Dramatis personae, in order of appearance

Rocaille: as an asymmetrical shell work, a creature of the eighteenth century. Associated with water, plants and animals, it is actually more image than ornament, often executed in stucco, always ‘on the edge’, cheerful, frivolous, extremely resistant due to its changeability. Loved by some, loathed by others. Motto: Tolerate ambiguity.

Meander: owes its name, according to F.S. Meyer in his Handbuch der Ornamentik (Handbook of Ornamentation), ‘to a river of Asia Minor — Mäandros, now Menderes, which flows along in recurrences.’ The meander is an example of an ornament based on abstract geometric construction. Its main motif consists of the simple interlocking of two U-profiles, which meet and then move away from each other. An endlessly repeating movement of embrace and detachment. Organised in a frieze or hem that can adorn anything: Ceramics, dress, architecture, utensils. The meander is ancient; its heyday was in ancient Greece. Motto: I’m simply the best.

Cartilage: a shell ornament and therefore a distant relative of rocaille. In its heyday of the 17th century, nobody would have even thought of calling this elaborately orchestrated shell ornament ‘cartilage’. The transitions from vegetal to carnal grace, from shell, to leaf, to ear, to ball and grimaced expression were part of an infinite game that could entwine both a house gable and a mirror. Georg Dehio possibly invented the concept of ‘cartilage’ ornament (a.k.a. in English, the Auricular Style, dwelling more on its ear-like forms) and thus created the clown in the dance of ornamentation. Motto: Do it in style.

Arabesque: sensitive and extremely curious. That is why it has been travelling for such a long time. It is thought to have originated in the East. It all began with the idea of dividing a climbing acanthus shoot and letting new shoots sprout from the division. The arabesque is therefore a free artistic invention, as the acanthus itself does not form tendrils. However, all kinds of shapes can be found in its tendrils. And this is precisely why the arabesque is so incredibly convincing. It is painted, drawn and also frequently used in sculptural stucco work, which perhaps explains its renaissance and great popularity in the digital realms of contemporary architectural production. Motto: Those who are loved are believed.

The Cartouche and the Frame: are really unbeatable as a pair. They encompass and decorate art, but they are not art themselves. The cartouche, with its origin in carta, the Latin term for paper or a map, is a special form of framing, developed for the staging of lettering above portals, windows, consoles or also on the front of furniture. Rolled strips of ribbon, volutes and other scrollwork can be complemented with vegetal elements. Their heyday was the Renaissance. Motto: True rulers serve.

The Wall: is not an ornament — the wall enables the very existence of ornament. In modern terms, a site of projection. However, like the ornaments themselves, it is also dependent on others, namely other walls that together form a space. A wall by itself only has a role in the theatre. In fact, the wall suffers from the illusion of being the epitome of modern architecture. Smooth, unadorned. Ideally white. Motto: Nothing happens without me.

The five orders of pillars: a gang that has it all. Of course, there are more than the five famous orders. But the idea of the sixteenth-century architect Giacomo Barozzi Vignola of placing five orders of ancient origin, namely the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, in a numerically secure and at the same time infinitely variable proportional context, was to prove to be the sensation of architectural theory. Not only the proportions but also the ornamentation of each type of column were clearly presented in the most famous copperplate engraving of the Regola delli cinque Ordini, thus also atmospherically testifying to what concerns us today more than ever: the combination of mathematical order and meandering beauty. Motto: We’re a family, but the door is always open.

Quo fugis, o Ornamenta?

Rocaille awoke from a confused dream with a slight ache in her head and limbs and in a very unsettled mood. She reached towards her mother-of-pearl-coloured shell forehead with a swaying, climbing motion and groaned. Her asymmetry, of which she was quite proud, and rightly so, as had become apparent yesterday evening in the aftermath of the ‘Quo fugis, o Ornamenta?’ conference, her asymmetry was getting to her with age.

What had previously formed a constantly changing ensemble with ease and elegance, she coughed nervously, now began to tug, pull and tangle in certain places. The tendrils, the wonderfully grooved round shell, the eternally rippling water at her feet, all of this had to be moved and exercised a lot. But what the heck, she thought with sudden optimism — my fluid appearance is more relevant than ever in these times of digitality, the delicate swiping of fleeting images and transparent layering of infinite pixels. My artificial, wonderfully hybrid naturalness is something to behold. And honestly, let’s leave the digital aside for a moment: basically, I am the proudest blossoming of completely autonomous art. You could really say that.

Friedrich August Krubsacius summed it up wonderfully in 1759 in his Gedanken von dem Ursprunge, Wachsthume und dem Verfalle der Verzierungen in den Schönen Künsten (Thoughts on the Origin, Growth and Decay of Ornamentation in the Fine Arts): Rocaille is, according to Krubsacius, "a mishmash, a) of reeds and straw, b) bones, c) shards, d) shavings, e) wisps, f) withered flowers, g) broken shells, h) rags, i) feathers, k) wood shavings, l) cut locks of hair, m) stones, n) fish scales, o) bones, p) tails and q) brushwood, full of dragons, snakes and other vermin it most resembles."1 Of course, she was now stretching out to her full length and enjoying her slight swaying, of course there is a lot of resentment here. You could also say that the good Krubsacius — he was the Royal Saxon court architect and also a professor of architecture at the Dresden Academy of Art — is completely beside himself. He is over the moon. The master of good taste cannot believe that an ornamental structure could consist of withered flowers and broken shells.

A crooked smile crossed her slanted, towering splendour. I am free from all the characteristics that conformist ornaments fulfil: symmetry and uniformity, harmony and balance. And that’s a good thing, because my imperfection gives me autonomy and... she was a little taken aback when she thought she recognised a shape moving slightly under her sheets. Was someone breathing? After a brief pause, her thoughts and feelings were back with Mr Krubsacius, who, she was firmly convinced, had helped Rocaille, that is, herself, to achieve fame and independence against his declared will. I also owe my rapid ascent to the heaven of artistic freedom to such elaborate compositions as the grotesque ensemble designed by Krubsacius, to which the etcher Dorothea Sysang lent the desired horrifying expression.

That’s what I mean by autonomous art, thought Rocaille, marvellous! Seen from today, leaning on her right side, his caustic criticism, so sensitively illustrated by Dorothea, reads like a paean to a modern assemblage of the very highest calibre. Jime Dine, for instance, made compositions on a base of steel wire bedspring, with, among other things, adhesive tape, rags, sackcloth, corduroy, wool, chequered fabric, bow tie, carpet, aluminium foil and a light bulb. She now sat up very proudly in bed. Jime Dine created a modern rocaille. I am modern, she thought...

But despite this positive turnaround in her emotional state, the uncertainty remained: what had happened in the dream? There was only one thing she knew for sure: the dream had a lot to do with the party held after the conference. The party was boisterous and lively, the very first conference in the history of the ornaments. They had come together to discuss, analyse and validate the theories that had been published about them over the years. On this basis, they had then unanimously decided to found an ‘International of Ornaments’, which had no other purpose than to guarantee the freedom of each individual ornament, no matter what theory or philosophy it had ever been associated with.

Again, what kind of dream was that? There was a certain darkness in her mysterious interior and so Rocaille decided to go through the course of the conference in her mind, then, the thought, the dream would return. The discussion had undoubtedly got completely out of hand at times. Not least because the moderation was a disaster. Some of the ornaments were given time to speak (Meander!) that others (Cartilage!) could only dream of.

Meander, who had been given ages to speak, blathered on about his antiquity (our eternally broad and present antiquity!), about his classical appearance (Greece! Presumably with ancestors in Egypt! The Stone Age!) and about how he had always and exclusively been at home in the most amazing places (temples, castles, opera houses).

Cartilage, on the other hand, hardly had time to rightly complain about Georg Dehio’s characterisation in the third volume of the Geschichte der Deutschen Kunst (History of German Art)! There, Cartilage was described in a truly devastating way as: "[...] an entanglement and matting of small, squashed, bruised, crusty forms that defy all rules, kneaded not drawn [...]".2 But no sooner had this sad description of several cartilages on stage been brought to the audience’s attention than there were already complaints that the speaking time had been exceeded, and tumultuous scenes broke out when the microphone was turned off. We’re not a bunch of nobodies, we’re legit!... one cartilage shouted angrily and slipped off the stage because he was travelling too fast as a cartilage and then there were problems with his balance.

Three identical cartilages then stood up in the audience in support and chanted We are absolute ornament! in overlapping voices. We are absolute ornament — with which, they invoked the enemy, namely Georg Dehio himself, which only very few people knew. In the rhetorical climax of his characterisation, he himself dismissed the cartilage work as "absolute ornament" after describing all its contortions with relish.3

Dehio’s art-historical view of things, orientated towards classical balance, saw in the overflowing dynamism of Cartilage the total renunciation of an appropriate connection with the architecture to be decorated. It is self-sufficient, it is ‘absolute ornament’. And one can rightly assume that for Dehio this was the height of tasteful awfulness. For Cartilage, on the other hand, this statement was a first-class accolade. Rocaille remembered this eventful moment of the conference very well, because the uprising of Cartilage had made her realise for the first time in her life what she had felt so intensely this morning: that she too had been formed autonomously and independently.

However, the self-administered accolade of Cartilage immediately provoked a determined response. There was a rousing wave of emotion in the audience when the arabesques were united and reminded that they were — if you don’t mind — the true representatives of the absolute ornament. They were actually art; they reminded us of the wonderful painting by Dame Armgart von Arnim entitled Oberon und Titanias Feeenhuldigung from 1842, in which all content seems to be subordinated to the whims of the arabesques.

No, this had not been invented, free whimsy was the beginning of free art. For what had Mr Karl Philipp Moritz written in his Überlegungen Vorbegriffe zu einer Theorie der Ornamente: "But much is also merely a work of whimsy, where [...] the wanton games of the imagination merely revolve around themselves — it is the essence of ornament itself, which is not bound by any law, because it has no purpose other than to amuse."4

That’s how it is, shouted the arabesques, and incidentally they were more international, indeed more global, than everyone else here. They had always been travelling between East, West, North and South, in a wide variety of guises, but always as arabesques and that was simply fa... Someone turned the microphone back on, which led to a high-pitched whistle and immediately the hall fell completely silent.

In this great silence, a cartouche and a frame had climbed onto the stage together and were now standing — hand in hand — behind the microphone. The entire audience of ornaments was suddenly tense, because despite the exuberant richness of their design, they radiated calm and self-confidence, even organisation and clarity. It quickly became clear why this was the case.

The pair had a role. They framed others. They were servants, and they would tell you as much. Some ornaments found it embarrassing, others vulgar, some also found it politically unacceptable with regard to the individual freedom of the autonomous autochthonous ornament, socially difficult and madness for the future of liberal self-determination. Still others had to admit with reluctance that there was something to it. The frame spoke and reminded those present that they — the honourable audience — were absolutely irrelevant, despite their repeatedly invoked autonomy and independence and their artistic character. The frame sneezed. Sometimes they — digitally produced and therefore supposedly modern, the frame turned its eyes upwards meaningfully — sometimes they would still pass as modern art on buildings, but basically nobody wanted ornament anymore. That was the sad truth. Silence reigned in the room. They, on the other hand, were ready to emphasise other things again in the service of architecture and things and spaces, to accompany transitions, to capture light, to play around the window, the door... the cartouche nudged the frame a little and whispered, now I’m going on, we have to get to the point and she continued... they had brought a witness with them who could only confirm their views. We have invited the wall, said the cartouche, a simple brick wall, plastered and smoothed. It is here and wants to testify.

There was a slight creaking in the back rows as the wall bent slightly and rose. Plaster crumbled onto the pillars that had settled next to the wall — just to provoke a little — and some ornaments shrieked, because the naked wall was really not a guest they had expected at their conference. And now the wall wanted to say something, which shocked them beyond measure, but it was too late. The wall spoke:

...Honoured ornaments, I can only agree with the frame and the cartouche: you were careless when you threw yourself into the arms of art and prioritised your individual autonomy. You wanted freedom from all the tasks of carrying, articulating and accompanying. Under no circumstances did you want to be the reason for the simple pleasure of a pleasant appearance. As the Adam brothers said: ‘Ornament is designed merely to amuse.’ Perhaps. Perhaps that’s true. But now look at me, a good old wall, plastered and somewhat crumbling and cast in concrete in modern form. My ascent was unstoppable: every architect’s darling. Marion Dorn, a great textile designer, chose me as the frame for a modern staging of her creative personality. Here, the cartouche can be experienced as the window’s sister at the moment of its birth: An opening is made in the wall and voilà, décor is born. The wall swayed back and forth very complacently and continued: the traces of my working are enough to create a purist aesthetic of the very highest order. And even if, even if ornaments should return, then I am the wall, the physical place, the anchor, the reference point, the canvas, the concept to which the ornamentation refers. They are nothing without me.

There was tumult in the hall and the wall’s speech was prevented from continuing by heckling. And what’s more: with a loud crash and applause, the classical column orders stormed onto the stage and proclaimed the end of the era without ornament. They held up a poster that read: "United against the lack of ornamentation and against the decay of form. Historic or natural? We demand a new style!"

An intricately constructed meander turned to its neighbour, a complex composite capital. Now that’s a bold statement, isn’t it? A new style, I can’t believe it. I admire the proposal, but it won’t work, what do you think? How is that supposed to work? History teaches us... developments are in fact irreversible... Do the orders want to abolish themselves? The composite capital nodded almost imperceptibly, wisely wanting to agree a little, but above all to disagree a little, because it actually found the idea of a new style enchanting. I’m bored in my vignolesque form, it thought. But unfortunately it was always quite slow to write down these thoughts because they had so many twists and turns to go through and in the end they sometimes curled up and forgot that they also had to get out. To be spoken! And as if his neighbour on the other side had heard him, he now stood up and made his message unmistakably clear to the room.

Reactionary,A backward-looking, traditional, a boor!, the digital grotesque, which had risen from its seat and, citing its creator, the architect and artist Michael Hansmeyer, demanded the final liberation from the shackles of ancient, antiquated, boring stylistic forms. Down with Ionian, Doric, Corinthian. Forward with the supra-global digital. Celebrate the absolutely endless, never-repeating, extremely fascinating and all-integrating algorithmic non-style.5 Be...

The digital grotesque interrupted itself, because on stage the column orders had made way for the Rocaille and the digital grotesque thought, WOW! We’re equals! I want to get to know you. Before this happened at the party later, but only for a short minute, because Rocaille was very interested in someone else, the digital grotesque had to swallow a big toad with the speech that followed. Rocaille called for organisation, clarity, poetry, in short a new beautiful style. And she did so with reference to her favourite author! Professor Dr Sabine Thümmler: Dear ornaments, we urgently need a break from useless arguments and unclear arguments, from simple assertions that are never empirically tested, from thoughts that only go in one direction, from distraction and inattention. Let us read Sabine Thümmler. Let us turn to her remarks in "Historical or natural, masterpieces for a new style". What happens then? Well, if I may put it so floridly, her reflections bring clear alpine air into your head, the arguments smell of fresh green hay and so you can sneeze liberatingly and immediately understand what it’s all about. Because Sabine Thümmler turns her attention to things, she observes things closely, weighs things up and notes the finest differences.6 And: she insists on the endeavour of intellectual and practical work on quality. On aesthetics. Beauty. And: she shows that there can be great power in stylisation, which is done with the joy of discovery and cheerfulness. Because stylisation strives for harmony, it strives forward into the nature of plants, into our nature. I said that there can be great power in stylisation. It can, dear ornaments. You all know that: People shut the windows and air-condition themselves. Nature and ornament are excluded.

She nodded encouragingly to the five column orders and the digital grotesque. That’s why I’m telling you to change. Everyone must change, including the wall and of course myself, as we can easily see in Mr Meurer’s wonderful depiction of an Aron.

So I call to us all: be permeable and flexible, be clear and connected, be natural and still have a ‘new’ style. For, as the sociologist Georg Simmel said in his essay "The Problem of Style": "2A very subtle shame lies in the fact that a supra-individual form and law is placed between the subjective personality and its human and objective environment; the stylised expression, way of life, taste — all these are barriers and distancing, in which the exaggerated subjectivism of the time finds a counterweight and a shell.’7 In any case, dear friends, and this should be said in conclusion, we should understand Sabine Thümmler’s clear alpine air remarks as a tender but very clear plea for a forward reflection on the Principles of Life and Energy, which our relatives, the plants, generously give us.

Rocaille remembered the feeling as she swayed off the stage: like on a big balloon ride, everyone was clapping, the mood was confident and relaxed. The digital grotesque had finally fallen in love and was ready to take unknown stylised paths. But Rocaille didn’t know that. Instead, she now clearly remembered the party. The solution to the mystery of the night was therefore close at hand. All hell had broken loose at the party, the slogan had been: Love, Nature, Energy. Against her first spontaneous aversion, she had arranged to meet Meander for a civilised country dance. But the sparks were already flying. And then Meander and Rocaille grew beyond themselves during the Schwälmer round dance and became a couple.

And now she realised: there was no dream. They had simply stayed together. It was Meander that had moved slightly this morning, breathing under the sheets. She pulled them aside. And there he was. He was lying very neatly folded up next to her — in her bed. He was folded so precisely that she felt a little wistful, because her magnificent shell-and-water-palm structure stood majestically in the way of a precise fold. But that didn’t matter at all. She leant towards him as far as she could at the moment, kissed one of his imaginary guidelines, smiled and thought: This could be fun, the two of us. Maybe we can manage it: a new ornament. Love, nature, energy.

Epilogue

This text was written as a contribution to the colloquium on the occasion of the farewell of Prof. Dr Sabine Thümmler, Director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin on 25 May 2022. Sabine Thümmler has repeatedly dealt with questions of ornamentation throughout her professional career. This pronounced passion had already begun with her dissertation, which was dedicated to the development of vegetal ornamentation in Germany before Art Nouveau.8

The text is a narrative. Its protagonists are a number of ornamental forms from the older and more recent history of architecture and interiors. The dispute is largely fuelled by the question of hierarchy within the world of ornamentation, as there were clear indications of the authors’ likes and dislikes in the writings cited. They distinguished between good and bad ornaments, those that they favoured as classically beautiful and appropriate and those that they rejected as mannered and exaggerated, frivolous and inappropriate. However, it was precisely these non-conformist forms, such as the arabesque, the rocaille and the grotesque, that were granted special status by some free spirits with the emergence of modern ideas of the absolute autonomy of artistic works. Oscillating in their forms between ornament and image, they were summarily declared to be purely autonomous art, detached from any task (apart from to amuse and please). Here, one of the doors to the abstract forms of modern art was thrown wide open. What happened later is sad but true: ornament survived in the artistic image, but the 20th century thoroughly drove it out of architecture. (Acolytes of Taut!). This was and still is a paradoxical, unresolved situation. Despite all the attempts to revitalise it digitally, ornamentation still leads a shadowy existence; at most it is appreciated as art (perhaps as part of an artwork made as part of a new building).

But where do our own limits of perception of beauty and ugliness lie in the spaces that surround us; of appropriateness, tact and style and their opposite of vulgarity and coarseness, the shapelessly slapped on. If we listen to the ornaments in this story, it could happen that we see and feel these boundaries more clearly. We laugh with those who laugh and weep with those who weep. Perhaps we also sense that we owe something decisive to the ornaments. What could that be? Do you remember visiting older buildings in which ornamentation plays a natural role? And then look around in your mind’s eye, in your town, in your post office, in your doctor’s surgery, in your railway station.

Finally, one more thing should be mentioned: the author and Sabine Thümmler have a long-standing friendship that began when they were students in Bonn. The choice of the non-academic form is inconceivable without the long nights of discussion, silliness and also tears of indignation over misunderstandings and misinterpretations, misguided interpretations, obstinacy, capricious trains of thought, surging emotions and relieved sighs of relief. For Sabine from Bettina.