The Gehry Tapestries

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And now Gehry is in the news because of the Eisenhower memorial that he designed. It doesn’t look like “just another Gehry”, because there are no shapes, but there are very large tapestries illustrating Eisenhower’s life:

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And the tapestries are made of fine interlaced metal yarns that represent pictures of Eisenhower’s life. However, many people do not see them as tapestries but as iron curtains — the nickname that Churchill invented for the frontier that the Soviet Union once set up in Europe — walls and tanks and machine guns.

Of course, names influence a lot. Somebody also called Gehry’s tapestry a fancy bug screen :-)

The photo was released into public domain by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eisenhower_Memorial_ViewFromIndependenceAvenueLookingSouth.jpg

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The problem is Classicism, the fact that the center of US wealth and many universities and government buildings have been made to look just like the most famous of Greek temples:

Now: is that right? Does it make sense?

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The Parthenon 2500 years ago was a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. Later it became a church and then a mosque and also an ammunition dump — altogether a meaningful CV.
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The drawing by Simonfieldhouse is under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_Stock_Exchange_Simon_Fieldhouse.jpg

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Yet, because this style is old and has been venerated and imitated for generations, it stays present in many people’s hearts and minds. It won’t just go away. It is in fact everywhere. So all artists have to deal with it trying to find new ways or re-invent the old ones:

Some, like architect Leon Krier, attack Gehry’s orientation*** with big words like

– brain dead
– fired by fossil fuel energies
– an atavistic belief in infinite progress
– artistic amnesia
– cataclysmic degradation
– paralyzed tremor and arrested collapse

but even so the text was published as piercingly intelligent. Most modern art critics write like that. That is part of the problem.

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Leon Krier’s text is complete at http://www.eisenhowermemorial.net/krier.html

*** Gehry’s artistic orientation is sometimes classified as modernism or post-modernism, but these labels are not yet figured out. See for example these dictionary definitions from  http://wordweb.info/free/ :

Modernism: “Genre of art and literature that makes a self-conscious break with previous genres”

Post-Modernism: “Genre of art and literature and especially architecture in reaction against principles and practices of established modernism”

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