The paradoxes of Quinlan Terry
Jan. 8th, 2008 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusSkirmishes (perfectly civil and respectful ones befitting to the two elements of a mutually-defining binary) have broken out on Click Opera between the avant and retro factions recently. The other day I noted an odd "semantic drift" which sometimes happens here, a drift from "laboratory" to "conservatory". I start by talking about some kind of laboratory culture (Mike Meiré's Farm Kitchen Project, for instance), but the comments have drifted into a discussion of conservatories by the end of the day. If I blog about radical fashion, someone sooner or later asks me if I read conservative fashion blog The Sartorialist. If it's the philosophy of form, I'm asked my views on Alex Kerr or Christopher Alexander.
Now, in terms of cultural politics, these queries are the aesthetic equivalent of the questions political pollsters ask to find out how someone's likely to vote. They're good questions because they're hot buttons. A thumbs-up for Kunstler, Alexander, Kerr and The Sartorialist would represent a certain view of the universe which I'd characterize as conservative. So I tend to take these questions as "Are you a conservative yet?" Explaining, the other day, why I tend to back off from Alexander and The Sartorialist, I said that it was because they both seemed to propose the existence of a cosmic order -- justified by metaphysics of some kind -- which favoured some forms (the gentleman's suit, the "natural city") above others. These forms would usually be characterized as "classic" and "timeless" and "real" and "spiritual", as opposed, say, to "vogueish, modern, secular, facile, meretricious, plastic, trendy".
Nobody so far has asked me what I think of the architect Quinlan Terry, but he's an interesting case, a sort of extreme example of the retro-fogey tendency which holds the avant-trendy one in a neat binary opposition. Have a look at the building on the right above and tell me when it was built.
It's the Howard Building, Downing College, Cambridge University, and it was designed and built by Quinlan Terry in the mid-1980s. Most people, encountering this building without knowing its origins, would probably assume it was built in the late 18th or early 19th century. Now, I don't find it, in and of itself, an ugly or bad building. It's actually quite handsome. But I'm very much against the idea of making straight pastiches of old building styles -- it seems like a complete abrogation of the responsibility of the artist to say something relevant to the times. It's also letting down the future, which requires topicality and inventiveness from us, even just so it has something to revive and play around with in its turn. There's nothing more useless to the future than an age which just recycles a previous age and doesn't come up with its own distinctive style.
Presenting this conservative architect to its liberal readers, The Observer asked "In a world obsessed with modernism, could this classically-obsessed traditionalist be the ultimate rebel?" The story began with another paradox: "He is our most controversial architect - precisely because he is so uncontroversial." The trouble with these formulae is that they quickly become so semantically unstable they self-destruct.
In a world where to rebel is to conform, to conform is to rebel.
Quinlan Terry is so uncontroversial he's controversial.
Some people are so retro they're positively avant-garde.
To challenge perpetually is no longer challenging; the true challenge now would be to soothe and reassure.
If to conform is to rebel in a world where to rebel is to conform, then conforming and rebelling no longer have any meaning. The moment you start to rebel in that world, you conform. And yet the moment you start to conform, you rebel, so rebelling is actually rebelling again. And yet it's not, because to rebel is to conform. But that's to rebel, actually. And so on. It's like a dog chasing its own tail.
The Observer article confirms that Terry's classicism has a strong cosmological-metaphysical underpinning in the form of his Christian faith. But what I find really interesting is how this worldview which is supposed to be based on an inherent order in the universe was actually created dialectically through an Oedipal struggle with opponents who turn out to be Terry's own parents and teachers. This opposition is what makes him a "rebel", and yet the people he rebelled against to become the man he is today are, themselves, much bigger rebels than he is.
"His parents were typical Hampstead progressive types," Lynn Barber tells us. "Guardian readers, communists, they went to Moscow before the war," says Terry. "They were not atheists, but I think they were militantly agnostic. Another word for agnostic is ignoramus, but no one likes to use that word." His mother was an artist friendly with key Modernists like Barbara Hepworth and Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus, then, wasn't just a set of forms and principles in a textbook for the young Terry. It was Walter, sipping tea with Mummy in the drawing room.
Later, Terry clashed with his Modernist teachers at the Architectural Association, again rebelling against people I would consider rebels. The Architectural Association is one of the places I feel at home in these days when I go back to Britain. There's a wonderful bookshop, a great cafe, interesting shows. The place is just filled with a spirit of adventurous experimentalism. When I was there in October my friends from Abake -- and James Goggin, who made my last two sleeves -- were showing in the ground floor exhibition space. Anyone attacking the spirit of the AA is basically not a friend of mine (unless it's some sort of "minor differences" grouch), just as anyone attacking egalitarian idealism or the Bauhaus is basically on the other side of the political divide. These attitudes are "rebellious" the same way it's "rebellious" for art critic Brian Sewell to advocate a return to figurative painting in a time dominated by post-Duchamp conceptualism, or for the Standard (Sewell's paper) to say that the ICA should shock and challenge its own liberal patrons rather than the standards of a wider cross-section of the British public. It's a rebellion against rebellion, a revolution against revolution, an Oedipal attack on the progressive.
"I thought that the world was not as I'd been brought up to believe," Terry told The Observer, explaining the rift with his parents and teachers. "They said it was getting better and better, but it was actually getting worse and worse. Because I'd never been taught about original sin and its hold on the whole human race, and how man in sin is displeasing to God, in a way I was totally protected from the Christian faith... We live in terrible times... I just think we're in decline really, in every way. The West in general, Britain in particular. Morally, I think we're in decline - look at the crime figures, the divorce rate." And so Terry, in his practice, returns to a Golden Age and justifies it with reference to Golden Sections and Golden Rules and God, the parent you can trust, the parent who isn't a communist or an aesthetic radical, and certainly isn't trendy.
In some ways I'm "on the same page" as Quinlan Terry -- just heading in the opposite direction, and for similarly Oedipal reasons. Terry works in Dedham, an unspoilt English village where my family also lived for a couple of years in the 70s. The Georgian Edinburgh flats I was brought up in would probably be very much to Terry's taste, as perhaps would my school, the neo-classical Edinburgh Academy. But these buildings were the perfect reason for me to fall in love with Tokyo, a city which actually felt like the present and the future rather than the past, and had a dynamism, a reckless modernity sorely lacking in conservative British places like Edinburgh and Dedham, no matter how well-proportioned or God-approved they might be.
At least, though, I recognize where Terry is coming from. I recognize that he's simply responded negatively to the progressivist radicalism and aesthetic Modernism I respond positively to. And perhaps he really has become a Christian and a conservative in a spirit of rebellion. It's just that he's chosen, as I see it, the wrong thing to rebel against: rebellion itself. In his quest for cosmic order, he's released a whole Pandora's Box of tail-chasing Oedipal paradoxes which, ironically, make the world considerably more unstable and chaotic. Back to the lab.
Now, in terms of cultural politics, these queries are the aesthetic equivalent of the questions political pollsters ask to find out how someone's likely to vote. They're good questions because they're hot buttons. A thumbs-up for Kunstler, Alexander, Kerr and The Sartorialist would represent a certain view of the universe which I'd characterize as conservative. So I tend to take these questions as "Are you a conservative yet?" Explaining, the other day, why I tend to back off from Alexander and The Sartorialist, I said that it was because they both seemed to propose the existence of a cosmic order -- justified by metaphysics of some kind -- which favoured some forms (the gentleman's suit, the "natural city") above others. These forms would usually be characterized as "classic" and "timeless" and "real" and "spiritual", as opposed, say, to "vogueish, modern, secular, facile, meretricious, plastic, trendy".
Nobody so far has asked me what I think of the architect Quinlan Terry, but he's an interesting case, a sort of extreme example of the retro-fogey tendency which holds the avant-trendy one in a neat binary opposition. Have a look at the building on the right above and tell me when it was built.
It's the Howard Building, Downing College, Cambridge University, and it was designed and built by Quinlan Terry in the mid-1980s. Most people, encountering this building without knowing its origins, would probably assume it was built in the late 18th or early 19th century. Now, I don't find it, in and of itself, an ugly or bad building. It's actually quite handsome. But I'm very much against the idea of making straight pastiches of old building styles -- it seems like a complete abrogation of the responsibility of the artist to say something relevant to the times. It's also letting down the future, which requires topicality and inventiveness from us, even just so it has something to revive and play around with in its turn. There's nothing more useless to the future than an age which just recycles a previous age and doesn't come up with its own distinctive style.
Presenting this conservative architect to its liberal readers, The Observer asked "In a world obsessed with modernism, could this classically-obsessed traditionalist be the ultimate rebel?" The story began with another paradox: "He is our most controversial architect - precisely because he is so uncontroversial." The trouble with these formulae is that they quickly become so semantically unstable they self-destruct.
In a world where to rebel is to conform, to conform is to rebel.
Quinlan Terry is so uncontroversial he's controversial.
Some people are so retro they're positively avant-garde.
To challenge perpetually is no longer challenging; the true challenge now would be to soothe and reassure.
If to conform is to rebel in a world where to rebel is to conform, then conforming and rebelling no longer have any meaning. The moment you start to rebel in that world, you conform. And yet the moment you start to conform, you rebel, so rebelling is actually rebelling again. And yet it's not, because to rebel is to conform. But that's to rebel, actually. And so on. It's like a dog chasing its own tail.
The Observer article confirms that Terry's classicism has a strong cosmological-metaphysical underpinning in the form of his Christian faith. But what I find really interesting is how this worldview which is supposed to be based on an inherent order in the universe was actually created dialectically through an Oedipal struggle with opponents who turn out to be Terry's own parents and teachers. This opposition is what makes him a "rebel", and yet the people he rebelled against to become the man he is today are, themselves, much bigger rebels than he is.
"His parents were typical Hampstead progressive types," Lynn Barber tells us. "Guardian readers, communists, they went to Moscow before the war," says Terry. "They were not atheists, but I think they were militantly agnostic. Another word for agnostic is ignoramus, but no one likes to use that word." His mother was an artist friendly with key Modernists like Barbara Hepworth and Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus, then, wasn't just a set of forms and principles in a textbook for the young Terry. It was Walter, sipping tea with Mummy in the drawing room.
Later, Terry clashed with his Modernist teachers at the Architectural Association, again rebelling against people I would consider rebels. The Architectural Association is one of the places I feel at home in these days when I go back to Britain. There's a wonderful bookshop, a great cafe, interesting shows. The place is just filled with a spirit of adventurous experimentalism. When I was there in October my friends from Abake -- and James Goggin, who made my last two sleeves -- were showing in the ground floor exhibition space. Anyone attacking the spirit of the AA is basically not a friend of mine (unless it's some sort of "minor differences" grouch), just as anyone attacking egalitarian idealism or the Bauhaus is basically on the other side of the political divide. These attitudes are "rebellious" the same way it's "rebellious" for art critic Brian Sewell to advocate a return to figurative painting in a time dominated by post-Duchamp conceptualism, or for the Standard (Sewell's paper) to say that the ICA should shock and challenge its own liberal patrons rather than the standards of a wider cross-section of the British public. It's a rebellion against rebellion, a revolution against revolution, an Oedipal attack on the progressive.
"I thought that the world was not as I'd been brought up to believe," Terry told The Observer, explaining the rift with his parents and teachers. "They said it was getting better and better, but it was actually getting worse and worse. Because I'd never been taught about original sin and its hold on the whole human race, and how man in sin is displeasing to God, in a way I was totally protected from the Christian faith... We live in terrible times... I just think we're in decline really, in every way. The West in general, Britain in particular. Morally, I think we're in decline - look at the crime figures, the divorce rate." And so Terry, in his practice, returns to a Golden Age and justifies it with reference to Golden Sections and Golden Rules and God, the parent you can trust, the parent who isn't a communist or an aesthetic radical, and certainly isn't trendy.
In some ways I'm "on the same page" as Quinlan Terry -- just heading in the opposite direction, and for similarly Oedipal reasons. Terry works in Dedham, an unspoilt English village where my family also lived for a couple of years in the 70s. The Georgian Edinburgh flats I was brought up in would probably be very much to Terry's taste, as perhaps would my school, the neo-classical Edinburgh Academy. But these buildings were the perfect reason for me to fall in love with Tokyo, a city which actually felt like the present and the future rather than the past, and had a dynamism, a reckless modernity sorely lacking in conservative British places like Edinburgh and Dedham, no matter how well-proportioned or God-approved they might be.
At least, though, I recognize where Terry is coming from. I recognize that he's simply responded negatively to the progressivist radicalism and aesthetic Modernism I respond positively to. And perhaps he really has become a Christian and a conservative in a spirit of rebellion. It's just that he's chosen, as I see it, the wrong thing to rebel against: rebellion itself. In his quest for cosmic order, he's released a whole Pandora's Box of tail-chasing Oedipal paradoxes which, ironically, make the world considerably more unstable and chaotic. Back to the lab.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 09:43 am (UTC)completely unrelated
Date: 2008-01-08 10:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 11:26 am (UTC)Given that much of the history of architecture since the renaissance consists of variations on existing forms of classical or gothic architecture, that would lead you to conclude that nothing from then until the advent of modernism could be described as having a distinctive style. That might seem a little unlikely.
- K
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 11:42 am (UTC)Does anyone mix up Victorian Gothic Revival with actual Gothic cathedrals? No, it's a series of references mixed with specific innovations unique to the Victorian period. Terry's stuff, though, brings almost nothing new to the table. There's a turning away from modernity, a disgust with the present. Which makes it all the more alarming that this "rebel" is Prince Charles' favourite architect, or that he remodelled the interior of 10 Downing Street.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:03 pm (UTC)Come on. Terry's project positively screams 1980s. It's just another form of postmodernism (whether he likes that descriptive or not). And I think if you went into his Cambridge building (or even if you didn't) you'd never mistake it for a real, actual neo-classical building from the 18th C. I've been to Poundbury, Prince Charles's brand-new 18th C. village, and I can tell you it doesn't look anything like a real 18th C. village, or only as much as the village in "Prisoner" looks like a real one.
That's not to say I approve of this kind of architecture, but it's dumb to think it doesn't reference the 1980s at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:04 pm (UTC)There's also the problem of extrapolating a political outlook from aesthetics - it might work for Terry but a medievalist like William Morris was also a leading socialist.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:06 pm (UTC)- K
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:27 pm (UTC)Terry's universe is one in which, at a certain point (in some long-gone Golden Age) "they got it right" and we can only keep repeating that cosmic "rightness" forever. Unfortunately, many rock musicians are stuck in the same belief -- nothing can ever top "Pet Sounds" or whatever. It's a tragic belief for the medium involved, because it deprives practitioners, instantly, of any motivation to be inventive or innovative.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:36 pm (UTC)But I'm talking here about paleo-con attitudes as they play out in culture, and how they're often held in a tight yin-yang relationship with a radical progressivism they know very well, and even require. In other words, Terry's cosmic order doesn't come from God and the universe itself, as he claims -- it's a visceral, dialectical reaction against modern life, progressives, his parents, and so on.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:54 pm (UTC)The danger with this view is that you're basically arriving at one of the paradoxes I'm talking about today, because you're saying
The present is the past.
Sure, PoMo did re-introduce some elements of the past. But it didn't make the present style a replica of a past style. It didn't, in other words, try to claim that
We're so retro we're positively avant-garde!
Instead, it made unique juxtapositions of new and old.
If it hadn't done that, it would be tail-chasing, saying things like "What's old is new and what's new is old, but therefore what's new is new, because the old is new again, but what's new is old, because the new is old, and the old is old, no, wait, new..." etc etc.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 01:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 01:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 01:29 pm (UTC)And on that dialectic of conformity and rebellion: if there isn't a single coherent 'world' or thought-world, then the semantics are bound to become unstable. For some, modernism is still too daringly futuristic, while for other it looks outmoded.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:01 pm (UTC)The only thing I will ask is under what criteria are you making the judgment that the Howard building is "not an ugly or bad building"? Are you joining Terry and slipping back into "beauty is objective" mode? Or maybe you're saying, "it's not what the conservative authority of style would call ugly." Which would be kind of silly, since one point you make is that their authority is not valid in the absolute sense that they believe it to be.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:03 pm (UTC)It's both glib and nonsensical to say that to conform is to rebel and to rebel is to conform, or that breaking convention is conventional. That ignores the key question of what -- within PoMo production -- is original and what isn't, what's creative and what isn't. You're throwing the baby out with the bath-water if you say that rebellion is conformity, innovation is renovation, etc.
PoMo is not purely recreation, it's creation using retro elements together with contemporary ones and avant ones. It can be done well or badly, freshly or not. I blog frequently about people I think are doing it well -- recently, for instance, Henrik Vibskov, Mike Meiré, Ettore Sottsass and Seijun Suzuki got detailed and glowing reviews from me. Would you really be willing to go into detail and tell me how Ettore Sottsass was a conventional conformist who didn't innovate any more than (or in fact less than) the designers who make Hallmark cards? Or how Seijun Suzuki's "Tanuki Goten" is no more rebellious than the average Hollywood production? Such a flattening would be the ultimate in nihilistic philistinism.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:18 pm (UTC)I feel about Terry's work the same way I felt about the Charlotte Gainsbourg album put together by pasticheurs of her father's work. I described in Epigone Pop (http://imomus.livejournal.com/208965.html) my reaction: "it sounds, immediately, great... No, wait, it sounds terrible because it sounds great. It sounds like a pastiche..." That's Terry too: his buildings look great because we're conditioned to think (well, I have been) that Georgian buildings are great. And yet they're terrible because of that. We wouldn't have a Gainsbourg to copy if Gainsbourg had just slavishly copied some departed master, and we wouldn't have a Robert Adam if he'd made exact replicas of someone working 200 years before him.
Terry talks a lot about the decline and decadence of the modern age, but his inability to innovate is much more decadent, and much more likely to provoke artistic decline and fall.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:36 pm (UTC)Personally, I find it quite interesting that we're living in this perplexing time where the notion of rebelling becomes a conforming move in itself. You've said the same about rock, haven't you? And where do we go from here? I don't know, but probably neither back to the 18th century nor back to the 1930s.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 03:32 pm (UTC)There is no way you can actually rebel now, because all rebellion is inevitably either ignored or absorbed into the mainstream.
So: Terry (unlike the pseudo-rebels) is at least being honest, he's giving (certain, conservative) people what they want, no high-falutin' strings attached.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 03:56 pm (UTC)It's not a question of whether I tolerate retro pastiche, it's the age we live in. You know, I don't know your music at all, so I had a quick look on youtube and listened to one of your tracks, Frilly Military. Initial reaction: this isn't bad, but it could quite easily be by some kooky Donovan-esque singer-songwriter in 1969...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 04:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 04:56 pm (UTC)But even in "essential" form -- say, just lyric, vocal and guitar -- the song couldn't have been written and recorded in 1969. The opening couplet references Jimmy Osmond's song "Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool", which wasn't released until 1972. The guitar is actually an algorhythmically-stretched sample pattern; it couldn't be played on a real guitar the way you hear it. And the song itself was written for a female Shibuya-kei singer, and really couldn't exist without the whole context of 90s globalization and the particular state of PoMo in that decade.
You might want to separate the "body" of a song (its production, its sound) from its "soul" (its lyrics and chords), just as you might want to separate art and technology, or lyrics from the cultural context in which they were produced. It can't be done. "Timeless" is a lie.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 05:05 pm (UTC)Few of us have any more use for slavish revivalism than we do permanent revolution; on their own, both are unsustainable and ultimately toxic. There needs to be an ebb and flow, an improvised process that takes both periods of growth and dormancy into account.
I think we see very different things when we look at, say, a glass conservatory, or a highwheel bicycle. I don't see antiques or artifacts--I see dramatic, light forms that have a humane application and a human scale. I could care less when they were made--that's beside the point. The point is that these things represent a robust, healthy springboard from which to progress with creating a hopeful future. They feel fresh to me, whereas the brutal late modernism which I grew up with--and for which I still harbor a certain nostalgia and affection--usually feels stale and stultifying. It's alienating and cold, and exudes menace and control.
A horticulturalist would note that many conservatories are also home to laboratories in which new cultivars of plants are hybridized. Also, all terraria and glass houses require proper ventilation, lest the life inside them rot.
I don't object to the conceit behind Sunday's post, but I do not share your tastes in textures.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 05:05 pm (UTC)But if conformity and rebellion were the same thing, both those conclusions would make no sense. How could there be any meaning in either "conformity" or "rebellion" if everyone was either a conformist or a rebel? The only thing to do, in this parallel world where conformity and rebellion are the same thing, would be to stop using -- or even thinking of -- the terms altogether. That's also impossible for us: a binary like "conformist / rebel" can't be unthunk once it done been thunk.