Emptiness, Bauhaus, death throes of PoMo
Ah Austin, if only we understood how lucky we were to wash ashore on the banks of Town Lake in 1990.
I remember arriving in Austin on a Pan Am direct flight from Logan, after being dropped off by my mother with one suitcase and a pair of shorts. I stepped off the plane and was knocked over by the overwhelming Texas August heat. This was not New England. What struck me was the near absence of anyone outside on the street; the city appeared vacant from the back of the Taxi as I travelled to my hostel.
Later, when school started, the sense of emptiness was still very present. The corridors of Sutton Hall, with their towering ceilings and intimidating locked offices super cooled by chiller plant no. whatever were vacant, despite the academic year well underway. All of us first year students seemed bewildered and lost. I think this sense of arriving at place that was empty with little recognizable content made your Birkenstocks so important. It was the first familiar sign I had come across.
I arrived at UT with a lot of modernist baggage. I had grown up in environment that was steeped in the Bauhaus and Bostonian exceptionalism. A very unfortunate way of starting school. I certainly had a lot of attitude. The Prix de Cadeau is just such a good snap shot of this east coast snobbishness. What the hell did I really know except that we were witnessing the end of post-modernism. This to me is the larger context of our time at UT. Our reaction to exaggerated kitsch form and the need for ‘narrative’ being foisted on us, struck me as awful. Especially after spending a senior year of college submerged in thesis about Walter Gropius.
Downplaying formal expression seemed the right thing to do as the alternative was a bad Michael Graves haircut. That first semester at UT was enlightening as I definitely did not want to buy what was being sold by our first-year faculty. But I also learned that lot of the east coast attitude was really a big waste of time. It took several months for me to relax and understand that the emptiness was the point, and this container was waiting to be filled.