Adolf Loos, in his manifesto “Ornament and Crime” in 1908, claims that ornamentation is a sign of primitive mental state. As he states “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use”. His example about the Papuans and their lifestyles is giving the idea clearly to us ornamentation is quite amoral and uncivilized. Papuans kills people and eat human beings and also they make tattoos on their skin, boats, everything that they lay hands on, but while doing these things we don’t see them as criminals because they belong to a world very primitive. According to Loos, if any human who lives in civilized world would do these things, he/she is a degenerate and criminal.
He indicates that also “All art is erotic”. The “cross” shape, the murals of the caveman’s, graffiti on the toilets, even the paintings are belonging and made from to same basic and primitive instinct, “erotism”. He is also against the longing of the old luxuries. This would make hard to development of the cultures according to Loos.
The ornamentation also increases the cost of the buildings and other daily life objects in a fake way because the ornament has no function, also it is a waste of labor and money. He states that ornamentation is “lighting of a cigarette with a banknote”. So it seems that it is not rational to add ornamentation to any object that civilized people use.
Loos sees the ornamentation as if it is a way to self-promotion and self-expression but in a very desperate way, and also an obstacle in front of the development of culture. He sees ornamentation also a thing that suitable with lower classes because they nothing to prove their potentials, so it is a way to say that ornamentation is pretentiousness. But higher levels of the society, aristocrats do not have to trust ornament because they do not need to prove their intellectuality with ornamentation. As he says “I don’t accept the objection that ornament heightens a cultivated person’s joy in life”.
As we see from text ornamentation is a primitive way to express the oneself and it can be compared with what cannibal Papuans do. It is amoral and uncivilized. The urge to paint, to draw (by the means of art) is primitive and erotic. Ornamentation is waste of time, money and labor. Deornamentation is a sign of civilized world and subtle people.
BÜŞRA ŞAFAK 