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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 418-420



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Ornament: A Modern Perspective. By James Trilling. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Pp. xxi+265. $45.

Harvard-trained art historian, former Textile Museum associate curator, and independent scholar James Trilling expands here on many of the highly original themes that appeared in his The Language of Ornament (2001). He offers intriguing new views of the modernist movement in art and architecture, its puritanical hostility to ornament, and its manifold relationships to the history of technology, science, and industry in the phenomenon known as modernization. Trilling is a passionate advocate of ornament, and he makes a fervent plea for its revival, largely on the grounds that it gives pleasure and "makes people happy" (p. 227).

Ranging widely across cultures, time periods, disciplines, and topics, Ornament: A Modern Perspective is a densely layered book of formidable learning, imagination, and complexity. The argument is deceptively simple and difficult to summarize; as Trilling writes of Comte (p. 177), "it is rarely possible to give the bare bones of a utopian vision without making it sound naive."

Ornament for Trilling is a specific, intricate concept. He spends part 1 of his two-part book explicating this concept, by which he means the use of motifs and patterns by skilled artists/craftsmen, "the art we add to art" (p. xiii), in the creation of one-of-a-kind objects laden with cultural meaning and symbol, esteemed as art by collectors, connoisseurs, and knowledgeable art historians.

In part 2 Trilling traces the links between modernism and the rejection of ornament. Though the focus is on the period since the pivotal Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851, his book includes an impressive intellectual history [End Page 418] of the many ways in which ornament was repudiated as idolatry and artifice in numerous societies long before modernism. But after the triumph of mechanization and the ascendancy of efficiency, materialism, and positivism, the leading theorists of modernism thoroughly devalued and assaulted ornament. The most famous instance was Viennese architect and critic Adolf Loos's 1908 essay that seemingly equated ornament with crime.

Modernism's visionaries instead exalted functionalism and simplicity in architecture and design. They saw ornament as wasteful, inefficient, and, after the Industrial Revolution, as the product of dehumanized, debased workers far removed from the ideal of the skilled artisan/craftsman of the prefactory era. Modernism's subsequent long reign among intellectual and cultural elites (despite the thin, pale revolt of the postmodern movement), Trilling argues, has now all but blinded us to ornament, erased it from our collective memory and from art. Early modernist theorists sought to jettison the wealth of inherited patterns and motifs rather than welcoming their incorporation and reworking, as traditional crafts had done. (Ironically, one of Trilling's most original arguments is that modernism in fact had its own ornamental style, employing materials that had pattern and texture and creating art rooted in indeterminacy, "labile, ambiguous, unpredictable" [p. 217].) Trilling's mission is to restore understanding and appreciation of the rich, lost world of artisanal ornament. His book addresses artists, architects, designers, their clients and collectors, art historians—tastemakers and all who care about taste.

Many have long recognized, however, that modernism had only a very limited success in banishing ornament from the world. Even Trilling grudgingly acknowledges this. In fact, as Reyner Banham wrote in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969, p. 94), the high modernism of Loos, Gropius, and Le Corbusier "was no more than an ideal, and far from embracing all things and all men, embraced only the upper strata of the . . . intelligentsia, and that for a limited period only." In the wide world of the built environment and of consumer goods, ornament continued to flourish despite modernism, giving widespread pleasure, comfort, and reassurance in a turbulent century. As Trilling notes, this was of course the ubiquitous, mass-produced version of ornament—in patterned china, fabrics, wallpaper, packaging, and the like—the material culture largely discounted by artistic and art-historical elites. But it was nevertheless ornament, it retained enormous cultural power, and it had...

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