A4402 Metropolis: Avant-gardes and the City
History/Theory LectureStan Allen
The Spectacle of the city as the most concentrated artifact of industrial production; the fracturing and disintegration of public space and class norms, the emergence of the modern bourgeoisie and a corresponding ideology of consumption all of these establish a complex field of resistance within which the terms of the modernist project are defined: The real place of the improbable is in the city. (Manfredo Tafuri)
The modern city is not only the site of the most radical experiments of modernism but is itself an active subject in the actions of the avant-gardes. The streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes proclaimed the cubo-futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The metropolis is the privileged site of social, artistic and political experimentation; a freedom guaranteed by the multiplicity and irreducibility of the urban field itself. The downfall of reason, Tafuri points out, was felt persistently in one specific area: that of the metropolis. It is not merely coincidence that the subject of the Grosstadt dominates the thought of Simmel, Weber, and Benjamin .... The shock of the metropolis in turn unleashes a series of repercussions: the multiple projects of t he avant-gardes and their various strategies for making sense (or non-sense) out of the new city. The idea of history employed here is also to be multiple, acknowledging in this way that the heterogeneity of avant-garde production and the complexity of the metropolis itself.
Given the difficulty of reducing the idea of the city to an artifact or to a fixed description, it is evident that a complete investigation of the idea of the metropolis would involve film, literature, art, political and social thought, as much as the history and theory of architecture and urbanism. The premise of this course is an explicit criticism of the reductive approach to the city traditionally taken within the disciplines of architecture and urban planning. Rather than attempt to reconstruct a linear history of the modern metropolis, its complex and often contradictory configurations will be examined through a series of cross-sectional snapshots. The sequence will be roughly chronological, but not organized in a story of infl uences and succession. By employing a cross-sectional model (as opposed to a linear narrative model) the interplay of artistic practices is emphasized, allowing a more complex idea of the city to emerge.
Central to this project are the theoretical and critical writings of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Krakauer. But attention will also be given to texts and works by artists of the avant-gardes (Picabia, Breton, Duchamp, Heartfield, Grosz, Schwitters) and films by Vertov, Lang, Godard, and others. An examination of architecture's margins may in turn establish an alternative context for re-reading of the production of some of the canonical figures of modern architecture: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos and Hannes Mayer.
TOPICS
1. New York 1915: The City of Scrambled Alphabets
2. The Metropolis and Mental life: The crisis of the object and the dissolution of the subject from Expressionism to Mies
3. The Formalist Projection: aesthetic theory and cultural politics: Moscow 1917-29
4. Modernism and Mass Ornament: the politics of modernity in Weimar Germany
5. Dream life of the Metropolis: Surrealism and the city
6. Loos and Le Corbusier: the interior and the city
7. Postwar Theories and Projects: the American metropolis and the culture of plenty
8. Art and Politics: from the Armory show to the New York School
9. Skirting the Forest: from surrealism to the situationist international
10. Mapping the Postmodern City: the end of metropolis?
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Take-home midterm and take-home final exam