The Poverty of Ornament

In Palermo, Sicily, there is a palace chapel, the Cappella Palatina, that presents a remarkable clamor of stylings: Norman architecture, Byzantine saint mosaics, Islamic muqarnas with distinctly secular figuration. To the modern eye, each motif could be isolated and, alone, be cause for fascination. But their meaning lies in their improbable unity. Having conquered the island and its Muslim population in 1091, the Normans commissioned this cut-and-paste chapel in 1140 to contain the contradictions of their conquest and legitimize their upstart presence in the Mediterranean. The ornamentation, nodding to the great empires of the Byzantium to the north and Fatimids to the south and the local descendants of a prior Abbasid conquest, establishes the political diplomatic function of the structure. Ornament, inseparable from architecture and civic life, has a role to play. It is embedded in social necessity.

The Clamor of Ornament at the Drawing Center in Soho takes an opposing view, arguing for contingency over necessity. Here, ornament is broadly defined by curators Emily King, Margaret-Anne Logan, and Duncan Tomlin as “embellishment, surface or structural, that can be lifted from its context, reworked, reproduced, and redeployed.” Diverse textiles, sheets, and photographs are grouped semithematically throughout the playfully designed exhibition by Studio Frith. This decontextualization might have rewarded the visitor with the delight in the play of forms, but instead has a punishing effect. Oddly placed wall texts demand stoops and squints. The space is overwhelmed rather than organized, and weirdly dark. The curators’ framework compounds the design problems: the attractive ornamentations on display are clumsily subsumed under “power imbalances and exploitation” and “structural violence and manifold trauma.”

It’s very Pinterest-y. Grab-and-go images to be reproduced at will then reworked and redeployed as comment on cultural appropriation. The global scope is commendable, but, in spite of itself, all roads in Clamor lead west. We learn how western forms pilfered the ornaments of the rest of the world, but the material histories of the stolen goods are paid less attention. The uncurious attitude toward the development of these “other” ornaments reproduces the European narcissism it seeks to undermine.

There are many fine examples of paper and textile pattern. The intricate Pakistani kashmir scarf patterns are transfixing, and a Gee’s Bend quilt is a wonderful contemporary instance of ornament set in place by long tradition and, miraculously, still a part of daily life. Perkins Harnly’s 1931 illustration of an ornately decorated boudoir offers a welcome bit of context and cozy charm. The geometric embroidery work on an unattributed, twentieth-century Ghana Boy tunic that borrows shapes from western imports is strong, as are the predictably pleasing William Morris samples.

Most of the basement gallery is curiously dedicated to line drawings of towering comestibles on The Great British Baking Show, which stretch the meaning of “ornamental” to farcical limits. Matt Sharp’s 1968 poster, Blowing in the Mind/Mister Tambourine Man, is an illustration of Bob Dylan, not a detachable embellishment; its inclusion rests on the fact that it borrows elements (Dylan’s head full of patterned circles and nested mandalas) from a 1521 Albrecht Dürer woodcut. A process drawing by David Adjaye for the National Museum of African American History is a rare consideration of an architectural whole but does little to elucidate the ornamental referent, which the sullen wall text tells us is the “geometric patterning from wrought iron grills produced by African Americans in the United States, often in conditions of slavery.” (More glad interpretations see in it the crown of a Yoruban Caryatid, owing to Adjaye’s Ghanaian heritage.) I appreciated Wendy Red Star’s annotations of photographs of indigenous people that reinscribes in red ink the cultural meanings of the ornaments of their dress. But is that not more a lesson on ornament than ornament per se? There’s no use parsing definitions here.

In all the confusion, Clamor’s would-be revolt of the playful falls flat. It invokes washable markers, knee pads, and heavily regulated playgrounds, “very special episodes.” Even postmodern architectural pastiches are too unruly for this totally governed global HR department twenty-first century. All that is sacred has become not only profane but mind-numbingly banal: inoffensive to everyone and attractive to no one, leaving no mark that can’t be erased. When it becomes possible to so easily sever ornament from substrate, we must admit that it has become, in some crucial respect, a thing of the past, no longer embedded in life.

The exhibition’s collapse of all times and places from mercantile Italy to the neoliberal present falsely suggests a stable position of ornament in society even as its forms are destabilized. Quite unlike in centuries prior, nineteenth-century industrialization made clamor and clutter prolific, desirable, and affordable in the form of figurines and cheap print goods. What had been available to the educated few became the style of the uninformed and tasteless many. Doubtlessly the massification of ornate decor contributed to the degradation of its social status. At the same time, the optimization of mass production stripped all superfluous elements from its commodities.

By the mid-twentieth century ubiquitous domestic goods were sleek and to the point. Minimalism presented the total triumph of mass production over handicraft as progress even emancipatory. Today, social practice art—like the work of Turner Prize–winning collective Assemble—valorizes the ossification of free time by turning the small pleasures and discomforts of the everyday into anemic objets d’art. The death of the author was not, as Barthes proposed, the emancipation of the reader, but a phenomenon that had already taken place, living on only in niche eclecticism. The fait accompli becomes a virtue. Under these conditions, reactionary anti-minimalism, expressed on Twitter in comparisons between ugly contemporary buildings and beautiful “trad” architecture, is understandable. The liberatory promise of mass production (less work!) did not come to pass, and against its cold efficiency the inefficiencies of handicraft appear desirable, if in a confused way. “The trad” longs for luscious surface embellishments that give buildings a sense of singular existence, but cannot differentiate medieval from Jugendstil, Bavarian heraldry from Disneyland chintz. (The reference point is, without fail, European.) It’s all about the patina. The fact that something is old is more the source of its appeal than its “beauty.” Trads can only express their dissatisfaction with present forms in impoverished yearnings for the past.

Clamor simply serves this nostalgic function in a different, “progressive” way —it uses the language of liberal culture but does not imagine, let alone enable, much progress. It is also entirely unaligned with contemporary tastes. Walk out onto the Soho streets and you’ll find nothing but austere sans-serif text-only logos for high-fashion brands. Any sense of playful ornamentation is confined to hot dog carts. Our buildings and dwelling spaces are spartan and fungible, populated with flat-pack furniture and maybe some unremarkable poster print.

We are at a stylistic impasse; no form seems to satisfy. We idle here because the types of spaces society requires have not changed. Architecture cannot but conform to the social relations it serves. The possibility of innovating the form of buildings wanes the longer their function remains the same. It can be dull, generic cladding and glass arrangements, the gaudy playfulness of the Portland Building, Gehry crumples, or even neoclassical marble, but it’s all facade at the end of the day. It feels false, incongruous, like an over- or underenthusiastic bad Photoshop job.

Sadly, Clamor tells the truth: ornament, having lost its social and architectural embeddedness, has become a museum piece. All architectural surfaces must be left blank, awaiting projection. If institutional minimalism leaves us cold, ornament at least entertains, briefly, in a procession of disposable images flattened to meaningless frivolity. The pre-modern Cappella Palatina employs a meaningfulness of pattern and image no longer available to us. Neither the clamor of dislocated patterns nor the stony curlicues and marmoreal statuary of the trad offers a meaningful escape from this anemic century.