Form without content?

I visited MoMA yesterday to see the "Inventing Abstraction" exhibition. A lukewarm show with many sins of omission. A guide was giving a gallery talk. What struck me most was the absence of big history in her discussion. The push towards abstraction took place on many fronts, but to view it without considering accelerating industrialization, advances in physics, WWI, the Russian Revolution, is to take it out of context to a great degree. This is akin to the split that Reyner Banham describes in The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment. At some point in the recent past, there was a divorce between architecture and systems of comfort. The latter was, and still is, banned from consideration of a work of architecture. So the larger context of a work of architecture remains ignored. The same holds true for much of art in the academy (MoMA being a bastion of the academy). Despite the deep theory that accompanies much contemporary art, the same depth of investigation into wider culture doesn't seem to apply to modern art, which, it appears, is still viewed as primarily an aesthetic endeavor. So El Lissitzky is viewed as equivalent to Picasso. But Lissitzky was seeking to build a new language, divorced from the anti-Semitic, imperialist history of art.

Is Drawing Dead?

This weekend at Yale there was a symposium that addressed this topic. A pretty renowned cast addressed the topic: Massimo Scolari, Peter Cook, Stanislaus Von Moos, Antoine Picon, and many others.

For me, the first presentation by Cammy Brothers of U.Va probably had the most resonance. She talked about "drawing being relieved of its responsibility in the making of buildings." Also the question of the knowing the rules but willfully breaking them. And finally an issue of temporal simultaneity.

I could not stay for the entire 2 days. There was a lot of talk of the digital, as any discussion of the topic of drawing today is not only obliged to do, but required to do.

But here is my take.

Arthur Danto, in "After the End of Art" indicates that art has ended. What he goes on to describe is that the thrust of art in terms of representation came to its end in various denials of representation. This vein was exhausted. Art has ended. This does not mean that art making has ended, its just that its focus or emphasis has shifted. What has replaced it is philosophy, in Danto's thesis. Art becomes about ideas.

The role of the drawing in architecture has similarly come to an end. With the rise of BIM, parametric modeling, all manner of 3d modeling software, even things like Ecotect, the role of drawing in the representation of a building has all but ended.

What of drawing given this condition? Drawing becomes liberated from its responsibility. Drawing is freed to explore ideas. Drawing can be about drawing. Drawing, at least as it relates to architecture, is freed in much the same way as painting was freed after the invention of the camera. Drawing can focus more purely on the ideas.

To quote Mark Twain: "reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated."