The Arcades Project - Operi

Focillon on technique: "It has been like some observatory whence both sight and
study might embrace within one and the same perspective the greatest possible
number of objects and their greatest possible diversity. For technique may be
interpreted in many various ways: as a vital force, as a theory of mechanics, or as
a mere convenience. In my own case as a historian, I never regarded technique as
the automatism of a 'craft; nor as ... the recipes of a 'cuisine'; instead I saw it as
a whole poetry of action and . .. as the means for attaining metamorphoses. It
has always seemed to me that ... the observation of technical phenomena not
only guarantees a certain controllable objectivity, but affords entrance into the
very heart of the problem, by presenting it to us in the same terms and fiom the same
point of view as it is presented to the artist. " The phrase italicized by the author
marks the basic error. Henri Focillon, Vie desfimnes (paris, 1934), pp. 53-54."'
[N19a,2]
The " activity on the part of a style in the process of self-definition . .. is generally
known as an 'evolution,' this term being here understood in its broadest and most
general sense. Biological science checked and modulated the concept of evolution
with painstaking care; archaeology, on the other hand, took it simply as . . . a
method of classification. I have elsewhere pointed out the dangers of 'evolution':
its deceptive orderliness, its single-minded directness, its use, in those prohlematic
cases . . . , of the expedient of transitions; its inability to make room for the
revolutionary energy of inventors." Henri Focillon, Vie des formes (Paris, 1934),
pp. 11_12."" [N20]