The problem of experience must continually traverse any attempt to dwell on or to
present either modernism or the present. In order to take these deliberations a step
forward it is essential to take up—perhaps even to redeem—elements of Burke’s
aesthetics. The value of Burke lies in the importance that is attributed to experience. It is
an emphasis that springs from the almost physiological foundation he gives to the
aesthetic. None the less within Burke’s body—the body as place—lies the possibility of
drawing, withdrawing, specific elements that will be fundamental to a conception of
avant-garde experience.
These elements emerge with greatest clarity when Burke is attempting to distinguish
between terror and delight as part of a general clarification of the sublime.
When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any
delight, and are simply terrible, but at a certain distance, and with slight
modification, they may be and are delightful, as we every day
experience.^17 (My emphasis)This particular passage is of central importance. It introduces time into experience. There
is a more or less straightforward sense in which ‘distance’ can be seen to involve time. It
would seem, on the surface at least, to be the temporality at work in Turner’s painting
The Morning after the Storm. Here the storm is over and its absence marked by the
choppy water, the heavy condensation. Distance, however, does not mean simply ‘after’
or ‘over’. Were it to be the case then the temporality signalled in the passage from Burke,
as well as in Turner’s painting, would involve a backward and forward movement
structured by the temporality of sequential continuity (with its related ontological
considerations). That Burke can be read otherwise, and thus that Turner’s painting
demands more sophisticated and complex temporal and ontological considerations,
provides a way forward. It is only in the wake of this adventure, perhaps only in its
calmer waters, that it will be possible to take up the problem of avant-garde experience.
There is another problem that is at stake within the interpretation of architecture. It
concerns the relationship between an architect’s writings and the buildings themselves.
Clearly both are objects of interpretation. The problem concerns their identity qua objects
of interpretation and their difference within that designation. Experience will provide, in
the case of Eisenman, a way of approaching this problem. It is perhaps not surprising that
Eisenman’s own writings nearly always refer to the experience of buildings. In so doing
the event of experience and the experience of the event come to be rethought in their
being reworked. Prior to taking up the interpretive possibilities implicit in Burke’s
conception of the sublime—possibilities stemming for the most part from the conception
of temporality proper to the sublime—it is essential to note, once again, the centrality
attributed by Eisenman to experience.
Writing about the work undertaken on a loft in New York he notes that:
The structure of the loft space is understood piece by piece as one
glimpses fragments of the integrating text. The entire space has the effect
of being a rare, isolated glimpse of some larger usually invisible context
of vectors, currents and coded messages.^18Andrew Benjamin 281