Ornament
Surface impressions
Celina Fox
To introduce the latest lavish compila- tion of interiors, Nineteenth-Century De- coration (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £50), the author Charlotte Gere quotes Goethe, perhaps a shade subversively. In conversa- tion with Eckermann, he condemned the practice of fitting out living-rooms in artifi- cially contrived historical styles: It is a sort of masquerade; which can in the long run do no good in any respect, but must on the contrary have an unfavourable influ- ence on the man adopting it. Such a fashion is in contradiction to the age in which we live, and will only confirm the empty and hollow way of thinking and feeling in which it originates.
I wonder what the current rage for pillaging such volumes for decorative effects reveals about our age. Is today's obsession with lavish interiors a sign of our poverty of spirit? A seemingly inexhausti- ble supply of room settings embellishes the pages of our glossier magazines. Yet for all their surface elaboration, the thin air of make-believe pervades them. Someone (the stylist) has lit/switched on the fire, arranged the flowers and plumped up the cushions, but to no evident purpose, not for anyone. These are rooms as fiction, dedicated to the acting out of historical dramas, designed to bolster a myth of ancestral wealth and leisured comfort as surely as any television saga.
Possibly they also represent a form of reaction against all too prevalent public squalor. The well-upholstered interior is Insulated from the traffic, the pitted pave- ments, the skips and the litter. It is significant that few are depicted in any context greater than themselves — the street or garden outdoors — lest reality comes crashing through the curtains in the form of burglars. An over-canny friend of mine whose London flat featured in a book of Englishmen's rooms resited his little nest for the purposes of the caption in the country, a security precaution that put him on the spot socially if not physically when the local duke requested a visit.
Certainly the treatment of decorative surfaces has taken on a new importance with the demise of modernism. Last week a symposium on the subject of ornament took place at the V & A, organised in association with Apollo magazine. For two days the meaning of ornament, its lan- guage and imagery both now and in the past were discussed. What is the role of ornament in an age lacking a coherent value system? Is it true that the less we are at ease with our collective identity the more we find solace in the surface of things? Is art without ornament possible? Is architecture without ornament possible? Is architecture without ornament art? Is high-tech the only honest response to the age we live in?
Fortunately there was much to reassure those of more catholic sensibilities. One of the arch-opponents of the modern move- ment, David Watkin, maintained that the vocabulary of classicism was richer and Panel of grotesque ornament by Heinrich Aldegrever, 1549, from the V & A more varied than is generally supposed, and proceeded to prove his point at length by tracing the palm motif and its meaning in context from Solomon's Temple to the Prince Regent's kitchens. The flights of erudition displayed by other speakers were equally impressive. We were reminded that Renaissance artists revived the de- corative application of grotesque ornament by filching the designs unearthed at the end of the 15th century in some Roman grot- toes, later identified as the remains of Nero's fabulous Domus Aurea. The ex- traordinary 'art nouveau'-style brocaded damasks produced in France and England around 1700 and now called 'bizarre silks' were shown to have been the desperate efforts of designers to feed a burgeoning consumer society's insatiable appetite for novelty, by distorting oriental precedents to maximum effect. It was revealed that guides to different types of ornament stylistic menageries — already existed in the 18th century, innocent of the rigid dogmatism that was to overlay Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament. The architect John Outram, chiefly famed for his 'Egyptian' pumping-station on the Isle of Dogs, described how he invents his own private iconography while doodling on his drawing-board.
Whether one tolerates this happy eclec- ticism or disapproves with Goethe, it was generally agreed that a knowledge of the language of ornament has almost entirely disappeared. In a laudable effort to edu- cate the public, the V & A proposes in 1991 to open an ornament reference gallery on the second floor of the Cole wing, devoted to the explanation of terms and definitions. It will ask what is ornament as opposed to `an ornament' and have recourse to a photographic tour of Oxford Street to demonstrate common ornamental devices. Arranged thematically rather than chrono- logically, it will cover classical and Renaiss- ance architectural ornament, non- architectural ornament and exotic and historicist ornament, with the help of the more traditional media of plaster-casts and engravings. The hope is that it will teach people to look, and illuminate other ob- jects in the museum for them.
To some extent it represents a return to the V & A's origins in the Museum of Ornamental Manufacturers, opened at Marlborough House in 1852. But if it is going to lead to anything more than a superior version of I-spy, then the level of presentation and explanation in the other galleries will have to improve dramatically for the crucial historical and cultural con- nections to be made, for this grammar of ornament to acquire meaning. It is perhaps symptomatic of the uncertainties of the present age that the opportunity has not been seized to revive the most memorable feature of the Marlborough House Museum: an ante-room in which 'Exam- ples of False Principles in Decoration' were displayed, swiftly dubbed 'The Chamber of
Horrors' and wickedly parodied by Dick- ens ('When I went home I found that I had been living among horrors up to that hour...'). Or maybe the Prince of Wales will be invited to mastermind that slot.
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