Pil and Galia Kollectiv text on Hannah Westwood
Posted by
Hannah Westwood on 10.06.08
Hannah Westwood: Mural Painter April 2008
In his pivotal essay on Modern style in architecture and interior design, Adolph Loos constructed a surprisingly simple narrative of cultural linear progression. We, the moderns, have succeeded in overcoming the phenomenological separation of skin and flesh, exterior and essence and moved forward from the ornamental to the functional, from an extension and symbolic representation of the object’s use value to an object contained and defined only by its inherent parameters. Le Corbusier’s house as a machine for living was the epitome of this view of design. One hundred years on, and the triumph of an aesthetics defined through functionality is all but forgotten, architecture once again replacing “less is more” with a renewed fondness for spectacle and fantasy. The primitive, ornamental tattoo that Loos associated with criminal tendencies now subsumes the body it adorns, covering it completely and assuming its core function, like the tattooed consciousness of the protagonist of Memento – the signifier of the psychological continuity of the subject standing for identity, or the tattooed prison map on the body of the hero of “Prison Break” – the sign as a real moment of the liberation of the body from the confines of the controlling architecture of the prison.
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