Having interned at the Barbican Art Gallery towards the current Le Corbusier retrospective late last year, I have spent a lot of time thinking about his approach and method, successes and failures. These, the first thoughts I have penned, result from a talk I went to last week by Marc Treib from UCB speaking about Le Corbusier’s involvement with the 1958 Philips Pavilion from the Brussels world fair, and my own thoughts on the subject, which have taken a twist following my recent literary adventures in the world of the Merry Pranksters.
Though Corbusier’s involvement with the architectural schema of the Philips Pavilion was shown by Treib quite conclusively to be in doubt, it having actually been fully realised and designed by Iannis Xenakis, it is the Pavilion’s insides that interest me. Built in response to the Philips companies desires for a totemic temple to the power of electricity: their electrictity, as well as the potential technological advances thought possible through their progression, Le Corbusier’s écran for the insides of the pavilion was a considered thesis on the potential of technology.
Here, the grand master of modernist design stepped his methods up a notch, working with the Philips Company to create a “synthesis of the arts”, where images, animation, light, colour, overwhelming sound from 300 odd speakers (in the shape of Edgar Varèse’s composition which worked within and against the space given to it) and design integrated towards an EXPERIENCE. The effect must have been destabilising. a multi-sensory attack of the modern, the new, the possible.
Though Varèse’s soundtrack, now thought a modern masterpiece, was attacked by none other than Fritz Philips as “everything rallied against by the free world” (though Treib amusingly pointed out Stalin may well not have liked it either), the piece as a whole was thought a celebration of technological prowes…
…and yet the reality is that in Corbu’s imagery, starting off at Dinosaur’s, the virgin mother, “primitive sculpture” and buddha, before moving on through auschwitz and machinery, science fiction and planes, to missiles, nukes and mushroom clouds, before settling on babies, love and the universe (according to my notes), the message presented appears both an anti-technological, anti-evolutionary, anti-MODERN diatribe on technologies failings. (Though as Treib commented, Corbu also positioned his own buildings in the latter part of the filmic trajectory…the love and babies bit! contrived to say the least). But the message reads as though Corbu was rallying against the free-world just as Varèse was said to be, or rather pointing out its pitfalls and its indiscipline.
Indeed, the abstract glitchiness of the soundtrack came on at times like a Warp records noise box… squarepusher at his laziest, making the twisty squelchy noises with none of the DnB and gabba furiosity… a maniacal accomplishment in the 50s and a musical ode to abstraction which itself was the protégé of modernist pictorial ennui.
When a member of the audience asked about the surrealist overtones of the piece, however, Treib defiantly stated that they weren’t there to be found except maybe in a footnote… the reality seemed to me quite the opposite. Many of the images were directly lifted from Georges Bataille’s Documents journal, and fell perfectly within the surrealist programme of misappropriation and confusion which sought to reimagine the world as unexplainable, curious, impregnable and, ultimately, failed… ish.
AND SO, it was here that my mind ticked over. Having just finished Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the success of Corbu’s film seemed, rather than a reverential meditation on technological and economic prowess, a sort of nihilistic renunciation of the accepted order, and a call to arms VIA the new technology… a multi-sensory evocation of NEW as a method of CHANGE… MODERNISM’S CENTRAL TENET.
Just as Ken Kesey’s acid tests were, in essence, a reimagining of space, of thought, or human approaches to understanding and our abilities to comprehend and explain the world around us unilaterally, so might Corbu’s work with Philips have been a way to promote hope through discombobulation.
As the merry prankster’s trials with LSD and with multi-sensory befuddlement were a dada-esque manifesto on new approaches to SEEING, so, perhaps, was the philip pavilion’s true story one of progression through insurrection.
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test left me thirsty for reimagining my approach to thought, both responding to Kesey’s desire for advancement away from reality, or away from the expected line, and responding to Wolfe’s literary style which in it’s quasi-concrete form attempted to approach Kesey’s direction with sensitivity and understanding…
As e e cummings’ poetry has long been for me a way into thinking about semiotics and the possibilities of words and images, so do both of these projects appear somehow utopian in their desire to confuse… a reality much more appreciative of life as we live it…
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