<![CDATA[
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" BACKGROUND="figures/bg01.jpg"><center><img src="figures/title.jpg" width=170 height=196><H2>The Butcher's Shop</H2>
<B>disgust in picturesque aesthetics and architecture
<HR><A href="../../misc/contribs.htm#macarthur" target="right">John Macarthur</A>
<P>I</B></center>
<P>Architecture is yet to overcome some uncertainities
concerning its referential and aesthetic capacities which
were first explored in the picturesque. Is architecture to
please us, or to instruct us? Is it free and parallel to the
world of social forms and production, or, is it the material
form of that social economy? These problems arose in a
double movement at the end of the eighteenth century. First
there was the possibility of architecture 'representing'
some distant thing, China or an ideal civics. Second there
was the picturesque aesthetes' discovery of vernacular
building, architecture's silent twin which has followed ever
since taking roles as: the material operated on; and the
authority for reform; but always something beyond
architecture and re-presented by it. From what resources can
an architect produce a representation of a building which is
produced naturally, automatically, ordinarily? These
questions, although puzzling, have not been unproductive:
Soane and Nash's agricultural buildings; the suburban
cottage-villa; Butterfield's ugliness; Cullen's
Townscape,<sup><A name="b1" href="#1"
target="right">[1]</A></sup> and the Brutalist's cult of the
ordinary, are perhaps all more historically important than
my present topic. But something of the conceptual economy of
the picturesque can be grasped in the idea of cutting an
architecture out of something so insistently material,
instrumental and disgusting as a butcher's shop.
<P><center><B>II</B></center>
<P>In 1830, after publishing three folios of designs for
cottages and ornamental buildings, P.F. Robinson published
<i>Village Architecture</i> which contains a design for a
picturesque butcher's shop <i><A href="figures/01.htm"
target="right">(fig 1)</A></i>. <i>Village Architecture</i>
claims to illustrate suggestions by the contemporary
aesthetician Uvedale Price as to how landlords could have an
economical occasion for exercising their taste when
upgrading the agricultural infrastructure.<sup><A name="b2"
href="#2" target="right">[2]</A></sup> Robinson provides
hints to the improving landlord as to how an agricultural
workforce could be tastefully housed; considering their
needs for a church, a school, an inn, and a butcher's shop.
It is hard to know where to begin in describing Robinson's
boorish over-literalness. Is it his insistence on pleasing
us with an Olde English-ness which would doubtless extend to
the chopping block, the gallows on which the beasts where
hung, the buckets that collect the offal and blood? Or, in a
period of rural starvation and class war, is it the
overdetermination of this proffered ideological instrument?
The butcher's shop is trying to speak. What it wants to say
is: that while outside the estate, scabrous day labourers
starve in mud floored hovels; here loyal estate workers have
sound dry cottages, and even money to buy the meat they have
been producing. Robinson has misunderstood the logic of
mimesis, its economy and its relation to economy. What can a
picturesque butcher's shop be but the crudest of
ideologies?<sup><A name="b3" href="#3"
target="right">[3]</A></sup>
<P>While it has ideological aspects of the kind I describe,
Robinson's butcher's shop is probably intended as a
theoretical object, a kind of thought experiment on the
limit of picturesque taste. In Robinson's literary source,
Uvedale Price's <i>Essays on the Picturesque</i> of 1810, a
view of a butcher's shop plays a crucial role as an example
of Price's theory of disgust.<sup><A name="b4" href="#4"
target="right">[4]</A></sup> Price has a whole chapter on
disgust and a very elaborate, not to say confused,
discussion of the implications of the phenomona for
aesthetic theory. Price also includes a chapter on
architecture, and the two discussions come together in his
dramatised "Dialogue on the Picturesque."<sup><A name="b5"
href="#5" target="right">[5]</A></sup> If one takes the
common view that the picturesque is some sort of
proto-modernist reification of the gaze, then in their
materiality architecture and disgust might seem odd
considerations for Price. Architecture has been much
overlooked in revisionist histories of picturesque which
begin in painting and literature. The picturesque is not a
theory of composition, of the form of visual experience, it
is rather a theory of the form of content: it is not a 'way
of seeing' but a "way-of-seeing X" in which X is
synatagmatic of a system of genre and taste. Price and his
contemporaries saw images as tools which were to be
understood in relation to their regimes of materiality, that
is landscape and architecture. Given that the site of these
material works is the agricultural and scenic improvement of
the countryside, how better could Price concisely state the
materiality of buildings and landscape than to analogise
them as meat?
<P>Price begins his thought experiment by assuming that a
butcher's shop will disgust us in its squeals and smells, in
its visceral mess, in the idea of this mess having a logic
and necessity; but not in its colours and textures as he can
show that these provide a fine occasion for the painter's
skills. With this neat paradox, disgust is of value to
aesthetics. It explicates the differentiated but paired
projects of judging nature and art. As a concept which
opposes taste, disgust can help explain and distinguish it.
But, this differentiation of art and nature does not suffice
to end the paradox of an aesthetic disgust. For the more the
concept of disgust is of value to us in discussing taste,
the more we need to explain phenomenal disgust; actual
nausea. Disgust at art is the opposite of disgust at nature.
Bad art disgusts us conceptually precisely because we are
being asked to judge something which does not necessitate
the judgement of taste, but rather precludes it. But if we
remember those occasions when we have had to vomit we cannot
but wonder if phenomenal disgust is not the same kind of
necessity with which beauty determines the correct judgment
of taste.
<P>These first splits, between good taste and disgust; and
between an 'animal' disgust and a conceptual disgust at bad
taste, is only the beginning of Price's crazy morphology.
This is somewhat unexpected if one follows Kant and Derrida
who think that disgust has its significance in its absolute
singularity and alterity: the impossibility of its
signifying anything else.<sup><A name="b6" href="#6"
target="right">[6]</A></sup> Jacques Derrida, in his essay
"Economimesis," argues that disgust's guarantee of the
integrity of aesthetic judgement is in the radical
singularity of its outside: the absolute alterity of bodily
disgust, the impossibility of any vicariousness of vomit,
that is any economy of disgust.<sup><A name="b7" href="#7"
target="right">[7]</A></sup> Disgust is actually the answer
to the question which Derrida asks about Kant, the question
of 'economimesis,' that is: the economy of imitation and how
it can be distinguished from economy in general. Derrida's
purpose is not to demonstrate a systematic accommodation of
a mimetic system to a political system but rather to show on
a most general level that there can be no opposition between
them. Economy and imitation are the same, or rather they
explicate the same hierarchy. Politics and aesthetics have
often been thought to be masks one for another. The
picturesque is a celebrated example as it has been well
established that it functions to ideologize the
capitalization of agriculture in Britain. What Derrida sets
out to show in "Economimesis" is that there is no distortion
here, no powers abuse aesthetics in this role. The autonomy
of aesthetics actually lies in its ability to calculate its
'economimesis.' Derrida insists that Kant is dependent on
the radical singularity of disgust, its unnamability.
However, Derrida seems to contradict himself by saying that
disgust is "a parergon of the Third Critique." By this he
means that it frames and ornaments it, supplementing
aesthetic's inability to rigorously name the limit to its
economy, and he refers to his other work on ornament in
Kant. Price's work on disgust as an ornamental relation
suggests another logic, a logic of doubling where disgust
functions across the bounds of taste in a tactical and
localised calculation of its interior and exterior. And this
would better serve the consistency of Derrida's argument in
the essays "Economimesis" and "Parergon."<sup><A name="b8"
href="#8" target="right">[8]</A></sup>
<P>Price's proliferation of disgust begins in his aim to
split beauty. Most writers and practioners of the
picturesque thought of the picture-ing implied as a mode of
analysing the beautiful.<sup><A name="b9" href="#9"
target="right">[9]</A></sup> Price, however, believed that
picturesqueness was an empirically existing aspect of
objects in the world. Whereas his contemporaries would
approve something as beautiful on account of its
picturesqueness, Price insisted that they ought distinguish
the picturesque from the beautiful. The representation of
unpleasant things, death, cataclysm and tragedy had long
been claimed as explicating the representational contract.
But the art produced surpasses beauty into the sublime.
Hamlet's tragedy, and Shakespeare's telling of it, are not
beautiful but sublime. The play does not give us pleasure
but a moment of exceeding our self, only one judgement is
possible as the sublime places us indubitably before the
facts of our mortality and our hopes for transcendence. But
Price points out that there are many things which disgust in
life and which are commonly enjoyed in representation
without the slightest teleological dimension. Rotting and
precarious cottages, boorish peasants politicking in
ale-houses, mendicant cottage children, all of these would,
if met in life, give us feelings of revulsion, sorrow, fear
and nausea; yet they make very pleasing pictures. These
pictorial imitations ought properly to be called picturesque
to avoid any suggestion that one found beauty in dankness,
poverty and disease.
<P>Price now has two terms of aesthetic approbation, and
although he has used the disgust argument once to show the
necessity of this split, he is obliged to do it again to
show the difference between picturesqueness and beauty. For
although Price's aesthetics are pluralistic his project is
actually a theory of the coherence of taste. Society must be
able to agree and police a single standard of propriety in
judgment. Therefore Price is worried about how to explain
the failure of artworks and bad taste. A failed
picturesqueness cannot lie in too much beauty. Price decides
to introduce two terms of disapprobation: deformity and an
ugliness qualified as insipidity. Ugliness and deformity
have the same visual causes as beauty and the picturesque.
Were we merely sensual and rational beings, we would group
the insipid with the beautiful, separately from the
deformed and the picturesque. It is the faculty of judgement
which allows us to approve both the beautiful and the
picturesque, and to cast out the insipid and deformed. The
difference between these two others will better explain the
difference between picturesqueness and beauty. The
occasions of one's liking the sweet or the sour, can be
understood in a refusal of the sickly or the acrid.
<P>Price arrays these distinctions in a linear manner in the
story of a woman's face. Price imagines a fine featured
picturesque woman, her eyes, eyebrows, hair, and complexion,
are more striking and showy than delicate."<sup><A
name="b10" href="#10" target="right">[10]</A></sup> Were we
now to imagine a lessening of these features, finer
graduations of skin tones, less eyebrows, and so on, we
would have a more finished delicacy which we could call
beautiful. But were we to continue the process until the
skin lost colour, the eyebrows became transparent; the face
would pass through the angelic and become insipid. If, on
the other hand, we took the fine featured woman and gave her
a dusky complexion, thickened her eyebrows, drew in moles
and an arch cast to her gaze; then we would have taken off
from beauty what we had given to picturesqueness. Thus we
can imagine a taste for wild gipsy women as well as our
angelic wives and daughters, but taste tells us not to go
further and take pleasure in preposterous eyebrows, squints
and smallpox scars.<sup><A name="b11" href="#11"
target="right">[11]</A></sup> What truly disgusts, says
Price, what is beyond the territory of art's appropriating
powers, is the combination of the insipid and deformed.
Imagine, says Price, a man with a face like an oyster,
covered in wens and excrescences.
<P>Let me rewrite Price's proliferating terminology with
this diagram <i><A href="figures/02.htm" target="right">(fig
2)</A></i>. The figure shows the array of the four main
terms in a linear sequence described by a range of what
Price calls 'visual stimulus' from 'too little' to 'too
much.' The standard of taste would span across beauty and
picturesqueness and out to a knowledge of what is ugly and
what is deformed without allowing a taste for these. Disgust
is the combination of the extremities. Further complications
need to be modelled. It is apparent that the range of
stimulus is in fact overlapping ranges of the characters of
picturesqueness and beauty. The weakened character of
beauty, what Price calls ugliness, he also says is informe,
unformedness. The excess of the character of the picturesque
is an excess of ornamental form. What is unformed does not
lack form per se, indeed the fact that it has form is what
is disgusting about it, but it is a form without figure, a
non-signifying form, specifically a form which does not know
what ornaments are appropriate. Deformity is the obverse,
the supplement which no longer knows the propriety of
attachment, like preposterous eyebrows and warts.<sup><A
name="b12" href="#12" target="right">[12]</A></sup>
<P>Price goes on to imagine further allegiances; picturesque
ugliness and deformed beauty, which takes the count up to
five terms for disgust. Whereas ugliness and deformity are
merely indifferently unpleasing and material for art, and
while their combination is completely beyond the pale, Price
is unsure what to make of lightning-blasted trees and
ornamented cottage hovels. These paradigmatic picturesque
objects do not at all fit his theory. Dosing the unformed
cottage with the picturesqueness of exaggerated chimneys and
rustic tree trunk posts ought logically to bring it back up
to beauty. The lightning strike ought either to make the
beautiful oak picturesque or deform it properly. Picturesque
ugliness and deformed beauty each stand in the place of
picturesqueness itself and Price is torn between including
them (at the cost of losing his theory of disgust) or
excluding them and thereby losing his certainty on what
disgust is. Deformed beauty does disgust, he decides: but
differently. It is an aesthetic pleasure which we ought to
reject, like a gash on a living animal. Picturesque ugliness
is, however, definitely within the realm of taste as it
shows the productivity of art in raising ugly things to
value. But quickly Price re-introduces deformed beauty into
the realm of taste in the figure of the ruin. Price needs
time and ruin and deformation in general, because the
picturesque's main advantage over beauty in practice is that
it is 'œconomical.'<sup><A name="b13" href="#13"
target="right">[13]</A></sup> If one possessed a landscape
scarred by a quarry it is not only that it is cheaper to
convert to picturesqueness than to beauty, picturesqueness
has that general aim and meaning of recuperation. But the
economy of picturesque improvement is not the symmetry Price
would have us believe. Deformed beauty is reincorporated
into taste to balance the overwhelming number of projects
for improvement that have nothing to do with deformation by
time; these are the ordinary unformed uglinesses of
agricultural production and they have been made available to
the improver's art not because they have been located by the
eye of taste, but because of the unmentionable fact that the
aesthete is also the land owner.
<P>What disgusts then is the collapse of the aesthetic
economy onto the economy as such: when the talent and
refinement required to judge is suddenly equated with the
wealth to acquire; when the gentleman used to the double
nobility of being born to wealth and to taste loses the
space in which to deploy this ideology. If one wishes to do
with one's own estate what aesthetes do with the Alps and
the Bay of Naples a protocol like the picturesque can serve
to evince the liberality of doing so. It is not that
judgement is limited by the land. Rather a free choice has
lead to the unlimited aestheticization of one's own
property. This becomes clear in Price's "Dialogue" where
with the example of a butcher's shop he makes clear how much
is at stake for the noble subject in appropriate feelings of
disgust.
<P>Three gentlemen are out for a walk. They are, covered by
pseudonyms, Price, Richard Payne Knight, and an everyman Mr
Seymour. Knight was Price's neighbour, sometime friend and
rival theorist of the picturesque, and his speech in "The
Dialogue" is exerpted from his texts. The Price character is
then at leisure to anticipate his friend's arguments and
call on the common good sense of Mr Seymour in support. The
friends' walk has as its destination the picture gallery of
a nearby country house. On their way there the gentlemen
experience several scenes in nature which are contrived to
provide them with comparisons to the paintings that they
will later see. The aesthetes stop to admire a gipsy camp as
if it where a painting, praising the tones and textures of
objects which disgust Mr Seymour. Seymour thinks that the
old gipsy's beard and his hovel are very ugly and no amount
of abstraction will allow him to call this beauty. Neither
Price nor Seymour mention this but in fact the description
of the dirty, godless, squatting, thieving, gypsies is a
stereotype of the supposed faults of the dangerous classes
during the period of agricultural discontent, so the
abstraction being asked of Seymour is not to overcome some
sympathy for the gipsies. Knight persuades Seymour that if
the scene where painted his disgust would necessarily
dissipate; one cannot be disgusted at a
representation.<sup><A name="b14" href="#14"
target="right">[14]</A></sup>
<P>When they get to the Gallery all three admire a Claude
and it reminds them of the view from a hill top which they
had taken after leaving the Gipsy camp. Seymour is troubled
by the suggestion that his enjoyment of the painting is in
wishing to be there, in constructing a desire to possess the
real scene which it represents. So to return him to the
issues raised by the gipsies the aesthetes show him a
Teniers of a woman washing pig's guts. Seymour remarks:
<P><i>if what the woman is washing and cleaning, were real
tripes, guts, and garbage, the sense of smelling, and animal
disgust, would prevent any pleasure I might have ... This
certainly is merely the pleasure arising from
imitation</i>.<sup><A name="b15" href="#15"
target="right">[15]</A></sup>
<P>And thus Price has the hundredth opportunity to repeat
that such pleasures are better called picturesque than
beautiful.
<P>Of course picturesqueness is not about the disgusting
Price insists, it is just that with the disgusting we can
practice certain discriminations which will be useful with
proper objects. Seymour wants to know if, having learnt his
lesson with this low material, he can then apply the
picturesque mode of viewing to objects which he finds
valuable. If gipsies and broken down asses, why not
gentlefolk and handsome horses gaily caparisoned he asks,
and Price rewards his useful interlocutor by ending the
gallery tour with a contemplation of a noble hunting party
painted by Wouwermans. Seymour says he is "glad to find,
that what, according to my ideas, is beautiful and highly
ornamented, may be expressed in painting, as well as what is
so like dirt and ugliness, that it takes some practice to
distinguish in what the difference consists."<sup><A
name="b16" href="#16" target="right">[16]</A></sup>
Disinterest is, of course, a prerequisite for judgement, but
how can it be constructed and shown? Seymour's exercises
with offal and the poor have not obliged him to remain in
bad company: on the contrary they have brought him to a
level of evinced autonomy of judgement. Picturesque disgust
is an hors d'oevre in the project of taste.<sup><A
name="b17" href="#17" target="right">[17]</A></sup>
<P>At the very centre of "The Dialogue" the aesthetes show
Seymour Rembrandt's <i>Slaughtered Ox</i> <i><A
href="figures/03.htm" target="right">(fig 3)</A></i>. This
extraordinary painting is notionally within the Dutch genre
of kitchenpieces, which has here been transposed as a
crucificixion.<sup><A name="b18" href="#18"
target="right">[18]</A></sup> Although a great lover of
Dutch art Price seems entirely ignorant of their iconography
and the Dutch painters' generic system. But the placement of
this example in "The Dialogue" nevertheless shows his
appreciation of the unexpectedness of Rembrandt's elevation
of a mean subject. Price has placed the discussion of the
Rembrandt between the Teniers' kitchen painting of pigs' guts
and the Wouvermanns' game piece. Constructing a series of:
pigs, cattle and game; offal, flesh and whole creatures: the
discussion sits in the centre of "The Dialogue," the centre
of Price's argument and like the picturesque it acts to
transcode genre hierarchies into aesthetic experiences.
<P>Seymour praises the mellow and harmonious tints of the
painting and says:
<P><i>It certainly is very like the thing; and yet though it
is so like, and the subject so offensive, I do not look at
it with as much repugnance as I would have expected ... Now
I recollect that in coming through the village, we passed by
a butcher's shop, where a real ox was hung up in this
manner; but neither of you stopped to examine it: on the
contrary, we all got out of the way. Animal disgust,
therefore, prevailed in the one case, and not in the
other</i>.<sup><A name="b19" href="#19"
target="right">[19]</A></sup>
<P>Consider what actually disgusts here. What might have
happened at the butcher's shop, had our friends not
possessed taste? When they saw the ox hung up, they could
have gone in and bought steaks for their supper, or queried
the butcher on the price of beef. But what is so offensive
about that? Had they been hungry, or inquisitive as to the
profits to be had from rearing cattle in this neighbourhood,
then any disgust at viscera of oxen, would have already
exhausted its significations as a cost. "The Dialogue"
offers an implausible description of being disgusted as
crossing the road near fainting with nausea. In that disgust
there is a doubling, a second unlikely disgust at those who
do not cross the road, those whose inordinate desires
overcome their sensibilites. In the extreme oppositions of
the example we have lost any possibility for knowing that
gentleman aesthetes can also be cattle breeders, and might
also hunger. What has been elided in the description of the
characters' reaction to the butcher's shop is the
essentially prosaic nature of a plural subjectivity.
<P>What has happened in "The Dialogue" is that nature has
been made to imitate art. Price has constructed the
experience of the butcher's shop as a direct inversion of
the experience of Rembrandt's <i>The Slaughtered Ox</i>. In
fact the characters are as unlikely to feel disgust at the
butcher's shop as they would be to praise the meat for its
tones and colours. A single exclusion marks both the
descriptions. What Price has excluded in an unlikely way
from description of the experience of the butcher's shop, is
much more seriously excluded from the gallery. What is
excluded is valuing the meat. What would truly disgust is
not the sight of 'real' gore, but Seymour losing patience
with his friends' interminable debate and taking the
opportunity provided by the Rembrandt to guess the carcass'
weight and its price at market. Then two economies which
were circulating in parallel would suddenly be tied
together. There would be no possible play of reference
between the skill of distinguishing different types of
objects and values, in painting and in the management of
estates. There would be no categorical difference between
meat and Rembrandts, between hunger and 'taste' <i><A
href="figures/04.htm" target="right">(figs 4 and 5)</A></i>.
<P>It is possible that the landscape gardener and theorist
Humphry Repton is referring to Price when he describes going
to some trouble to hide a butcher's shop in the view from
his home in the village of Harestreet. Repton imagines for
the reader an example of poor taste: someone who "might not
object to the butcher's shop;" some land holder who
"condescending to become his own tenant, grazier, and
butcher, can have little occasion for the landscape
gardener."<sup><A name="b20" href="#20"
target="right">[20]</A></sup> What might seem the common
sense wish of his clients, to manage agricultural and scenic
improvements together, must be forcibly rejected. Repton
expects his clients to be first freed by their wealth so as
to then cultivate their taste under his direction. But these
remarks on the liberality of art and the salary due to her
workers are not the topic here. This is rather a concept
Repton thinks completely different, that of 'appropriation;'
the profit one might take of landscape with an investment
only of taste.
<P>Repton has quite a sophisticated theory of appropriation
and Harestreet is intended as a definitive example.
Appropriation has three axes. First it removes 'improper'
objects so that each element in the view is an ornament
appropriate to its genre. Then it involves finding major
compositional lines in the view which are familiar from
acculturated picturing practices <i><A href="figures/06.htm"
target="right">(fig 6)</A></i>. Lastly it obscures the
relation between the composition and the property
boundaries. Repton bought twenty yards of road verge to
enlarge his garden, but it obtains for him the whole
village, and a basket of roses replaces the butcher's shop.
What is it about the shop which makes it immutable to
composition? Is it an 'animal disgust' at the idea of
slaughter, or at the flies and road grime on the legs of
mutton? Is it what Repton says it symbolises: the greed of
enclosing whig landlords who will not pay his fees? Or is it
what Price calls the nauseating repugnance of appetite, the
horrid possibility that our nature might lead us astray when
visiting Repton's garden and, having seen the butcher's
shop, we might begin to plan our dinner? A proliferation of
disgusts which obscure a more obvious one.
<P>The crippled beggar is also removed. The starving beggar
looks at Repton and Repton worries about the butcher's shop.
Appropriation would demand that we chase away those figures
which would want to share our view or objectify us in
theirs, to a distance where they 'animate the scene.' But
the beggar is cast slightly comic with his loss of an eye,
an arm, a leg, as well as the means of his support <i><A
href="figures/07.htm" target="right">(figs 7 and 8)</A></i>.
He is too deformed to ornament this pretty village, but
Repton guarantees our disgust through a dreadful metonymy of
the cut which links the beggar to the butcher's shop. The
formless ordinariness of the butcher's shop thus
surreptitiously encourages our disgust at the beggar as an
object of taste. The beggar calls for our charity and the
butcher displays the joints to whet our appetites. Both
pleas must be refused as they are unlicensed evocations of
particular economies which threaten the detachment necessary
to the judgement of the whole and its character. The poor
are not disgusting in the intractability of their problems,
but in their appetites.
<P><center><B>III</B></center>
<P>Since John Nash's borrowing of these ideas in the design
of Regent's Street and Park, appropriation has became one of
the major mechanisms of the aesthetics of the city.
"Position, position, position" as the real estate agents
say: to remind the avaricious that views have to be
quantified alongside land area. It is widely accepted that
to aestheticize a city one treats it as a kind of landscape;
forgetting the economic logic of freeways, malls and tall
buildings just Price or Repton had to forget the value of
the grazing cattle. But the particular fecility which
architects seek in that much overused word 'urban' is
another part of the same picturesque heritage: this is the
idea that there is a space of reference between architecture
and the 'urban fabric' which is held to be incapable of
referentiality; mere mute particularity, a content seeking
to be appropriated as form, meat on the butcher's stall.
<P>Today in architectural discourse picturesque attitudes to
urban landscape are identified with 'townscape;'<sup><A
name="b21" href="#21" target="right">[21]</A></sup> a sort
of feeble-minded adventure in humanism that assumes that we
can agree an image of the good, and then build it like
Repton's basket of roses, covering the harsh appearances of
the reality of city life. But if one's disgust at
picturesque townscape is at its "softness" then
paradoxically this is in its refusal of disgust as an
aesthetic concept. It may be pedantic; but one aim of this
paper is to remember that Townscape is only one voice in the
picturesque dialogue; it is Seymour rather than Price. Both
of these attitudes, those who have recourse to visual tricks
to improve the image of the city; and those who love it for
the actuality of its fetid decay and strident excesses; both
are in a way picturesque. Despite the difference between
them they are a split description of a picturesque attitude
rather than alternative positions.
<P>But I do not wish to revive or hold up for your
admiration a hard picturesque. Because in many ways the
'advanced taste' in architecture today is the result of the
success of attitudes like Price's, what Ruskin later
characterised as picturesque heartlessness.<sup><A
name="b22" href="#22" target="right">[22]</A></sup> And it
is easy enough to turn the tables on the high seriousness of
'critical' architecture so as to reveal its shallow
vicarious thrills, what it has in common with P. F. Robinson
and the Olde English style. To appropriate the smashed
buildings of Sarajevo as a kind of architectural
pornography; to treat Mike Davis' <i>City of Quartz</i> as a
brief; one would think that there were not enough butcher's
shops in the world for today's architectural aesthetes to
sharpen their teeth on. My problem is rather that we have
not digested the picturesque and continue in that circuit
of: evoking pleasure; a disgust at the facility of doing so;
a demanding aesthetics of the unpleasant; and a disgust at
the onanism of aesthetic disinterest.
<P>I am not suggesting either that present thinking is so
imbued with the picturesque that we are constrained from
thinking outside of it. But we might produce a thought to
end with by imagining what we have in common with Price's
picturesque, despite the complete change of its ideological
role. What disgusts us both, now and then, is the collapse
of the split between aesthetics and referentiality. For
Price aesthetics was a project which (for epistemic reasons)
could only happen on the plane of reference and
representation. His problem, given that what was there to be
represented was the class interests being played out in
agrarian revolution, was how those references could be
sublated in aesthetics without opening out to a general
political economy. Our problem today is a different
orientation of the same terms; how can we appear to be in a
relation of reference, how can we construct a critical
intervention in an largely imagined cultural politics of
building, while disguising the fact that our operative
concept remains that of taste.
<P>Thanks to: <BR>Mark Cousins, Rosemary Hawker, <A
href="../../misc/contribs.htm#moulis" target="_top">Antony
Moulis</A>
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<HR><center><B>Notes</B></center>
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<P><A name="1"><LI></A>Gordon Cullen, <i>The Concise Townscape</i> (London: The Architectural Press, 1971). <A href="#b1">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="2"><LI></A>Peter Fredrick Robinson, <i>Village Architecture, or a Series of Designs ... illustrative of the observations contained in the essay on the picturesque, by Sir Uvedale Price</i> (London, 1830). <A href="#b2">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="3"><LI></A>But even at the crudest level there is more than ideology going on in books such as Robinson's. We could say that the butcher's shop and the possibilities of representing or improving it are an analogue of the 'cottage architecture' going on at this time. Architects such as Robinson published pattern books of designs for cottages, villas and ornamental park buildings which functioned as a space for the invention techniques. The license claimed for such experimentation was both picturesque discourse or the reformist discourse on the condition of the poor; two disourses which were politically, even semantically, incompatible. The space of technical invention seems to be premised on the buildings being an object of both phobic disgust and scenic interest.
<P>This genre of the architectural design of ornamental cottages is the subject of my Ph.D thesis, (University of Cambridge, 1989), and a book in preparation <i>The Ornamental Cottage, Landscape and Disgust</i>. For a description of the genre see Michael McMordie, "Picuresque Pattern Books and pre-Victorian designers," <i>Architectural History</i> (1975) n. 18, pp. 42-59, and my "The Picturesque Cottage: Genre and Technique," <i>Southern Review</i> (1989) v. 22, n. 3, pp. 301-314. <A href="#b3">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="4"><LI></A>Sir Uvedale Price, <i>Essays on the Picturesque</i> (London: Mawman, 1810). <A href="#b4">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="5"><LI></A>"The Dialogue" is a supplement added to the <i>Essays</i> in their last, 1810, edition. <A href="#b5">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="6"><LI></A>In the essay "Economimesis,"
Jacques Derrida [<i>Diacritics</i> (June 1981), pp. 2-25.]
analyses Immanuel Kant's reliance on disgust as the outside
of aesthetics. [<i>Kant's Critique of Aesthetic
Judgement</i> (Oxford: Claredon, 1911), particularly § 48,
p. 174.] <A href="#b6">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="7"><LI></A>Derrida, "Economimesis," p. 4. <A href="#b7">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="8"><LI></A>"Parergon" and Derrida's other essays on the Third Critique are collected in Jacques Derrida, <i>The Truth in Painting</i> (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Oddly, given that it is an analysis of the third moment of 'The Analysis of the Beautiful,' "Economimesis" was not republished there. <A href="#b8">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="9"><LI></A>The Picturesque is a very large and diverse field of study and no characterisation could be short enough to be useful in this paper. I am not suggesting that Price's theory of disgust is definitive of picturesque theory, nor does it explain the whole of Price's theory. Price does give positive definitions of the picturesque in its irregularity, intricacy and variety which I have not discussed here. Before doing so I would need to first establish the importance of genre hierarchies and ornamentation in Price's 'aesthetics.' Christopher Hussey's <i>The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View</i> (London: Frank Cass, 1967) remains the best overview and introduction. There has been much revisionist work on the politics of the Picturesque. An excellent recent collection is <i>The Politics of the Picturesque</i> eds. Stephen Copely and Peter Garside, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). There has been less work on the picturesque as aesthetics. A useful exception is Kim Ian Michasiw's "Nine revisionist theses on the Picturesque," <i>Representations</i> (1992), n. 38, pp. 76-100. <A href="#b9">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="10"><LI></A>Price, <i>Essays</i> v. I, p. 204, 207. <A href="#b10">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="11"><LI></A>Price, <i>Essays</i> v. I, p. 206-7. <A href="#b11">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="12"><LI></A>The surrealist Georges Bataille much later defined <i>informe</i> as the idea that some-<i>thing</i> could be spit, or it could equally be a spider. Price would correct him, the incomprehensible body product is <i>informe</i>, but the spider, that super-figural image of malevolent nature, is a necessary partner to spit in making up the conditions of a thorough disgust. Georges Bataille, "Formless," <i>Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939</i> (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989). <A href="#b12">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="13"><LI></A>Price, <i>Essays</i> v. I, p. 195-196. <A href="#b13">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="14"><LI></A>Here Price quotes Burke's idea that we can be sure that our judgement is purely aesthetic when we have no wish to see a represented object in reality: "so it is with most of the pieces the painters call still-life: in these a cottage, a dung hill, the meanest and most ordinary utensils of the kitchen are capable of giving us pleasure." Burke quoted, Price, <i>Essays</i> v. iii, p. 324. <A href="#b14">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="15"><LI></A>Price, <i>Essays</i> v. III, p. 302. <A href="#b15">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="16"><LI></A>Price, <i>Essays</i> v. III, pp. 328-329. <A href="#b16">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="17"><LI></A>There are several reasons that the picturesque does not achieve the abstract concept of disinterest which Kant does about the same time. These are: political theory of disinterest; the necessity of maintaining space for a genre hierarchy; and the particular politics of landscape improvements in agricultural estates. <A href="#b17">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="18"><LI></A>Dutch kitchen paintings typically included biblical scenes partially obscured in the background and thus had the general meaning of warnings against gluttony and worldlyness. An famous example is Pieter Aertsen's <i>Butcher's Shop</i> (Uppsala University, 1551) which includes an ox on a gallows (viewed from the same angle as the Rembrandt) as part of an allegory about the Prodigal Son. Rembrandt reduces all of the figurative and spatial complexity of such paintings to the one monumental image of the ox and thus transcodes its genre with paintings of higher status. Scott A. Sullivan, <i>The Dutch Game Piece</i> (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984); Kenneth M. Criag, "Pieter Aertsen and <i>The Meat Stall</i>," <i>Oud Holland</i> (1982), n. 96, pp. 1-15. <A href="#b18">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="19"><LI></A>Price, Essays v. III, p. 315-316. <A href="#b19">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="20"><LI></A>Humphry Repton, <i>The Lanscape Gardening of the Late Humphry Repton Esq</i>. (London: 1840), p. 568. Repton also proclaims "I have never admitted the word <i>ferme orneé</i> into my ideas of taste, any more than a butcher's shop or a pigsty, adorned with pea green and gilding." p. 472. <A href="#b20">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="21"><LI></A>The word 'townspace' was popularized by Gordan Cullen in the <i>Architectural Review</i> from the late forties, and became the title of his book, (London: Architectural Press, 1961). Nikolas Pevsner had written a number of articles on picturesque theory for <i>Architectural Review</i> in this period [collected in <i>Studies in Art, Architecture and Design</i> (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968)] and is said to have suggested to Cullen that he popularise picturesque theories and practices to assist in the design of New Towns. <A href="#b21">[back]</A>
<pre>
</pre><A name="22"><LI></A>John Macarthur, "Ruskin and Barrell on the Heartlessness of the Picturesque," <i>Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference Papers 1991</i> ed. B. Garlick, (Brisbane: 1992). <A href="#b22">[back]</A>
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