Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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“program” of the avant-garde includes the aim of trivializing the shock experience
that is typical of the new, rapid tempo of urban life. The method adopted for this is
the technique of montage. The principle of montage involves the combination of elements—theoretically
of equal value—that are drawn from different contexts and
related to each other in a nonhierarchical way. According to Tafuri, this process is
analogous in structure to the principle that operates in the money economy. He describes
the latter on the basis of a striking quotation from Georg Simmel: “All things
float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things
lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which
they cover.” Tafuri goes on to ask: “Does it not seem that we are reading here a literary
comment on a Schwitter ‘Merzbild’ [figure 65]? (It should not be forgotten that
the very word ‘Merz’ is but a part of the word ‘Commerz.’)” 146
What he is implying here is that the technique of montage that is used in avantgarde
works of art derives from the relationship between things that is operative in
the money economy. The development of this artistic principle, therefore, foreshadows
a process of assimilation that every individual is subjected to—the transformation
of the anxiety, provoked by life in the metropolis and by the “destruction
of values,” into a new principle of dynamic
evolution. It is this process that
took place in the rise of avant-garde
art. “It was necessary to pass from
Munch’s ‘Scream’ to El Lissitzky’s
‘Story of Two Squares’ [figures 66 and
67]: from the anguished discovery of
the nullification of values, to the use of
a language of pure signs, perceptible
by a mass that had completely absorbed
the universe without quality of
the money economy.” 147
Kurt Schwitters,
Merz column, 1930s.
Tafuri believes, then, that there
is a structural analogy between the
laws of the money economy that regulate
production and which govern the
entire capitalist system on the one
hand and the typical features of the
avant-garde on the other. The latter,
he argues, with its technique of montage,
reproduces the “indifference
to values” of the money economy,
and in the rise and fall of successive
-isms it replicates the mentality of permanent
innovation that is typical of
65
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