Gilt and pleasure
Draw a flower, carefully unfurling its petals. Follow the line of its sinuous stem, adding tendrils to its flow, extending and multiplying their curves, sprouting a bud here and a leaf exactly there. Repeat, with loose wrist and elegant variation, and an ornament is born. Surely making and looking at them an innocent even natural, pleasure?
Hardly. Overthe centuries, theuseof ornament( and its fraternal twin, decoration, usedhere interchangeably) haswaxed andwaned. Perhapsit’sthe association of pleasure with guilt; or of surface beauty with superficiality or even deception, butornament’s street rep has always been uneven. Understandingthe root soft he modern hostility to it, and its survival as an indelible, civilisational instinct— itsDeepDesign— may allow the modern man and woman an escape from this binary and the burden ofhistory.
It took modernity to bring the argument against adornment to its present position, near the centre of high design discourse. The opposition to it acquired a moral tone by the mid 19th century.
In the Great Exhibition of 1851, the world’ s first trade fair, the products on display were flayed by reformist critics, andonecalledout their being“covered with… cornucopia te harvests from the vegetable kingdom .” Manymadeitto Examples of False Principles in Decoration, anexhibitat whatbecametheV&A MuseuminLondon. In1908, architect Adolf Lo os’ enormous ly influential, and vehementessay, revealingly titled“Ornament and Crime”, declaredit“a de generative tendency ”, andtakingcredit, by1930, for“saving Mankind” from ornament by turning it into “a sign of inferiority ”.
There are several strands to the opposition to ornamentation, notalways moral, madebydesign criticism. Theageofmodern design is also the age of manufacture, implying productivity and efficiency by the economics thinking brought about after Adam Smith. Astructural rationalism that emerged in Europe, whichstressed standard is at ion also contributed to opposing ornament .( The French standard is ed typefaces and tried to geo met rise them, for instance). Thisviewmakes decoration superfluous, a sign of excess and waste.
Yettheindustrial revolution did not erase ornament, forornament reminds us that a product is special, asignofagoodlife. Instead, industryenabled them ass replication of ornament, albeitwithsome compromise of quality, giving access to ornamented products to classes that did nothavethem. Today, it’s difficult to conceive the social ordering role that ornament played for mill en ia in so many cultures —the type of ornament signifiedstatus, and regulated the decorations on the houses they built and the clothestheywore, bywhat are called sumptua ry laws. By making ornamentation about money rather than status, industryand capitalism loose ned the class grip on ornament.
In the 20th century, the ideological successors and companions of Loos, like the Bauhaus and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, created the international style. What Loos saw as an impediment to progress and evolution was lifted. An unadorned style became a norm, as standing for a universal notion of good taste. Its moral charter shifted from democratising ornament to seeing it as inauthentic and false.
The international style’ s lasting influence created a world where we use“clean” as high design value, almost adesignessential. Butask: if ornamentationisa civil is at ion al instinct, how didtheunadorned fundamentalism of the international style escape being a bare cup board, bereft of sensuousness? One answeristhat ornamentation, nolonger subject to sumptua ry laws, nevertheless retained the idea of the sumptuous.
A new sumptuousness, facilitated by media, advertisingand architecture, taughtusa universal language of perfection. Welearnedtosee beauty in planes of material: thegrainofwood; the reflectivity of glass, the polishofsteel, thetextures of concrete and plastic. As the architect Le C or busier put it ,“Modern decorative art is not decorated .” Again money, notclass, decides access. Less signifies luxury, with expensive materials, while ornament occupies a spectrum from middle class domesticity to vulgarity, creatinganew, inverted system of class signification.
(A more Leftist stance would reject ornament as conveying a false recreation ofapre-modernideal, but wouldbeinbroad agreement. Perhapsitwould replace concrete with brick, ala Louis Kahn’ s II M Ahmed a bad building and CPKukreja’sJNU.)
The modern pushback against the banishment of ornamentation and decoration does not refute all of modernism. It may integrate decoration into structural features, like a building with superfluous non-structural columns. Its use of decoration might be humorous, ironic or camp. Its agenda might to be to promote multiculturalism, or appropriate other cultures.
Ingraphicdesign, the computer makes possible an elaborate visual style that replaces laborious detail: fine lines and elaborate geometriesabound. Productsenjoynew materials, andtechniques. Apple’ s laptops feature an aluminium chassis carved from a single block of metal, bywaterjets. Precision replaces fine workmanship as the source of embedded value in the adorned object, and positions the whole solid as an ornament, rather than just its surface .3 D printers and computer aided visualisation, atanyscale, permit there ali sat ion of forms that would have been impossible to make or conceive hardly some decadesago.
The best way to navigate these waters is to view modern design as a pastiche; a set of containers in which anything can go. Surface decoration and solid three-dimensional form can live in holy incompatibility. All these open the doors of the mind to decoration. In another way, it may be best to realise that modernity is not a point of arrival or a destination, nor a type of progress, but yet another wrinkle in an unending story.