9 Ornament to the Edge of Indecency

Adolf Loos and the Crusade against Ornament

The quarrel over ornament was not born in 1912, whenDer Sturm published Adolf Loos’s celebrated polemic “Ornament and Crime” (“Ornament und Verbrachen”).1 But the title of his fiery attack shows clearly enough how radical the polemic had become by the beginning of the century. It is this radicality that forces us, even today, to look at this essay—a text all too often misread and misunderstood and one whose virulence historians regularly do their utmost to tone down—not so much to take up the debate where Loos left off as to try to formulate the issue of ornament in terms at once retrospective and critical, historical and theoretical.² Written in 1908, when European architecture was just beginning to free itself from the web of art nouveau (and its Viennese variant, the Secession style), Loos’s essay immediately took on the appearance of a manifesto and was soon adopted by the adherents of an incipient modern movement. In a 1913 issue ofLesCahiers d’aujourd’hui, Georges Besson published an abridged translation that, deliberately aiming to shock, cut out the better part of its cultural connotations. It was this translation thatL’Esprit nouveau republished in 1920 and that served as a pretext for Le Corbusier’s appeal for the crusade of whitewash [lait de chaux] and Diogenes, for the great purge, the elimination of the superfluous, that by “The Law of Ripolin” would at last sound what he called “the hour of architecture.”³ Of course, the issue of ornament cannot be dismissed with a sudden about-face, no matter how analytical, and it has in no way been settled by the alleged bankruptcy of the modern movement. The question cannot be filed away under the history of taste alone, any more than under the history of styles. For instyle, Le Corbusier saw only an accidental, superficial, and gratuitousmodality that, like decoration, must disappear.⁴ Nor, moreover, is it an issue that can be limited to the realm of architecture any more than what is called precisely the “applied” arts. To limit the problem to the realm ofart, in the most general sense, is merely to displace it. If we assume that art cannot actually be reduced to ornament—or, according to Hegel, to “the decor of our life”—the question still remains as to whether the value of art can be considered wholly separate from decorative values and whether all art is not, to some degree, necessarily ornamental.

The Rhetorical Argument

In his bookThe Sense of Order, Ernst Gombrich poses the question of ornament in strictly psychological terms and links it (in highly doubtful fashion) to the avant-garde abstraction of the first half of the twentieth century—considering only Malevich and Mondrian—but concludes that abstraction is distinct from ornament so that it may be associated with Le Corbusier’s project of “thinking against a white background.” In dealing with this question, Gombrich nonetheless has the merit of tracing it back to its remote sources, which lie in rhetoric.⁵ From the beginning of what we call Western metaphysics, ornament was in fact theorized in its relationship to speech, if not to thought. We know that Plato was not loath to use, in the form of the dialogue, some of the Sophists’ methods, which he, through Socrates, nonetheless condemns. However, it was Cicero who produced the first doctrine of ornament, which he based on the genre of rhetoric known in Greek asepideictic, “because it is made for demonstration, and for pleasure.”⁶

Cicero’s praise of the simplicity that characterizes the Attic style does not imply that the orator should give up ornamenting his speech with certain of the “flowers” employed by the Sophists. It is less to persuade than to seduce that orators use such devices more often and more overtly; their discourse obeys a differentmodality than one that aims to convince. This modalization is translated into the formal register, into what characterizes an orator’s style: They seek parallelism more than correctness; they are full of digressions; they insert anecdotes and are bolder in the metaphorical use of words, which they employ in “the manner of painters with their various colors”; they juxtapose words of equal length or opposite meanings and often end their sentences with the same sounds.⁷ All of these features, as we know, can easily be transposed into the codes of painting (to which Cicero explicitly refers) as well as those of music—not to speak of architecture, with which the art of oration shares, at least metaphorically, numerous points. Thus, inDe Oratore, Cicero speaks of examining and explaining the nature of “the edifice” built by the orator and the manner of its embellishment⁸ through the creation of “beautiful vestibules” and “light-filled entrances” in order to plead his case.⁹ Even if the literal use of words ought to constitute the ground and foundation of his speech, the orator will not necessarily avoid metaphors, those “species of borrowings thanks to which we take elsewhere what we lack,”¹⁰ any more than he will refuse the help of an architectural mnemonic system that allows him to move, in his imagination, through those spaces of a building into which he has first inserted images that correspond to the different parts of his discourse.¹¹

Cicero did not fail to observe that the simplest style can demand much effort, and that the appearance of negligence requires the greatest art: “There are women who are said to be dressed without affectation and it suits them; similarly, the sober style pleases even without ornament (etiam incompta): in both cases elegance has been sought, but not shown. One will therefore set aside any gaudy finery, such as pearls; one will not even curl one’s hair; as for the artificial red and white of make-up, one will completely reject them; all that will remain are good taste and cleanliness.”¹² The absence of ornament can be, in itself, an ornament, but on the express condition that it is not flaunted; an orator should appear more concerned with ideas than with words. Thus, ornamentation will never be more justified or richer in effects than where it springs, in some way, from utility: “Columns are made to support temples and porticos; however, they are just as majestic as they are useful. The magnificent pinnacle of the Capitol, and of other temples, was created not through a need for elegance but out of necessity itself. In fact, the means had been sought to make water flow on either side of the edifice, and the usefulness of the temple’s pinnacle quite naturally involved majesty, such that even if the Capitol were placed in the heavens, where there can be no rain, it seems that, deprived of its pinnacle, it would not have majesty.”¹³

Truth and Lies in Ornament: The Metaphor of Dress

We know how much weight the question of roofs, flat or sloping, has held and continues to hold in the debate over so-called international architecture (to say nothing of the insistent emphasis that those who today define themselves as postmodern place on entrances, doors, and approaches, thus clearly revealing the rhetorical nature of their words). However, Gombrich is correct when he writes that beauty and utility, on the one hand, and makeup and finery, on the other, are two of the commonplaces borrowed regularly for attacks on ornament, whether on behalf of the campaign led by the proponents of the severe style against the fantasies of baroque and rococo decoration or on behalf of the rationalists’ condemnation of the use of historicizing motifs in metal architecture. The comparison of ornament to makeup, bodily decoration, and even tattooing served as yet another weapon in Loos’s assault at a moment when, as we read in “Ornament and Crime,” the tattoo had become a mark of delinquency (we are reminded of Cesare Lombroso’sPalimsesti del carcere, published just a few years earlier) or a sign of the degeneration of a certain aristocracy.¹⁴

As for the functionalist argument, we can see that it was to have a particular impact in the field of architecture, where the relationship, if not the opposition, between structure and decoration seems to invite theorization without metaphor, in terms of truth and falsity. That is to say, in terms best expressed in Viollet-le-Duc’s question: “Does an architectonic concept include the decoration, or is the decoration summoned by the architect when the composition of the building is finished? In other words, is the decoration an integral part of the building, or is it just a more or less empty dress used to cover the building when the forms have been fixed? The various civilizations that have had an architecture most likely never asked themselves these questions, but proceeded as if they had posed them, which for us comes down to the same thing.”¹⁵

It was from this perspective that Viollet-le-Duc could contrast Greek decoration, which he believed could be reduced to a simple contour of constructive members “with no ambiguity or lie,” to Roman decoration, whose classical ordonnance is no more than a borrowed dress with no relationship to the masonry: “For, if there is an architecture in which the decorative mode is out of keeping with the structure, it is certainly that of the [Roman] Empire.”¹⁶ Greek rationalism is opposed to Roman eclecticism, just as medieval, and especially Gothic, rationalism is opposed to the eclecticism of the Renaissance, which Auguste Choisy saw, at least in the Italian context, as a simple reform of the system of ornament. According to Choisy, Gothic decoration in Italy—in contrast to France, where tradition impeded the widespread adoption of antique forms—was not concerned with structure and was reduced to an adornment added to the body of the edifice: “When antiquity returned to favor in the fourteenth century, architecture remained essentially unchanged: it went Roman, just as it had once been Gothic—only the dress was altered.”¹⁷ Published in 1899, Choisy’sHistoire de l’architecture may be counted among the first expressions of a modernist ideology—but its impact would be felt even among archeologists. One of the greatest connoisseurs of Hindu art wrote, “Nature allows the Hindu architect to erect the vast rooms ofmandapams by laying large granite flagstones on monolithic pillars. The construction methods are thus extremely elementary. Only the details of the sculpture are interesting, and the history of the architecture of Southern India can be reduced to the history of ornamentation.”¹⁸

In this way, the metaphor of clothing constitutes, through to Loos, anothertopos of the rationalist critique. Viollet-le-Duc saw in man, as the most complete of all living organisms,the myth of structure.¹⁹ As he wrote, this is why the Greeks preferred thenude, as much in architecture as in sculpture and painting, which lent their support not to hide but to better reveal the forms; whereas for the Romans, decoration consisted only ofdressing:

Greek architecture may be best compared to a man stripped of his clothes, the external parts of whose body are but the consequences of his organic structure, of his wants, of the framework of his bones and the functions of his muscles. . . . Roman architecture, on the other hand, may be compared to a man clothed: there is the man, and there is the dress; the dress may be good or bad, rich or poor in material, well or ill cut, but it forms no part of the body; if well made and handsome it merits examination; if it restrains the man’s movements, and its shape has neither reason nor grace it is unworthy of notice.²⁰

Yet this metaphor gave rise to contradictory developments as to whether the problems of decoration could be assimilated to those of fashion, where the motifs, all on the surface, are exposed to rapid obsolescence (a crucial theme in the theory of ornament that, as Gombrich has shown, was introduced as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century by Percier and Fontaine²¹), or whether there was a possibility of a “rational [raisonné] clothing” (to use Viollet-le-Duc’s word) that would serve as a “true” envelope for the body, precisely revealing its essential forms and registering its inner needs.²² A dress, then, that is neither a disguise nor a mask: a dress that would primarily have a protective function—though, as Schelling opined, this would not exclude the possibility of a role for the dress in architecture as a metaphor of the body in relation to its construction.

The Avatars of the Mask

The crusade against ornament was, first and foremost, a crusade against masks. This is explicit in Loos, who never ceased to condemn the architecture of trompe l’oeil, or what he called the “Potemkin” city: the fake palaces, all facade and overloaded with showy ornamentation, erected by his colleagues along Vienna’s Ringstraße. Planned like the outer boulevards of Paris along the site of ancient ramparts, this ring was designed to strengthen new Vienna’s consciousness and to seal, in and through decoration, the union of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with bourgeois society while also effectively reducing the old city to a kind of ghetto. This was an architecture, as I have said, of allure, one that Loos considered immoral because it was based on deceit and imitation (“substitution”) and because it was the product of afalse shame: the falsity of materials, the imitation of the signs of a long-distant past, and the shame of the bourgeois who, denied the privileges of aristocratic birth, was forced to concede his “modernity.”²³ But the very notion, the category, of the mask itself is not unambiguous. The mask is not merely a disguise; it can also fulfill a protective function, as with the masks used by certain ethnic groups to dress up the dead, not so much to perpetuate their features as to defend them against the aggressions to which they were exposed in their passage to the beyond (to say nothing of the masks donned by fashionable women, in the classical age, to shelter their faces from the elements and the burning heat of the sun). However, the mask can just as easily ensure the wearer’s anonymity. Whereas (according to Loos) members of primitive hordes once got dressed up, first painting themselves in various colors, to distinguish one another, modern man uses his clothes as a mask to hide his difference, his otherness. Individuality, then, is no longer a function of the clothes, and the clothes no longer the sign of any kind of identity.

Loos believed he could contrast clothes (Kleidung) with clothing (Bekleidung), thecladdings (parements) of marble, wood, or polished metal that give his interior architectures a distinctive period feel. Does this mean that no appearance, no trimming, enters into the cladding and that the cladding (the “pare-ment,” as Jacques Lacan would say) cannot, in turn, function as a sign, however untruthful? “Everything that is smooth is not modern,” Loos’s first biographer noted, not without a critical emphasis.²⁴ The contemporary use of marble cladding as ornament for banks and for those companies whose anonymity lends them all the more prestige is a measure of the alluring power of art, even in its most iconoclastic guise: an art that tends necessarily toward modalization insofar as it is nothing more than a modality of production—and one that cannot help but carry meaning.

The rejection of illusionism, the demand for “truth” (a watchword taken up by various avant-gardes) with which modern art began, is thus partly a matter of taste—but it cannot be reduced to taste, which is why the question of ornament is of interest to theory. “Since iconolatry thrives and spreads as virulently as a cancer, let us be iconoclasts,” wrote Le Corbusier in 1925, as the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs was taking place in Paris.²⁵ That he could also declare that “modern decorative art is not decorated”²⁶ is a paradox that would not have escaped him. But did thisimpasse (a word of which Le Corbusier was not frightened) not constitute the aesthetic phenomenon, given that it derives necessarily from the order of communication? Can these positions not be endlessly reversed, from signified to signifier or, to use Choisy’s terms, from form to content and from content to form? If Loos set so much store by the principle of cladding, this is because, among other things, it allowed for the concealment of the apparatus of cables and pipes required by thosemachines for living that our houses have become, in keeping with Le Corbusier’s express desire. Indeed, for Le Corbusier, tools have their own beauty: “Works of decorative art are tools, beautiful tools.”²⁷ And he was not at all embarrassed to reveal the viscera of the domestic organism—an attitude for which he has been criticized. But even Le Corbusier, who maintained that “art has no business resembling a machine (the error of Constructivism),”²⁸ could not have foreseen the time when, in the heart of Paris, in a quarter he had hoped to raze to the ground and on the very spot where he dreamed of erecting the towers of his Plan Voisin, the machine’s most intimate organs would rise, painted in various colors to distinguish their functions, on the facade of a museum that we still cannot be certain is not “a liar” just the same.²⁹

The Hypocrisy of Luxury

Where ornament does not follow directly from construction and is not limited toemphasizing it (a word whose ambiguity Le Corbusier considered when rereadingThe Decorative Art of Today thirty years after its publication),³⁰ it could be, in the view of the “moderns,” only arbitrary. It was Auguste Perret, as Le Corbusier recalled, who thought “ornament generally conceals a defect in construction”³¹—but decoration can be a liar in any number of ways.

In his day, Bernard of Clairvaux already had attacked the pomp of Cluny, the gilding of Saint-Denis, and, in Georges Duby’s words, “the decoration draped on all sides like the display of a royal treasure.”³² Duby has correctly observed that this was no mere expression of humility, no profession of poverty. After all, the Cistercians spared no expense when it came to building, and their architecture, devoid of all ornament and built with materials of quality, does not fail to seduce us moderns, who have learned—as Loos had hoped—to feel “the beauty of bare stone.” In his language and teachings, Saint Bernard never neglected the flourishes of rhetoric. If he did not see the need to adorn the house of God as well, it was because the reform he had in mind was based essentially on a turn inward, a kind of conversion wherein the word alone (the recourse of all iconoclasm) would be the privileged instrument that procured access both to true wealth and to a truth foreign to the visible world.

By the Victorian era, the denunciation of ornament no longer proceeded from any concern for austerity. But if those who posed as reformers also called for a conversion of minds, their crusade bears witness above all to the disarray in which they were plunged, not so much by the vast accumulation of commodities—which, to echo the beginning ofCapital, heralded the wealth of societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production—as by the industrial progress that led to a general perversion of values. As Marx wrote, the increase in the productivity of labor and the growing mass of material wealth corresponded to a simultaneous decrease in its value.³³ To be sure, Marx did not see the production of luxury articles as a good indication ofmaterial production, in the technological sense. But the fact is that manufacturing, and then industry, quickly flooded the market with “luxury goods” that borrowed their appearance from a particular kind of ornamentation, a decoration that was merely allure: the allure oflabor, the machine reproducing the traces of handicraft by which the “artist” is traditionally recognized. There was the allure, too, of materials, for industry never hesitated to borrow whatever it lacked and to employ, always figuratively, the signs by which wealth is recognized—working the fonts, papers, and fabrics as artisans would the most precious materials. (As Le Corbusier himself wrote: “The industrialist thought to himself: ‘let us smother our junk with decoration: decoration hides all manner of flaws and blemishes.’ Camouflage is sanctified.”³⁴)

If the spirit of reform, as far as ornament is concerned, first showed itself in England, it is because England was exposed to the flood of “junk” very early on. Gombrich has shown that the sort of criticism to which, say, Pugin subjected the “ornamental abominations” coming from the workshops of Birmingham and Sheffield—those shrines of an unwitting bad taste (unlike what would later be the case with kitsch, at least tongue-in-cheek kitsch)—was prompted by the reactionary rejection that fueled Ruskin’s campaign against mechanical production in the name of the values of traditional craft. The devaluation of labor linked to the mass production of more or less inexpensive objects went hand in hand with the depreciation of materials. It matters little whether this was the inevitable consequence of the machine’s elimination at the execution stage of the qualities of manual labor, as Ruskin thought, or whether it was possible to intervene at the design stage, as believed by the Victorian reformers (and the members of the Deutscher Werkbund). The essential thing is that the profusion of decoration with which industry loaded its products was felt, from the beginning, not only to be an assault on good taste but also an attack on truth.

Does this mean that, unlike common sense, good taste cannot be shared—that in the days when ornament, once reserved for fortune’s privileged, was offered to all and sundry, the reformers were working on behalf of an elite who could not quite resign themselves to seeing the signs of their distinction escape? This would be to dismiss the fact that what those reformers said was prompted by a completely opposite determination, because at least some intended not to work against the imperatives of mass production but, on the contrary, to control it and if possible to subject it to the canons of good taste and—why not?—ofrefinement. That is, when they were not striving to reserve the rights of a sector of production they believed should remain the prerogative of the craft industry—as was the case with Ruskin and, curiously, also with Loos. However, it cannot be claimed that Loos’s indictment of ornament was not itself clad (that is indeed the word) in ambiguity. Tack is all the more unbearable because it does not try to hide what it is, but the very idea of cladding implies highlighting the peculiar properties of materials, and this assumes that the materials are of some value and could lend themselves, as in the art deco era, to all kinds of fantasies. Now, this is exactly what Le Corbusier would obstinately refuse to admit: “The final retreat for ostentation is in polished marbles with restless patterns of veining, in paneling of rare woods as exotic to us as hummingbirds, in glass pastes, in lacquers copied fromthe excesses of the Mandarins and thence made the starting point for further elaboration. . . . The almost hysterical rush in recent years towards quasi-orgiastic decoration is no more than the final spasm of an already foreseeable death.”³⁵

“Painting Is the Finest and Most Ancient Ornament of Things”

It is cladding’s properties as asurface that allow it to function as decoration. The surface is a place of illusion, starting with the perfectly smooth surface of the mirror—but also the surface of the painting, because painting itself, if Alberti is to be believed, is “the best and most ancient ornament of things,”³⁶ one by which architecture, sculpture, gold and silver work, and all the arts in general are guided: “Whatever beauty is found [in the arts] can be said to be born of painting.”³⁷ This is why, Alberti argues, architecture took from painting its finest ornament, the column,³⁸ along with architraves, capitals, bases, and pediments—in short, all of the features that make buildings so rich. It is as if, for Alberti, ornament were prompted by the mechanism of borrowing that for Cicero was the province of metaphor. But what meaning does ornament have here? We might observe in passing that commentators have generally avoided tackling this particular passage ofDella Pittura, but no matter the interpretation, it is a passage that reveals the extent to which the issue of ornament was to be displaced, in the nineteenth century, when metal construction (as Le Corbusier noted) seemed to impose a dissociation between structure and decoration. Indeed, such a dissociation was already noted in Alberti’sDe re aedificatoria, and the beauty associated with ornament is regularly treated there as “attached or additional,” fundamentally inessential.³⁹What is ornament, other than “a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty?”⁴⁰ But how does that argument work for the column, which, as Cicero liked to say, owes its majesty to its usefulness?

One of the keys to the passage no doubt must be sought inDe re aedificatoria, in the section stating that the ornaments used by architecture can be parsed into a certain number of parts, each of which has its own profile as a projection: The lintel accordingly has a squared-off projection, like the letter L; the gullet and astragal are placed under it like an S or a C; and so on.⁴¹ If the work of the architect merges into the work of the painter here, this is because the architect borrows from the same paradigm, one thatDella Pittura explicitly likens to the task of writing and which holds that the field of the visible should be seen as equivalent to what can be written down on a flat plane and reduced through projection to a combination of surfaces, each of which will be defined by its outline and be joined together, in the way letters are assembled on a page to form words and sentences.⁴² In other words, the qualities with which classical architecture is generally credited—the consummate art of the molding, the shaping of architectonic members—owes less to the technique of building than to the science of painting, or at least of drafting. The art makes sense only when related to the plane, and the column itself, which is nothing but a wall fragment, can be distinguished from the wall only when it is projected in the form of a pilaster.⁴³

The notion that ornament should be considered in its relationship with the plane is something that dawned on the reformers of the nineteenth century, starting with Pugin, who made it a rule to avoid any effect of depth or relief in decoration.⁴⁴ That rule is something we rarely see observed in baroque decoration, in which painting does the opposite, playing on all of the effects of trompe l’oeil and even resorting to an illusionistic mode by means of sculpture, if not of architecture. In any case, the idea of decoration, whether employed to negate, respect, exalt, or celebrate it, implies—as Matisse said about his work for the Barnes Foundation—“taking possession of the surface,” which can go as far as “correcting architecture.”⁴⁵

The Graft

There is nothing anecdotal about the reference to Matisse here, as he was one of those painters who, while keeping their distance from abstraction, always insisted on the essentially “decorative” nature of painting, in opposition to all those who condemned decoration in the name ofexpression. Matisse even said he could only paint portraits “in a decorative manner.”⁴⁶ For Matisse, decoration and expression were “just the same thing,” and how could it have been otherwise?⁴⁷ He even went as far as to proclaimcomposition as “the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings.”⁴⁸

A painting must stand on its own, in the density of its paint and the disposition of its elements, no matter its relationship with its support. In terms of the painting and the surfaces it procures in order to take shape and visibility, any opposition between structure and decoration has absolutely no relevance, and we could not salvage such an opposition by arguing for art’s decorative origins. Indeed, this hypothesis was key to the resounding success of aesthetic anthropology in the early years of the twentieth century, holding as it did that art as a form was subjugated first to the object, the thing onto which it was grafted. This is one idea among others found in Wilhelm Wundt’sVölkerpsychologie, which led Marcel Mauss to assert the primacy, based on the use of dyes and makeup, of painting over drawing.⁴⁹ One can paint an object or a face, dye it or put makeup on it, but drawing it already presupposes a different kind of transitivity; either the artist drawson the object or body, using it as support, or he represents the object or body by copying it onto some other surface. The genealogy that takes us from ornamental art to what Wundt called “ideal art”—that is, “the open art that creates its own object for itself”⁵⁰—implies a real ontological leap for art to free itself from its borrowed body and invent its own support. However, this does not happen without the work of repetition—from dyeing to painting and from painting to drawing to fabric (and to the human body, in which Mauss saw “the most immediately given object for ornament”⁵¹), as well as from fabric to the wall, from the wall to the panel, and from the panel to the canvas—a repetition that, in each case, is a repetition of the beginning and ready, as such, for every possible twist and turn and return.

It is at this juncture that we must look at the notion of ornament by itself. In confusing ornament and decoration, we overlook the thing that literally forms thebasis of ornament. Even when it is designed to be worn (as, for example, a jewel, jewelry having constituted one of the starting points for “ideal” art, according to Wundt), ornament retains its independence, as well as a kind of density, which draws its means from theline. Gottfried Semper saw the wreathed garland as the archetype of the work of art: the fiber leads to the string and the string to the wreath, if not to the knot, which “is perhaps the oldest technical symbol and . . . the expression for the earliest cosmogonic ideas that sprang up among nations.”⁵² We may regret, as Joseph Rykwert does, that Semper did not develop this allusion to the knot’s symbolism further,⁵³ especially since it overlaps with the question of the origins of writing and the significance of various kinds of “knot writing,” the use of which has continued to the present day.⁵⁴ But it cannot be overlooked that all of the arts are based on the quality, at once scriptural and ornamental, of the wreath, the knot, as we see in the art of the steppes, which has overcome its autonomy and is now sustained exclusively by the interlacing of its twigs.

Replacing Ornament

In the West, the transition to “pure” art, art’s slow conquest of its “ideal body,” was long masked by a proclaimed ideal of the body, and of the body captured in its nakedness, if not in its truth. Certain cultures, such as those of the steppes, went in the opposite direction and accentuated the animal body, with decoration borrowing only secondary elements from the vegetal realm—but this is a specific case, and we cannot, as Wundt tried to, turn it into a general rule.⁵⁵ Certain other non-Western civilizations have worshipped the human body, but only by submitting it to quite different canons, as attested by the great statuary of Africa. Meyer Schapiro noted that the nineteenth century, pervaded by a technicism perhaps even more than by a “realist” ideology, was able to appreciate primitive ornament while at the same time condemning the “monstrous” deformations to which the archaic arts submitted the human body.⁵⁶ The first chapter of Owen Jones’sThe Grammar of Ornament actually opens with the image of the tattooed head of a Maori woman, in which the author saw a demonstration of the principles of the highest ornamental art: “Every line upon the face is the best adapted to develop the natural features. . . . The ornament of a savage tribe, being the result of a natural instinct,is necessarily always true to its purpose.”⁵⁷

Loos would have said the same thing, because he was only too happy to let the modern bourgeois man collect primitive objects while his wife decked herself out in peasant embroidery or exotic castoffs. If he sawmodern ornament as an aberration, an indication of backwardness or degeneracy, then it was for the opposite reason: because there was no longer anything natural about it. Of course, decoration has always been a matter of luxury and, as such, “useless”; to confine ourselves to criteria that are peculiarly ours (luxury, as Marx said, is the only form of beauty the bourgeois knows), we need only look to the decorative accumulation, to the extravagant ends of food destined to rot on the spot, as Bronisław Malinowski observed while in the Trobriand Islands.⁵⁸ But what may be justified within an economy of the gift becomes the unacceptable waste of the labor force in the days ofCapital.

It is symptomatic that the purism, not to say Puritanism, that was characteristic of Loos as well as of Le Corbusier allows an economic explanation, in both the strict sense and the psychoanalytical sense of the term. Loos held ornament to be “superseded” (aufgehoben), as with any technological formation, but equally with sexual drives in the operation of sublimation. The cladding (Bekleidung) that hides the fittings in a bathroom does indeed represent a “sublation” of decoration, the way the work of art appeals to the visual drive, “directing some proportion of [our] libido on to higher artistic aims.”⁵⁹ But in this supersession, this sublation, thisAufhebung in the Hegelian sense of the word, what has been superseded is no less preserved in its place than the drainpipes are in the house—however well concealed—or even as the animal of the pleasure principle (das Lusttier), which was signaled by Freud and so disturbed Le Corbusier, is in man. If the idea of the beautiful has its roots in sexual excitement, diverted by art from its real aims and thus linked to other objects—first and foremost to the body as a whole—then we can understand that a similar superseding, a sublation, once more takes many twists and turns, displacements and regressions: As a matter ofdecency, decoration (from the Latindecore) can be decent to the point of indecency.

10.1

Le Corbusier, La Tourette, Éveux-sur-l’Arbresle, France, 1953–1960. La Tourette as seen from the road approaching the monastery. Photo: Hubert Damisch.