Gottfried Semper: Between Poetics and Practical Aesthetics Author(s): Mari Hvattum Reviewed work(s): Source: Zeitschrift fr Kunstgeschichte,

64. Bd., H. 4 (2001), pp. 537-546 Published by: Deutscher Kunstverlag GmbH Munchen Berlin Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3657236 . Accessed: 19/01/2012 10:41
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MISZELLEN MARI HVATTUM

GottfriedSemper:Between Poetics and PracticalAesthetics

Reprintedin IanJenkins,Archaeologistsand Aesthetesin the SculptureGalleriesof the BritishMuseum,

1800-1939, London I992, I64

I. The Assyrian Central Saloon at the British Museum, circa I854. British Museum PD

I939-I-I6-I0.

In October I848, the British Museum received a remarkable shipment from Constantinople. Austen Henry Layard, adventurer, archaeologist and diplomat, had started his Middle Eastern excavations in November I845, in fierce competition with the French archaeologist Paul Emile Botta. Less than two months later he unearthed a monument last mentioned in the Old Testament: King Ashurnasirpal II's palace in Calah.' In the
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decade that followed, an extraordinary collection was assembled in London, the arrival of which caused both celebration and unease.2 The Assyri-

I Genesis Io: 11-12 2 See e. g. R. D. Barnett and A. Lorenzini, Assyrian Sculpture in the British Museum, Toronto 1978, 20,

and E. Miller, That Noble Cabinet, A History of the

British Museum. Athens, Ohio I974, 213-220.

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537

Fig.2 TheAsyrianStool,Der Stil.

2.

GottfriedSemper,>The Assyrian Stool<<,

Der Stil, vol. I, 378

an treasure strengthened the status of the British Museum as a seat of ancient art, but it also threatened the >>classical<< principles upon which both the institution itself and its recently inaugurated building were based. The event challenged the view of ancient Greece as the autochthonous >cradle of art<<, indicating that Greek classicism widely regarded a symbol of the dignity and superiority of Western culture - had its roots in the >barbarian<East.3 Layard's collection shook nineteenth-century art history to its foundations, and had a profound effect upon the incredulous audience who witnessed its arrival to Bloomsbury. Among them was a German architect temporarily stranded in London: Gottfried Semper. Semper must have studied the new acquisitions of the British Museum carefully. Years later, in his magnum opus Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten oder praktische Asthetik (1860-1863), the Assyrian collection provided a key example in his innovative theory of the

origins and development of art. A stool had particularly captured Semper's imagination. In an ingenious series of analyses, he traced the iconography of the stool back to its origin in the >>primordial motifs of art<.4 He examined how the stool's stylised joints echo the motif of the seam, and how the mouldings of the legs invoke the motifs of the wreath and the ribbon. For Semper, these textile motifs represented nothing less than the origin of art. They sprang from a universal human desire to imitate the rhythms of nature; the cycles of the sun, the changing of the tide and the seasons. This imitation would first take the form of rituals, for instance the reification of time and movement into dance and musical expression. In time, these rhythmic patterns were slowly translated into the domain of art and craft, into the rhythmic movement of weaving and the symbolic gathering performed by the knot. By representing man's >cosmic conditions< in a comprehensible manner, the primordial motifs of art established a human domain amidst a threatening nature. Such a representation was precisely what Semper located in the Assyrian stool and elaborated in his vivid description of the animal heads flanking its seat, symbolically evoking acts of binding, joining and completing.5 Over time, Semper explained, these motifs had been gradually translated from their origin in textile art, metamorphosing into ceramics, metalwork or masonry, and somewhere along the way expression in the stool.6 finding their >>tectonic<< little excursus on Assyrian furniture Semper's reminds us of why Der Stil, despite its tortuous prose, was considered one of the most important contributions to the theory of art and architecture in the nineteenth century. Through a simple

3 For an account of the debate that ensued, see I. Jenkins, Archaeologists & Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum I800-I939, London
1992, I51-I70.

4 The notion of ?motif<< [Ger. Motiv] is key in Semper's architectural thinking. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as >a distinctive feature or element in a design or composition [...] also, the dominant idea of a work. [...] a leading figure or

short phrase, a subject or a theme.< This definition fits - but does not exhaust - Semper's use of the term. 5 Der Stil in den technischenund tektonischenKiinsten oder praktische Asthetik. Ein Handbuch fir Techniker, Kiinstler und Kunstfreunde,Vol. I, (i860), Mit6 ibid. 38I and 383. ?Tectonic? in this context refers to wooden constructions.
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tenwald I977, 383-387.

538

description of some chair legs, Semper seemed simultaneously to invoke the history of Middle Eastern civilisation, to present a tale of the origin and development of art, and to put forward a theory of symbolic form. This theory was nothing if not radical. Locating the origins of architecture in the ritual acts of binding, joining and weaving, Semper overturned the Neo-classical notion of architectural origins as an actual or imaginary ?primitive hut<.7 Rather than looking for the origin of architecture in architectural form, Semper located it in human action. In one of his late essays, he stated this quite explicitly: ?In a most general way, what is the material and subject matter of all artistic endeavour?< he asked, and answered: 4I believe it is man in all his relations and connections to the world<<.8 The Poetics of Architecture Semper rejected the Neo-classical doctrine of imitation for whom architecture was the imitation of a real or ideal architecturalmodel. Yet, he still considered architecture and art as a kind of imitation. An imitation not of things or forms but of human action, most notably action as it is reified in the ritual. This definition rings familiar. More than two thousand years earlier, Aristotle had proclaimed precisely this kind of imitation as the end and means of the tragedy: >For tragedy is not an imitation of men but of actions and of life<.9Semper's rethinking of the origins of architecture had in fact much in common with Aristotle. Mimesis in the Greek tradition was not a copying of something already there, but a creative interpretation of reality as a whole. It was an act of ordering, primarily associated with the

rhythmic movement of music and dance.'? For Semper, too, art was an ordering activity. His meticulous analysis of the scrolls and mouldings of the Assyrian stool was intended to reveal this: the ritual ordering of reality and its slow reification into the motifs of art, craft and architecture. It is through this process of ordering, Semper told his readers, that man captures the creative law of nature >as it gleams through reality in the rhythmical sequence of space and time movements, is found once more in the wreath, the bead necklace, the scroll, the circular dance and the rhythmic tone that attends it, the beat of an oar, [...]. These are the beginnings out of which music and architecture grew.?< This is precisely the kind of mimesis that characterises the poetic work in the Aristotelian sense. Paul Ricoeur calls it a kind of ?emplotthat ment<; a gathering of reality into a >plot<< to our actions and confers a certain >readability<<
lives.12 It is, to use Ernesto Grassi's words, an act

of >ordering reality into a world<.13Embodied in Semper's musings on some seemingly insignificant chair legs, thus, is a poetics of architecture. A poetics which allows us to understand architecture not as a formal or stylistic phenomenon but as a creative interpretation of human life and action. Practical Aesthetics Semper's Assyrian stool can still be seen in the British Museum, in a bas-relief from the North West Palace of Calah.'4 It is not simply a stool but a throne: that of King Ashurnasirpal himself. The king is seated on his throne, surrounded by priests and officials and involved in a ritual of

7 This point is elaboratedby J. Rykwert in >Gottfried Semperand the Conception of Styles, in: A. M. Vogt, C. Reble and M. Frolich (eds.), GottfriedSemperund die Mitte des I9.Jahrhunderts, Basel 1976. 8 ?On ArchitecturalStyles<, Zurich lecture, 1869, in: H. F. Mallgrave and W. Herrmann (eds.), The Four Elements of Architectureand Other Writings,Cambridge 1989, 269.
9 Poetics, I45oa.
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io See for example L. Golden, Aristotle on Tragicand I Prolegomenon to Der Stil, in: Mallgrave/Herrmann (as note 8), 196.
12

Comic Mimesis, Atlanta, Georgia 1992.

Time and Narrative, vol. I, Chicago 1983, 45-5 I

14 British Museum No I24564-6. For an iconographical Babylon, London I96I, 36f.

I3 Kunst und Mythos, Hamburg 1957, 115.

analysis of the relief, see A. Parrot, Nineveh and

539

?.--w~~-?~" J~-~--" u

,4-

llflWz

til

3. GottfriedSemper,Wreaths,weavingand rhythmic
ornaments, Der Stil, vol. i, I4-20

purification. The relief formed part of a frieze adorning the walls of Ashurnasirpal's throne room; an elaborate symbolic structure presenting the role of the king in a cosmic and political context. Contemplating the eloquent visual narrative of these panels, it becomes clear that the most remarkable feature of Semper's analysis is not so much what it includes as what it leaves out. Patiently examining the Assyrian stool in minute detail, Semper remained silent about the situation of which it was a part. He was obsessed with the
540
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II on his throne.Bas relief,North West Palaceof Calah.BritishMuseum I24564-6 4. King Ashurnasirpal

symbolic meaning of the furniture and tried to identify its religious, social and structural significance. Yet this symbolism remained strangely immanent, attributed to the chair qua formal composition, not to its role in the context of Assyrian kingship. It is as if, for Semper, the poetic imitation performed by art has been >frozen< at a particular point in time, beyond which the work has ossified into a purely formal existence. While the primordial motifs of art - the knot, the bead, the wreath - are indeed mimetic representations of ritual acts, the artwork as a whole has retreated into an autonomous sphere in which it can become the object of formal analyses by the scientist-cum-art historian. There were good reasons, of course, why Semper resorted to such aesthetic immanence. His aim, as he repeatedly told his readers, was not only to identify the origin of art, but also to establish a >method of invention< based on strictly

scientific criteria. In fact, his project was to provide nothing less than a complete science of architecture and art, unravelling the secrets of its conception, its transmission through time, and its future invention. Semper called this science his Practical Aesthetics. It was a project made necessary by what Semper saw as a deep crisis haunting the nineteenth century. Decline in taste as well as morals had made architecture and art a display of shameless imitation and mindless invention. And Semper, as a true nineteenth century man and a contemporary of Comte, firmly believed that the only way to save architecture from its present confusion was to elevate it into a science proper. More specifically he wanted to elevate it into a comparative science, modelled on the great successes of comparative linguistics and anatomy. 5 The comparative method, as Foucault has pointed out, presupposes certain things.'6 It pre-

I5 For a more thorough discussion of the implications of the comparative method for Semper's project, see my article >Gottfried Semper: Towards a Comparati-

ResearchQuarterlyno i, vol. i, I995. I6 Jacques Foucault, The Order of Things, an Archaeology of the Human Sciences,London I992, I25-I65. 541

ve Science of Architecture<<, in: ARQ, Architectural

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5. Galeriesd'Anatomiecompareeeet de paleontologie,Jardindes Plantes,Paris, Edition du MuseumNational d'HistoireNaturelle,Paris supposes that the object of study - whether it be nature, language or architecture - is completely and entirely accessible to the scientist. For example, when the French anatomist Georges Cuvier formulated his comparative anatomy in the hope of establishing natural history as a science proper, he had to presuppose that nature could in its entirety be accounted for by scientific explanation. This was quite a radical assertion. Up until the late eighteenth century, nature had not been considered accessible for such explanation, as long as it always included an idea of a final cause, most notably in the guise of God. In order for to be possible he had Cuvier's >science of life<< to break with an ancient tradition for thinking about nature. He had to reject the idea that nature had a purpose outside itself and presume that it could be understood as an immanent system, fully available to the explanations and predictions of the natural scientist. For the first time, as Foucault reminds us, the meaning of nature resides in nature itself. Cuvier's radical assertion depended on a philosophical shift that had taken place in the late I8th century, a shift expressed for instance in Kant's notion of organic systems. Nature, as it is

17 G. Cuvier, Discourse sur les revolutions de la surface du globe, Paris 1828, in: E. Cassirer, The Problem of 18 ?Outline for a System of Comparative Style-Theory<, London lecture, November II, I853, MS 122, Knowledge, New Haven 1950, I3of.

fol. 17, in: RES,Journal of Anthropologyand Aesthetics 6, Autumn I983. I9 >PracticalArt in Metals and hard Materials;its Tech-

nology, History and Styles<, Introduction, ? 8. Unpublished manuscriptin the Victoria & Albert MuseFUR KUNSTGESCHICHTE ZEITSCHRIFT 64.Band / 200

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encountered in Kant's Critiques, is no longer an emblem of God's creation but a self-sufficient system, available for man's understanding. Semper's Practical Aesthetics was based on remarkably similar presuppositions. In order to establish a >science of invention<, Semper had to assume that the work of art was in its entirety accessible for scientific explanation. This meant that all its aspects, including its highest spiritual and cultural meaning, had to be seen as a property of the work qua work. Cuvier had concluded that for modern comparative anatomy, the overall purpose of the animal is >presentin its bones<<.'7 Such an immanent significance was precisely what Semper attempted to locate in the structural-symbolic >organism< of the Assyrian stool. >Purpose?, as he made clear in his London leccoefficient< of the tures, had become an >>internal work of art.I8 The Transparencyof History: Semper's >Idealand Universal Collection< Nowhere is the curious >immanentisation? that takes place in Semper's Practical Aesthetics better expressed than in his plan for an >Idealand Universal Collection<. This fictitious collection became in Semper's mind a vehicle by which one could understand the principles governing human creativity. It would not be simply another museum but a complete encyclopaedia of human culture: >A Complete and Universal Collection must give, so to speak, the longitudinal Sectionthe transverse Section and the plan of the entire Science of Culture; it must show how things were done in all times; how they are done at present in all the Countries of the Earth; and why they were done in one or the other Way, according to circumstances; it must give the history, the ethnography and the philosophy of Culture.<<19
6. Gottfried Semper: diagrammatic sketch for an ideal museum. From >Practical Art in Metals and hard Materials; its Technology, History and Styles<, unpublished manuscript at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Semper outlined

the organisation

of such a

collection in some detail, the structure of which anticipates the organisation of Der Stil. The collection< would form a great com>>universal matrix in which artefacts were arranged parative to the four primordial techniques of according making and their corresponding >elements<. The section comprising textile art, for instance, would begin with the simplest wickerwork, expand to more refined textile products and culminate in the metamorphosed motif of Bekleidung

um Library. wrote this text in English,and Semper I have left his erraticuse of capitalletters intact. Extracts from the introduction to this manuscript is in MacJournal 4, GlasgowI999,andcompublished mented on in my articlein the same issue: ?The
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Order of History: Gottfried Semper and the Great London Exhibition<.

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in its different guises. The other elements of architecture, similarly, would be traced from their simplest origins to their most sublimated expressions and presented in their development through time and place. In this way, Semper hoped to establish >a good Comparative System of Arrangement<<, >a sort of Index to the History of Culture< that would enable >the Student to see the things in their mutual relations, to observe their mutual affinities and Dissimilarities, and to find out the Laws and Premises, upon which all these mutual positive and negative relations depend.<20 Semper's >universal collection? was to allow human culture in all its aspects to be captured and displayed in the simultaneity of the comparative matrix. By means of this matrix, which would grant art >a clear insight over its whole province<, the laws of artistic making were to be revealed and a Practical Aesthetics formulated.21What is extraordinary about Semper's ambition is not so much its >breadth< as its >depth?. >Universal< collections and >general<< histories were favourite of pursuits nineteenth-century scholarship. Sem>ideal and universal collection<, however, per's was not only supposed to display everything but to explain it, capturing the full meaning and manifold of human creativity in one, universal overview. Its significance was to be guaranteed, not by the particular meaning of the artefacts displayed, but by the methodological arrangement itself, displaying human culture and history as an immanent system whose laws are available for explanation and prediction. Within the laboratory of the comparative matrix the riddles of art and history were to be solved once and for all.

The idea of a comparative display of human culture got its theoretical counterpart in Semper's infamous formula for style. This quasi-mathematical formula presented the relation between formal laws, cultural praxis and architectural representation as a mathematical function, in which art is understood as a product of a functional relation between verifiable coefficients.22 Any work of art, Semper proclaimed, could be seen as >the uniform result or function of several variable values that unite in certain combinations and form the coefficients of a general equation. <23 The formula for style attempted to deand to account for fine all these >coefficients<< their interrelation, in order to determine the >correct< or >>incorrect<< correspondence between an art-work and its conditions of becoming. With this device Semper could, among other things, >prove<the inadequacy of contemporary eclectics, because they had failed to let the change in the >variables?produce a change in the In other words, they had failed to >finalresult.<< let architectural style be the outcome of contemporary social, material and spiritual conditions. Semper had produced a kind of ultimate test for rating the truth-content of architecture, and was indeed approaching the >fundamentalprinciple for invention< that he had sought for so long.24 Semper never attempted to implement his formula for style directly. He saw it as a >crutch<, an idealised expression for the complex reality of art.25Even on an analogical level, however, the formula reveals an ambitious dream: that of capturing the history of art as a system in which all components are fully accessible to the historian. This dream presupposes a transparency of his-

20 >Practical Art in Metals and hard Materials;its Tech21

22

nology, History and Styles<,Introduction, ? 7-I0. >Outline for a System of Comparative Style-Theory", London lecture, November ii, I853, MS 122, fol. 5, in: RES, Journal of Anthropologyand Aesthetics 6, Autumn I983. The formulawas written U=C(x,y,z,t,v,w....),where U stands for the -result-; the work of art, or more correctly,the style that unites the individualworks into a coherent culturalphenomenon. >x,y,z..... are the ma-

For a discussion of the various interpretationsof the formula, see H. F Mallgrave,>Commentaryon Semper's November Lecture-, in: RES, Journal of An-

of art,whileC is themathematical expresproduction sion of the relationship betweenthese coefficients.

terial,spiritualand formal coefficients influencingthe

thropology and Aesthetics 6, Fall 1983, 23-3 I. 23 -The Attributes of Formal Beauty,<in: W. Herrmann

(ed.), Gottfried Semper;In Search of Architecture, CambridgeMassachusettsI984, 24I.

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tory and culture, implying that if one only >understands? society well enough, one can >>calculate? its artistic expression. And vice versa: from a given style one can deduce the cultural conditions that produced it. Art, then, becomes a document of cultural history, ?an account< as the state of civilisation and of Semper wrote >>of the character of bygone generations, like the fossile shells and the coral trees give us an account of the low organisations, which once inhabited
them.< 26

Between Poetics and PracticalAesthetics This brief encounter with Semper's rich and idiosyncratic musings on the meaning of human making should be enough to show the deep tension inherent in his work. Responding to an acute sense of crisis in contemporary art and society alike, Semper's Practical Aesthetics was to save architecture by articulating its immutable laws. Yet he achieved such a >science of invention< only at the cost of abandoning his insights into the poetic capacity of art. From the point of view of his poetics, the work of art is not simply a >result< of certain pre-defined coefficients. Rather, it is the work itself that allows for a partial articulation of the concealed horizon of a human world. This articulation is never complete. The particular historicity of art, in which its poetic potential resides, can never be rendered transparent for a methodical explanation.2 As Karsten Harries puts it: >like a poem, no way of life is given so transparently that it unambiguously declares its meaning. There can be no definitive statement of that meaning; it must be

established, ever anew and precariously, in interpretation. All building, and more self-consciously architecture, participates in this work. Building is a response interpreting a way of life.<<2 This poetic potential was precisely what Semper recognised in his reflections on the origins of architecture as the mimetic interpretation of human action. In his Practical Aesthetics, however, imitation became calculation and praxis adhered to practice: a verifiable entity, no longer the horizon conditioning our understanding but itself fully available for scientific knowledge. While the poetics takes the opacity of the world as its necessary point of departure, the Practical Aesthetics requires a complete transparency of history and culture before the act of making can even begin. This paper began with a desire to understand the curious compression of meaning observed in Semper's analysis of the Assyrian >stool<. The compression occurred, I believe, in response to particular problems involved in modern thinking on art. Semper saw art as an inscrutable source and symbol of meaning, yet at the same time he tried to render this source into a transparent and accessible object for the scientist-historian. Such an operation presupposed that the work of art is fully autonomous, that its meaning depends on itself alone. The ?immanentisation< of meaning, so conspicuous in Semper's analysis, may thus be understood as a response to a problem haunting not only Semper but modern thinking in general. Habermas describes it as a >flattening< of the realm of reflection; a flattening in which ontology is reduced to epistemology and then to a matter of method, supposedly transparent to rea-

26 >OnArchitectural Symbols<,London lecture,au-

24 H. Semper, Gottfried Semper,ein Bild seines Lebens und Wirkens,Berlin I88o, I2. 25 ?Outline for a System of Comparative Style-Theory<, MS 124, fol. 6.

tumn I854, in: RES, Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics9, Spring I985, fol. 2. Further on Semper's vol. 2, 3 and Prospectus to VergleichendeBaulehre,

notion of architecture as a >Lapidargeschichte' of Der Stil vol. I, 212 and 406, society,see for instance
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in: Mallgrave/Herrmann(as note 8), I7of. See also Semper'slate criticism of the potential determinism implied in this view, in ?On Architectural Styles<, Zurich lecture, I869, in: Mallgrave/Herrmann (as note 8), 268. 27 I am relying here on a phenomenological interpretation of poetics, much indebted to Paul Ricoeur and Hans Georg Gadamer. 28 K. Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, CambridgeMassachusettsI996, 149. 545

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son.29 Semper's Practical Aesthetics testified to this flattening. While he started from a concern for the ontological significance of art - the meaning of art for human existence - he ended with a purely epistemological construct in which the question of the meaning of art is overshadowed
29

by a question of how to gain scientifically legitimate knowledge of its production. A reappraisal of Semper can perhaps shed light on both these aspects, alerting us to the depth of his poetics of architecture as well as to the necessary incompletion of his ?science of inventiont.

JiirgenHabermaas,Knowledge and Human Interests. London I972, 3.

Photo credits: I Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, 1800-1939, London I992. - 2, 3 Der Stil, vol. . - 4 British Museum, London. - 5 Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. - 6 Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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