Aesthetic Horror

    Now, just how did everything in our built environment get so damn ugly? Personally, I take this as more than some sort of peevish quibble, or the empty whining of a fussy aesthete. I live in Portland, Oregon, a spot which was intact wilderness fewer than 200 years ago, and I mean seriously, what kind of species takes a pristine old growth forest and just reduces it to a desolate strip of used car dealerships, where thousands of wires dissect the sky, choking traffic trundles by, and vast grease-stained asphaltic parking lots cover up the earth? And furthermore, how the hell can people just accept that kind of extreme ugliness dominating their visual environment? We’re the intelligent species in charge here, and really, we could pretty much make our world look however we wanted it to look. How is it that that we ended up living in this swill of reeling aesthetic horror?



    I’ve spent some time thinking about these questions, and I’d have to say that the answers really require some radical changes when it comes to how we think about our own species. First, a species that would do something like this, not just in a few isolated spots, but all over the world, on a stupendous, cataclysmic scale, can really in no possible way be considered as anything but malignant. Our whole language and societal training make it very difficult for us to entertain the idea of humans as evil. Saving a person in danger, healing someone who is sick, just helping people in general, all these things are just considered good, pretty much cross-culturally. Our language, our cultures, and even our own neurochemistry reward us for doing things that benefit humans. But objectively considering the large-scale effects humans have on their environments, we really ought to be throwing rocks at drowning people, dumping the sick off cliffs, and machine-gunning the attendees of autoshows.
    Second, we need to re-evaluate the much-vaunted artistic capabilities of our species. All of our interest in art, our fashion, our design, our music, are merely epiphenomenal distractions from the fact that humans generally have no aesthetic, and that they will commit the most massive aesthetic atrocities in order to facilitate the convenience with which their material and social lusts may be gratified. Look at how people will freak out about a small stain on their clothes, while basically living in a sea of their own trash. Look at how many people live in apartments with blank walls. Look at the 1970’s. I mean, imagine the unspeakable irony of someone putting on makeup while stuck in traffic. They are all worried about a few inches of their face, while all around them the most hideous, corrupt, aesthetic monstrosities parade on and on- endless fast-food huts, parking lots, chain link fences surrounding electrical sub-stations, plastic trash stuck blowing on the concertina wire, hulks of dead cars, traffic, huge signs, and the towering blank exteriors of malls. How about you take a minute off your face and use it to burn down a pawnshop? People use what aesthetic they have in attempts to set up certain mental states in other people, or to achieve ends of their own. They certainly aren’t inclined to use it in any kind of objective assessment of what their environment looks like. I’m not trying to say people should be more artistic here, I’m just pointing out what seems to be a fairly obvious fact- that most people don’t mind living their lives in a sea of visual shit.


    Likewise, listening to the radio, I wonder why it is that so much of it is horrible, annoying advertising. I mean, we invented radio. We could make it however we liked. It’s not like some alien species is forcing us to listen to all this crap. We’re the ones in charge here. Yet this thing we invented, which we entirely control, is mostly just subjecting us to a torrent of aggravating crap that we can at best just manage to block out. Why do we make our environment so ugly? Why do our inventions end up largely serving to annoy us? I’ll tell you why. Because humans are a dull, weak, blind species that has been easily and extensively parasitized by a cryptobiotic force called technology. Technology itself has no aesthetic, or if it has, it is one of utter horror and grey emptiness. Technology is generally safe here, because most people cannot be made to understand that it has many aspects of a semi-living, controlling force, like a virus.


    The admittedly stunning aesthetic achievements of a few great artists, instead of glorifying our species, serve merely to throw into higher relief the total banality and insufferable dullness that characterizes human aesthetic capacities in general. Yet, while I believe that humans have always been highly destructive of environment and biodiversity, I do not think their aesthetic dullness has always been quite so abysmal as it became in the 20th century. The Stalinist cityscapes of the east, and the galling blankness of the exteriors of megamalls, are unparalleled in the earlier annals of aesthetic atrocity. Although technology and the industrial revolution in general can be held responsible for the horrific degradation of our visual environment, two architects and their movements need to be singled out for especial hatred and opprobrium- Walter Gropius (Bauhaus) and Frank Lloyd Wright.
   




  






























    Both of these movements drew inspiration from the careful and effective use of negative space that characterizes Eastern, and particularly Japanese design. While the original works of these first borrowers indeed often managed to capture and retain this effective use of negative space, something went very wrong once these ideas were unleashed into the mainstream. Instead of carefully using negative space to emphasize and offset positive space, lazy designers began merely to use negative space to fill up their works with a brutal and crushing vacuity. Something crucial was utterly lost in this translation. Imagine an elegant and spare traditional Japanese interior, in which sliding panels of rice paper offset a niche where a vessel containing a few carefully arranged flowering branches is displayed. The sort of dynamic interaction of vacuity and detail visible here is indeed quite evident in Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs, but there it is manifestly alloyed with a sop to functionality. Some cluttering and darkness intrudes. In the vast myriads of Wright’s mass-produced imitators, the effective use of negative space is wholly lost, being replaced by merciless expanses of nothingness, which act as grotesque and parodic mockeries of the Eastern aesthetic that distantly inspired them.
    Flat, squat and dark, stuffed with an incongruous hodgepodge of clutter, the ubiquitous American Ranch House is a fit abode for cockroaches and other low scuttling beings. No elevated and pure thought could possibly occur in that dull brown slot.  Its dark and draftless interior, and its gratuitously multipaned windows, serve to contain and distill the miasma arising from slavish, mindless subjugation to aesthetic nothingness, the foul farts leaking from the dull carcasses of the precancerous bourgeoisie, as they sprawl enthralled before cathode ray tubes, engorged with synthetic extruded industrial food pellets.





    The contrast to the high, airy and dignified Victorian house, where broad windows and high ceilings announce an understanding of human needs for light and space, could not be more complete. One might as well compare a greasy and partially crushed pizza box with the sublime intricacies of a spiraling molluscan shell. The Victorian interior is conducive to dignity and upright reflection, to creativity and distant surmise. Here, where decoration has not been unjustly shunned, and a high staircase implies ascent to superior levels, one can breath freely.



    In the Northwestern quadrant of my city, an entire block, surrounded by a low wall of stone, stands blank, filled up by the nothingness of a seldom-used parking lot. At one corner an informational placard has been affixed, bearing the image of an enormous and achingly beautiful Victorian mansion, and inscribed with the tale of how this building, built on this spot in the 19th century, was torn down in the 1950’s to afford space for a parking lot. This abominable atrocity was carried out at a time when Wright’s modernist influence had first reached its peak.

    Indeed, in the 1950’s, it became popular to demolish awesome old Victorian mansions and replace them with parking lots. Victorian architecture was somehow considered too frilly and decorative. It required replacement with things more vacuous and brutal. This aesthetic movement, which mandated the total removal of decoration, and the spread of expansive blankness, neatly correlates with the rise of fascist and totalitarian social movements in world history. Indeed, we can trace the Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright movements back to Germany and Japan respectively, the two axis powers of the Second World War. Although the Nazis were anti-Bauhaus, it is hardly a coincidence that the two movements arose in the same historical period and region. Both started with a fatuous and contrived interest in the “volk” or people, and later came to exalt depersonalizing, mass technological processes. In fact, the Nazis suppressed a wide range of social movements, many of which had aims or interests quite similar to their own. The fact that they likewise closed the Bauhaus ought not to obscure the conceptual relations between the two movements. The Nazi program of autobahn building, as well as the numerous concrete and steel bunkers they constructed during the war, incorporated modernist elements from the Bauhaus school. While Nazism was safely eradicated, certain elements of it were inherited by the regimes replacing it. Just as the formidable skills of the German engineers behind the V2 were readily absorbed by the American military and space programs, the grim and sleek fascist aesthetic of the Bauhaus was likewise found useful by the corporate powers that came to dominate American visual experience.



    In places where individuals are dominated by and subsumed in masses beyond their control, squat, flattened and brutal structures, shorn of ornament, serve best to contain them.


    The sad and paltry attempts of the postmodern architectural movement to restore ornament are perhaps even worse than the complete vacuity they superseded. Their gross and impoverished details are like the crude, blunted, fetal alcohol syndrome version of the 19th century architecture they mock.




    The general disposition of architectural elements in our environment is largely determined not by any human standards of beauty, but by the functional requirements of our idiotic, foul, obscene, and toxic transport pods. These loathsome greasy carapaces, intended to serve us, actually end up determining for us the appearance of our entire environment, and even the quality of the air we breathe. Two servile structures in particular are worthy of especial opprobrium- the parking lot and the multistory parking garage. It is especially notable that these hideous blots arise not from the actual use of transport pods, but from attempts to deal with the pods when they are not being used.  The parking lot, a vast blank expanse of oil-stained asphalt, ought to serve as the emblem of our species. It represents the most vicious and brutal denial of beauty in our daily visual environment, and the fact that something of this extreme ugliness passes wholly unquestioned ought to arouse profound suspicions of any positive assessment of humanity. The multistory parking garage is certainly one of the most aesthetically repellant, soul-crushing, oppressive and nightmarish spaces we regularly experience. Being in one of these structures is an aesthetic atrocity equivalent to being shat upon. Yet these egregious affronts are accepted with supine complaisance and effectively ignored.
   
    There is another and more curious reason so much ugliness has been allowed to proliferate in our built environments. This is the bad reputation aesthetics has somehow acquired as a criterion for judgment in our societies. The way something looks is considered to be merely a superficial and frivolous attribute, masking its functional qualities, which are supposed to be deeper and more inherent. A few popular sayings, which are so common as to be considered self-evident, support this profoundly erroneous supposition – “Don’t judge a book by its cover. Its what’s inside that counts. Appearances can be deceptive.” While this functionalist, anti-aesthetic attitude may be a benevolent, if wildly unrealistic stance to adopt towards other people, it is uniformly disastrous when applied to our visual environment. Devoting anything more than the most perfunctory attention to our visual environment is readily slandered as shallow and superficial. This was certainly not always the case. In particular, it was most certainly not the case in the 19th century, when long aesthetic commentaries were composed (see Poe’s Philosophy of Furniture).

    Something must likewise be said on the unutterably repellant quasi-colors that have come to befoul our visual world. The problem seems to be most acute in the United States. I can remember being struck, upon first crossing the Atlantic, by the way actual colors were used in Europe for the packaging of items, and the paint of houses and cars. These would be real solid, bright colors, like red, blue, green, orange, white or black. Being in an environment containing such vivid coloration imparted a parallel sense of vividness, intensity and purity to life. In America, by contrast, everything is daubed in these hideous grayish non-colors - mauve, oatmeal, puce. Look at any given car on the street. What color even is that? A nothing color. Houses too are painted these sickly shades, which seem so timorous in their haste to retract into utter and inoffensive nothingness. They recall the bloody diarrhea of a diseased neonate, or the vile oozings of a gangrenous pustule. Look at the colors offered in an American clothing catalog- you are compelled to select from a spectrum of carefully crafted insipidity, an elaborate range of pallid, sickly nothingness. Surveying a crowd of American humans, this blight is pervasive, and one feels that people are vying eagerly with one another to retreat more rapidly and deeply into abject and meaningless anonymity. The French language has a wonderful suffix “-atre” that may be affixed to color words to denote sickliness or “offness” – bleuatre—a sickly blue. Perhaps this linguistic feature has served to inoculate them from the billowing miasma of weak, septic colors. These American colors are not so much subtle as cowardly. Their wearers seem to be eager to avoid even the remotest possibility of expressing anything like a vivid or clear impression in the world. Fortunately, the plague has not spread too far. In Africa, in the Caribbean, in India, China, Tibet, and the Andes, brilliant colors prevail in human costume. The stunning combination of black and red seems to be universally appreciated in pristine zones.
    But while a love of true, bright colors, and an appreciation for architectural detail may be a universal and ancient aesthetic attributes of our species, the readiness with which these are discarded, and the ease with which humans adapt to living in massively ugly surroundings, ought to induce reflection.


    In short, I argue that the extreme ugliness of the visual environments we create is not irrelevant or merely an incidental byproduct of human activity. Instead, this extreme ugliness ought to be of central importance in forming an effective judgment of what sort of thing humans are. This ugliness, once we can awaken to it, offers a glint of truth, clearing away socially and genetically conditioned reactions, hinting that most of what we consider good, (helping others, improving living standards, preventing death and illness, promoting human interests, human rights and human concerns) actually serves only to perpetuate a vile degenerative disease infesting out planet.