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CounterPunch
August
19, 2002
Auteur-Driven
Vehicles
The New New Laocoon
by Gavin Keeney
"The starry heavens
above me
The moral law within
So the world appears
Through this mist of tears"
-- Nick Cave (Longitude Music Company, 1996)
The problematic
myth of the lone genius is driven
by the romantic concept that a singular being may embody the
spirit of the times. This myth-on-top-of-a-myth -- the incommensurable
zeitgeist (demoted to the episteme by Foucault) informing the
work of an intensely-attuned individual -- is also the main spring
driving the auteur-driven vehicle.
What distinguishes the auteur-driven vehicle from everything
else is the presence of the guiding spirit of the plenitude
of Time Itself -- a presence problematized by the assumption
of the mantle of omniscience by one (sometimes two) very clever
persons.
In the case of a film director (Tarkovsky, Godard, Bresson, Kurosawa),
the auteur formula is part-and-parcel of the idiom of the art
film. In the case of theater (Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco,
Peter Brook, Tom Stoppard), the phenomenon is more precisely
focused on the ability to assemble the ensemble, as Wenders
has tried to do in a more prosaic manner and with less success
in film.
TANGENT 1 In
Praise of Obscurity
In architecture and landscape architecture the auteur-driven vehicle is the so-called "boutique
firm". Whether or not this term is pejorative depends on
which side of the divide you sit on -- which side of the partition.
The nature of this type of firm is to present a "signature"
style while proposing an alternative to the service bureau, or
the corporate design office. Whether such claims are valid usually
rises and falls on the reputation of a "name" and a
"style" versus something more vital and "of the
times" as in film or theater. This "something more"
is intellectual substance. What all the nouvelle vague
filmmakers had in common was a desire for the film to also act
as a critique of cinema and its times. Style is not sufficient
to fuel the auteur-driven vehicle for long, and this is why most
run "out of petrol" after a decade or so.
The low end of the auteur-driven phenomenon is the cult of the
 personality in its most prosaic
(paranoid) form, and the cult of genius in its highest. The latter
warrants/bears close scrutiny, while the former is just as well
left alone (ignored). The ensemble and the signature, the form
and its progenitor, the idiom and its maestro, are all relative
terms insofar as there is nothing exceptional except the claim
to genius.
Nick Cave's music is an example. What would the dark (brooding),
brilliant (poetic), philosophical (dialectic) musings of the
misanthropic artist mean without the sonorous ambient force of
the violin against the tinkling melodic line of the piano and
the ominous "fat" bass line. Wenders picked up Cave
in Wings of Desire (1987), as he picked up Lou Reed in
Far Away, So Close (1993) for associative magic. Such
appropriations are the stuff of the auteur-driven vehicle and
automatically undermine the romantic notion of creating
something out of nothing. Yet, paradoxically, the zeitgeist is
both something and nothing. Moreover, any work that taps
into the spirit of the times will carry the amalgam of forces
present at that time further, stretching and warping the
fabric of time such that new forms emerge infused with the stuff
of repressed dreams and nightmares. Such works of art are exceptional
because they illuminate the interior of time and draw/cast shadows.
TANGENT 2 The
Birth of Shadows
Boutique firms come and go ... Normally, one or two bona fide auteur-driven
vehicles emerge every decade. Just now there are dozens upon
dozens appearing. Why? Is it that the corporate idiom is so totally
(morally/artistically) bankrupt? Is it that architects and landscape
architects are tired of working their way through the professional
stations of the cross? Is it because there is something wholly
radical afoot, and the auteur-driven boutique firm is the best
method to press forward? To press the agenda?
All of these unanswerable questions have a single cause -- that
is, the professions of architecture and landscape architecture
are all-but bankrupt and the would-be artist-designer
knows it all too well. The corporate service bureau exists, will
always exist, as the Hollywood or Bollywood landslide of lamentable
films goes on and on. In the design world the realization seems
to be that everything is at stake, although this is also
almost always the case. Why is it more so now?
TANGENT 3 Landscape
Formalism, Anyone ???
Perhaps it is the fusion thing -- the inexorable movement toward a vital, integral,
intelligent form of form-making. The signs of intense pressure,
pushing upwards from below, that exist in other fields are beginning
to manifest in architectural and landscape-architectural design.
That these two traditionally antagonistic fields are merging
(against the will of many of the rear guard) is a significant
sign that something immense is underway.
Truly, then, the zeitgeist has got us by the -- um -- short hairs.
Ante up or fold! Your options will diminish as the floodgates
are opened.
"Out of sorrow entire
worlds have been built
Out of longing great wonders have been willed
They're only little tears, darling, let them spill
And lay your head upon my shoulder
Outside my window the world has gone to war
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?"
-- Nick Cave (Longitude Music Company, 1996)
Gavin Keeney
is director of Landscape Agency New York, not quite an auteur-driven
landscape architecture bureau in New York City. His primary activities
include cultural criticism and the design of mostly unbuildable
gardens and landscapes. He is the author of On
the Nature of Things (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001), a book
surveying the travails of contemporary American landscape architecture
and urbanism.
NOTES
Image (above)--Laocoon (copy, Adriaen de Vries, Wallenstein Garden,
Prague)--The original de Vries sculptures in the Wallenstein
Garden were carted off by marauding Swedes to Drottningholm,
Sweden during the Thirty Years War.
Of course, Clement Greenberg wrote "Towards a Newer Laocoon"
(Partisan Review, 1940), and Lessing wrote Laocoon:
An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), and
the Roman copy of the Greek Laocoon dug up during the Renaissance
(1506) created a sensation and some may say sparked the Mannerist
revolt around about the 1520s (the sack of Rome by Charles V
occurred in 1527). Nevertheless, Greenberg's and Lessing's diatribes
were primarily arguing for the differentiation of the arts. The
New New Laocoon argues for the total merger of everything.
Historicist Non Sequitur #1--Some say things began to go awry
when Socrates demolished the Homeric universe. Others claim it
all started to unravel when medieval scholastics failed to pinpoint
how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Still others
believe the great mistake was going off the gold standard. Lacan
would, of course, blame American psychoanalysts. Critics of Lacan
would blame the 45-minute session. If Nietzsche were alive today,
he would no doubt say the world began to fall apart when we started
putting milk into little plastic bottles with fake nipples.
Figura serpentina--"Mannerism, which discovered the spontaneity
of the mind and recognized art as an autonomous creative activity,
developed, in accordance with the spirit of that discovery, the
totally new idea of fictitious space." Arnold Hauser, "The
Concept of Space in Mannerist Architecture", Mannerism:
The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 279
See Renaissance/Mannerism:
Readings 2
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OUTTAKES
"Greenberg felt artistic 'quality' could be judged by the
degree of 'purity' art achieved in its own medium and effects
exclusive to itself. He was a follower of the philosopher Immanuel
Kant and the ideals of in[t]uitive experience and purity. During
the '60s his views were questioned by artists and critics who
saw them as too self-referential and resistant to change and
much contemporary criticism has been dedicated to refuting his
theories. Recently, though, his theories have been reconsidered
in light of his politics. Although he originally supported Marxism,
Social[is]m and Trotsky[is]m he eventually rejected them in favor
of an avant-garde that is concerned only with itself." The
Greenberg Symposium (ArtNetWeb)
"There is still a great deal of controversy concerning Lessing's
relation to rhetoric, the so-called genius-aesthetics of the
1770s, and how his criticism is to be positioned with regard
to Romanticism. Incontrovertible is his status as the primary
literary theorist and critic of the German Enlightenment."
G.
E. Lessing (Johns Hopkins University)
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