Thinking about the role of ornaments

Ornament has been present in cultures for centuries, and has worked many times as a powerful tool of cultural self-definition. While in some moments in its history it was extensively used, during other moments, it was feared and avoided –  a feeling known as cosmophobia.

This duality has been present since classical rhetoric took shape. Quintilian (100AD) already viewed ornament as a fundamental component of textual composition, whose function was to create textual eloquence with “sublimity and splendor, the brilliance and the weight” that increases attention and readiness to accept from its audience/readership.

[ Quintilian himself also considered ornamentation a potentially dangerous field where “vice and virtue are never far apart.” The limits between virtuous and vicious ornamentation were set by rules of propriety – “without propriety ornament is impossible.” This propriety was defined in strongly gendered terms: good ornamentation had to be “bold, manly and chaste” and have no “effeminate smoothness and the false hues derived from artificial dyes.” Embellishment applied to the surface of a text could increase its brilliance and turn into a “shiny weapon” but it could also become a “blemish,” a taint that weakens its effectiveness. ]

 The beginning of the 20th century marks perhaps the period in which the rejection to ornament was the greatest in its history. During this time ornaments were seen, at least in theory, as something to be completely avoided, eliminated. There have been diverging explanations to why such shift took place during this particular time in history.

According to Trilling, at this moment ornaments represented, “a way of work and ultimately of life” that had just been overcome, being considered obsolete. After the Industrial Revolution, many thought there was no more room for craft, no room for ornament - ornament was still associated with a mode of production in which the producer had personal involvement with work, took pride in his job, and valued the teaching of techniques that were passed down from generation to generation. A society that made used of ornament was seen as a society that was unable to let go of the past and move forward, to accept the new means of production and all the changes that came with it.

From a Marxist standpoint, the change in the means of production determined a huge shift in the way society was structured. Once society got industrialized and ornaments started being produced in large scale, accessible to a larger share of people, it lost its charm as a differential factor between higher and lower classes. When Trilling approached ogival patterns, in the book Ornament, he noticed that “mechanized weaving and printing had placed ogival aristocratic patterns within the reach of virtually anyone who aspired to some measure of elegance”. The result was that soon “the Arts and Crafts movement began stripping away the accrued lushness of centuries” in order to create some other sort of differential factor. In this context ornament, once associated with grandiosity, that on its turn was associated with money and power, became vulgar. A whole theoretical arsenal had then to be created to provide an explanation to why there was no more room in society for ornament and to propose a new aesthetics that should replace the one that had been in vogue until then.

The new aesthetics is the one of Modernism. To a great extent, the 20^th century was shaped by Modernism, especially in Architecture. Because it was conceived by those who felt the traditional forms of art were outdated in the new economic and social environment of an industrialized world, a strong characteristic of Modernism was irony in relation to traditions, which often led to experiments with form, and the use of techniques that drew attention to new processes and materials. In clear opposition to what existed before, for Modernists, good meant functional, and moderation was considered better than excess. In fact, moderation became almost a sign of cultural maturity, an idea that, in itself, was also recent. Even going beyond the avoidance of excess, simplicity started to be seen as ideal.

The ideal of simplicity encompasses the idea that the essence of a work of art is located in its core, and that it is accessible when everything that is superfluous to its existence is peeled off of it; therefore, an object that is raw, clean and simple would allow the viewer closer to its essence; such object would be considered more reliable than one that is covered in layers of ornaments; and such object was associated with the idea of a natural object.

Ornaments were then associated to everything that did not belong to this “natural state of things” and in opposition to the ideal of simplicity. Because they were then believed to take the viewer away from the essence of the object by adding layers to it that distance the viewer from the essence of it, they were seen not only as complex and elaborated, but also as deceitful, false, insincere, dishonest, artificial (as opposed to natural).

Modernism opposes so strongly to the culture of ornaments that a scenario of strong polarization characterizes much of this period. This division into two sharply contrasting sets of opinions however does not correspond to reality in the sense that ornaments keep being created and found even during Modernism itself. In other words, Modernism itself was never able to get rid of ornament, it ornamented in new, unexpected ways, a subject for further thinking. Although some claim that this polarity can serve specific educational purposes, I believe it to be harmful to us as a whole. Strong polarizations give origins to ideological extremes and, in a society characterized by them, moderate voices lose strength and influence.