c theory
"Of all the varying impacts of postmodernity (whatever we can or cannot agree that to mean) one of the most ubiquitous has been the preponderance of Lifestyle as 'a life of style' -- the "Wallpaper*ization"[2] of the proposed environment we are meant to inhabit. The stylist, the designer, the imitator has sought to create a modernism within postmodern eclecticism. Yet this is a modernism that only embraces the totalitarianism internal to a mis-read Nietzschean-derived will to power and order.
While it could be argued that postmodernism was the triumph of theory over substance, it was a reversal of a Marxist derived modernism: now all that melts becomes solid in the air. Like melting substances, disorder became the form of representation. Like a melting substance, that which seemed ephemeral became attached, sometimes organic, sometimes as collage but always, and this is crucial, as a form of ornamentation.
To understand the ethic of modernity too often the populist theory only goes back as far as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's gnomic "less is more" (a statement that he seems to have appropriated from Peter Behrens).[3] This has resulted in what I term an aesthetic of lifestyle minimalism, the utterance as clichéed byline and style-fascist principle. This is not to launch a Wolfean attack upon Mies or modernism[4] but to rather state the need to place Mies and his reductionist modernist aesthetic within a wider context."
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- bill 10-21-2004 6:42 pm
"Of all the varying impacts of postmodernity (whatever we can or cannot agree that to mean) one of the most ubiquitous has been the preponderance of Lifestyle as 'a life of style' -- the "Wallpaper*ization"[2] of the proposed environment we are meant to inhabit. The stylist, the designer, the imitator has sought to create a modernism within postmodern eclecticism. Yet this is a modernism that only embraces the totalitarianism internal to a mis-read Nietzschean-derived will to power and order.
While it could be argued that postmodernism was the triumph of theory over substance, it was a reversal of a Marxist derived modernism: now all that melts becomes solid in the air. Like melting substances, disorder became the form of representation. Like a melting substance, that which seemed ephemeral became attached, sometimes organic, sometimes as collage but always, and this is crucial, as a form of ornamentation.
To understand the ethic of modernity too often the populist theory only goes back as far as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's gnomic "less is more" (a statement that he seems to have appropriated from Peter Behrens).[3] This has resulted in what I term an aesthetic of lifestyle minimalism, the utterance as clichéed byline and style-fascist principle. This is not to launch a Wolfean attack upon Mies or modernism[4] but to rather state the need to place Mies and his reductionist modernist aesthetic within a wider context."
continue...
- bill 10-21-2004 6:50 pm [add a comment]