27 September 2008 - 12:58A Well-Travelled Aesthetic

September 25, 2008

There are two reasons why I have called my blog, “A Well-Travelled Aesthetic.”  The first is personal in that my own aesthetic developed from living in many different countries.  The second reason has to do with the nature of our world itself.  Increasingly we live in a world that is globalised and multicultural; where cultural mixing and fusion are the norm and cultural purity is increasingly an illusion.  My point is that nowadays, all aesthetics, or at least all those worthy of the term, are well-travelled.

Let me begin with the personal and then segue into the cultural.  My parents, who are academics, brought me up all over the world, thereby exposing me to an incredible cultural eclecticism.  At various times I have called India, Sri Lanka, Bermuda, Spain, France, Jamaica, America, Canada and England home.  It seemed to me when I was young that my parents’ houses were like the famous seventeenth century “wunderkammer,” rooms filled with wondrous objects and curiosities that they had inherited or collected on their travels. An eighteenth century burl walnut chest-on-chest sat cheek by jowl with thirties modernist chairs, late nineteenth century Orientalist paintings collected by my grandfather in Morocco in the twenties, and a West African Dogon ancestral figure that looked incredibly like one of Chagall’s sinuous flying lovers.   In short, home was abroad in the very literal sense that wherever I looked I saw cultural difference.   And of course, as my historian parents never tired of telling me, stylistic differences are not simply geographical but are historical as well.  As someone once said, “the past is a foreign country;”  we can put a piece of eighteenth century American furniture into our houses but we shouldn’t thereby think that we see it as they did, or even understand how they thought of it.  And so I grew up in my parents admittedly rather unorthodox and cosmopolitan houses with a sense that one’s personal aesthetic was something that grew organically out of one’s engagement with the world, and that increasingly our world is composed of what a well known anthropologist has termed “traveling cultures;” cultures that blur and fuse and travel from place to place rather than remain rooted geographically.

Having said that, although we speak of the present as a time of globalization and fusion of cultural traditions, it’s important to appreciate that this fusion has been going on, albeit at a slower pace,  for at least the past five hundred years.  One of the many things that colonialism did was to diffuse European tastes around the world and conversely infuse European taste with global influences.  So much so that I would argue that some of the most important European aesthetics over the centuries have been well-traveled.  Take for example the French and English eighteenth and nineteenth century fashions for incorporating Turkish influences, (the ottoman, the ‘Oriental’ carpet), and Chinese influences (Chinese Chippendale), or the early twentieth century modernist appropriation of African tribal art into the heart of the modernist aesthetic (see my Blog of September 2008 on Modern Design and the Primitive), or the use of real and imagined Egyptian and Japanese motifs in French Deco.

And so, I call my Blog and in fact my whole design philosophy, “a well-travelled aesthetic,” because it is not only informed by my own personal history, but also, and I don’t mean to sound grand, by the history of western culture since the age of exploration.  We in the arts and design professions have always been travelers either literally or metaphorically, for our designs are always inspired by other times and places.  And what we create is inevitably a fusion of here and elsewhere.  At times this is done brilliantly, such as by Picasso in the early twentieth century or Ruhlmann in the thirties.  But whether we chart new paths or follow well-trodden routes, our aesthetic is always on the move.