In the last week or so, two disparate associations have made me consider just how much European culture (that is, the western Christian version) has invested in commanding the narrative of (their) inherent superiority, and how even today there are some who would seek to reverse or suppress an appreciation and wider representation of cultural diversity. To perpetuate their lineal myopic narrative they return now, as was so during the Enlightenment, to the Mediterranean and Aegean of the classical antiquity.
Firstly, the bizarre Presidential decree, entitled – believe it or not – “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again”, that instructs planners and architects to resist the dictates of a zeitgeist determined to be obsessed with diversity and inclusiveness (and presumably any innovative design tendencies of the 20th century), and instead adhere to a traditional architectural form, that is, one inspired by the classical lines favoured in the founding years of the new republic and perfected in the moral wastelands of the antebellum South.
As The New York Times says in an editorial:
…The proposed executive order reflects a broader inclination in some parts of American society to substitute an imagined past for the complexities and possibilities of the present. It embodies a belief that diversity is a problem and uniformity is a virtue. It is advocating for an un-American approach to architecture.
The Editorial Board Feb. 4, 2020
Beyond the retrograde aesthetic that seems to be espoused, I can’t help but ponder that here we have another insidious attempt by the President and his cohorts to undermine a fragile social cohesion, and that along racial lines. One can well imagine how the power and grace of David Adijaye’s wonderful National Museum of African American History and Culture would send them off on a delusory tangent, whereby the Times’ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman writes this wonderful piece offering a more nuanced definition of “classical” – but then “nuance” is not a category applicable in some thought processes.
And a second association arose out of my reflections upon visiting an exhibition in Frankfurt a few days ago. At the Liebieghaus, and entitled “Gods in Color” , displayed were an impressive range of reproductions of antique sculpture reimagined in the colorful splendour of their time.
I was interested in many different aspects, including the historical narrative and cultural significance of the sculptures, the techniques and materials used in their creation and the contemporary techniques used to expose the polychromy. But, prompted by learning (short video clip below) that there had been evidence enough in the 18th century of antique polychromy, contrary to the essentially monochrome narrative inherited from the Middle Ages, and, further, that the preeminent art historian of the time, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (this a Wiki link, better is this from a 2017 exhibition in Weimar, unfortunately only in German), was erroneously seen as a proponent of the marble-white theory (until 2008!), I have been thinking a lot about the enduring public perception of the “whiteness” of antiquity – be it in sculpture, attire…and buildings.
And here I return to the very Trumpian view of the architectural imperative: the State embellishing (better said, white-washing) history and defining the present in the image of this falsely received and often discredited past.