I'd like to start out by saying that I don't have any kind of apology ready for why I'm writing about two books published three decades ago. I'm sure I could come up with one, but the fact is that I got them at a used bookstore for next to nothing, saw that they complemented each other, and because to me Wolfe is one of the most readable journalists out there.
The Tom Wolfe of The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) is an angry Wolfe, but happily angry (perhaps “generously angry” as Orwell once said about another Chronicler of His Times) and this condition of somewhat goodnatured irritation is probably due to the fact that these two books allow Wolfe to engage in what may be his favorite pastime, calling “Bullshit!”
Both Painted and Bauhaus appeared in Harper's before their publication as stand-alone volumes, and acknowledging the journalistic nature of their individual conceptions and the slant of Tom Wolfe's oeuvre as a whole really help in understanding these books' goals and messages, many of which they share. They are neither, as many people incorrectly categorize them, works of “art criticism” or “architectural criticism”, although there are moments, particularly in the later, more strident Bauhaus, when the author's own prejudices show through the scrim of his arguments.
What these two books/articles/essays are at their core are works of social criticism—as is virtually every piece of writing, nonfiction and fiction both, that Wolfe has ever produced. Seeing them as something else will mislead the reader, as happened to a lot of critics at the times of publication. Wolfe isn't trying to make sense of art or architecture per se, which in the context of the 20th century he might very well consider a crazy idea, but instead to understand the social relationships inherent in the “art world” or between architects and their clients.
Up front, it's got to be said that Wolfe has no positive response to the contemporary situation as it stood in the 1970s and 80s, i.e. what should be done about all this stuff that pisses him off so much. This is typical of Wolfe, and he can make a good argument that putting forward any kind of propositions for what art or architecture should be isn't his place. However, this contrasts with his criticisms and ideas regarding fiction writing (of which he was a practitioner) put forward in, among other places, Hooking Up, and also regarding the question of what place literature holds in a world of multimedia.
Enough foreplay (something I also recall Wolfe touching on in Hooking Up): so, what are these two books about? Well, aside from the obvious—Painted concerns art, Bauhaus architecture—they are run-downs of what went on in these sometimes enigmatic and often abstract realms of human endeavor (and commerce) during the 20th century, or as much of that century as Wolfe had seen up until the time he was writing.
Firstly, in Painted, Wolfe hammers and riffs repeatedly on a few observations/accusations:
(a.) The “art world”, as it is so often called, in fact involves a mind-numbingly small number of individuals; Wolfe sets the number at “approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!—restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities."
(b.) During the 20th century but not much before that, theory began to precede creation, and dictates the criteria not only of art criticism but of art's conception as well.
(c.) Since the 1920s, art has come to mean a game played with avowedly antibourgeois rules – and played only by artists, theorists, and the same elite whose culture is supposedly “under attack” within such an antibourgeois paradigm. Epatéz les bourgeois, ¿ne pas?
(a.) This is true, and annoying, given that art in one form or another ends up being consumed by so many of us. It irritates me to think that a small group of people decide what gets made and what doesn't, but then again I think it's got to be our (the “public” as Wolfe calls us) fault, since we don't really seem to do much to encourage art at its source, just consume it in whatever form we are given it. But at least on this point I share the author's irritation.
(b.) Theory, its rise and dominance, especially in the six and a half decades since WW2, is a really interesting thing. The fact is that this is true not only of the art world, where it's probably most thoroughly enshrined, but also in architecture (as we'll see) and literature, where literary criticism and theory is seen by some as the “final frontier” of philosophy, or something like that. It's interesting to live in a time—and maybe not a good thing, at that—when the rules get written before the game is played, as counterintuitive as that may seem. It gives some perspective to recall that J.S. Bach didn't own any books on music theory, yet his work embodies the structures and patterns that are now considered musical orthodoxy—there could be no projects of atonality or serialism without Bach as their bête noire.
(c.) Another curious situation, and I think one of the things that makes Wolfe, the conservative, even reactionary Wolfe most angry: Who do these artist people think they are, these leeches? Well, there I slip into the kind of polarizing attribution that I dislike in Wolfe's writing, central as it is to what passes for argumentation in much of these two books. But I'll discuss this more later.
As for Bauhaus, Wolfe argues variations of the following points:
(a.) Everybody except an elite group of architects, including himself, hates the International Style.
(b.) The client (that is, whoever commissioned the work) has little say in determining any part of the design aside from the functional requirements (e.g. the number of conference rooms or offices needed).
(c.) The International Style rests on a fundamentally antibourgeois ideology, despite the obvious paradox that the bourgeoisie or it's representatives in a capitalist society (to take up John Dewey's definition of government) are the ones paying to have these buildings built.
(d.) That the world of architecture is basically a world of “compounds”—in the U.S., mostly located within large elite institutions of higher learning such as Yale, Harvard, MIT—and that those who do not tow the ideological line are cast out and ostracized as heretics. This argument gives Wolfe the chance to repeatedly use the words “anathema”, which he seems to enjoy.
Now, I'll just take these in turn as well:
(a.) The revulsion which Wolfe alleges is a part of every right-thinking person's reaction to the International Style that has, it's true, come to dominate so much of the 20th and now the 21st century is one of the most important and basic things you have to believe in order to agree with Wolfe's essay. Now, I'm not saying I know much about architecture, but frankly I don't feel any particular revulsion to a lot of the examples he gives in his book (which reproduces a number of small black-and-white photographs of buildings he discusses). Neither do I think that many people in general share his all-out hatred for it. Most people have either grown up or lived long enough in the kind of place that the US is to not see anything strange about the coexistence of traditional forms (many of them anachronistic) with more modern, International Style-inflected architecture. No one seems to notice anything strange about it or mind; this in itself is interesting in terms of American culture, but because of the polarity of Wolfe's argument he can't discuss this: every normal person has to simply hate this shit, no questions asked. As an example of what I mean, take a look at this from the second paragraph of Bauhaus:
Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement parts wholesale distribution warehouse. Not even the school commissioners, who commissioned it and approved the plans, can figure out how it happened. The main thing is to try to avoid having to explain it to the parents.
(b.) I don't really know what to say to this one. This is the least well-documented of Bauhaus' assertions, seemingly based for the most part on things people told Wolfe that other people said. Or not even that: sometimes it's just how Wolfe feels about a building, assuming that the people who paid for it think something similar or even care very much. What Wolfe seems to be overlooking is the possibility that the individuals or companies who paid for these buildings to be built might have hired these architects because they wanted something that was “cutting edge” or “avant-garde” or whatever. Something “with it,” as I think they used to say back in Wolfe's day.
In fact Wolfe's objection to the way (in his account of things) the client-architect relationship appears to work is based on the idea that the client (whether they be an individual or a large group, like the board or directors at a large corporation) has really, firm ideas on what type of building they want, how they want it to look, what “style” they want it to be. I think this is a little doubtful. We're not talking about an 18th century folly on Robert Walpole's estate, we're talking about something that at least in the case of large buildings (company HQ's, civic museums, etc.) is almost an advertisement as much as a functional building.
Take a look at the cover of my mass-market paperback copy of Bauhaus: I think in terms of architecture I'm a fairly middle-of-road kind of American guy. I'm sometimes impressed by a nice big building with lots of glass and interesting angles, but I like a nice solid building with some decorative or traditional touches. But look at that picture again—I'd take the Modernistic “glass box” over that Victorian birthday-cake P.O.S. any day.
(c.) That the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, etc. were ideologically leftist and incorporated fairly radical ideas into their manifestos and into their designs as well, there is no doubt. After all, they wrote manifestos saying so. It's ironic that though their ideas started out as a way to, for example, design better housing for workers, or especially in Corbu's case to redefine the idea of the city in terms of an idealized proletarian utopia that he really never did anything to help arrive except draw pictures of it, these guys all ended up “selling out” to varying degress, either by designing buildings for the bourgeoisie or else (and this is probably a greater dogmatic sin, in retrospect) entering those elite institutions aforementioned to train a generation of American architects who didn't care about ideology except inasmuch as it determined their aesthetic choices when designing something.
(d.) As I mentioned earlier, Wolfe has carries a real dislike for “compounds”, these in-or-you're-not cabals that, in his view, largely determine who is considered a “true” architect and who isn't. In the chapter “Heretics”, Wolfe mentions some people who were ostracized from the compounds, as he tells it usually as the result of building a single building in contravention of prevailing orthodoxy.
What this means, however, is hard to tell, because Wolfe also tells us that these things did virtually nothing to affect these architects commercial prospects, many of who had far, far more prolific careers than the “compound” architects that Wolfe seems to take so seriously while simultaneously taking every opportunity to poke fun at them.
So what, I'm left wondering, does their supposed domination of “the world of architecture” add up to? Not much, apparently, unless you're an architect.
Since this is neither a tract nor an academic essay, but a polemic whose main concern is probably more or less to entertain the literate middle class and upwards of the United States, there are no notes and little rigor, except in “sticking it” to anybody with a facial deformity, unhappy love life or professional jealousy who happens to cross Wolfe's stage at any point. However, it is very clear that for someone who is not in any sense an expert on what he's writing about, Wolfe knows a hell of a lot.
While going to great length to give the impression that everything he's telling us was pieced together from snippets of cocktail conversation in the fashionable drawing rooms of Madison Avenue, it is very clear that this man has read widely and in detail about his subject, including coming to grips with what must be for him some epicly stultifying theorectical works. Then again, at times he seems to eat that stuff up, if only to spit it back out like poison in passages like this, where he discusses Greenberg being one-upped in his antibourgeois pretentions by Leo Steinberg:
Greenberg had always argued that the Old Masters, the classic 3-D realists, "an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking," whereas—to the everlasting glory of Modernism—you couldn't walk into a Modernist painting and least of all into an Abstract Expressionist painting. . . . Just a minute, said Steinberg, but you're talking about a "pre-industrial standard of locomotion," i.e., walking. Perhaps you can't walk through an Abstract Expressionist painting—but you can fly through. Right! You could take a space ship! Just look at a de Kooning or a Rothko or a Franz Kline. Look at that "airy" quality, those "areas floating in floating in space," those cloud formations, all that “illusionistic space” with its evocations of intergalactic travel. Why, you could sail though a de Kooning in a Mercury capsule or a Soyuz any day of the week! All along, the Abstract Expressionists had been dealing with “open atmospheric effects.” It was aerial “double dealing,” and it did “clearly deny and dissemble the picture's material surface”--and nobody had ever blown the whistle on them!
Wolfe is fond, overly so, of the exclamation mark, and makes corresponding overuse of it. He also attempts to summon up a carnivalesque atmosphere through various devices and tactics of the 18th century “storm in a teacup” school. And another thing that is evident in the above paragraph: Wolfe's extremely entertaining and highly suspect use of free indirect style. He puts a lot of words in a lot of people's mouths, and while this may help them and their conflicts to better “come alive” on the page, at the same time it intentionally attempts to mislead the reader into thinking that these words are more or less exactly what a person thought, what they must have said in private conversation or in their diary or when talking to themself in the bathroom. (Yes, I just used “themself”.) This, and the humorous juxtaposition of two discordant registers, is the explanation for Wolfe's always fluid and often comedic use of direct quotation.
As Wolfe himself makes clear, even if he doesn't realize it himself, the art market drove on this vicious cycle, encouraging as it did the conditions where theoretical revolution and artists' submission to the tenets of various schools and -isms were the correct economic decision, if little else. In fact, the three choices seemingly open to artists was, and probably still are (a.) give in, make a living and maybe get rich, (b.) do your own thing as starve, or (c.) get another job, either totally giving up art in disgust or becoming reduced to the status of an “amateur” painter. Talk about a Catch-22 of the soul, huh, Tommy Boy?
Sometimes I wonder how I've ended up reading so much of Wolfe's work, when my sensibilities are and always have been in many ways opposed to his. There is a constellation of reasons for this seemingly incongruous fact, and they include: (a.) his ubiquitous cultural gaze, (b.) his prolific and popular career, which gives him a kind of default relevance, and (c.) his almost unsurpassed, 100 mph style, which though quirky, idiosyncratic and sometimes very irritating is among the best of the best journalists'.
So why does Wolfe write stuff like this? Partly I think he's a performer doing a routine, this particular routine being taking the mickey out of people who behave very self-importantly. Partly, like most performers, he's wanting us to love him, both for what he is—a great guy with words, really laugh-out-loud funny sometimes—as well as for what he's not—in this case, not one of those silly bastards.
He also very clearly identifies with the bourgeois with whom he was raised and educated, and probably as a cultural critic he has to take a slightly condescending, paternalistic attitude towards them in order to perpetuate his own myth of identification (look at that suit: what could be more late-19th century eccentric gentleman than that?)—a myth that many artists and writers abandon for exactly the opposite kind of myth, something he actually discusses is Painted and alludes to in Bauhaus (Gropius, for example).
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