A great epoch has begun.
There exists a new spirit.
There exists a mass of work conceived in the new spirit; it is to be met with particularly in industrial production.
Architecture is stifled by custom.
The “styles” are a lie.
Style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special character.
Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style.
Our eyes, unhappily are unable yet to discern it.
—Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture
Written in 1923, this architectural manifest’s ideal seems prurient in the tidal wave that has castrated the US people, land, architecture, ideals, freedoms, and seeming sovereignty. The mass has come down. The style assaulted, the epoch destroyed, the purveyors of that epoch measured by their devastation, but their spirit remains and will be renewed. However horrifically—our eyes, unhappily are unable yet to discern it—but, it will come.
The cover—a close up of a butterfly wing, is delicate and brittle, beautiful beyond physical measure, short lived but magnificent in its fleeting life—a metaphor of the Twin Towers which began their growth in the ’60s. They appeared as babes in a cacoon on the cover of zingmagazine seven, only 30 years in existence, and seem unrecognizable, compared to their grown manifestation extinguished now, and forever devastated into a piedmont of rubble, encrypted into our consciousness—religious, economic, technological, political or otherwise. Those Towers. These wings.
Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
—Mohammed Ali
Devon Dikeou
New York, New York
September 14, 2001
The saccharine patriotism I felt in the above commentary now tastes as bad as the New Coke of 1984-5. Certainly our life has changed. What has been espoused and written, reflected and exhibited, conjured and published, felt and surmised, televised and broadcast, e-mailed and monitored, queried and justified, has more than adequately archived the range of emotions following 9/11. 9/11 itself is a new linguistic signifier for tragedy, as well as a monumental gravestone in the ephemeral landscape. And like the New Coke, I want it recalled; taken back; removed from the shelves.
So as I reassess my feelings and attempt to effuse thoughts on what is published here in the current issue of zingmagazine, I ask myself, “is any of the above salvageable, and what must or has to change?” I like the Le Corbusier quote. It engenders a rethinking appropriate of those moments this fall. And still, it seems less perfunctory in the abstract isolation of the present. And what does the present hold? In the most chronological sense, zingmagazine was at press when the events of 9/11 struck. Two curated sections were pulled for the appropriateness of their content. Two others have since been slated for later publication. So this issue of zingmagazine has certainly changed—even as the idea was the run the magazine as it was—without any differences or deferences. But that is the beauty in and of itself of zingmagazine—change in the same leading role, as contrast—both in the character of the curated projects. zingmagazine is as it was, only now a biannual. Fickle is change.
Homeland Security, Cipro, Enron Media Frenzy, American Taliban, Dirty Bombs, Hockey Dad, Skate Gate, Blame it on the French Judge
Irving Berlins “God Bless America” and “The Star Spangled Banner”. We now have two National Anthems.
“Then all the reindeer loved him, as they shouted out with glee, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you’ll go down in history!”
—Johnny Marks
All innocents and innocence re-relegated. All revenge revealed not re-orientated.
