The highly rational societies of the Renaissance felt the need to create utopias; we of our times must create fables.
Francis Alÿs, 1998

When reflecting on the question raised by the organizers of the twelfth Documenta under the rubric “Is Modernity our Antiquity?”, it quickly becomes apparent that addressing modernity in the form of an interpretative reading does not lend itself well to generalizations. Indeed, modernity can be treated as either a historical period or an ideological, cultural or even civilizational fantasy. The question is an interrogation thematizing whether or not we are still inhabiting modernity’s ‘inside,’ or whether we have surpassed it and left it behind, or whether its spectre is still haunting this ‘rotten kingdom’ of ours, or if, as Bruno Latour has provocatively stated, we have ever even been ‘modern’ in the first place.

In order not to simply imbue this infinity puzzle with a colour of one’s choice (Georges Perec insisted that monochromes are the only true riddles), one that is constituted through multifarious understandings of modernity, which emerge depending on whether modernity is understood from a historical, philosophical or more restricted to an artistic point of view (which is a priori our domain for investigation), but also depending on whether it is understood from a western perspective or non-western perspective—in brief, if one wants to escape the realm of mere opinion—it is undoubtedly necessary to question the very function of historicism itself.

The principle of rereading, of the resumption and reinterpretation of the past, is not the prerogative of our contemporary epoch. The prevailing conception of modernity sees the latter in terms of a dialectic articulation between a Past and a Future. As such, it counters the cyclical continuity of traditional Time by confronting it with an ideology centring on the rupture between a ‘bygone’ past and a future that is conceived as teleological. This future, moreover, is founded not on a continuous but discontinuous idea of progress. It stands for the principle of ‘creative destruction’ which ensures the seizure of power of secular time over uniform time. This notion is quintessential to the Marxist interpretation of History, which calls upon the creation of new models of production in order to get out of the “prehistory of humanity.” Such terminology provides an interpretative key for this ambiguous notion of Antiquity, and, in a certain sense, its pre-requisite.

Historically speaking,this notion of the break was often founded on the reinterpretation of the past in order to render it legible and comprehensible within a given framework. In a telling chapter of Jacques Rancière’s The Distribution of the Sensible, with the title “Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity,” the author reminds us that “those who exalt or denounce the ‘tradition of the new’ forget that the latter has as its strict complement ‘the newness of the tradition.’ The aesthetic regime of the arts did not begin with decisions to initiate an artistic rupture. It began with decisions to reinterpret what makes art or what art makes.”[1]

In fact, such a reinterpretation had as its objective to facilitate the emergence of a synergy between aesthetic practices and the construction of a socio-political History. Rancière names Hegel, whom he sees as having conjured up the idea of European emancipation in Dutch genre painting, as well as Hölderlin, who analyzed the premises of democracy in his reinvention of Greek tragedy, but also earlier, Perrault, who outlines the formation of a national cultural identity within medieval literature, thus in effect tracing the aptly named conflict between the “Ancients” and “Moderns” of the seventeenth century.

An explanation of the past does not only function to invent the present. It of course also invents a past to explain the present. Perhaps we need to invent modernity today as a tradition, in the meaning that Blaue Reiter painter Franz Marc gave to this idea: “Traditions are beautiful, but to invent, not to follow”, a sentence chosen by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray as a motto for their Société Anonyme Incorporated Inc. In light of this, one should remain particularly distrustful of the forms in which modernity is invented and the aims it might serve. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins points out, one cannot really trust ‘post’ ideologies (postmodernist, post-structuralism, post-colonialism), which he calls “afterology,” when they set themselves up against a cultural inheritance that is invariably presented as coherent, uniform, stable, systematic and neatly delimited. The gesture of figuring Modernity as ‘post’ serves no other aim than to polarize dogmas and dissidence and to decree aporias, by allocating positions which only have functional value within a system: it therefore lacks substantial value.

As Jacques Rancière puts it, “the idea of modernity would like there to be only one meaning and direction in history, whereas the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities. The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationships with the other spheres of collective experience.”[2] He in fact characterizes artistic modernity as an attempt to proclaim its own “distinctive feature”, aiming at the autonomization of the artistic sphere, which entertains paradoxical or even contradictory relations with actual artistic practices and the manifest ambitions of avant-gardes. This contradiction becomes all the more apparent when focusing on their intention to establish non-hierarchical bridges between disciplines, and their aspirations to construct non-imitative and non-comparative points of convergence between the aesthetic and the political.

Equally paradoxical is that the dominant contemporary reading of modernity still rests on the supposed synchrony of the history of aesthetic practices and socio-political history. As a consequence, by drawing straight lines between aesthetic practices and totalitarianisms, colonial politics and the collapse of these systems in the twentieth century, the disillusions generated in one sphere drag along the others into a generalized aporia.

We must therefore take note of what we are looking at, and how we are looking, when we are tempted to draw consequences from, or to perceive filiations and breaks with, modernity. Heeding the point of view that guided Walter Benjamin in his text “Announcement of the journal Angelus Novus” (a magazine that was finally never published), it effectively seems that “the task of the critic is not to educate through historical accounts, or to form the mind by means of comparison, but to reach knowledge by plunging himself into the work.”[3]

For three years now, my friend and colleague Guillaume Désanges and I have been ceaselessly collaborating in order to ascertain what we could do, in our capacity as curators in the field of contemporary art, with a text whose reading had dazzled us in theextreme, i.e. Glass Architecture, a manifesto written in 1910 by the German poet Paul Scheerbart—his last text before his death in 1915 (the previous year, and following great difficulties, he had finally succeeded in publishing his text thanks to Herwarth Walden, the chief editor of the expressionist periodical Der Sturm). Glass Architecture is a visionary, lyrical and technical treatise that advocates the use of glass architecture and dismisses brick architecture. The text envisages a radical transformation of the individual and of civilization through its institution and effects, which are elaborated point by point in 111 short and peremptory chapters. Scheerbart, whose work mainly comprises futuristic and eccentric fictions (his own publishing company was called Deutscher Phantasten Verlag—The Publishing House of German Fantasts), had already taken up—most notably in Lesabéndio and in Das Graue Tuch (The Grey Cloth), which was published at the same time as the manifesto—the idea of a utopian transformation of civilization through technology, which Walter Benjamin also did not fail to recognize in his text Experience and Poverty:

The poet’s work is imbued with an idea which could not have been more foreign to then widespread notions. This idea—or rather, this image—was of a humanity that had deployed the full range of its technology and put it to humane use. To achieve this state of affairs, Scheerbart believed that two conditions were essential: first, people should discard the base and primitive belief that their task was to ‘exploit’ the forces of nature; second, they should be true to the conviction that technology, by liberating human beings, would fraternally liberate the whole of creation.[4]

Through his connection with Herwarth Walden and Else Lasker-Schüler, the founders of Der Sturm, Scheerbart got in touch with architect Bruno Taut, with whom, he founded the “Society of Glass Architecture” in 1913. This reciprocal influence enabled Taut to realize his Glas Haus, the Glass House displayed at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition. Thanks to this collaboration, Scheerbart could write his treatise, which is a culmination of his will to reconcile his romantic and spiritualist aspirations with his political engagement with a technical and social modernity, nourished by a Nietzschean vitalism enlivened with militant pacifism. In a sense, the Glas Haus is the unique architectural realization corresponding to Scheerbart’s tenets: an integral architecture of coloured glass, a dome saturated with translucent and multicoloured stained glass windows, sheltered display cabinets with collections of ‘Naturalia’ revealing the sources of inspiration of this ornamentality: butterflies, crystals, precious stones, to name only a few. This is a complete architecture that sets it sights on the exaltation of the senses, advocating beauty over reason.

The reception of this architectural eccentricity becomes interesting when keeping in mind that, amongst the public of the Werkbund, one could find Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, who were still young architects at the time. In 1919, just after the end of the First World War, Bruno Taut’s creation of the “Glass Chain” architectural society echoes the ideas of Scheerbart. The group cites Scheerbart as a precursor of modernism, up to the architectural projects drawn by Lyonel Feininger for the Bauhaus which Gropius would found that same year. However, little by little, it is the functionalism and utility of glass with its transparent quality that will inform Gropius’s “construction of the future,” which found its apogee with the construction in Dessau of the Bauhaus building in 1926, and with Mies van der Rohe’s drawings of skyscrapers, also made in 1926, which were published by Taut in his journal Frühlicht (Spring). Scheerbart’s ideas on perenniality and the alliance between technical and social progress for a harmonization of humanity would still survive, while his notions of the aesthetic were discarded. From then onwards, writings on the figure of Scheerbart would invoke him as the pioneer of glass, from Walter Benjamin (linking him to Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier) to Reyner Banham (in his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age). These propel a misinterpretation, in which he is made into an apostle of transparency and visibility as the tools of democracy. If the aesthetics of Scheerbart is an unmistakable mishap—perhaps a belated outgrowth of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil—it is only so because of the functionalist theses which started to predominate at time of the writing of his manifesto. These find their incarnation in Loos’s 1908 condemnation of “the ornament as crime.” However, Glass Architecture contains an outspoken chapter on the subject, with the title “The Functional Style,” where Scheerbart expresses his position: “I should like to resist most vehemently the undecorated ‘functional style,’ for it is inartistic.”[5]

More precisely, it seems that the apparent conflict between Loos’ condemnation of bourgeois architectural decoration and Scheerbart’s defence of the ornament can find points of resolution. In Ornament and Crime, Loos’s main target was the imitative tendency of the architecture of the Viennese Secession, corrupted by decorative eclecticism, which advocated the ‘decorational’ as emerging from the material itself. This thesis echoes Scheerbart’s assertion: “For a transitional period, the functional style seems to me acceptable; at all times it has done away with imitations of older styles, which are simply products of brick architecture and wooden furniture. Ornamentation in the glass house will evolve entirely of its own accord—the oriental decoration, the carpets and the majolica will be so transformed that we shall never, I trust, have to speak of copying in glass architecture.”[6]

Nothing remains but this almost primordial misunderstanding concerning the reception of Glass Architecture. It merely reinforces the appeal of this text, which is modernist in its style (given its projectivity and its totalizing ambition) while simultaneously anti-modernist, if one is lead by imposed norms that anchor Scheerbart’s contributions in a 19th century thought and aesthetics.

Thus strongly influenced by Scheerbartean exegesis, Désanges and I also developed The Glass Show, in the form of a conference-transparence, and a subsequent exhibition hosted at Villa Arson in Nice (France), called Intouchable (l’idéal transparence) [Untouchable (The Transparence Ideal)], to expose the partial and ultimately intentionally erroneous visions on Glass Architecture. Here, we foregrounded the history of transparency as it has been filtered through the arts of the last forty years, since the advent of minimalism and conceptual art. This is not the place to go into the details of our articulation. Allow me to refer to Guillaume Désanges’s text, “Rien que pour vos yeux” [“For Your Eyes Only”], and my essay “Progrès constants de la visibilité”, [“The Constants of Progress of Visibility”], published in the Intouchable (l’idéal transparence) [Untouchable (The Transparence Ideal)] exhibition catalogue (Editions Xavier Barral, Paris), but let us briefly note that we progressively moved away from the reality of glass to the notion of transparency as value.

Essentially a modern value, its main power of fascination lies in the fact that it cannot be linked to any specific ideology, although it has been subsumed within the most conflicting ones. At the beginning of the 20th century, rationalistic, mystical, socialist, liberal, pacifist and bellicose discourses conceptualized transparency and constructed their ideals on the basis of the characteristics of glass. In parallel, and from its very origin, the notion of transparent architecture catalyzed utopias and dystopias in a relay of intertwining comments that cross from the one into the other. One could trace this back to the time of the presentation of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace for the London World Fair of 1851. In his novel Chto Delat? (What Is To Be Done?) Nikolai GavrilovichChernichevsky projected his pre-socialist utopia in his dream of a transparent building, which immediately underwent an ironic treatment in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, where Crystal Palace is associated with the latent terror of an enclosed air conditioned space in which social life is regulated. This thesis is again taken up in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s counter-utopian novel We, where transparency is the most effective tool for absolute surveillance. This constitutes the “Human Zoo”—to use the expression coined by Peter Sloterdijk. Coincidentally, in one of his most recent publications, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals [In the Global Inner Space of Capital], Sloterdijk returns to glass architecture (specifically London’s Crystal Palace) as a premonition of a governmentality directed by a vision of society arranged as an interior, as a stretched-out home: “Biopolitics begins in the form of an enclosed building.”[7]

Glass Architecture contains all of these tensions and contradictions, these utopias and dystopias, when taking into account that transparency can never gain autonomy over its correlate, opacity. As a tool of reflection on modernity, Glass Architecture is a knot of paradoxes, a hiatus, a hapax. Situated between ornamentalism and messianic discourse, between beauty and reason, this text does not resort to any orthodoxy or paradigm. Nonetheless, one may wonder what modernity could have been, in a speculative and hypothetical “what if?” scenario.What if Scheerbart were alive and we were all dead?

Translated from French by Aarnoud Rommens.

Notes:

[1] Rancière, J. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated and edited with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, p. 25.

[2] Ibid., p. 26.

[3]Benjamin, W. ‘Annonce de la revue Angelus Novus’, in Œuvres Volume I. Paris, Gallimard (translated from German into French by Rainer Rochlitz)

[4] For the English version, see Benjamin, W. 2003. ‘On Scheerbart’ in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Selected Writings, Vol 4: 1938-1940. Cambridge, Massechusetts: Belknap Press, p. 386.

[5] Scheerbart, P. 1972. Glass Architecture, by Paul Scheerbart and Alpine Architecture, by Bruno Taut. Edited with an Introduction by Dennis Sharp. Glass Architecture translated by James Palmes. Alpine Architecture translated by Shirley Palmer. New York: Praeger, p. 45.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Direct translation from French text. See Sloterdijk, P. 2006. Le palais de cristal: A l'intérieur du capitalisme planétaire, Paris: Maren Sell.