A TILT AT QUEER ART

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21714, 22 February 1936, Page 26

A TILT AT QUEER ART

AN ARCHITECT'S PLEA FOR SANITY The so-called "art" which insists on a queer, unintelligible symbolism or muddled "self-expression" in painting, sculpture, and architecture is breezily criticised by a leading New Zealand Architect. "The 'Revolutionary' says the world has opened out, social conditions, mental outlook, materials and construction have changed completely," he re-v marks. "Let us cast away the dead shibbolets of the past; let us start with an entirely clean sheet; let us be 'original.' He talks of 'functionaism;' 'machinery,' and 'modernism" as though no other architectural age was functional, as though the chief characteristic of architecture should be the stamp of the devil's advocate—the machine; and as though anyone who differed from him was imbecile and fit only for the lethal chamber. He has the courage, earnestness, and fire of the fanatic, and the latter's superficiality. His works are full of the spirit of adventure, of freshness of outlook; but their chief characteristics are, generally speaking, crudity, an exaggeration of impulse, and an undue expression of material utility so inconsistent even with the material development of the times as to become the negation of expression of human activity.

"We can all call to mind the church that exudes the spirit of a factory, as though approach to the Supreme Being was only possible through the workings of machinery; the public building that might be a power house, the hat factory that, because of its size, looks ridiculoua as a hat and as a hat looks nothing like a factory; and of the 'House of Labour' in Russia designed after the shape of a dynamo. "We are thankful that the worst impressions of this school are confined to the Continent, and that in* England it is more strongly defended in words than mimicked in buildings. Nevertheless, even' in England there has been sufficient mimicking of Continental practice to -warrant calling the extremist to boot, especially when it is found that many of the practices are either costly or impracticable and now being discarded in the land Of their birth, the Continent."