The Forces of Form in German Modernism by Malika Maskarinec

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Forces of Form in German Modernism by Malika Maskarinec Josh Todarello (bio) Malika Maskarinec. The Forces of Form in German Modernism. Northwestern University Press, 2018. 199 pages. The Forces of Form in German Modernism takes its title from Heinrich Wöllflin’s 1886 Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, in which Wöfflin coins the term “Formkraft” (in English, “the force of form”) to name the force that opposes gravity and holds human bodies upright. This conflict between gravity and a will that strives, against it, toward uprightness is fundamental to Maskarinec’s book. Out of this opposition comes a concept of form—not the Platonic, ideal form, preexistent, always there, the true and eternal reality—but rather a mechanistic idea of form that emerges out of a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces. It is, one might say, embodied, bound to the earth, always struggling, always precarious, ever seeking a state of upright equilibrium. Maskarinec argues that the concept of corporeal uprightness is integral to German modernism as an aesthetic and corporeal ideal. Early 20th- century aesthetics, Maskarinec says, embraces classical mechanics and the “optimistic” law of the conservation of energy and eschews or rejects the “pessimistic” second law of thermodynamics. Modernism, like the classic aesthetic it brings into the 20th century, rejects a descent into formlessness, entropy, horizontality, and affirms uprightness. The book is divided into three thematic sections: An Aesthetics of Heaviness; Empathy and Abstraction; and Poetic Gravity. These sections explore concepts of heaviness, equilibrium, and force across various media and degrees of the literal and figurative. To this end the book brings philosophy, architecture, sculpture, and literature into conversation around the central theme of weight and will. Each chapter reads a particular thinker, artist, or work of art in these terms of weight and will, force and form. Specifically, Schopenhauer, Rodin, Klee, Kafka, and Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz are all read in these terms. The first chapter on Schopenhauer and architecture lays out most of the theoretical language the book will employ throughout the other sections. Essential to this chapter is the aforementioned reciprocally determined concept of form. The book traces this concept from Newton’s ideas of repulsion and attraction, through Kant’s critique of Newton (who could not explain the repulsive force), and into Schopenhauer’s theory of architecture. An architectural structure embodies this reciprocally intensifying relationship: the “will” of the structure strives upward while, at the same time, the structure is pulled toward the ground by the force of attraction, the gravitational force. The structure is thus suspended in a sort of tension between complete dissolution, if it were to succumb to gravity, and a pure levitation or expansion, if it could be free of the attractive force of gravity. It is this precarious state of suspension that all artworks embody, and because we, as humans, also embody this tension, this state of dramatic suspense, we can “empathize” with artworks. The greater the mass, the greater the drama of force. An aesthetics of heaviness, Maskarinec argues, champions the dynamic properties of matter and so casts it as an agent of form. Matter, gravity, force—entwined in each [End Page 798] other—the book argues, make aesthetic experience possible. It is a compelling, if somewhat reductive, idea. The second chapter offers a reading of Rodin’s sculpture that investigates the widely held claim that Rodin’s work epitomizes the modern epoch. Maskarinec’s reading challenges, or augments, traditionally held notions of modernity as an age of anxiety and Rodin’s sculpture, to paraphrase Leo Steinberg, as a passport to this epoch of anxiety. Rodin’s contemporaries, according to Maskarinec, do indeed read Rodin’s work as exemplifying modernity, but they fail to see it as a condition of anxiety. Maskarinec brings to this discussion Georg Simmel and Carl Burckhardt, both of whom wrote as Rodin’s contemporaries about his work. Citing extensively from both Burckhardt and Simmel, the chapter includes detailed discussions of Balzac and Les bourgeois de Calais, two of Rodin’s major pieces, which convincingly support Maskarinec’s alternative reading of both Rodin and modernism. Georg Simmel, for example, writes that we read vertigo (and...