The Problem with the Avant-Garde

Edgard Varèse/Le Corbusier

The concept for the current series of 100 paintings disallows me to paint individuals twice. Iannis Xenakis has with five works a huge presence in the list and I'm finding ways to reflect this presence in the paintings as well. There are two "Polytopes" in the list so I made myself familiar with the concept of polythopes in order to select two appropriate individuals to illustrate the the polytopes by Iannes Xenakis. The first, and highest ranked polytope, is the Polytope de Cluny while the second one is called Polytope de Montreal. The latter is a work for four orchestras spread throughout the audience. Each of Xenakis' Polytopes (meaning many/place) is linked to a site. Each work is a site specific installation and is a so-called gesamtkunstwerk (a term borrowed from German, used by Wagner to mean a total-work of art.) The fist of Xenakis' polytopes (although not named yet that way) was the installation for the Phillips Pavilion at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels. Xenakis worked for the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) at the time. Xenakis is credited with the architecture of the site while Le Corbusier collaborated with the composer Edgard Varèse on the sound and engineering of the work. The title: Poeme électronique. The musical part (by Varèse) was once early on in a top 100 of mine. The three, Varèse, Le Corbusier, and Xenakis, are truly heavyweights of the avant-garde, and the three combined nothing short of an experimental/intellectual supergroup. When I started painting Varèse and Le Corbusier, the weight of importance made itself felt immediately. But then, especially in the right half (Le Corbusier), something started to manifest itself that was different from awe. I started to dislike the character of the face I was painting, in a similar way as a painting last year (that of Jean Rouch, also a super-important white-middle-aged-French-male) the face spoke to me in an authoritarian way. I sorta knew there was some controversy surrounding Le Corbusier but I didn't know what, or how. The last time I wondered about Le Corbusier was in art history class in the 1980s. So I Googled Le Corbusier and read about his (early) flirtations with Fascism and eugenics. (To his credit, later on he did not engage in any of such rhetoric anymore, but he didn't atone either.) When, in the process of painting, his image started to remind me of Rudy Guliani (the disgraced former major of New York), the case was settled: I was painting someone I couldn't feel sympathy for. (Now my critique of Le Corbusier is only in the field of eugenics, because I could not possibly criticize him for his work. To be completely honest with you: the concepts I have been reading about mostly go straight over my head. I'm not smart enough to understand their philosophies in the same way I can't understand quantum mechanics, and the theory of relativity. I still find it interesting though.) There is a lot of antisemitism and nationalism in the avant-garde of pre-WWII. It's a little scary to consider how those, mostly left-wing, cultural pace-setters, subscribe to visions so much at odd with ideals of equality and justice. What the avant-garde needed was diversity.