If you
grew up in the United States, or in any spot on earth where traditional Western
culture has leaned hard against local custom, there's a good chance that the Spartan,
the smooth and white have come to define the aesthetics of sophistication.
Any student
of art history knows this trend reaches back to the classic era, the sort of supposed
heyday of clear-thinking and pure reason. It was supposed to be a time of
perfecting form across the realms of art, architecture and philosophy. Dredged
up centuries later by expeditions and pseudo-archaeologists, Western powers
viewed the smooth white marble forms of antiquity as spectral saints, that
transcended their low heathen roots through a sharpness of structure.
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| Roman Statue of Apollo (photo: Stuart Yeates) |
What they
missed either through choice or ignorance is that the plain, white surfaces of
the temples and statues were rarely plain and seldom white. Rather, the
artisans and civic planners of Mediterranean antiquity favored the
polychromatic, with bold colors and metallic embellishments clinging to columns
and corbels. When it comes to aesthetic
and political history, Western powers have tended to prefer the fantasy to the
facts, with neoclassical architecture displaying gleaming whiteness, untouched
by the 'low' primitive use of bright colors. Systems of government that offer an aura of
self-evident perfection rooted in the classical past, turn out to be far from
it, requiring revision after revision to approach arriving at a society that is
truly democratic.
This
retroactive editing of history allowed architects, governments the opportunity
to privilege their methods and mandates, linking them to some partly imagined
epic past which validated their ideology.
The
attraction to this strict, dogmatic ordering of forms and colorless
geometries has had uncomfortable and unfortunate results throughout history as
it was picked up and remixed to suit by various authoritarian figures in the
West and East. From the formal systems of Fascist Architecture that borrowed
heavily (and falsely) from antiquity, to the over-reaching community policing
that forbids certain paint colors or embellishments, too often the aesthetic
'lessons' of ancient Greece and Rome were thin disguises for restrictive and
fiercely hierarchical standards.
The elite self-selecting powers sought to
dictate aesthetics (among other things) to the masses, lest they be tempted
into bold colors, embellished surfaces, and other base impulses visual or
otherwise. Thankfully the disruptive philosophies of post-modernism, greater
cross-pollination in a truly global world, coupled with the decline or downfall
of certain Western powers has chipped away at these false tropes of design and
restored some of the incredible and intense color that was really there all
along.
