ANOTHER VOICE
Aesthetic indifference, not perversity, is the greatest scourge of our time
AUBERON WAUGH
Afurther argument which I have not yet seen deployed against British military intervention in the partition of Bosnia may not be as compelling as the more familiar ones — that it is nothing to do with us, we have nothing to gain or lose by any likely outcome, there is little to choose between the warring factions, we cannot afford to join any and every scrap which breaks out on the face of the earth simply for the plea- sure of asserting our moral superiority. The further argument is aesthetic and may, for that reason, be ruled out of court as flip- pant or even callous in the ghastly atmo- sphere of public debate in our times, but anybody who has seen the unbelievably fatuous and ugly memorial to RAF partici- pation in the Falklands war will know exactly what I mean.
If we were to join the war — for whatev- er reason — on behalf of the Bosnian Mus- lims against the Bosnian Serbs and Croats We would inevitably suffer very heavy casu- alties, comparable, perhaps, to those of Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, even if we were ultimately victorious, as the Prussians were in 1871 — which is by no means certain. The result would be a demand for war memorials in every country churchyard, on every village green, and in front of every town hall to be met by every Arts Council-sponsored Gay Handicapped Street People's Ethnic Workshop in the land. The result will be a rash of ugly mon- uments on what is left of the fair face of Britain. Unlike the sorrow of a grieving nation for its dead sons and daughters, they Would prove a permanent impoverishment of our national life.
Thank God Lord Palumbo is leaving the Arts Council, but every time I heard him Speak of Arts Council plans to celebrate the new century, I felt a chill hand clutch my heart. Could we not give the event a miss this time round, or move over, in the Post-Christian age, to some alternative method of dating the years? Might it not be thought belittling of our Muslim or atheist brothers and sisters to celebrate the second Christian millennium? The truth would aPpear to be that the age of remembrance IS past, and the prevailing aesthetic of our time is not capable of producing work Which will be admired for more than a year or two.
This gloomy observation is prompted by the news that English Heritage is consider- ing listing the block of council flats in Beth- nal Green designed by Sir Denys Lasdun in the late Fifties, even as it faces demolition after being condemned as a dangerous structure. If this hideous block is preserved, along with Erno Goldfinger's dismal Trel- lick Tower in North Kensington, they will at least remind us that the modern move- ment in architecture, inspired by Le Cor- busier, taken up by Spence, Fry, Lubetkin, Goldfinger and Lasdun, was not a tempo- rary aberration where normal aesthetic standards were briefly suspended or even deliberately perverted. One can treat the modern movement in literature as a bizarre cul-de-sac if one likes, because the Arts Council and other award-granting pseudoc- racies are at best peripheral to how we communicate with each other through the spoken or written word. But where the established orthodoxy is concerned, it would appear that the modern movement in architecture might not mark a temporary aberration so much as a permanent retreat from grace or beauty or any desire to please. It would be easy to say this is nonsense, that perfectly decent buildings are going up all over London — the black glass clusters in Hammersmith Road, one or two gen- uinely handsome buildings on the western approach to London. Never mind that glass is almost as disastrous a material as con- crete in our climate, requiring immense expenditure of energy to stop those inside it freezing in winter and roasting in sum- mer. At least these glass buildings are quite easy on the eye. The desire to please may not have been lost entirely, although it is noticeable that apart from these showpiece developments the general standard of design in less important buildings is even worse than it was in the Fifties. Just as Mrs Bottomley can pertly reply that she is not part of the Heritage Department when announcing plans to close down and rede- velop Barts, so no builder or developer nowadays feels he has the faintest responsi- bility to enhance the beauty of the scene. That is why so much post-modernist deco- ration is perfunctory and vile.
But my main point is that the sadistic strain in modern architecture which led to the choice of raw, exposed concrete as the main building material of the late Fifties, Sixties and Seventies survives, and is allowed to flourish in places like English Heritage by virtue of this general retreat from aesthetic responsibility. My assess- ment is that we should consider the aes- thetic-on-'heritage' consequences of every action — even of joining a war in the Balkans.
I do not suppose that the revolutionaries who deliberately turned every received idea — of what was beautiful, what was pleasing, what was true, what made sense — on its head ever intended to promote this general apathy. The opposite was their intention. They hoped to shock us, make us sit up and rethink our own ideas. Unfortunately, they were not witty enough for the task they set themselves, and their followers are much worse.
Sir Denys Lasdun might be counted as one of the pioneers. On the only occasion I met him, at a drinks party, he stood in front of me and said: 'I am a modern architect. Punch me in the face. You are right. I deserve it.' But on other occasions he sings the usual seductive song about how modem architecture is the natural development from all the classical and gothic traditions which have gone before, while a chorus of sycophants will proclaim that his appalling Royal College of Physicians harmonises with the Nash terraces of Regent's Park and his National Theatre is a symphony in concrete.
He is a better man, I suspect, than his supporters. If there is an element of masochism in his continued championing of a flawed and discredited aesthetic, it is an amiable enough characteristic in old age. The people we should keep in our sights are the band of younger sado-mod- ernists who surround the ludicrous figure of Jocelyn Stevens, persuading him to sus- pend all work on the Albert Memorial while he tries to spend £15 million destroy- ing Stonehenge, turning it into a recreation area for the mass market of peanut-eaters and Sun readers. Of course these people want their theme parks and their peanuts, but that is no reason to direct them towards Stonehenge. Our surviving historic monu- ments should be as difficult of access as possible, to ensure that only those who are genuinely interested make the effort to seek them out. Mass tourism will destroy everything it touches, unless it is directed into the recreational gulags it seeks.
Perhaps the destruction of the Albert Memorial will be the sado-modernists' last blow. Thereafter, no doubt, things will con- tinue to collapse, but out of indifference rather than malice.
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