has done so eloquently and at length. But you must understand that what one means here by abstraction is not fully captured by the usual distinction between abstract and figural art, or by the endless, undecidable debates as to which approach is more or less revolutionary, whether in the political or artistic sense. What I mean is something like a concrete abstraction, but with a slight difference from the common Marxian sense. If, for example, circulatory financial instruments like derivatives and the values they produce are abstract, the Bank of America, as an institution, a set of buildings, and a group of people, is concrete. The tables turn, however, when we recognize that that institution, those buildings, and those people are also in some sense constitutively abstract, in the sense of being interpellated as objects and subjects, in utterly tangible, material ways, into the language, practices, imaginaries, and infrastructures of capital, a priori. In this light, it may seemand perhaps rightly sothat the only truly revolutionary cultural activity is to be found in the real-world, hands-on, agit-prop art actions in and around Occupy Wall Street, the Alter-globalization movement, the Arab Spring, and forms is nowhere to be found in this mix, being so thoroughly hardwired to power precisely through its ability to deliveron-demandan aestheticized abstraction (the icon in all its iterations) that complements and even reproduces the rush of religious fervor generated byand generatingworldwide financialization. In the midst of
Martin In the Bank 105

other insurgent formations worldwide. Architecture in its traditional or disciplinary

thresholds 41 Spring 2013, 104-109 all of this, there are plenty of revolutionary or at least dissenting architects, many of whom are students, and many of whom find the courage to speak out against injustice and dispossession on a daily basis and act accordingly. But there is no revolutionary architecture. Unless, that is, we are speaking of the sort of revolution that begins from the right. From the other direction, architecture, even in its most insurgent, grassroots variations, is at best today to be found on the side of reform. Of course, Le Corbusiers now-clichd question, Architecture or Revolution? suggests mutually exclusive categories; but that questions rhetorical nature also symptomatically represses the much more poignant and much more famous question posed by Rosa Luxemburg in 1900: Reform or Revolution.2 In western Europe by 1923, when Le Corbusier wrote, the enlightened reform of housing, of the city, and of the republican institutions of liberal capitalism was well under way, as represented, for example, in all of the projectsfunctionalist, formalist, and historicistdesigned a few years later for the ill-fated League of Nations, including his own. Luxemburg, for whom Mies van der Rohe also designed and built a memorial in 1926, had fought all her life against such compromises, which she regarded as opportunistic capitulations. But even in her polemical struggles in Germany with the reformist Social Democratswhose leftward politics and policies, we all know, make todays American Democrats look like flaming neoconsher question, Reform or Revolution, names a double bind, a tangle tighter than a mere contradiction that can only be cut with the sharpest of knives, like a Dadaist collage. Here architecture can be something much more than an art of the possible. For rather than merely offering modest ways to make the brutal world system a little bit more humane, architecture harbors the capacityprecisely because of its complicity, and not despite itto conjure, like Lissitzkys little drawing with its ghostly little letters, the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg. For every small reform, however earnest, however limited, potentially bears her revolutionary question within itself, and it is well within architectures resources to ask, loudly and defiantly: Is that all you have to say?3 Or, to put it another way: Is that the best you can do? This also means recognizing today how the tables have turned, and how the most insidious propaganda for things as they are rather than things as they should be is to be found in the most abstract, most ethereal, most otherworldlyand yes, most outwardly sophisticatedarchitecture. As in past revolutions, actual or virtual, architecture-as-religious-icon is therefore the first thing to be demolished if the glimmers of other futures are to remain visible. For the so-called triumph of neomodernist abstraction over historicist figuration is what makes architecture finallyand belatedlypostmodern. At last, when the real estate developer demands world-class architecture above all else, architects have entered the bank vault, the headquarters of the new world order, only to find nothing thereexcept, that is, Malevichs black
108

square hanging in the corner. Rather than celebrate this nothing or give it metaphysical gravitas, it is time to see it for what it is. Nor can one be satisfied with opposing a resistant (or supposedly more real) architecture of brick to the apparently weightless balloons of financialization. For inside the empty vault, or in the real estate bubble or balloon, the air is thick and stale. And from its material, molecular density can be assembled concrete tools with which to gently tap, or firmly smash, the idols of our day, just as Nietzsche applied his philosophical hammer to the pieties of idealist, Apollonian classicism. What are these tools? A precondition for that question is the desire to change things, really and genuinely. Of this, I am afraid, there is little evidence in todays architecture, perhaps by definition. Instead, there are abundant noble attempts to solve pragmatically the problems, like climate change and poverty, thrown up willy-nilly by the status quo, rather than a concerted effort to reject and reformulate the world system out which these problems emanate. So too with abstraction, which was once the harbinger of other things and is now the very emblem of complacency. Faced with this one can only repeat, with Rosa Luxemburg and with so many others then and now: It does not have to remain this way.

Martin In the Bank 109

1 T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes From the History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 2 Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (London: Militant Publications, 1986 [1900]), accessed 7 February 2013, http://www.marxists.org/archive/ luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/.

3 Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, accessed 7 February 2013, http://www.marxists.org/ archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch10.htm.

You might also like