Memories
Such a strange time we live in. The confluence of the disparate arriving on your home screen courtesy of TV. A Holocaust remembrance at Auschwitz; Philip Johnson dies and his history of “flirting” with fascism is mentioned — the same news program, one segment atop the other, soaking into each other.
Johnson lied about his early fascist leanings (an admirer of Hitler, helper to anti-Semite Father Coughlin) and then admitted them, much later, and apologized. That was good enough for Paul Goldberger, architectural talking head, as Goldberger spoke about Johnson on Lehrer tonight. Goldberger drew a comparison with fascist loving Leni Riefenstahl, and the perils of over “aestheticizing” — loving the surface and forgetting the substance. It isn’t only postmodernism that haughtily disdains depth (on principle), so too did aspects of modernism — the fetish of the new vitiating meaning as its enablers sang clueless praise.
Johnson’s Glass House, an emblem of modern architecture, looks to me like a reception area for a corporate retreat. The resultant structure made both the landscape and the house small; the house doesn’t bring the landscape in as Goldberger claims, but denies privacy and, on a metaphysical plane, denies interior life. Johnson flitted from one style to another, hitting stride when he combined classical elements with the soulless concoctions of Mies van der Rohe. Johnson called himself a “whore” stylistically.
Johnson insinuated himself into the power structure in a remarkably cogent way. He made himself indispensable; large of ego and personality, Johnson became a gatekeeper, an arbiter. The power structure loved one who so loved power; power, devoid of meaning, was beauty to Johnson.
Johnson was one of those who sucks the juice out of the new without finding a deeper expressiveness; the rich kid with short attention span and no value system, tearing open his Christmas gifts as he joylessly says, “oh, I got a train, oh I got a baseball mitt, oh…” — you wilt at his predatory, materialist emptiness; newness for its own sake: precious, shiny, grandiose, empty.
≡≡≡≡≡≡
In another confluence, as we watch the brave forces who believe in the future in Iraq, brave American troops and brave Iraqis who believe in democracy, fight those who believe —in the words of Christopher Hitchens — in a “Clockwork Orange theocracy”, the consequences of fascism are expressed in this brilliant op-ed from the NYT:
God did not reveal himself in Auschwitz or in other camps. The survivors came out of hell wounded and humiliated. They were betrayed by the neighbors among whom they and their forefathers had lived. They were betrayed by Western culture, by the Germans, by the language and literature they admired so much. They were betrayed by the great beliefs: liberalism and progress. They were betrayed by their own bodies.
…No wonder many of the survivors went on to Israel. No doubt, they wanted to get to a place where they could leave their victimhood behind and assert responsibility over their fate, a place where they could connect with the culture of their forefathers, to the language of the Bible, and to the land that gave birth to the Bible…
