Читать книгу Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек - Страница 8

The general public, as everyone knows, doesn’t like contemporary art. This trivial observation in fact covers two opposing attitudes. Ordinary passers-by who happen to walk through a place where contemporary pieces of painting or sculpture are being exhibited will stop in front of the works on display, if only to make fun of them. Their attitude will swing between ironic amusement and outright sneer; in any case, they will be sensitive to a certain dimension of derision; the very meaninglessness of what is presented to them will be a reassuring guarantee of harmlessness; they will certainly have wasted their time, but in a way that is basically not all that unpleasant.

Placed, this time, amid contemporary architecture, the same passers-by will feel much less like laughing. Under favourable conditions (late at night, or against a background of police sirens), a phenomenon clearly marked by anxiety will be observed, and all their organic secretions will go into overdrive. In each case, the functional unit comprising the organs of vision and the locomotor limbs will experience a significant intensification.

This is what happens when a coach full of tourists, thrown off course by the web of exotic traffic signs, drops off its passengers in the banking district of Segovia, or the business centre of Barcelona. Immersed in their usual world of steel, glass and signposts, visitors immediately rediscover the rapid stride, the functional and oriented gaze that correspond to the environment offered to them. Progressing between pictograms and written signs, they soon reach the cathedral district, the historic heart of the city. Immediately their pace slows; the movement of their eyes becomes somewhat random, almost erratic. A certain dazed amazement can be read on their faces (their jaws drop, a phenomenon typical of Americans). Obviously, they feel they are in the presence of unusual, complex objects that are difficult to decipher. Soon, however, messages appear on the walls; thanks to the tourist office, historical and cultural landmarks are set in context; our travellers can take out their camcorders to record the memory of their travels in a guided cultural tour.

Contemporary architecture is a modest architecture; it manifests its autonomous presence, its presence as architecture, solely through discreet winks – generally these are advertising micro-messages about the techniques behind its own fabrication (for example, it’s customary to ensure very good visibility for lift machinery, as well as for the firm responsible for its design).

Contemporary architecture is a functional architecture; indeed, any aesthetic questions concerning it have long since been eradicated by the formula: ‘What is functional is necessarily beautiful.’ This is a surprising bias, which the spectacle of nature constantly contradicts, as the latter incites us to see beauty as a way of taking revenge on reason. If the forms of nature appeal to the eye, this is often because they are useless, and do not meet any perceptible criterion of efficiency. They reproduce themselves in a rich, luxuriant way, apparently moved by an internal force that can be described as the pure desire to be, the simple desire to reproduce – a force that is not really understandable (just think of the burlesque and somewhat repulsive inventiveness of the animal world), a force that is nonetheless suffocatingly obvious. Admittedly, certain forms of inanimate nature (crystals, clouds, hydrographic networks) seem to obey a criterion of thermodynamic optimality; but these are precisely the most complex, the most ramified. They do not make one think of the functioning of a rational machine, but rather of the chaotic turmoil of a process.

Reaching its own optimum by creating places so functional that they become invisible, contemporary architecture is a transparent architecture. Since it has to allow for rapid movement of people and goods, it tends to reduce space to its purely geometric dimension. As it’s meant to be crossed by an uninterrupted succession of textual, visual and iconic messages, it must ensure maximum readability for them (only a perfectly transparent place is likely to ensure a total conductivity of information). Subject to the harsh law of consensus, the only permanent messages this architecture can allow itself will be confined to objective information. Thus, the content of those huge signs that line motorway routes has been the subject of thorough preliminary studies. Numerous surveys have been carried out in order to avoid offending one or other category of users; social psychologists have been consulted, as well as road safety specialists; all of this just to end up with indications of the kind: ‘Auxerre’, or: ‘The lakes’.

The Gare Montparnasse deploys a transparent and non-mysterious architecture, establishing a necessary and sufficient distance between video screens showing timetable information and electronic reservation terminals, organizing with adequate redundancy the signage of the departure and arrival platforms; this allows Western individuals of average or higher intelligence to achieve their goal of travel by minimizing friction, uncertainty, and wasted time. More generally, all contemporary architecture must be considered as an immense apparatus for the acceleration and rationalization of human movements; its ideal point, in this regard, would be the motorway interchange system that can be observed in the vicinity of Fontainebleau-Melun Sud.

This is also how the architectural ensemble known as ‘La Défense’¹ can be read as a pure productivist arrangement, a device for increasing individual productivity. This paranoid vision may be locally accurate, but it fails to account for the uniformity of the architectural responses offered to cater for the diversity of social needs (hypermarkets, nightclubs, office buildings, cultural and sports centres). On the other hand, we will get a bit closer to the truth if we consider that we live not only in a market economy, but more generally in a market society, that is to say a space of civilization where all human relations, and similarly all human relationships with the world, are mediated through a simple numerical calculation involving attractiveness, novelty and value for money. In this logic, which covers erotic, romantic and professional relationships as well as purchasing behaviour as such, the point is to facilitate the establishment of many rapidly renewed relationships (between consumers and products, between employees and companies, between lovers), and thus to promote a consumerist fluidity based on an ethic of responsibility, transparency and free choice.