Andrew's Wiki
Nature Gothic

Description

• The Gothic is not a specific form that every building will have; can’t find it in ideal form; but the Gothic is a product of “mingled ideas” which “only in their union” form the Gothic style
  • Compares his critical technique to that of a chemist: gestalt, not in separate parts but in their union: purity in the entangled
• Fanciful, love of variety, richness: that is the “mental expression” the values of the Gothic
• Pointed arches, vaulted roofs: that is the “material form” the form of the Gothic
• Mental Expression of the Gothic
  • Savageness
    • Stern, rude, based on cruel Northern landscape
    • We should venerate man’s wild nature
    • Dignified b/c shows man’s ability to contend with forces
  • Changefulness
    • “Perpetual novelty”
    • Endless capacity for variation
    • Pointed arch: can have any angle!
    • We need both order and variation to appreciate the balance, to understand the sweetness of change
    • Subtle and flexible, the Gothic meets this need
    • Restless, disquietude: always looking for the better
  • Naturalism
    • Love of nature
    • Willingness of artist to start with nature
    • But you will allow fancy to work (it’s not a love of law)
    • Spiritualism
  • Grotesqueness
    • Disturbed Images
  • Rigidity
    • Obstinacy
  • Redundance
    • Generosity
• Not going to be perfect
  • Animals are perfect in their ways, but they’re not better than humans, which are imperfect
  • Imperfection shows willingness to go as far as you can, to try new things and test your effort to its limit

Political Significance

• Three Types of Ornament
  • Servile: Renaissance
    • Inferior workman subject to higher man’s intellectual will, which he executes diligently
    • The Slave
  • Constitutional: The Medieval Reality
    • obedient workman yet has measure of creative independence
    • Still admits inferiority (ie, the Christian subject b/c they remember we’re imperfect)
  • Revolutionary: Gothic ideally points here
    • No inferiority on the part of the executive worker
    • Worker is not a tool but a man
• Laborers might not be smart, emotionally refined, or terribly energetic, but take their error for the best you can get
  • The very best is always “in company with much error”
  • Give them power: ask them to think about the product so he’s no longer a machine or part of it
  • “Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools.”
  • Perfect is inhuman. “Soul and sight will be worn away” if you demand perfection (literally, the processes that are required to make a perfect object will turn people into machines)
• Damns English folks’ covetousness when they demand perfect, precision objects because they are signs of “a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter” than classical slavery
  • Perfect objects “smother their souls” “make the flesh and skin…into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with.”
• Like Hegel, Ruskin doesn’t locate true freedom in the outward political signs of it, but rather in the freedom of the soul (saying that the slave who is beaten daily could have more true freedom than an English worker in a mill)
  • Before, difference of rank was a mere law, but now it’s actuality and has produced two different classes of humanity: “it is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men” (referring to division of labor, saying that it results in “segments of men” “fragments and crumbs of life” when you make the head of the nail, not the nail itself)
  • “We manufacture everything there except men.”
  • Asks for the RIGHT KIND OF FREEDOM, rather than freedom itself: this is a motion of modernity, I say: when you start to specify what kind of freedom, equality, etc, not just the abstraction.
  • “Fuel to feed factory smoke” when you ask for perfection
  • “life and liberty of every workman” that “no laws, no charters, no charities can secure” but instead change your expectations about goods
• Why do people revolt? This kind of work slavery
  • “Degradation of the operative into a machine” more than anything else, even more than poverty, is why people are striking and revolting
  • The lack of their pleasure in work is degrading and makes them “less than men”

Recommendations

• Don’t ask for the perfect object
  • Gothic rudeness much better
  • Imperfection is the true state of life, always changing
  • Slavery is in sameness, not in variety: the English love of order can be awful!
• Make sure manufacture allows for Invention on part of maker
  • For example, buying glass beads supports slavery b/c it’s a mere tic of the hand that makes the bead; whereas buying glass cups is okay because they allow the worker to form them himself
• No imitation/copying allowed
  • Do not allow one person to execute another person’s idea
• Manual labor is okay as long as the intellect is involved: he wants to take away stigma of manual labor

Work and Art Now Have to Obey Same Rules! The higher instincts of art will provide the rules for labor.