[Frank Lloyd Wright REDUX]

I’d like to point you in the direction of Flying House—a new organization devoted to collaboration between writing and the visual arts. Check out their page to see details about the annual operations, but also look at the blog, where they will be providing new content throughout the year. I had the good fortune to be asked to contribute an essay to their new series, “House Talk,” which is focused on exploring the places where writing and art come together. My essay, “Frank Lloyd Wright, the Interstate, and the House: A Romance,” attempts to approach several ideas about collaboration and the divisions between the arts by looking to America’s greatest architect. There’s also a healthy dose of loosely related personal anecdote. I hope you enjoy it.

(I have a feeling this will not be my last meditation on Mr. Wright. Consider yourselves warned.)

[FLW FTW]

I’m sorry to say it was news to me that Frank Lloyd Wright was a madman. Today in the library I came across a book of his, When Democracy Builds, published in 1945. It was only this book, rather than his designs, which led me to my new understanding of our most famous architect. Take this paragraph from the foreword as early proof:

This book is written in the firm belief that all true human Culture has a healthy idea of the Beautiful as its Life-of-the-Soul: an Aesthetic-Organic, as of Life, not on it. One that nobly relates Man to his environment. This true Aesthetic sense would make of Man a gracious, potent, integral part of the whole of Life. Ethics, Art, and Religion have survived only as they were actual departments of the aesthetic sense; and survive only to the extent that they embodied human sentiment for the Beautiful. To ignore this truth is to misunderstand the Soul of Man, turn him over to Science ignorant of his significance and blind to his destiny.

Of course, this was 1945, and it certainly makes sense that the rants which follow appear at the end of World War II. It makes sense when later he sounds almost Melvillian (thanks to Robert Dixon for the observation) in his disdain for the modern urban citizen:

The properly citified Citizen has become a broker, a vendor of gadgetry, a salesman dealing for profit in human frailties, or a speculator in the ideas and inventions of others; this puller of levers is a presser of the buttons of a vicarious power, power his by way of mechanical craft.

In some ways it’s hard to disagree completely. There is a feeling in the text that seems to prophecy our conquest of the virtual (hello blogosphere), and our increasingly digitized existence, as expressed in the many terminals we use as interfaces with the world. Yet, this is also clearly a form of madness. Paranoid, anxious, hyperbolic madness. The type of mind that would worry about the potential for cultural contagion carried on the backs of immigrants.

It’s still all very palatable, though, until he starts comparing cities to cross-sections of fibrous tumors, and arguing that the Buddha taught individualism.  It leads in the direction of capitalized Democracy, “Law Organic,” and the decentralization of all things.  It leads in the direction of this final line: “The ever moving Infinite that divides Yesterday from Tomorrow is still the Present.”  And what a closer that is.

It reminds me of something I’ve wondered for years: am I crazy enough to be a real artist? I don’t think so. I think I’m doomed to obscurity by my very plainness. Most days I feel grateful for that. And most days I don’t aim to fool onlookers. It reminds me of Slavoj Žižek, pawing around his kitchen in an early scene in the documentary bearing his name. He happily shows the filmmakers how he stores his clothes in kitchen drawers, rather than regular kitchenware. It’s as if he’s screaming, “Look! I am eccentric! I am eccentric enough to be considered a real philosopher, right?” Right. Play on, master thespian.