AESTHETIC OR ANAESTHETIC: The Competing Symbols of Las Vegas Strip

Visible Language, 2003 by Bhatt, Ritu

In this famous essay on architecture, Goodman cites Robert Venturi's work and focuses his discussion entirely on exemplification and indirect reference. Goodman writes, "when Robert Venturi writes of 'contradiction' in architecture, he is not supposing that a building can actually assert a self-contradictory sentence, but is speaking of exemplification by a building of forms that give rise when juxtaposed, because they are also severally exemplified in architecture of contrasting kinds (for example, classical and baroque), to expectations that contravene each other. The contradiction thus arises from indirect reference."7 In fact, Goodman argues that the expression of meaning in architecture is seldom denotational -at the level of description or representation. In most cases, buildings express meanings through exemplification. That is, that the building may not represent anything as such, but it may exemplify or express certain properties. Such reference, Goodman argues, runs not as denotation does, from symbol to what it applies to as label, but in the opposite direction, from symbol to certain labels that apply to it or to properties possessed by it.8 In fact, exemplification is one of the major ways by which architectural works mean; exemplified qualities are not qualities a building merely possesses but are qualities that the building exemplifies. For instance, Goodman gives the example of the Verzehnheiligen pilgrimage church near Bamberg and shows that the qualities of synocopation and dynamism associated with the building depend not upon how different formal properties relate to each other but of the properties the building exemplifies. The emphasis on exemplification is central to Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's analysis, especially in how they demonstrate that, in the architecture of the highway strip, buildings do not inherently mean something.

Instead they combine false fronts that disengage themselves from the building, and reengage in the new world of the highway strip -turning themselves perpendicular to the highway as big signs competing and often contradicting each other. Las Vegas, for them, is an object lesson in complex relationships.

In a similar vein, Goodman emphasizes that works of art are not inert and they do not refer solely (if at all) to themselves. Works of art pick out, point to and refer to some of their properties but not to others. And most of these exemplified properties are also properties of other things, which are thus associated with, and may be indirectly referred to by, the work. Furthermore, Goodman emphasizes the normative dimensions of interpreting both the literal as well as metaphorical aspects of art. Understanding a work of art, Goodman writes, is not to appreciate it, enjoy it or find it beautiful, but to interpret it correctly-and to recognize what and how it symbolizes and how what it symbolizes bears on other aspects of our worlds. Pointing out that metaphorical truth is as distinct as is literal truth from literal falsity, Goodman shows how metaphorical referencing in buildings can also be evaluated. For instance, a Gothic cathedral that soars and sings does not equally droop and grumble. Although both descriptions are literally false, the former, but not the latter is metaphorically true.9