Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture 9781350192898, 9781350192928, 9781350192904

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture

Material Culture of Art and Design Material Culture of Art and Design is devoted to scholarship that brings art history into dialogue with interdisciplinary material culture studies. The material components of an object—its medium and physicality—are key to understanding its cultural significance. Material culture has stretched the boundaries of art history and emphasized new points of contact with other disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, consumer and mass culture studies, the literary movement called “Thing Theory,” and materialist philosophy. Material Culture of Art and Design seeks to publish studies that explore the relationship between art and material culture in all of its complexity. The series is a venue for scholars to explore specific object histories (or object biographies, as the term has developed), studies of medium, and the procedures for making works of art, and investigations of art’s relationship to the broader material world that comprises society. It seeks to be the premiere venue for publishing scholarship about works of art as exemplifications of material culture. The series encompasses material culture in its broadest dimensions, including the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles), everyday objects of all kinds (toys, machines, musical instruments), and studies of the familiar high arts of painting and sculpture. The series welcomes proposals for monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections. Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis, USA Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA Claire Jones, University of Birmingham, UK Stephen McDowall, University of Edinburgh, UK Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia, USA John Potvin, Concordia University, Canada Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile Stacey Sloboda, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia

Volumes in the Series British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775–1930 Edited by Rosie Dias and Kate Smith Jewellery in the Age of Modernism, 1918–1940: Adornment and Beyond Simon Bliss Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present Edited by Megan Brandow-Faller Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers Edited by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe: Seventeenth Century to Contemporary Edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones Georges Rouault and Material Imagining Jennifer Johnson The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives and Afterlives of the Domain Edited by Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge Sarah R. Cohen Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art Edited by Sharon Hecker and Silvia Bottinelli Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture Edited by Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler and Änne Söll Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion (forthcoming) Freya Gowrley Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920 (forthcoming) Edited by Claire Moran

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture Edited by Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler, and Änne Söll

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Selection and editorial matter © Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler, and Änne Söll, 2021 Individual chapters © their authors, 2021 Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler, and Änne Söll have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xxi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Lipstick, (2017), Hans-Jörg Mayer (© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krause-Wahl, Antje, editor. | Löffler, Petra, editor. | Söll, Änne, editor.  Title: Materials, practices, and politics of shine in modern art and popular culture / edited by Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler and Änne Söll. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Series: Material culture of art and design | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020046745 (print) | LCCN 2020046746 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350192898 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350192904 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350192911 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Reflection (Optics) in art. | Materials–Appearance. | Senses and sensation–Psychological aspects. | Popular culture–Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC N7430.5 .M375 2021 (print) | LCC N7430.5 (ebook) | DDC 701/.18–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046745 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046746 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3501-9289-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9290-4 eBook: 978-1-3501-9291-1

Series: Material Culture of Art and Design Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Table of Contents List of Plates List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction  Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler, and Änne Söll

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Part 1: Dissemination of Shine in Popular Culture 1 2 3

Gloss for All: Shiny Cars and Bemberg Silk in the 1920s  Monika Wagner Flickering Lights: Shine and Diversion in Weimar Cinema  Petra Löffler Matte Black/Pan-Cake—On the Negation of Shine  Tom Holert

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Part 2: Temporalities of Shine within Material Cultures: Between Nostalgia, Appropriation, and Expropriation 4 5 6

Fabric of Light, Surface of Displacement: Lamé and Its Shine in Early Twentieth-Century French Fashion  Mei Mei Rado Gleam: Rebranding Big Steel in Postwar America  Nicolas P. Maffei The Sheen of Shellac—From Reflective Material to Self-Reflective Medium  Elodie A. Roy

71 89 105

Part 3: Glimmer, Sparkle, Glitter: Performing Queer Identities 7

All That Sparkles and Shines: Deco, Dissidence, and the Design of Glamorous Modern Interiors  John Potvin 8 Cosmic Surfaces: Materiality and Portraiture in Queer Modernism  Antje Krause-Wahl 9 Double Shiny: Leigh Bowery’s Costume Design for Because We Must (1987/1989)  Alistair O’Neill 10 “Inevitable Plastic Palace”: A Surface Reading of Andy Warhol’s Factory  Barbara Reisinger

123 139 155 169

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Part 4: Shiny Surfaces in the Art of the 1960s (and Beyond) 11 Against the Biological Metaphor: Robert Smithson’s Crystalline Figuration  Eva Ehninger 12 Shiny, Glossy, and Smooth: Commodity Surfaces in 1960s and 1970s Painting  Christian Spies 13 Finish Fetish: Judy Chicago in LA  Kathrin Rottmann 14 Shine On: The Mirror Ball as Art Object  Änne Söll Index

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List of Plates 1–2 Monira Al Qadiri, Diver, 2018, video installation, 4:00 min. loop. Courtesy of the artist   3 Otobong Nkanga, In Pursuit of Bling – The Discovery, 2014, installation view. 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, May 29–August 3, 2014. Photo: Anders Sune Berg   4 Otobong Nkanga, Solid Maneuvers, 2015, different metals, forex, acryl, asphalt, salt, make-up, vermiculit, dimensionen variabel. Installation shot Crumbling Through Powdery Air, Portikus, 2015. Photo: Helena Schlichting. Courtesy of Portikus, Frankfurt/Main    5 Promotion-Postcard for the AEG Vacuum Cleaner Vampyr, c. 1929. © Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin   6 Jupp Wiertz, Poster for Bemberg Silk Cloth and Lingerie, c. 1928, 84 × 33.5 cm. Collection of Ernst Cremer und Lilli Philippen “Die Femme fatal im Tempo der Großstadt,” Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen 2003, 77. © Ernst Cremer and Lilli Philippen Collection, Aachen    7 Max Factor Hollywood “Pan-Cake Make-Up” advertisement at the occasion of the release of the 1944 Technicolor musical movie Cover Girl starring Rita Hayworth. © Max Factor   8 Baron Wolman, Miles Davis Leans on His Ferrari 275 GTB in New York City, October 1969. © Baron Wolman   9 Raoul Dufy, Women’s Shawl, manufactured by Bianchini-Férier, France c. 1925, silk and metallic threads, printed. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Jane Peck Messler Bequest (M. 2004. 25). Photo © Museum Associate/LACMA   10 Raoul Dufy, Women’s Shawl, detail, manufactured by Bianchini-Férier, France c. 1925, silk and metallic threads, printed. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Jane Peck Messler Bequest (M. 2004. 25). Photo © Museum Associate/LACMA   11 Thayaht (Ernesto Michaelles, Italian, 1893–1959), “Unerobe de Madeleine Vionnet,” Fashion Illustration, Gazette du bon ton, no. 8, 1922, plate 62

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   12 MaisonWorth, Women’s Cape, France 1925, silk and metallic threads, silk design by Jean Dunand, manufactured by BianchiniFérier. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of the Pasadena Playhouse (63.40). Photo © Museum Associate/LACMA    13 “Steelmark” logo designed by Lippincott and Margulies, 1958, for the American Iron and Steel Institute. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, American Iron and Steel Institute Records. Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library    14 Gateway Arch for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, completed 1964. Designed by Eero Saarinen. Photo: Bev Sykes, 2005, CC-BY-2.0    15 Thérèse Bonney, Smoking Corner of Apartment of Tamara de Lempicka, Artist, 7, Rue Méchain, 1925. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum    16 Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant. c. 1927. © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sothbey’s    17 Pavel Tchelitchew, Personage, 1927, oil and coffee grounds on canvas, 129.5 × 86.7 cm. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY    18 Pavel Tchelitchew, Portrait of Charles Henri Ford, 1934, gouache, ink and sequins on board, 55.2 × 43.6 cm. © Christie’s Images Limited    19 Wu Tsang, Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, 2015, mixed media. Photo: Antoine Kralik, commissioned by Swarovski as part of the Swarovski Series at FIAC Paris 2015. Photo credit: Swarovski Series—Wu Tsang, Antoine Kralik. © Swarovski    20 Female ensemble for Because We Must, 1987, Leigh Bowery (designer) Mr. Pearl (maker), Museum no. S.102:1 to 3–2010. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 21–22 Charles Atlas, Because We Must, 1989, 52:30 min, color, sound, “Venus in Furs” sequence. © Charles Atlas; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York    23 Lucian Freud, Evening in the Studio, 1993, oil on canvas, 200 × 169 cm. © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images    24 Billy Name, Slide (Jill Johnston in The Silver Factory), 1964. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. T3431. © Bildrecht Wien, 2019

List of Plates    25 Billy Name, Slide (Jill Johnston in The Silver Factory), 1964. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. T3422. © Bildrecht Wien, 2019    26 Robert Smithson, Untitled (Pink Linoleum Center), 1964, collage and color pencil on paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG BildKunst, Bonn 2021    27 Robert Smithson, Untitled (Venus with Lightning Bolts), 1964, pencil and crayon with collage on paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021    28 Roy Lichtenstein, Mustard on White, 1963, manga on plexiglass, 62 × 77 cm. Private Collection. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021    29 Ben Schonzeit, Cauliflower, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 190 × 190 cm. Private Collection, Ben Schonzeit    30 Judy Chicago, Car Hood, 1964, sprayed acrylic lacquer on Chevrolet Corvaircar hood, 109 × 125 × 11 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © 2019 Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © Photo: Alissa Walker    31 Kenneth Anger, Kustom Kar Kommandos, 1965, Puck Film Productions, 3:15 min., PAL, color, sound, Screenshots. © Kenneth Anger    32 Geerten Verheus, Pit, The, 2009, rubber and steel, 140 cm × 50 cm. © Geerten Verheus    33 Hans-Jörg Mayer, LIPSTICK, 2017, acryl on canvas. 230 × 155 cm. Courtesy Galerie Nagel Draxler. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 34–35 Wolfgang Tillmans, Lights (Body), 2000–2002, single channel video, 5:00 min. Music: Don’t Be Light, by Air, Hacker Remix, Helsinki/ London. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne

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List of Figures 1.1 Margaret Bourke-White, Pierce Arrow, 1931, gelatin silver print, 33.6 × 21.8 cm. Estate of Margaret Bourke-White. © Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 2020 1.2 Tamara de Lempicka, Self-Portrait in Green Bugatti, 1929, oil on panel, 35 × 26,6 cm. Private collection, Switzerland. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 1.3a Marlene Dietrich, Promotion-Postcard for Bemberg Silk Stockings, c. 1928. Collection of Marlene Pilaete. © Marlene Dietrich 1.3b Reverse Side of Same Postcard, Saying, “Ich trage nur BembergStrümpfe—Marlene Dietrich” (I only wear Bemberg stockings). Collection of Marlene Pilaete. © Marlene Dietrich 1.4 Jupp Wiertz, Poster for Bemberg Stockings, c. 1928. Collection of Ernst Cremer und Lilli Philippen, “Die Femme fatal im Tempo der Großstadt,” Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen 2003, 77. © Marlene Dietrich 1.5 Erich Engel, Panne, Uhu 1932. © Ullsteinbild-Erich Engel 2.1 (a–f) G. W. Bitzer, New York Subway (American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., USA 1905). © National Film Preservation Foundation 2.2 Friedrich Mäschke, Stage Performance in the Berlin Wintergarten, 1940. © Bundesarchiv Bild 146–1988-035-15/Mäschke, Friedrich 2.3 E. A. Dupont, Varieté (UFA, DE 1925): Acrobat Performance in the Wintergarten. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung 2.4 (a–b) Joe May, Asphalt (UFA, DE 1929): Window-Shopping. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung 2.5 Joe May, Asphalt (UFA, DE 1929): Desire for Diamonds. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung 2.6 Joe May, Asphalt (UFA, DE 1929): Black Shine. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung 3.1 Kim Gordon, Murdered Out, 2016. © Matador Records 3.2 Dorothy “Dotty” Saulters among other co-performers in the “Cotton Club” scene of The Vogues of 1938 (Irving Cummings, United Artists, USA 1937)

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List of Figures 4.1 Paul Poiret, Evening Gown “Irudrée,” France 1922, silk and metallic threads. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of the Costume Institute Gifts 2007 (2007.146). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Resource NY 4.2 Michel Dubost, L’Oiseau dans la lumière, France, c. 1925, manufactured by Soierie F. Ducharne (Société Anonyme), silk and metallic threads. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Monsieur et Madame Jean Ducharne, 2004 (2004.84). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource NY 4.3 Paul Poiret, Ensemble, France, 1911, metal, silk, cotton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Irene Lewisohn Trust, 1983 (1983.8a, b). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource NY 4.4 Raoul Dufy, Chevaux marins et Coquillages, France, c. 1925, woven by Bianchini-Férier, silk and metallic threads, detail. The George Washington University Museum, Washington, DC, T-1074, Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection 4.5 Paul Poiret, Model of an Evening Dress, France, ca. 1925, displayed in the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 1925. Published in Encyclopédie des arts décoratifs et industriels moderne au XXème siècle, Paris 1925, Vol. 9, PL. VII 5.1 McLouth Stainless Steel Advertisement, c. 1961: “The gleam in her eye says it’s stainless steel!”; “A Special Report on: Carefree Living for your Home, The Gleam of Stainless Steel,” American Metal Market, Section 3, February 19, 1962, 6. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, AISI Records, Box 123, Folder “Stainless Steel 2.” Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library 5.2 “Carefree Living” trade advertisement for Armco Steel Corporation using the Gleam emblem and Steelmark hangtag, 1962: “A Special Report on: Carefree Living for your Home, The Gleam of Stainless Steel,” American Metal Market, Section 3, February 19, 1962, 7. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, AISI Records, Box 123, Folder “Stainless Steel 2.” Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library 5.3 Title page of “A Special Report on … The Gleam of Stainless Steel,” American Metal Market, Section 2, January 25, 1961. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, AISI Records, Box 123, Folder “Stainless Steel 2.” Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library

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6.1 Cleansing Stick Lack, c. 1900. Knaggs, N. S. (1947), Adventures in Man’s First Plastic. The Romance of Natural Waxes, New York: Reinhold, n.p.  Courtesy Wm. Zinsser & Co 6.2 Bhilwaya Stretching Shellac, c. 1900. Anon. (1956), Shellac, Angelo Brothers Limited: Calcutta, 40. Photography: Col. W. F. Rhodes 6.3 Odeon Advertisement for Double-Sided Discs, 1904. Author’s personal collection 6.4 François Kollar, Etude publicitaire pour Magic Phono, portrait de Marie Bell en photomontage, 1929. © RMN—Gestion droit d’auteur François Kollar Localisation: Charenton-le-Pont, Médiathèquede l’Architectureet du Patrimoine. Photo © Ministèrede la Culture—Médiathèquede l’architectureet du patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/François Kollar 7.1 Thérèse Bonney, Bar on Studio Balcony of the Apartment of the Artist Tamara de Lempicka, Rue Méchain, 1925. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 7.2 Thérèse Bonney, Aluminum Screen. Rectangular Vase. Maple Table with a Deep-Sea-Blue Green Glass Top, 1925. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 7.3 Thérèse Bonney, Entrance Hall of the Domicile of Tamara de Lempicka, 9, Rue Méchain, c. 1931. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 7.4 Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, c. 1927. © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sothbey’s 8.1 Pavel Tchelitchew, Phenomena, 1936–38, oil on canvas, 200 × 270.5 cm. Tretyakov Gallery. © Tretyakov Gallery, Moskow 8.2 Ode, Ballets Diaghilev 1928, stage design: Pavel Tchelitchew, photographer: Boris Lipnitzki. © Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet 8.3 Advertisement for Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics, photographer: Baron de Meyer, different issues of Vogue 1931. Duke University Digital Collections. © Duke University Digital Collections, Ad Archive 8.4 Pavel Tchelitchew, Portrait of a Boy with Blue Pitcher (Charles Henri Ford), 1933, gouache on cardboard, 104 × 76 cm. Courtesy of Natalia Kournikova 9.1 Front view of female ensemble for Because We Must, 1987, Leigh Bowery (designer), Mr. Pearl (maker), Museum no. S.102:1 to 3–2010. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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List of Figures   9.2 Back view of female ensemble for Because We Must, 1987, Leigh Bowery (designer), Mr. Pearl (maker), Museum no. S.102:1 to 3–2010. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 10.1 Ugo Mulas, Warhol’s Factory, New York 1964. Photo Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved 10.2 Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Billy Linich [ST194], 1964. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum  11.1 Robert Smithson, Quick Millions, 1965, red, glitter, light blue and black plastic panels, 137.2 × 142.2 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 11.2 Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1949, enamel and coal on canvas, 152.4 × 121.6 cm. Collection of Mr. Boris Leavitt. © The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 11.3 Jackson Pollock, The Blue Unconscious, 1946, oil on canvas, 213.4 × 142.1 cm. © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 11.4 Image, Physique Pictorial, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 1, Bob Mizer Foundation 11.5 Robert Smithson, Untitled (Man in Colonial American Dress and Indian), 1963, mixed media with collage on paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 11.6 Philipp Otto Runge, Der Tag, 1807, etching, 72 × 48.4 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. © bpk, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Elke Estel, Hans-Peter Klut 11.7 Robert Smithson, Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space (title page), 1966. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 11.8 Pellegrino Tibaldi (circle of), Venus and Minerva, c. 1590–1620, oil on copper, 31 × 22.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain (CC0 1.0 Universal) 12.1 Andy Warhol, Storm Door I, 1961, oil on canvas, 117 × 107 cm. Daros Collection, Zürich. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York and DACS London 12.2 Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey!, 1961, oil on canvas, 122 × 175 cm. National Gallery of Arts, Washington. © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington 12.3 Roy Lichtenstein, Ice Cream Soda, 1962, oil on canvas, 164 × 82 cm. Private Collection. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

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12.4 James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964–65, oil on canvas with aluminum, twenty-three sections, 304 × 2621 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of James Rosenquist/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 12.5 Ralph Goings, Airstream, 1970, oil on canvas, 152 × 213 cm. mumok, Vienna, On Loan from the Ludwig Foundation, Aachen. © Ralph Goings 13.1 Billy Al Bengston, Mesquite Western Series, 1969, lacquer polyester resin on aluminum, 58.42 × 55.88 cm. © Courtesy of Billy Al Bengston 13.2 Judy Chicago, Iridescent Domes #2, 1968, sprayed acrylic inside successive formed clear acrylic domes, 38.1 × 38.1 × 10.16 cm. © 2019 Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman. © Photo courtesy of Judy Chicago/Art Resource, NY 13.3 How to Spray Common Materials …, double-page spread from How to Paint 6 Times Faster. Craftsman Paint Sprayers, Sears, Roebuck & Co, 1950 13.4 Custom Cars, written and photographed by Ed Radlauer, 1968, Glendale, CA: Bowmar, 1974. © Ed Radlauer 13.5 Judy Chicago, Virginia Woolf Place Setting, from The Dinner Party, 1979, mixed media. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York.  © 2019 Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © Photo: Sarah Ross 14.1 Cover of a brochure for Woeste’s Myriad Reflector, “World’s Most Novel Lighting Effect,” c. 1920. Image from a blog in Kay Corney’s honor, the granddaughter of the inventor 14.2 Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mirror Ball, c. 1974, mirror on plaster ball, 19 × 19 × 19 cm. Collection of Nima Isham, Clyde Park, Montana. © Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. © Photo: Filipe Braga. © Fundação de Serralves–Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal 14.3 Dave Allen, The Crowd Waits Outside, 2012, mirrorballs, electrical motors, mic stands, strobe lights and spray paint. © Dave Allen 14.4 Bernhard Martin, Single Disco (Whisperclub), 1999, mixed media

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List of Contributors Eva Ehninger is Professor of Modern Art at Humboldt-University, Germany. One of her main research interests is American postwar art and postmodernism. In this field she has published a monograph entitled Vom Farbfeld zur Land Art: Ortsgebundenheit in der amerikanischen Kunst, 1950–1970 (2013), and she has coedited Theorie2. Potenzial und Potenzierung künstlerischer Theorie (2014, with Magdalena Nieslony), In Terms of Painting (2016, with Antje Krause-Wahl), and Bruce Nauman. A Contemporary (2018). Further works have appeared in international journals such as PhotoResearcher, Getty Research Journal, Texte zur Kunst, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and kritische berichte. Her research has been supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (2002–10), Fulbright Commission (2003–04), Swiss National Science Foundation (2013), Max Weber Stiftung (2015), Terra Foundation of American Art, Chicago/Paris (2016), and the Getty Research Institute (2009/2018–20). Currently she is working on a book on the photographic norms of representation. Tom Holert works as an independent scholar and curator; he is also a member of the executive board of the Harun Farocki Institut, Germany. In 2004, Holert co-curated the exhibition “The Future Has a Silver Lining. Genealogies of Glamour” at the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; in 2015, he guest-edited the two-part “Politics of Shine” for e-flux journal and e-flux Supercommunity. Recent book publications include Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (2018, edited with Anselm Franke) and Knowledge beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (2020). Antje Krause-Wahl is Professor for Contemporary Art at the Institute for Art History at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. Her research focuses on the art and visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in the United States, artist’s identity, painting and painting theory after 1945, gender studies and queer theory, interaction between art and digital culture, artist magazines, fashion and fashion photography. Her writing has appeared in journals like Fashion Theory, Journal of Design History, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. She is currently preparing the publication of her book Art, Fashion, Magazine: A Queer History of Images and Surfaces. Petra Löffler is Professor for Theory and History of Contemporary Media at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. She has held research and teaching positions at the universities of Cologne, Regensburg, Vienna, Weimar, and Lüneburg. She was Guest Professor of Media History and Visual Culture at University of Siegen, Guest Professor of Media Philosophy at Bauhaus University in Weimar, and Guest Professor at the Institute for Cultural Studies of Humboldt University in Berlin. She is author of several edited volumes and books on media archaeology, ecology, and media

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practices including Verteilte Aufmerksamkeit: Eine Mediengeschichte der Zerstreuung (2014) and Bilder verteilen: Fotografische Praktiken in der digitalen Kultur (2018), among others. From 2019 to 2020 she was project leader at the cluster of excellence “Matters of Activity” at Humboldt University. Nicolas P. Maffei is a Senior Lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts, UK. He is a design historian specialising in graphic design, modernism and materials and has written extensively about American design of the 20th century, including streamlining as a cultural expression in his book Norman Bel Geddes: American Design Visionary (Bloomsbury, 2018). Subsequent research has focused on the branding of the postWWII American steel industry, exploring the imagery and rhetoric of shininess to promote ‘big steel’ as modern and progressive. Maffei’s book, Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context (Bloomsbury, 2019) was co-authored with Grace Lees-Maffei and focuses on the impact of digital technology on traditional graphic design forms, including the book, the poster and data visualisation. Alistair O’Neill is a writer, curator, and Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK. He is a member of the Photography and the Archive research center, sits on the editorial board of Fashion Theory, and writes regularly for Aperture magazine. His research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary fashion, fashion photography in relation to visual culture, London as a center for fashion cultures and fashion curation, and histories of display. John Potvin is Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Canada, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design, and fashion. The author of over forty essays, his work has been published in such leading journals as The Journal of Design History, Journal of Interior Design, Senses and Society, Genders, Home Cultures, Visual Culture in Britain, and Fashion Theory. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures beyond Male Bonding (2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013), and Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014), and winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize. In addition to being editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) and Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (2015), he is also coeditor of both Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (2009) and Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity (2010). He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of several international peer-reviewed journals and was book review editor for Interiors: Interiors, Design and Architecture (2011–13). His current book projects include Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris and Masculinity and Interior Design: From Professionalization to Queer Theory, 1869–2019. Mei Mei Rado is Associate Curator of Costumes and Textiles at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA. An art historian whose specialties cross-cultural boundaries, she has lectured and published widely on French, Chinese, and Japanese fashion and textiles from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Her forthcoming book The

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Empire’s New Cloth: Western Textiles at the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court will examine the cultural exchanges between Europe and the imperial court in China centering on luxury silks and tapestries. Barbara Reisinger holds a joint PhD from the University of Vienna and the University of Basel, teaching modern and contemporary art at both universities. Her publications include an essay on Maria Lassnig’s “Television Drawings” made during her stay in New York, a glossary entry on “Wallpaper” in relation to the fine arts, and an examination on Robert Morris’s “Blind Time Drawings.” Kathrin Rottmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at RuhrUniversity Bochum, Germany, and coeditor of kritische berichte: Zeitschrift für Kunstund Kulturwissenschaften. Her research concerns modern and contemporary art, with a focus on surfaces, materials, and things; the history and theory of photography and film; streets and public spaces; as well as art and industry. Her recent book is “Aesthetik von unten”: Pflaster und Asphalt in der bildenden Kunst der Moderne (2016), which analyzes paving stones and asphalt in modern art. Elodie A. Roy is a media and material culture theorist based in Newcastle, UK. She is the author of Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove (2015) as well as further publications engaging with phonography as a technology of memory, sensory materialities and collecting, archiving and discarding in physical and digital realms. She is currently preparing a monograph on the long cultural and environmental history of shellac, with the support from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (USA). Her forthcoming publications also include the coedited book Phonographic Encounters: Mapping transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890–1945. She has held research and teaching positions at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and at Newcastle University, the Glasgow School of Art, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Cambridge in the UK. Änne Söll is Professor for Modern Art History at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She has published on men’s portraiture of the Weimar Republic, video art, fashion, and photography. Her research has also focused on issues of gender, especially masculinity. Her recent project concerns the history of the period room and interventions therein. She was coeditor of kritische berichte and edited issues on ecstasy, luxury, the history of artist’s magazines, and art magazines. She also coedited volumes on the cultural history of coolness Coolness Zur Ästhetik einer kulturellen Strategie und Attitüde (2010), and together with Anca Lasc and Andrew McClellan, she is currently working on an edited volume on the interventions into historic interiors and museums. Christian Spies is Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Cologne, Germany. He studied art history, fine art, and German literature in Siegen, Gainesville, and Frankfurt, and obtained a doctorate degree from the University of Basel, Germany. He taught as a post-doctorate at NCCR Iconic Criticism from 2005 until 2008, when he became an assistant professor at the University of Basel,

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List of Contributors

Germany. From 2015 he was Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Spies’s research interests are postwar painting and painting theory, image theory of sculpture, ornament, and video art. His publications include Die Trägheit des Bildes (2007), Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren (2010, with Gottfried Boehm and Sebastian Egenhofer), and Movens Bild: Zwischen Evidenz und Affekt (2008, with Gottfried Boehm and Birgit Mersmann). Monika Wagner studied modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on the semantics of materials, modes of production, and reception. Prior to her studies in art history, she was trained as an artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel, Germany. After several years at Tübingen University, she taught art history at the University of Hamburg from 1988 to 2009 and directed the Funkkolleg Modern Art. Her publications on eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, particularly on materials, include Das Material der Kunst. Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne, second edition (2013), and Marmor und Asphalt. Soziale Oberflächen im Berlin des 20. Jahrhunderts (2018).

Acknowledgments The idea for this volume derives from an international conference on the topic of “Cultures of Shine” organized by the editors in October 2017 at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany. The conference was financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Society of Friends of the Goethe-University, Frankfurt/ Main, and the Society of the Friends of Ruhr-University, Bochum. We are also grateful for the financial support by the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” at HumboldtUniversity, Berlin. We would like to thank Renate Poccia und Ruth Boshoff who helped to organize the conference and who made its lively and fruitful atmosphere possible. The experience of stimulating discussions with colleagues and scholars from a broad field of disciplines and academic expertise encouraged us not only to go on thinking about the multifaceted phenomena of shine, but also to develop the concept of this book. First, we wish to thank the participants of the conference for their inspiring presentations and in-depth discussions, all of which initiated this volume. John Potvin pointed out to us the series “Material Culture of Art and Design” at Bloomsbury and helped us find a fitting intellectual environment for this project. We also would like to express our gratitude to Staci von Boeckmann and José Segebre for translation and proofreading; Clara Stolz, Jacob Brehm, Dana Bulic, Réka Patricia Gal, and Sonja Fassbender for their help in finishing the manuscript; and last but not least the series editor Michael E. Yonan; and our publisher, Bloomsbury, in particular Margaret Michniewicz and James Thompson as well as April Peake who were supportive right from the start and helped us at every stage of the process.

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Introduction Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler, and Änne Söll

Shine (Ger. Glanz, Fr. éclat) allures and awakens desire. It manifests itself in a variety of ways, establishing, as well as destabilizing, the relationship between the subject and object of vision. Always ephemeral, shine oscillates between the material and immaterial, the sensual and transcendent, the presence and absence. Shine is, in the first instance, an event captured by a fugitive gaze, a phenomenon of perception, of refraction and reflection. Shine is a light effect, a glare on a surface—as with the moon, whose surface reflects rays of the sun or jewels, whose meticulously cut surfaces sparkle refracted light. Shine is all about shimmering, sparkling, glittering, twinkling, flickering, glaring. The phenomenon captures our imagination so powerfully that Virginia Woolf even dedicates the entire first page of her 1931 novel The Waves, a classic of modern poetry, to the dense description of a sunrise captured as a purely visual spectacle of light and color: The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold. (Woolf [1931] 2005: 5f)

Woolf compares the sun to a lamp raised by a woman as a source of light that casts its rays over everything, begetting fire and gold. Here, it is light itself that appears as fire and gold. The many ways shine mediates between subject and object, between the living and the nonliving, is illuminated by the array of terms differentiating the phenomenon: “Shine” is the broadest term; it is defined as a “brightness or radiance shed by a luminary or an illuminant” (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989: 268). Sparkle means “a glittering or flashing point of light” (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989: 121), while “glitter” and “shimmer” accentuate the continuous refraction of light, “to shine with a tremulous or flickering light” (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989: 580). In contrast, “glimmer” is a shimmering phenomenon that is even more subdued; it “gives

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine

a faint or intermittent light, a feeble or wavering light” (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989: 576). The difference lies in the intensity and the movement of the reflected light waves, whose interferences accentuate the relationship between the shiny object or subject and their viewer to varying degrees. Shine, however, is more than merely a visual phenomenon. It can be produced, manufactured by certain practices—manual practices of the everyday, such as polishing or the skilled work of fabricating glossy surfaces and refined finishes. In other words, shine always blurs the boundary between nature and culture; it can be natural or artificial, or both at once. To be sure, it is able to deceive the human eye. This is also true in nature where mimicry is used by certain animals to mislead their natural predators or to attract the attention of potential mates. Here, shine embodies the tension between true and false, the real and the virtual, by revealing the potential of material and color to develop certain aesthetic qualities. Iridescence, for instance, is a highly versatile multilayer structure reflecting light in different angles that allow us to conceive “of the surface precisely not as boundary, but as a scintillating site of intractable multiplicities” (Meraud 2015: 3). Thus, both shine and iridescence alike not only appear at or on the surface of bodies, things, and materials, as Tavi Meraud demonstrates, rather they “mark the site where a surface begins to emerge, where a surface surfaces” (Meraud 2015: 3).

Perceiving Shine As a phenomenon of perception, of refraction and reflection, shiny bodies, things, and materials fascinate and tantalize. They are a formative element of material culture, promising luxury (possession), social distinction (prestige/glamor), and the hope of limitless experience and excess. Shine is firstly a visual phenomenon; it can’t be heard, smelled, or touched. As such, it must be experienced by an observer and is contingent upon the physiological conditions of the observer’s vision. In the case of human observers, binocular vision resulting from the gap between the eyes requires the synthesis of two different visual perceptions—a synthesis that always remains temporary and uncertain. Physiological experiments in the nineteenth century showed that the visual perception of shine results from the aberrant vision of both eyes. The German physician Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, for instance, conducted experiments with a stereoscope and explained how shine is caused by a dispersion of light reflections (Dove 1853). Dove’s studies on human visual perception make it clear that staring at shiny surfaces or at certain combinations of colors might hit the eye of the observer with a painful glare (Wundt 1863: 357). From a phenomenological perspective, shine has been described as a “local glare (lokale Blendung)” that distorts the presupposed natural space of vision consisting of the positions of a light source, an object, and the eye (Cremonini 2005: 220). To perceive shine, all three positions have to be in a certain constellation. Following this argument, shine appears and disappears in relation to these changing positions—its appearance is only temporary, as a distribution of reflected light on the surface of an object seen by an observer at a certain moment in time. Furthermore, the distribution

Introduction

3

of light points on an object; their shape and intensity provide information about the condition of its surface (rough, smooth, moist, round, concave, convex, etc.) and the materials it consists of (glass, metal, ceramic, plastic, etc.). Here, shine appears as a genuine material property created in treatment or processing, such as polishing or crumpling, gluing, or weaving. What fascinates about shine from a psychoanalytic perspective is that it fulfills the preconditions of vision in general: the act of seeing always encompasses the inverse— to see means nothing less than to be seen by an “other” (Cremonini 2005: 224), be it a living being equipped with eyes or a thing with a shiny surface that reflects rays of light at a certain moment, such as the famous sardine can that moved the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan so strongly.1 In other words, the act of seeing is active and passive at the same time (Cremonini 2005: 226). No wonder that shiny surfaces play so central a role in psychoanalysis—in Sigmund Freud’s theory of fetishism, which entangles vision and desire, as well as in Lacan’s theory of the split between the eye and the gaze. According to Freud, shine is not merely a phenomenon of perception; it is primarily the experience of an “other,” of a strange ambiguity between being affected and selfaffection (Freud 1927). Lacan makes reference to Freud, as well as to Maurice MerleauPonty’s phenomenology, when he examines the otherness of shine and discusses the eccentric position of the human subject in relation to a picture. For him, to be looked at, gazed at from an uncertain distance by something that reflects light, means to be grasped and solicited. That is, the gaze is always ambivalent, “a play of light and opacity,” like the reflections from a concave mirror or a sparkling diamond, and that is why he concludes that “the point of gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the jewels” (Lacan [1973] 1998: 96). For Lacan, the gaze is a sheer reflection of light. He thus attributes to the shiny surfaces of things, such as the sardine can above, the ability to gaze. In this view, shine is an ongoing flicker, an on-and-off switch between opposite positions that finally implodes. Thus, shine mediates between the reversible positions of the subject and the object, the active and the passive in the act of looking. This in-between-ness of shine expresses desire and negotiates visibility. For this same reason, shiny things generate cultural capital and create imaginative space, affecting exchange economies and social relationships, alike. In recent years many efforts have been made in disciplines ranging from philosophy, science and technology studies, anthropology and ethnography through to cultural and media studies, art history, and design studies to reevaluate the status of materials. To speak of things rather than objects in this regard highlights their material agency or effectivity (Ingold 2012). By emphasizing the resistance and independence of nonhuman things, Jane Bennett (2010: ix) advocates for “more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption.” Under the umbrella term “New Materialism,” feminist approaches that argue for a performative notion of matter and a geopolitically as well as ecologically responsible coexistence of bodies, things, and materials in an entangled world stand out (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010). New entanglements in recent artistic practices and research have focused a spotlight on phenomena of iridescence. The artist Monira Al Qadiri dedicates herself

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine

in Diver (2018) to the changing economies of the Gulf regions, whose pearl fisheries were fundamentally changed by the discovery of oil there in the twentieth century. Her female divers wear dichroic body suits, a high-tech material that reflects or absorbs light with different wavelengths, taking on the iridescent shine of pearls and oil alike (Plate 1, Plate 2). Art historian Natasha Eaton (2016) also points to the shiny qualities of pearls and explores the mimetic and technological approximation of pearlescence in colonial photography. It is precisely this iridescent shine that can be found in both animate and inanimate nature, as well as be produced artificially. Shine, again, crosses the boundaries between nature, culture, and technology, between the natural and the artificial. The value attributed to shiny materials, such as pearls or iridescent fabrics, then, is always embedded in the complex social relations, economies, and ecologies between them. The present volume focuses on the various cultures of shine in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; it examines the potential of materials and their composition, their historically changing assemblages and economies of circulation, their geopolitical histories and individual stories that must be told. These entangled stories can be found in both the arts and sciences, as well as in common everyday practices.

The Art of Shining Precious materials that appear glossy when illuminated in certain ways—metals, like gold and silver, or crystals, like diamonds—are central to the art of shining. As the material culture historian Esther Leslie points out, “[t]he red-yellow gleam of gold and the bright whiteness of silver are attractive, and this, combined with their malleability, makes gold and silver so serviceable for jewelry, ornamentation and the addition of splendor to other objects” (Leslie 2005: 86). In addition to gold, silver, and gemstones, shiny fabrics have become highly valued, prestigious materials in many cultures. Persons of all genders decorate themselves with luxurious clothes of shiny materials and wear jewelry, appropriating their shine for themselves. In her study Brilliant Effects, art historian Marcia Pointon (2009) describes how the wearing of grand robes and adornments from the seventeenth century onward indicated a person’s social rank and level of prestige. Furthermore, in her book Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones (2017), Pointon pays particular attention to the geopolitical implications and broad cultural imaginary of jewels and jewelry made of precious materials, such as diamonds. Precious robes and jewelry alike can be understood as works of art whose shiny surfaces consciously foster the culture of luxury embodied by the self-representations of the dominant aristocratic society. At the same time, however, jewels, particularly the sparkle of diamonds, “can destabilize social structures, undermine discursive formations and disrupt economies of meaning” (Pointon 2009: 4). In his seminal work Sociology Georg Simmel investigates the social function of shine from the perspective of cultural history, writing: “Adornment increases or enhances the impression of the personality, while it functions as its, as it were, radiation. For that reason gleaming metals and precious stones have always been its substance and are ‘adornment’ in the narrower sense, similar to clothing and coiffure, which indeed

Introduction

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also ‘adorn’” (Simmel [1908] 2009: 333). Simmel highlights the radiation engendered by shiny materials such as gemstones or metals giving them a symbolic value that is transferred to the personality of the adorned. Because shine indicates social distinction, it is also capable of deception and falsehood—shine is able to glare and to deceive. As such, the phenomenon of shine becomes a moral and ethical category. The values attributed to shiny materials depend on the historically shifting political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances. As Nicolas P. Maffei and Tom Fisher point out, there is the shine that comforts the senses, such as the immanent shine of gold, human skin or hair; then there is the shine of viscous surfaces, whether solid nor liquid, that may be repellent. Shine may even stand for diametrically opposed valuations: “The shine of one object may strongly connote value[,] while the gloss of another may suggest cheapness and ‘glizz’” (Maffei and Fisher 2013: 231). Which value is attributed to different shiny materials equally depends on the way in which value preferences are attributed to culturally motivated affects and moral standards. Shine as a moral category plays a central role in Ida Boy-Ed’s 1920 novel Glanz (Shine).2 Set in the world of the aristocracy, the novel offers extensive descriptions of expensive clothing, precious jewelry, and luxurious interiors. Its heroine is an ambitious countess who is always immaculately attired to attract attention. She possesses a natural charisma, which she consciously employs. Boy-Ed not only emphasizes her beauty, but above all her “large and lustrous eyes” (“das große Auge voll Glanz”) as “a grace of nature” (Boy-Ed 1920: 7). The novel traces her conversion from the superficiality of her outer appearance to the inner splendor of her soul shortly before she passes away—a splendor that finally appears on the countess’s face in death: “The eyelids closed. The soul exhaled. And the glory of eternity [der Glanz der Ewigkeit] shimmered over a serene countenance” (Boy-Ed 1920: 462, translation by the authors). With the introduction of a capitalist economy and the rise of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century, and with the industrialization, urbanization, mobilization, and commodification, luxury goods became more and more affordable for wealthy citizens. The establishment of big department stores attracted a bourgeois audience with their wide array of more or less expensive, luxury consumer products and played a key role in the commodification and distribution of modern shine. Émile Zola’s 1884 novel Au Bonheur de Dames about a then famous Paris department store describes in detail the desires that were evoked in shoppers by precious consumer products staged in displays and illuminated by natural and artificial light to make them shine. Shine was being democratized. Boy-Ed’s novel about the aristocracy of shine as social and moral distinction can thus be regarded as the last glimpse of a disappearing culture—a culture that nonetheless reappears, again and again, as the modern desire to enhance one’s own personality and desirability by wearing glittery clothes and adornments. The oscillation between appearance, disappearance, and reappearance points to not only the special temporality of shine as a phenomenon of perception. It likewise introduces a politics of shine concerned with historically changing dress codes designating distinctions in class, race, and gender. Furthermore, dress is also a performative strategy of interpersonal and intersectional subjectification. In this respect, the dressed body becomes an object of desire, in particular, those parts of

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine

the body that are left uncovered. As Roland Barthes describes, the tempting gloss of naked skin becoming visible between two layers of cloth constitutes “the staging of an appearance as disappearance” (Barthes [1973] 1975: 10).

Democratizing Shine The phenomenon of the contemporary culture of shine warrants serious examination in its specific economies, cycles, and spheres of influence. Since the early twentieth century, we have witnessed an increase in the mass production, dissemination, and popularization of synthetic materials that produce heretofore-unknown effects of shine (Higgins 1993). This has led to the democratization of shine as an effect that can be experienced not just by an elite, but by the masses. At the same time, shine is subjectified and, in the form of glamor, turned into a token of performative self-empowerment. Through magazines, fashion, photography, film, and a myriad of mimetic practices, the culture of shine represents, at once, the promise of popular culture to dissolve social distinctions of all sorts. Materials with shiny surfaces are now beloved by more consumers than ever. New technologies and innovations in the production of materials are increasingly applied in the spheres of art, fashion, design, and architecture. By the end of the nineteenth century, more and more industrially produced shiny materials became available on the consumer market. To them were attributed values “associated with modernity, including progress, speed, hygiene, and efficiency” (Maffei and Fisher 2013: 234). Many of these new materials were born in the chemical laboratories of big companies searching for alternatives to rare materials that were not only expensive, but often had to be extracted or collected in far-off colonies. Other materials are derivatives of natural substances, such as petroleum or cellulose, which were initially by-products of the oil or cotton industries. The versatility of these materials made them very valuable in a capitalist economy in which the exploitation of all possible material elements is essential. Pauline G. Beery, in her 1930 publication Stuff, highlights the many uses of such newly found substances: Cellulose solutions can be spun into textile fibers, forced into thin films, painted on auto bodies and other surfaces, mixed with shiny material of fish scales and made into “pearl” beads, and hardened into a tubular shape and used as sausage jackets./ What could be more versatile?/It can also be molded into combs, brushbacks, mirrorbacks, shoehorns, powderboxes, and a thousand and one other article of everyday use. (Beery 1930: 280)

The title of Irmgard Keun’s novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl), published in 1932, is telling in this respect. It refers to a material that was increasingly widespread in the 1930s. As early as 1885, Joseph Wilson Swan had introduced a synthetic material called “art silk” made of nitrate cellulose fibers. Until the middle of the twentieth century, “art silk” was used as a generic term for synthetic fabrics whose material properties came close to those of natural silk, above all to its luster (Hottenroth

Introduction

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1926). For this reason, “art silk” was alternatively referred to as “rayon” (French: rayonne) or “viscose.” Around 1900, more and more synthetic fabrics and materials capable of imitating shiny natural fabrics and able to produce previously undreamed gloss effects had been produced and distributed on a massive scale (Higgins 1993). At the same time, the imitation of precious fabrics is accompanied by the process of profanation, as Roland Barthes asserted, particularly in regard to the plastic fashion that began only a few decades later in the 1950s. For him, plastic is the most versatile and, at the same time, most profane material imaginable—a material that does not try to imitate certain materials in order to imply luxury, but to decrease the high value of rare materials: “[U]ntil now imitation materials have always indicated pretension, they belonged to the world of appearances […]; they aimed at reproducing cheaply the rarest substances diamonds, silk, feather, furs, silver, all the luxurious brilliance of the world. Plastic … is the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic” (Barthes [1957] 1972: 98). After all, what makes plastic, as a material, so prosaic in Barthes’s view is that it lacks any brilliance—it is utterly devoted to being useful. In contrast to the profane uses of plastics, in the 1960s shiny metal surfaces became more and more common in Western architecture, interior design and fashion, designating a desire for luxury and (self)representation. The architect Ulrich Franzen, for example, designed the New York boutique Paraphernalia in 1968, presenting clothing in minimalist cylinders made of stainless steel, whose surfaces were made to shimmer using film projections. These glittering, moving surfaces created an atmosphere that incorporated the consumers’ body, generating a field of tension between bodies, things, and materials in an artificial environment. In recent years studies in material culture have traced trade and consumerism in the “Global North” back to colonialism and slavery (Gosgen and Knowles 2001; Edwards, Gosgen and Philipps 2006; Yusoff 2018). The possession of land and people, as well as the extraction of ores, minerals, or other valuable materials, and the exploitation of workers lead to the decisive power relation that made the wealth of “Western” societies possible. The critique of “Western” colonialism and its geopolitical regime of appropriation, extraction, exploitation, and enrichment at the cost of others is a key concern in recent debates on numerous areas of cultural production. Works of art, such as Otobong Nkanga’s installation In Pursuit of Bling (2014), also link postcolonial thinking with an understanding of how valuable materials circulate. Shown at the 8th Berlin Biennale, the installation reflects on this entanglement of colonialism, consumerism, and shine by referring to the contradictory meanings of the word “bling” that signifies the splendor and pomp natural resources can provide and designates the endless capitalist exploitation concomitant with the extraction of minerals, such as mica (Nkanga 2017, Plate 3).3 The colonial and postcolonial exploitation of materials that shine or make shine possible is also taken up in Nkanga’s exhibition Crumbling through Powdery Air at Portikus, Frankfurt (2015). For the installation entitled Solid Maneuvers, Nkanga had filled the floor of the exhibition space with shimmering sand, an admixture of vermiculite, granite, and heavy-mine sand. Shiny sculptures whose hill-like forms had been developed from the contour lines of topographical maps referred to Tsumeb, a mining town in Namibia founded by Germans in 1905 that supplied ores to Europe for use in church architecture, among other things. The mining of minerals left behind a devastated landscape. On the sculptures were indentations containing crusted ores (Plate 4), and performers – students from

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine

Städelschule – were rubbing the shiny material on their own bodies through machinelike movements that were rehearsed before and loudly spoken out by Nkanga. Later the elements of the installation were used by Otobong herself for Solid Maneuvers Performance, making palpable the human costs involved in unearthing shiny material in the Global South to produce shiny objects for consumption in countries of the Global North.

Subjectivities of Glamor The twentieth century has seen many economies of shine and glamor. In this volume, we shift our focus to relationships that make glamor an effective instrument of subjectivation. Glamor plays a formative role in the processes of individual self-empowerment and selfpresentation and is involved in establishing gender differences—it is also in this respect that we examine cultures of shine. For example, Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl weaves the individual history of her heroine with social ideas of a “glamorous” career. The novel’s main character Doris breaks out of precarious economic circumstances and disastrous amorous affairs and leaves for the dazzling metropolis of Berlin to pursue—as she writes in her diary—fame and “ein Glanz” (“a shine”): “I want to be one. I want to become a star. With a white car and bath water that smells from perfume, and everything just like in Paris. And people have a great deal of respect for me because I am glamorous and they’ll find it so cute when I don’t know what ‘capacity’ means” (Keun 2002: 80).4 Her desire to become a star implies two things at once: prosperity as economic freedom and social distinction. It promises a life without need, replete with social recognition. To “become a shine,” here, means first and foremost to acquire material goods that indicate wealth and provide for the requisite “charisma” in sociologist Georg Simmel’s sense. Keun’s heroine not only shows a preference for furs, but a true obsession for “pure silk”: Throughout the novel, the silk quilt, the silk kimono, the silk negligee, and the silk slippers with fur trimming, the white silk shoes, and silk scarves with which she is decorated by her lover are described in detail. The shimmering surface of silk undoubtedly possesses a haptic quality that attracts the human sense of touch and establishes a bodily relationship with the wearer. Silk becomes the shimmering material par excellence that seduces in two ways: the female wearer, who falls in love with it and herself, and her lover, who eroticizes his economic potency by kitting out the desired woman with expensive silk clothes. At the same time, the desire to “become a shine” aims at an explicitly female subjectivity: it is the desire for visibility and social recognition that women have not yet been awarded. This explains Doris’s longing to become a movie star in the first place. For her, stardom is the only position that offers security, economic as well as emotional. As she records in her diary: “I’m going to be a star, and then everything I do will be right […] nothing can happen to me anymore, no loss, no disdain, because I’m a star” (Keun 2002: 80-81).5 The glamorous world of the movies represents her desire for visibility and respect, because it creates viewing relations, attracts glances, and awakens desire. Glamor subjectifies and becomes evident in or through performative self-empowerment. However, in Keun’s novel, Doris fails in the end. The glamorous world of the movies turns out to be an illusion and not at all the right place for a young woman who has been classified as an “artificial silk girl.” Nevertheless, department stores, fashion magazines, photography, and film make the world of glamor more and more accessible to an audience that believes they can

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mimetically participate in the glamor of others. At the same time, glamor becomes a promise of popular culture that aims to dissolve social distinctions. From the start, movies promised glamor and prestige. Cultural theorist and film critic Siegfried Kracauer referred to the major cinemas of the Weimar Republic as “palaces of distraction” (Kracauer [1926] 1995: 323) and criticized their “elegant surface splendor,” describing them as “shrines of the cultivation of pleasure: their glamor aims at edification” (Kracauer [1926] 1995: 323). In his 1929 sociological study The Salaried Masses, Kracauer recognized their urge to “live amid glamour and distraction” (Kracauer [1929] 1998: 89). For him, the splendor of the big cinema theaters of his time seduces the masses of employees by offering them vicariously a life they cannot attain for themselves. This seductive glamor is, thus, at the same time an expression of delusion in the lower classes, who suffer as a result of their social position. In this respect, the splendor reflected in the architecture of big cinema theaters, as well as in the majority of the films shown there at that time serve as an instrument of disempowerment. Film director Joseph von Sternberg, who stylized the actress Marlene Dietrich into a film icon, wrote in a 1963 magazine article how the “glamor” of film divas like “La Dietrich” is fabricated with the assistance of photographic media and lighting. There he asserts: “Glamor is the quality of being provocative, tantalizing, entrancing, fascinating, ravishing, and bewitching, all these implying vibrating and twisting the beholder’s emotional wiring” (von Sternberg 1963: 172). Von Sternberg believes in different styles of “glamor,” always changing over time and always “promising something [they] cannot deliver” (von Sternberg 1963: 172). He stresses the idea that glamor is volatile and unreliable in many ways: “Glamor is an elastic concept, composed of a play of fluid values, of imponderables artfully arranged in a spiritual space, a visual stimulant achieved by flummery” (von Sternberg 1963: 172). By its very nature, then, glamor necessarily employs dazzle and delusion and makes a multitude of identifications and reactions possible. Consequently, glamorous people, as Nigel Thrift has pointed out, are “always an entity with relationships integrally implied” (Thrift 2010: 302). This notorious ambivalence of glamor is what Andy Warhol plays on in his Factory’s shiny interiors producing a space where shine can transfer importance and attention onto everybody associated with it. Tom Holert and Heike Munder take up the ambiguity in the capitalist economics of glamor as “a perfect machine of illusion” and claim that “glamor can lead to the very limits of economic rationale and beyond” (Holert and Munder 2004: 19). On the one hand, the discourse on and the aesthetics of shine are part of the economy of power (Holert 2015); on the other hand, excessive glamor, especially if artificially made, is able to challenge the rationale of capitalist economies. Precisely in this ambivalence of glamor lies the possibility of self-empowerment. Anne Anlin Cheng (2013) and Krista Thompson (2015) describe the excessive glamor with which people of color surround themselves as a complex strategy. On the one hand, this glamor—the admired “bling”—of hypervisibility designates a desire for visibility (Thompson 2015). On the other, this glamor excess is a reflection on the impossibility of being represented in a visual culture based on structural racism. Moreover, the dazzling sheen in films of the 1920s and 1930s, which virtually erases the surface, precludes the fetishizing gaze on a female and ethnically marked body. Thus, according to Cheng, the metallic, shielded, shellac beauty becomes a weapon, “a body clad in resistant and mobile gleam” (Cheng 2011: 1031). But also the costumes used in drag performances of the 1970s often lovingly handmade with a plethora of shiny materials are not just repetitive imitations

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of Hollywood glamor. Instead, the colorful glittering surfaces used by the avant-garde theater group The Cockettes represent the withdrawal of the gendered and/or raced body as a fixed entity (Bryan-Wilson 2017). Camp or queer rewritings of glamor and the appropriation of mainstream, heteronormative, e.g., Hollywood cinema, offer an alternative culture of shine that can foster nonbinary identities. This is equally the case in African-American cultures, where “bling” not only establishes an alternative mode of performance and economy of attention, but also, like for example in the sound suits of the artist Nick Cave made out of glittering materials, resonates with the complex relation between shine and the sonic, between light waves and sound waves. In club cultures shine is experienced with all senses; the dancing body pulsates and dissolves in the flickering lights, enabling a temporary existence beyond representation.

Introducing the Sections This volume responds to the lack of a comprehensive scholarly attention to the extensive issue of shine to date by bringing together a broad spectrum of disciplines and approaches to the complex phenomenon of shine, as well as to processes and practices of shine. The contributions problematize and discuss the interplay of shine as surface phenomena of concrete materials and glamor, including performance and attraction. They consider gender as well as cultural differences and intercultural transfers. One of the key inquiries of our investigation, then, focuses on the alliances formed by shiny materials with cultural practices of mimesis and abstraction, or replication, on the one hand, and with processes of subjectification, on the other. The volume takes up several tracks: shine as a phenomenon of perception or touch; as an instrument of subjectivation, of empowerment and disempowerment; and as practical knowledge of the potentials of specific materials. It also takes a closer look at the relationships and modes of action of shine in contemporary cultures. Of particular interest to the contributors to this volume are practices through which shine is produced and circulated, because shine is not only a surface phenomenon that depends on specific material qualities, but is also the result of concrete production methods. In addition to visual shine effects in the arts, design, and media, this volume focuses, in particular, on techniques and operations through which shine is created and put into circulation. After all, shine is not only a surface phenomenon deriving from specific material qualities, such as those visible in metals, as well as gems, glass, leather, stones, and a large variety of synthetic materials. It is, to an equal extent, the result of concrete methods of processing, such as polishing and sanding, as well as of special techniques and products for the care and maintenance of synthetic materials.

Dissemination of Shine in Popular Culture At the advent of the twentieth century, the advancing modern metropolitan consumer culture was propelled by shop window decorations, advertising neon signs, glossy magazines, photography, and cinema. Technological progress was at the core of modernization. Synthetic materials were developed and introduced onto the market in order to satisfy the higher demand for consumer products. These newly found

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materials, together with automated mass production, also made shiny things available for the masses and thus a certain democratization possible. This modern dissemination of shine was buttressed by photography and film. These optical media also changed the channels of dissemination and distribution of shine. Monika Wagner shows how, in the so-called Golden Twenties of the Weimar Republic, shine was fabricated through an alliance of “new” mass-produced consumer products, such as motorcars and artificial silk stockings, with the advertising industry and the glamorous world of movie stars. Gloss, Wagner argues, is an aesthetic vehicle for mobilization and the new technologies of automation. The automobile with its shiny metal surface was a status symbol and, with few exceptions, a male domain, whereas silk stockings were intended, above all, for female consumers. Gender as well as class distinctions became visible through the use of different glossy materials and things. Wagner shows how the alluring shine of consumer products mediates between opposing desires to create distinctions (of class and gender) and to erase these distinctions at the same time. In Tamara de Lempicka’s Self-Portrait in Green Bugatti from 1929, the artist’s pose underscores the erotic appeal of both—the sparkling metallic surface of the car and the woman dressed in a silvery gleaming suit and helmet. At the same time, the “cool” aesthetic of metal shine highlighted by the gleaming surfaces of advertising photography was associated with cleanliness and hygiene. Interestingly, the preference for black cars vanished in the 1920s when more women were driving cars—such as de Lempicka’s green Bugatti— and were thus addressed directly as consumers by advertising. Wagner argues that the metallic gloss of motorcars and the smooth gleam of artificial silk stockings oscillate between different social and gender-specific spheres that coexist and overlap in the modern metropolis. The metropolis as a major site of the modern entertainment and advertising industries, as well as of the glamorous film culture of the Weimar Republic, also plays a crucial role in Petra Löffler’s contribution. Modern technologies of illumination, such as street lighting or neon signs, were based on the broad distribution of electricity. Löffler develops a twofold conception of shine: as a metaphor for desires elicited by modern consumerism, on the one hand, and shine as a metonym of modern light systems and shiny synthetic materials, on the other. For Siegfried Kracauer, one of the leading figures of Weimar cultural theory, “shine” was a key concept mediating between the material and economic conditions of the modern lifestyle and the “human condition” in order to transcend the material world. This dialectics of shine as a visual phenomenon of surface perception and as a material reality with political implications can be observed in detail in many films of Weimar cinema. In an examination of Joe May’s 1929 film Asphalt, Löffler shows how shine is produced through film technologies and differentiated by materials and agents. As Löffler argues, the “black shine” of the paved road resonates with class distinctions and is associated with the milieu of the demimonde, where the plot of the film takes place. In his essay, Tom Holert addresses the socioeconomic connotations and performative expressions of shine in contemporary popular culture and highlights their racial implications. He shows that shine is not always a sign of wealth or superiority. On the contrary, shiny skin is devaluated through its association with labor. Racial distinctions can also be observed in the production codes of the Hollywood film industry and in the marketing strategies of cosmetic companies. That is why, according to Holert,

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine

practices of avoiding shine can be regarded as a highly political gesture playing out the contradictions of the phenomenon. His interpretation of the lyrics of Kim Gordon’s 2016 song “Murdered Out” highlights its reference to a segment of contemporary, masculine car culture centered in Los Angeles—painted, matte black low-rider, or muscle cars as an integral part of African-American, Hispanic, and other ethnicized lifestyles. For Holert, the anti-glamor of these cars offers a spectrum of cultural tactics that not only denies newness, visibility, and brilliance, but comments on an entire regime of consumer habits and its fetishization of shine. The darkening and matting of the fabricated shiny surface of mass-produced cars thus represents the reappropriation of a consumer product through a negation of shine. Nevertheless, as Holert clarifies, no matte-black coating should be mistaken for per se embodying criticality or resistance in respect to recent racial discourses. Instead, his genealogical reading of the stealth antigloss of matte black provides insights into the contradictions of a politics of shine and its negation resulting from its broad dissemination in modern cultures.

Temporalities of Shine within Material Cultures: Between Nostalgia, Appropriation, and Expropriation In modernity, the transient phenomenon of shine only initially signals technological progress and a better future. Shine has, like the modern itself, an intransient underside, a nostalgic longing for a long-gone past or a “golden age.” That is to say, shine involves and evokes different, more or less conflicting, temporalities and trajectories, including geopolitical power relations in the past and present. The contributions to this section underscore the temporal vectors of many modern materials used for luxury or common mass products that have many roots in other times and other cultures. Furthermore, they make it clear that things made of shiny materials reveal their haptic qualities when worn or used. Mei Mei Rado analyzes the relationship between fashion and light, especially electric light, arguing that the play of luminosity and shadow determines how the shine of clothes is viewed and experienced. In an examination of lamé—a silk fabric woven with metallic threads—popular in European high fashion in the 1910s and 1920s, Rado links the uncertain and transient nature of shine in textiles to that of time and memory. Her contribution shows how twentieth-century lamé textiles emerged as a new product of modern yarn fabrication maximizing the possibility for a finished garment to reflect light. Thus, it was electricity that essentially mediated the design of lamé and the perceptions of its luminescence, because the luxury lamé clothing was intended for evening, indoor spaces lit by artificial electric light. Rado demonstrates how the metallic shine of lamé textiles generated diverse and complex meanings in relation to modern life and art spanning from the cold and distant modern glamor to the exotic or nostalgic glimmer of a seemingly glorious past. This is especially so for the exotic designs of Paul Poiret or the highly sophisticated garments of Mariano Fortuny, which played with historical references and created brilliant surfaces where different temporalities and multiple cultures of shine were superimposed. Nicolas P. Maffei examines the promotion of stainless steel in postwar America as an instance of the democratic dissemination of shine in “Western” consumer cultures.

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The “Gleam of Stainless Steel” was employed as a key visual and rhetorical trope associating the “old-fashioned” dirty material of steel with luminous modernity, in contrast to competing materials, such as plastics and aluminum. Not least because of its shininess and its association with contemporary design and cutting-edge technology, stainless steel was regarded as the ideal material to communicate the qualities of modern steel to the general public. Apart from its shininess, the durability and hygienic qualities of stainless steel made it a modern consumer-oriented material with many-sided usefulness. According to Maffei, the newly designed Steelmark emblem was consistent with contemporary postwar design imagery that evoked a new kind of modernity. He shows that terms such as “luster,” “brightness,” and “gleam” were often used interchangeably to denote the modern qualities of domestic products made of stainless steel and that such qualities could be used to suggest a range of meanings associated with consumer modernity, including stylishness, novelty, cleanliness, and even a kind of domestic “magic.” In comparison to industrially produced stainless steel, shellac has a much more heterogeneous history as a domestic material. Elodie A. Roy traces this history back to the geographic origin of this natural material in India and Southeast Asia and its ancient uses as a dye for silk and cloth. The sheen of shellac was produced through a series of well-ordered practices relying on the asymmetrical collaboration between human and insect energies. As Roy shows, the shine of shellac emerged out of dirt, out of rough, organic matter, that became a commodity fetish when set in circulation. She goes on to link the production and use of shellac and its shine to female labor and femininity. In India, shellac was also a cosmetic for the face, hands, and feet and, increasingly, a prized artistic material exported to Europe over colonial trade routes. Eventually in the nineteenth century, it was used to cast myriad small domestic objects, such as toys, decorative items, and bangles. But one of the most enduring and memorable applications of shellac was to be found when Emile Berliner first used it to mass-produce gramophone discs in 1897, where the sheen of shellac represents the reflexivity and self-reflexivity of recorded sound. Roy describes in great detail the agglomeration of different temporalities in the rich colonial history of shellac, focusing on the modes of appropriation and expropriation, the interrelations between geography, history, and culture. She argues for a relational notion of shine, because it cannot be owned, constructed, or cognitively secured as a finite object. As Roy maintains, it is for this reason that the history of shine is necessarily liminal, almost off-limits. After all, as a tool of reflexivity and self-reflexivity, shine always bears—not least in respect to its geopolitical connections to colonialism—a phantom-like presence.

Glimmer, Sparkle, Glitter: Performing Queer Identities Shine establishes connections. Through its ability to fascinate and dazzle, it binds subjects to objects and can, as this section shows, give rise to subcultures of shine that reinterpret and reevaluate the hegemonic “Western” culture of modernism that, as Maffei shows discussing the branding of steel, are deeply rooted in the idea of progress, technology, and hygiene. Instead, as John Potvin argues, camp and queer appropriations of shiny surfaces, objects, and interiors must be seen as establishing

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an environment that enables a queer self-fashioning that works against the notion of naturalness, normalcy, and what is “morally” appropriate. They, thus, engender a queer modernism that has so far been written out of the modernism’s design history. Closely tied to market capitalism, shine and glamor belong to the lifestyle of the new modernist, capitalist elite of the “Global North” that cannot lay claim to traditional heritage. Nevertheless, shiny interiors also lend themselves to the staging of queer desire and identity, emphasizing the double nature of shine—that is, its ability to connote both mainstream ideas of progress and consumption but also subcultural ideas of desirability and queer modernist lifestyles. Instrumental to the establishment of queer modernist identity through shine is the clever and purposeful use of light and its reflections in the photographs featuring the interiors of Stephen Tennant or Tamara de Lempicka. These images of rooms are full of enticements to touch, to desire, and to possess sexually. What becomes apparent in Potvin’s analysis is that the history of shiny interiors, which are intimately linked to queer identities, does not begin with the shiny aluminum walls of Andy Warhol’s Factory but dates back further to the gold and silver wallpaper adorning the interiors of Stephen Tennant and others in the 1920s and 1930s. Antje Krause-Wahl dedicates herself to the same period and the cosmopolitan queer avant-garde of the interwar years. She analyzes the colorful shine and above all the iridescence shimmer of the paintings, stage sets, and costume designs by Pavel Tchelitchew. Tchelitchew, who was written out of the modernist canon in art history, used sequins in his carefully crafted paintings and achieved surfaces gleaming in colorful luminosity. Whereas the monochromatic shine in queer cultures is often associated with erotic desire, Krause-Wahl shows how iridescent shine especially in his Portrait of Charles Henri Ford (1934) expresses a desire to dissolve and to set up new relations beyond representation. This queer aesthetics resonates strongly in contemporary queer art and theory most notably in Wu Tsang’s use of Swarovski crystals. Their iridescent shine caused by synthetic materials is part of a rejection of the humanist conception of the natural word and its normative orders attempting to establish a queer aesthetic of existence and perception. It is the sequins that connect both Pavel Tchelitchew’s portraits of the 1930s and Leigh Bowery’s costumes of the 1980s discussed by Alistair O’Neill. Whereas queer modernist’s use of shiny surfaces must still be decoded to be read as “queer,” the use of shiny materials in the spectacular costume designed by Bowery for choreographer Michael Clark’s work Because We Must (1989) was part of a more visible and acknowledged queer culture. O’Neill offers a close reading of the making of the costumes, their staging in the film, and their presentation in the Victoria and Albert Museum. He shows how Bowery’s combination of baroque decorating techniques, such as crewelwork embroidery and contemporary plastic sequins, inspired by Hollywood musicals, makes the textiles reflect and radiate light, drawing attention to the surface of the dancer’s bodies. This attention, the excess of decoration, and the glittering sequences produce an ostentatious effect of difference marking the costumes as clearly part of an aesthetic of spectacle located in queer underground cinema of the 1960s and 1980s London club culture. Following up John Potvin’s thoughts on shiny interiors, Barbara Reisinger shows how the interior designs of Billy Linich draw attention to the surfaces of Warhol’s

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famous Silver Factory with its layers of aluminum foil and paint, crumbling walls, floors, and furniture. She explains how these materials produced a variety of effects, from shine and glitter to dusty softness, and argues that they constitute a coordinated effort in interior decoration, transforming the Factory into a space in which the divide between public and private, disguise and revelation of self, intimacy and openness was continuously and performatively crossed. What becomes semi-public, here, is once again a queer lifestyle based on self-fashioning, a sense of community, and an emphasis on “surface” values that negate the notion of depth and core. All of the chapters in this section make evident that shine is a key element in the self-fashioning and representation of queerness right from the start of modernism and cannot be divorced from what has so far been seen as the mainstream of modernism. In other words, the queer appropriation of shine tells an alternative history of glamor, glitter, and gleam, which must be acknowledged as central to modernism as an alternative, positive, and empowering aesthetic strategy.

Shiny Surfaces in the Art of the 1960s (and Beyond) Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory and its shiny aluminum walls can be regarded as the site of a playful and ironic postmodern appropriation of glamor connecting the art world to the world of queer glamor as well as to consumer culture. And within this ambivalent terrain and aiming at different objectives, artists are appropriating and working with all sorts of shiny surfaces in the 1960s. Whereas the sequins and crystals of Tchelitchew, Bowery, and Tsang dissolve their wearers into sparkling colors and Warhol’s silver interiors let their inhabitants shine, Robert Smithson’s works of the mid-1960s, as analyzed by Eva Ehninger, show us a world where sexuality (of any sort) is crystallized into inanimate structures that are entirely unavailable as a site of identification. Smithson appropriated pornographic images of gay magazines like Pictorial Physique, but shininess in Smithson’s early figurative works implies lifelessness, commodification, artificiality, and even superficiality. For Smithson, crystallization serves as a metaphor for refraction and distortion working against modern ideas of progress and even life. Whereas in the nineteenth century, the naturally grown form and transparency of crystals made them a metaphor for life, here, the reflection of light serves only to highlight the unfulfilled promises of consumer culture. While Smithson deconstructs consumer culture’s surfaces and sexuality as commodity, the paintings of pop art and photorealism address the role of shine and glossiness within 1960s American consumer and car culture by flaunting it to a degree that it becomes visible as an almost aggressive, obscene phenomenon. Christian Spies argues that the Greenbergian dictum of matte, flat, and self-reflexive painting was rejected and expanded at the same time by figures of the pop artist generation like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who depict and therefore critique the glossy surfaces of consumer capitalism that make almost all goods desirable and enticing. This effect is magnified by the photorealist Ben Schonzeit’s treatment of shiny surfaces. His paintings of cauliflowers wrapped in cellophane are double-layered shiny transparent surfaces. They are part of an experience of a photographic reality whose

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine

extreme glossiness paradoxically attracts and ultimately distances the viewer from the consumer world and the painted object. In the universe of photorealism, the double nature of shine as an effect that attracts and distances becomes apparent once more. This distancing is also employed in the works of Judy Chicago discussed by Kathrin Rottmann. Here, Chicago’s spray-painted car hoods featuring a glossy, industrial surface are shown to be an exercise in the feminist critique of male-dominated car culture and finish-fetish artworks of the Californian art scene in the late 1960s. Brilliant shine, often unrecognizable in the photographs of Chicago’s work, is clearly connected to a petit bourgeois car culture, where it is manufactured by labor-intensive processes that are clearly regarded as “male” work. The manual manufacture of shine is equally adhered to by West Coast Minimalist artist such as John McCracken, whose works give the appearance of slick industrially produced objects, when in fact their shininess stems from polishing objects by hand. Chicago’s Car Hoods bring to the fore how shine can or must disguise its own manufacturing or industrial production process and how this equally disguises the mechanisms of the gendering effects of different types of shine and gloss. Comparing this 1960s car culture to the matte fetish and non-shine of contemporary California described by Tom Holert, it becomes clear that the values attached to shiny surfaces are also subject to change. What all of the three chapters emphasize is how the art world’s preoccupation with shine is closely and intricately linked to the workings of consumer culture and its enticing surfaces, ready to be consumed or “polished off.” The industrially manufactured, shiny surface we turn to in the final contribution to this section is mirrored glass, specifically, in the form of the mirror ball. Änne Söll focuses on the light reflection of the rotating mirror ball, which was first employed by the modern entertainment industry in the 1920s, in movies as well as night clubs featuring the latest technical inventions to entertain dancers and diners alike. She examines the mirror ball’s reappearance in the alternative dance culture of the early 1970s and its use as a device to foster community in dancing. From the point of these marginal dance cultures, this utopian vision is then apparently absorbed and compromised by the success of the movie Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, Paramount, USA 1977) and the advent of disco as one of the most ubiquitous dance crazes to traverse class as well as racial difference. In the appropriation of the disco ball by contemporary artists, however, the ambiguities of the disco ball as a sign of community and traversing difference on the one hand and as a sign for commercialized dance culture on the other become apparent. As a phantom of modernist cultures of shine stemming from high modernism and deeply rooted in consumer and entertainment culture, the mirror ball’s use in contemporary works shows that the disco ball cannot live up to its promise to bring a democratic, inclusive culture of shine to everybody. This volume examines intercultural and media differences in the evaluation of shine phenomena, which have so far received little attention. The chapters therefore also address the alliances shiny materials enter into with cultural practices, on the one hand, and with technologies, on the other. With our main focus on twentieth-century cultures of shine in the arts, in popular media, design, and fashion, it is our aim to show that shine is a relationship between bodies, things, and material in environments that are created by technologies and media.

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Today, fabrics and materials with shiny surfaces are in demand again. New technologies and innovations in material production are increasingly being employed in art, fashion, design, and architecture. This new boom in shine must be captured in its specific economies, cycles, and fields of action. Considering the shiny surfaces and visual points of intersection between technological devices and their significance for the development of new media, which to a great extent shape our relationship to our social and cultural environment, remains the task for another volume on the cultures of shine. If, we must ask, modernist cultures of shine have seemingly come to an end, what will the new age of shine look like? Will subjectivity continue to be linked to the material quality of surfaces as it was through modernist and postmodernist means? Can shine, glamor, and sheen still play a role when its means of production and dissemination are politicized in a way that makes their cost apparent? In this sense, shine can be regarded as an intersectional effect in which issues of the material production of race, gender, and class meet or even clash, producing highly reflective and controversial discourses on subjectivity, consumer culture, and art. In its attempt to answer these questions, this volume seeks to re-politicize shine as a phenomenon spanning from high modernism to today.

Notes 1 Lacan tells the story of his encounter with the sardine can on a boat trip with fishermen in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. According to Lacan, it was a young fisherman who drew his attention to the glittering can floating on the surface of the waves by claiming: “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!” ([1973] 1998: 95). However, for Lacan, the can was looking at him exactly “at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated” ([1973] 1998). Here, he argues for a situatedness of the gaze in respect to class distinctions, which makes him feel displaced among the fishermen. 2 The novel plays with the oscillating meanings of the German noun “Glanz.” It can be used to designate visual phenomena of shine and luster as well as to address the glamor or splendor of a personality. 3 The German word “Glimmer” for mica—deriving from the Latin word “micare,” which means to twinkle, to glitter—makes this entanglement even more explicit. 4 The German original is worded as follows: “Ich will eine werden. Ich will so ein Glanz werden, der oben ist. Mit weißem Auto und Badewasser, das nach Parfüm riecht, und alles wie Paris. Und die Leute achten mich hoch, weil ich ein Glanz bin und werden es dann wunderbar finden, wenn ich nicht weiß, was eine Kapazität ist” (Keun 1932: 45). 5 Keun (1932: 46): “Ich werde ein Glanz, und was ich dann mache, ist richtig—[…] nichts mehr kann mir passieren an Verlust und Verachtung, denn ich bin ein Glanz.”

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Kracauer, S. (1929, 1998), The Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Q. Hoare, intr. I. Mülder-Bach, London/New York: Verso Books. Lacan, J. (1973, 1998), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. J. A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: W. W. Norton. Leslie, E. (2005), Synthetic Worlds. Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry, London: Reaktion Books. Maffei, N. P. and T. Fisher (2013), “Historicizing Shininess in Design. Finding Meaning in an Unstable Phenomenon,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 26, No. 3: 231–40. Meraud, T. (2015), “Iridescence, Intimacies,” e-flux Journal, No. 61. Available online: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/61/60995/iridescence-intimacies/ Nkanga, O. (2017), Lustre and Lucre, ed. C. Molloy, P. Pirotte and F. Schöneich, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Pointon, M. (2009), Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewelry, New Haven: Yale University Press. Pointon, M. (2017), Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones. Diamond Histories, London: Reaktion Books. Simmel, G. (1908, 2009), Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, trans. A. J. Blasi, A. K. Jacobs and M. J. Kanjirathinkal, Leiden/Boston: Brill. Sternberg, J. von (1963), “The von Sternberg Principle. The True Nature of Glamor. A Great Master’s Notes on the Revivification of a Dying Art,” photographs by Frank Bez, Esquire, Vol. 40/4, No. 359 (October 1): 90–7, 172–3. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989), second edition, ed. James Murray, Vol. 15, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, K. A. (2015), Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, Durham/London: Duke University Press. Thrift, N. (2010), “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamor,” in M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham/London: Duke University Press, 289–308. Woolf, Virginia ([1931] 2005), The Waves, London: Collector’s Library. Wundt, W. (1863), Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele, Leipzig: Leopold Voß. Yusoff, K. (2018), A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Part One

Dissemination of Shine in Popular Culture

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1

Gloss for All: Shiny Cars and Bemberg Silk in the 1920s Monika Wagner

“All that glisters is not gold.” That was particularly true of the decade in the last century known in Germany as the “Golden Twenties.” While the gold standard was losing its luster as a benchmark for the currency system (Mouré 2002), upwardly mobile classes in the new democracy were developing a taste for gloss.1 After the First World War, everyday urban life became increasingly glossy. In fact, gloss was a hallmark of the new age. The splendor of the Wilhelminian Empire, associated above all with the pomp and circumstance of the social elites who managed state affairs, gave way in the Weimar Republic (but probably not only there) to a promise of gloss for all. This much-lauded modern splendor was more than just a metaphor; it had a very real counterpart in a great variety of new materials and shiny surfaces. Alongside the glittering glamor of Varieté and the “semi-silken” Charleston bars, which we today probably associate most with the Golden Twenties, every effort was being made to inject a sparkle into the gray of ordinary existence. It went hand in glove with hopes for broader social participation.

Working Up a Shine These hopes were nourished by various sectors of industry, and in their advertising campaigns, they offered a whole arsenal of aids, with every kind of paste, tincture, material, and device to add a gleam not only to the human body but also to things and surroundings: shiny shampoos and pomade from Elida for the well-groomed pixie or helmet-shaped bob sported by “New Women” à la Josephine Baker. After having been transferred from Vienna to Leipzig in 1925, the Elida Company started an intense advertising campaign. The brand name Elida sparkled and shone over Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz in the form of an enormous illuminated sign made of neon tubes fixed to the dark blue glass panels of the Telschowhaus (Wagner 2018: 38–40), which was modernized between 1926 and 1928 by the brothers Luckhardt and Alfons Anker. Erdal shoe polish promised not merely “waterproof gloss,” but also “a fresh and brilliant shoe shine every day” to preserve the prestige of costly leather; Regina Hartglanzwachs

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for waxing wooden floors and trendy linoleum was a must in every household and claimed to bring luster to even the humblest of shacks. These products and many more items of merchandise propagated by the commercials were designed to coat materials of all sorts in a lacquered finish and to create glossy surfaces that would glint in the light. Moreover, these marketplace options for enhancing sheen fitted neatly with the broad contemporary discourse on the subject of cleanliness and hygiene. Quite clearly, this day-to-day gloss was not presented just as a quality inherent in materials and objects. A gloss called for constant renewal. For a surface to sparkle in the light and interact with the gaze, it must first be cleaned and then carefully varnished or else burnished to a shine. Gloss, as Walter Grasskamp put it so graphically in his Anatomy of Gloss, is the “promise of social interaction” with things (Grasskamp 2012: 45–50). This social interaction, in the sense of exchange, applies equally to places and surroundings. As a mediating agent, gloss operates between an onlooker and reflective surfaces. In gloss, the world appears fluid and ever changing—even opposites seem to vanish.

Machine Aesthetics In the 1920s, machines were the real driving force behind the cool gloss aesthetic that pervaded art and everyday existence (Lethen [1994] 2002). Machines began intruding into many spheres of daily life after the First World War, when industry turned its attention back to civilian affairs. Of particular interest was the electric vacuum cleaner, which promised effortless elimination of the most powerful enemy of gloss: everproliferating dust. As AEG announced in their initially rather wordy newspaper ads in 1927, their Vampyr vacuum cleaner made light work of “simultaneously cleansing the floor of dust and brushing it to a glossy shine.” Posters for the British Star vacuum cleaner from Wolverhampton opted instead for visual persuasion: the appliance seemed to transport the extraterrestrial twinkle of the stars into the house. But the crowning glory of vacuum cleaner advertising in the second half of the twenties was AEG’s picture postcard campaign. The company managed to recruit celebrities like Edmonde Guy, the Parisian actor who had danced at the famous Casino de Paris. Guy was also well known in Germany, thanks to the film Gehetzte Menschen (Hunted Men, Peter Ostermayr Produktion for Messters Projektion, DE 1924), which was released in 1924 with Hans Albers playing the leading role, while Edmonde Guy performed as a dancer. In the same year, she appeared in the revue Noch und Noch (More and More) at the famous Admiralspalast in Berlin. This star brought a double twinkle into the home, as a colorful postcard promoting AEG vacuum cleaners around 1929 illustrates: not only was the name itself a promise of stellar brilliance, but the diva was shown with a lacquered bob and an oriental-style costume of gleaming gold (Plate 5). In her hands, the shimmering silver metal AEG Vampire glides over a Persian carpet like an exotic pet. The elegant lady and the machine are a team, demonstrating that the vacuum cleaner effortlessly adds gloss even to the textile surfaces of a fusty, dusty old lounge. Were we to inspect a modern household of the twenties, we would identify numerous other little appliances that mechanized daily chores, importing a cool gleam

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into the home with their metallic casing. They included such boons as the electric hair dryer, the “bob maker” for styling hair, the toaster, and the coffee grinder of polished or chrome-plated metal, stainless steel, or aluminum, and with an enameled, or lacquered finish. But the kingpin of all these glossy machines in the 1920s was the motor car.

Automotive Splendor The machine aesthetic of the early twentieth century found its most vibrant and popular expression in the motor car. After the First World War, the car continued its triumphal march as a vehicle of individual propulsion right into the heart of the cities. Most people at the time could not afford one, but that made the object all the more attractive. Its sprayed, perfectly lustrous surfaces revealed no sign of manufacturing texture, no trace of dirty manual labor. The car embodied the mechanically made product in its most coveted form. Commercial photography with its shiny surface highlighted the finish of the machine. Its painted panels and chrome-plated fittings united with the gleam of photographic surfaces. The automobile was presented in countless images as a radiant phenomenon. Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the legendary Pierce Arrow, dated 1931 (Figure 1.1), is an outstanding example. At first, her clients in Buffalo found the spartan black-and-white imagery too avantgarde. They liked their adverts to tell a narrative about traditionally elegant couples in colorful scenes. But the American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White was thoroughly familiar with the world of manufacturing. She had gained a reputation as an industrial photographer with her reportage in 1925/26 about the big Otis steel mills in Cleveland, called the Story of Steel (Bourke-White 1964: 41–5) that came to the attention of Time, the Weekly Newsmagazine and in 1929 led to orders for the new business magazine Fortune (Bourke-White 1964: 51). By selecting a small detail from the luxury frame of Pierce Arrow and dispensing with accessories of any kind, BourkeWhite was able to avoid the box-like driver’s cab, still a common feature in all the cars of the period. Instead, she highlighted the sinuously streamlined contours of the vehicle by focusing on an elongated front wing. This picture of the Pierce Arrow, with its powerful horizontal reflectors on the bonnet and the elegantly curving mudguard, is an abstract and suggestive evocation of dynamic forward motion, while the statuette of the archer on the bonnet features as a symbolic expression of the arrow’s speed. By selecting details from the frame, the dynamic elegance of the wing, the glinting chrome of the wheel caps and headlamp moldings, Bourke-White emphasizes the flawless surface of the cool metal. The lissome forms of the various functional components blend seamlessly. The way the headlamps seem to grow out of the wing is underscored by a second car silhouetted in the foreground with its shimmering light reflexes. This surface perfection of the automobile was a promise of great things to come, namely the new technology of automation. Gloss was its aesthetic vehicle. Serious research was devoted in the 1920s to perfecting automotive paints— Albertol in Germany and Duco in the United States (Blaszcyk 2012: 121f.)—because the commercially available nitrocellulose products, still matte after application, required manufacturers to factor in a labor-intensive final polish (Museum für Lackkunst

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Figure 1.1  Margaret Bourke-White, Pierce Arrow, 1931, gelatin silver print, 33.6 × 21.8 cm. Estate of Margaret Bourke-White. © Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 2020

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2000). This was no longer necessary with the newly developed alkyd coatings. Besides, they were easier to spray, resulting in a more homogeneous quality of surfaces. After a ride on dirty, bumpy roads, car owners, or else their employees or a professional service, devoted hours to maintaining the look: they washed, waxed, and polished to preserve the glamorous relationship with the status symbol. Nothing in the production process should impair the shine, but neither should use. Cars had to look brand new at all times. Any particle of dirt or dust, any scratch, any dent would blight both the real and the metaphorical shine. Modern-day prestige found material expression in a car as bright as a new pin. The painted surfaces of the vehicles flashing like arrows down roads of smooth asphalt reflected the variegated lights of the big city. In return, as the cars sped past, they caught the lights reflected in shop windows and in the glass facades of new buildings, and so the spaces and the materials seemed to slice through each other and constantly alter in the sheen of their surfaces. At night, the urban splendor made up of glaring headlights, illuminated shop windows, and neon ads fused into a “veritable frenzy of light unrivalled by the dreamy glow of some old fairy tale” (Riezler 1928: 42). Despite the growing number of so-called Selbstfahrerinnen (self-driving women), an expression that served to distinguish between driving women and women being driven by a chauffeur (see Hertling 2013: 67), motorists in the 1920s were for the most part men. The social glamor associated with a car was boosted by placing a muse, i.e., an attractive female, on the passenger seat. In his whimsical essay “Car and Young Girl,” published in the magazine Der Querschnitt in 1931, Karl Vollmoeller, the motor racer and aircraft designer who exerted considerable influence as an author, scriptwriter, and talent scout, claimed: “Our industry churns out the car on a belt. And the car churns out our girls. More or less on a belt too.” He goes on to assert: “Telephone and car are currently a girl’s secondary gender characteristics” (Vollmoeller 1932: 244f.; first mentioned in Molderings 1995: 63). However, observes Vollmoeller, further to his diagnosis of this attraction between cars and girls, “the car will soon be taken for granted and lose its sex appeal” (Vollmoeller 1932: 244). Imagery likewise conveyed the relationship between women and cars as latently erotic. At the start of the century, the newly developed motor vehicle had been accompanied in visual depictions by lightly clad female figures in the tradition of Nike and Victoria, but the liberation movement changed that. The “New Woman” of the 1920s liked to imagine herself at the steering wheel. Accordingly, in the 1928 volume of Die Dame, Elida gloss shampoo was promoted by a driving lady proudly wearing a bob (Thormann 1993). There are poster designs from a male perspective like the Citroen-Lady at the Place Vendome (see Zeller 1985: 67) by the French artist André E. Marty in 1924, showing a frontal view of a grim-faced lady in a wide-brimmed hat concentrating hard behind the wheel within a carriage-like interior. And there are others, like Tamara de Lempicka’s Self-Portrait in Green Bugatti (Figure 1.2) projecting the audacious female racing driver from a dynamically diagonal angle. In the July issue of 1929, the painting was reproduced on the front cover of the fashionable journal Die Dame (Thormann 1993: 141–3). The close-fitting racing cap emphasizing the boy-look contrasts with the sensuous eyes under heavily made-up lids. As a laid-back chauffeuse, Lempicka in her selffashioning uses the vehicle as body armor to enhance her erotic potential. Both car and

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Figure 1.2  Tamara de Lempicka, Self-Portrait in Green Bugatti, 1929, oil on panel, 35 × 26,6 cm. Private collection, Switzerland. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

woman bathe each other in additional sparkle. And it is by no means just metaphorical since cars were regarded as a luxurious female comfort (see Sachs 1984: 51–60). In 1923, 80 percent of the American cars were black (see Blaszczyk 2012: 116), but in the mid-1920s, Henry Ford’s oft-quoted principle that an automobile could be had in any color as long as it was black began to crumble: the car body paint industry had

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discovered color and used it to appeal primarily to women, who were allegedly more susceptible on that front, enabling the old cliché of the affinity of female and color. And so the shiny pink dress of the lady on the front cover of the American magazine Motor serves as a model for the choice of paint. The horrified carmaker is clad in subdued shades of gray, while the paint technician wields a color chart to display the myriad new opportunities (Blaszcyk 2012: 120).

The Gloss of Artificial Silk However, among the women of the 1920s, the mistress of the motor car remained the exception. More commonly, the car and the trendily dressed female body would fuse in surface glitter. Over the course of the 1920s, ladies’ legs in shimmering stockings of artificial silk perched on the bonnet or bumper, or quite simply lined up by the lacquered frame, evolved into a commonplace for erotic relations between the sexes. There was a prelude here in a fashion element adopted by the “New Woman”: the short, leg-revealing skirt (Schaukal [1927] 1980: 178–9). And along with the leg, the stocking acquired an unprecedented public visibility.2 Despite initial concerns about the morals of their wearers, stockings of artificial silk were a resounding success. For the first time, gloss was combined with a relatively high level of transparency. Legs remained visible under the transparent tissue without being naked. Henceforth, they were clad in the gloss of artificial silk. Europe’s leading artificial silk, known as Bemberg silk, but also as glossy silk or copper rayon, was made by Bemberg AG in Wuppertal. It was famed for its fine mesh and its metallic sheen. As the advertising materials and impressive range of colors testify, the company produced not only stockings but also rolls of this fabric, which the new middle classes could purchase by the meter to turn into ball gowns and ladies’ underwear (Plate 6). Bemberg silk, far glossier than the most expensive natural silk, was the embodiment of the petty bourgeois glamor. Though the new material was propagated as a contribution to overcoming old class divisions, too much gloss, on the other hand, was seen as a revealing sign of the social climber unable to afford “pure silk.” No one has revealed the ambivalent promises of artificial silk more clearly than Irmgard Keun. The Artificial Silk Girl in her eponymous novel of 1932 is aspiring “upwards” and wants, as she repeatedly points out, “to become a shine” (Keun 2002: 36, 37, 69, 77, 81, 171, 188, 192).3 The heroine feels she has scored a stage victory on this journey when she manages to steal “five undershirts made from Bemberg silk” of a lover’s wife (Keun 2002: 71). Thanks to this booty, she imagines that she is already on the ladder up and notes: “Things are looking up. I have five undershirts made of Bemberg silk” (Keun 2002: 66). In Keun’s novel, gloss is the yardstick for a successful social ascent, and it can be gauged by the possession of artificial silk. Only when the heroine offers her “silken shins” to a blind war cripple is there—indicatively enough— no talk of gloss. That passage is about touch instead, but it is clear from the context that artificial silk stockings are the ultimate sensation in this proletarian milieu. As time passes, the “artificial silk girl” realizes that for “every gloss … there is an even higher gloss” (Keun 2002: 106).4 Right at the top, there is “pure silk” (Keun 2002: 94), the only

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contender for really “posh silk” (Keun 2002: 81).5 Its sheen is at home in a different social setting, which, in the novel, can conceivably be entered through hard, honest work, but which the “artificial silk girl” emphatically rejects. In Alfred Döblin’s famous novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1927, “ladies stockings, genuine artificial silk” (Döblin 1996: 42) also figure as an indicator of modern urban life and new social values. The image of artificial silk glamor in this milieu was promoted by advertising campaigns involving contemporary female actors and singers. In 1927, three years before her career took a leap forward with Josef von Sternberg’s film Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, UFA, DE 1930), Marlene Dietrich (Figures 1.3a and 1.3b) was part of a picture postcard campaign for Bemberg AG. Like the movie actors Grit and Liane Haid, she posed for a media-effective profession of faith in the shiny Bemberg stockings. With elegantly crossed legs, Marlene Dietrich seems to take the viewer into her confidence with that saucily naive look, revealing

Figure 1.3a  Marlene Dietrich, Promotion-Postcard for Bemberg Silk Stockings, c. 1928. Collection of Marlene Pilaete. © Marlene Dietrich

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Figure 1.3b  Reverse Side of Same Postcard, Saying, “Ich trage nur Bemberg-Strümpfe— Marlene Dietrich” (I only wear Bemberg stockings). Collection of Marlene Pilaete. © Marlene Dietrich

the secret of her charm in the caption: “I only wear Bemberg stockings.” In other cases (as with the Haid sisters), there are trivial rhymes on the back of the postcards, such as: “If you want to attract an envious stare, Bemberg Silk should be all you wear.” In contrast to the colorful picture postcards advertising the AEG Vampyr, the black-andwhite photographs for the artificial silk stocking bear a closer affinity to contemporary cinema,6 which is where the models had established their public image. Posters produced by Bemberg AG, on the other hand, did revel in color. Jupp Wiertz, the Cologne graphic artist who worked for this company, among others, in the latter half of the 1920s, seems to have used Marlene’s perfect legs as the template for a poster advertising Bemberg stocking (Figure 1.4). The vertical format shows two wellproportioned, elegantly shod female legs emerging from a gently flowing red fabric. Their pale sheen is set off by a jet-black cat that rubs against the shiny silk, creating an effective contrast between the tactile allure of the cuddly fur and the satin stockings. The cool eroticism of silkily shining ladies’ legs that dominated these stocking commercials could also be found in other contexts during the 1920s. When the gloss of silk-clad legs was combined in photographs with the gloss of the motor car, there was doubtless an element of provocative pleasure in the confrontation, choreographed far more drastically in 1928 by Georg Scholz in Flesh and Iron, a painting now deemed lost, but handed down by a photographic reproduction in a contemporary magazine Der Querschnitt in 1928 (Der Querschnitt 8, no. 9, September 1928). It depicted two naked women between gleaming metallic machines. Compared with the naked bodies in Scholz’s painting, however, glossy stockings brought refinement to bare skin.

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Figure 1.4  Jupp Wiertz, Poster for Bemberg Stockings, c. 1928. Collection of Ernst Cremer und Lilli Philippen, “Die Femme fatal im Tempo der Großstadt,” Suermondt-LudwigMuseum Aachen 2003, 77. © Marlene Dietrich

They were a kind of fitting. And in this juxtaposition, there was probably also a witty invitation to the viewer to contemplate the natural means of propulsion alongside the car. Certainly, glossy legs were a widespread proxy for the “artificial silk girl,” and they were often encountered in contemporary shop window decorations and in commercial photography. Some of these photographs were taken by Umbo (whose real name was Otto Maximilian Umbehr) for the stocking department in Berlin’s celebrated department store KaDeWe (Molderings 1995: 117). One of his pictures shows two stockinged “dummy legs,” an invention allegedly so powerful in its ability to create an illusion that shop windows were “only permitted to use natural positions” (StephaniHahn 1923: 75). Another work by Umbo was referenced by the Hungarian journalist and art historian Ernst Kállai (see Molderings 1995: 45). It is what might be termed a female serial portrait in the form of five glossily stockinged pairs of legs. The gag is that

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for his serial portraits of legs, precisely synchronized like chorus girls, Umbo used a highly polished floor, so that each leg seems to recognize itself in a mirror. One photograph that picks up this reduction of the female body to glossily clad legs and their relationship with the gloss of an automobile (Figure 1.5) was published in 1932 in the monthly magazine Uhu. The caption was Panne (Breakdown), a popular catchword in the early days of the automobile (see Kroner [1926]1980: 141–2). The detail chosen from the car is not unlike the one in Bourke-White’s photograph of

Figure 1.5  Erich Engel, Panne, Uhu 1932. © Ullsteinbild-Erich Engel

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the Pierce Arrow, although this vehicle appears to derive from humbler origins. The female person apparently tinkering with the underside of the vehicle has been whittled down in this photograph—like in the Bemberg ads—to her beautifully formed, silkily shimmering legs (Uhu 1979: 108). These protrude from under the chassis like those disembodied dummy legs, offering themselves up to the viewer. The female figure is literally lying in the dirt of the road, protected only by a carefully spread, patterned blanket. All too obviously the perspective of the male savior—on the woman and on the car—is playing with the stereotype of the “fallen woman.” The gloss of artificial silk and the gloss of shiny cars oscillate between the different social and gender-specific spheres that came together in the overwhelming gloss of the city. This gloss of the new materials apparently surpassing the physicality of the material world demanded constant care for and labor on physical surfaces. But the promise of becoming part of this gloss was held out by all the different aids to surface optimization, however big or small, promoted by the advertisements. After the catastrophe of the First World War, gloss for all in the heydays of the Weimar Republic seemed to break down rigid social boundaries and to herald a new world.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Kate Vanovitch for translating the main text. 2 Birgit Haase kindly made her manuscript titled “Mythen der Moderne—Vom Kunstseidenstrumpf zur Feinstrumpfhose” (Modern Myths: From Artificial Silk Stockings to Tights) accessible, which will appear in the book “Strümpfe aus Deutschland” ed. Michaela Breil, Peter Fassl (forthcoming 2021). 3 Transl. modified: “ich will ein Glanz werden,” a phrase that—in several variations— runs through the entire novel. The English translation (“I want to become a star”) does not meet the multiple meanings of “Glanz” in the sense of shine, gloss, and glamor. 4 Transl. modified: “jeder Glanz hat über sich noch einen höheren Glanz” (Keun 2017: 129). 5 Transl. modified: “aus weißer vornehmer Seide” (Keun 2017: 101). 6 See the contribution of Petra Löffler in this volume.

References Blaszczyk, R. L. (2012), The Color Revolution, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Bourke-White, M. (1964), Licht und Schatten: Mein Leben, und meine Bilder, München: Droemer/Knaur, 41–5. Döblin, A. (1996), Berlin Alexanderplatz, München: Deutscher taschenbuchverlag. Grasskamp, W. (2012), “An Anatomy of Gloss. The Art of the Surface,” in Max Hollein, Vinzenz Brinkmann and Matthias Ulrich (eds.), Jeff Koons. The Sculptor, ExhibitionCat. Liebieghaus Frankfurt, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 45–50. Hertling, A. (2013), Eroberung der Männerdomäne Automobil. Die Selbstfahrerinnen Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, Erika Mann und Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Bielefeld: Aisthesis.

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Keun, I. ([1932] 2002), The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. Kathie van Ankum, New York: Other Press. Available online: https://archive.org/details/artificialsilkgi00keun/ Zugriff01/09/2020 Keun, I. ([1932] 2017), Das kunstseidene Mädchen, Berlin: Ullstein. Kroner, F. ([1926] 1980), “Das Auto meiner Frau,” in C. Ferber (ed.), Die Dame. Ein deutsches Journal für den verwöhnten Geschmack 1912 bis 1943, Berlin: Ullstein, 141–2. Lethen, H. ([1994] 2002), Cool Conduct. The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press. Molderings, H. (1995), Umbo. Otto Umbehr 1902–1980, Düsseldorf: Richter. Mouré, K. (2002), The Gold Standard Illusion: France, the Bank of France and the International Gold Standard 1914–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Museum für Lackkunst, ed. (2000), Licht, Lack, Farbe. Die Geschichte der Fahrzeuglackierung, Münster: Museum für Lackkunst. Riezler, W. (1928), “Licht und Architektur,” in W. Lotz (ed.), E. Haberfeld (asst.) Licht und Beleuchtung. Lichttechnische Fragen unter Berücksichtigung der Bedürfnisse der Architektur, Berlin: Reckendorf, 42. Sachs, W. (1984), Die Liebe zum Automobil. Ein Rückblick in die Geschichte unserer Wünsche, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Schaukal, R. v. ([1927] 1980), “Das Bein,” in C. Ferber (ed.), Die Dame, Ein deutsches Journal für den verwöhnten Geschmack 1912 bis 1943, Berlin: Ullstein, 178–9. Stephani-Hahn, E. v. (1923), Schaufenster. Künstlerische Lehrsätze und Erläuterungen, Berlin: Schottländer & Co. Thormann, E. (1993), Tamara de Lempicka. Kunstkritik und Künstlerinnen in Paris, Berlin: Reimer. Uhu. Das Magazin der 20er Jahre (1979), Frankfurt/Main Berlin: Ullstein, 108. Vollmoeller, K. (1932), “Auto und junges Mädchen,” Der Querschnitt, Vol. 4: 244 f. Wagner, M. (2018), Marmor und Asphalt. Soziale Oberflächen im Berlin des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Wagenbach. Zeller, R. (1985), Automobile. Das magische Objekt in der Kunst, Frankfurt/Main: Insel.

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2

Flickering Lights: Shine and Diversion in Weimar Cinema Petra Löffler

Cinema and Visual Pleasure The advent of electric lighting and that of cinema go hand in hand. The world’s first International Exhibition of Electricity took place in the fall of 1881 in Paris, “the city of light.” The Palace of Industry displayed all manner of new lighting systems, promising that “electricity was ‘the light of the future’” (Freeberg 2014: 10). Two decades later, around 1905, industrially produced electricity, as well as motorcars and airplanes, was becoming cultural practice. As Henri Lefebvre ([1962] 1995: 106) notes, “[T]his was also the first years of cinema, of advertising transformed by new means, of mechanical recording of music and the human voice.” That cinema began to flourish in the wake of these innovations is due largely to the ready availability of incandescent electric light bulbs, as film projectors required both a strong and steady source of light.1 Precisely because of this intense source of illumination, the first encounters of moviegoers with moving images were often a challenge for their perception. The intermittent projection of the film images produced flickering light, which provoked physical reactions in the audience, ranging from visual pleasure to dizziness and even to nausea. In fact, the stroboscopic effect of film projection soon became a subject of film itself, as with G. W. (“Billy”) Bitzer’s short film Interior New York Subway (USA, American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. 1905). Here, we follow a train on its journey through the tunnels of the new subway system from Union Square to Grand Central Station. The train was filmed from another train traveling behind it and illuminated by a floodlight mounted on a third train traveling at the same speed on a parallel track. This complex arrangement of moving vehicles and light sources in combination with the design of the underground railway’s construction in picket fence-like rows of piles transformed the subway tunnel into an intermittent film projection (Figure 2.1). Reflected off of the closely positioned piles, the flickering lights hit the eyes of the spectator (Löffler 2014: 211), just as they do moviegoers in the cinema. As Bohemian journalist Walter Serner describes his experience at the movies in 1913, “[i]t was an act of seeing, full of speed and life; it was pleasure. … The cinema is entirely devoted to the eye and to its pleasure” (Serner [1913] 2016: 43). For Serner and his contemporaries,

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Figure 2.1  (a–f) G. W. Bitzer, New York Subway (American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., USA 1905). © National Film Preservation Foundation

film was perceived as a procession of images, capturing the steady “lifelike” movement of vehicles, people, and things “as the most important component and the essential nature of visual pleasure” (Serner [1913] 2016). Refractions and reflections of light on shiny surfaces or human bodies, things, and materials became a common feature of early cinema, generated deliberately by filmmakers of the 1920s. At the time, film theory was concerned with the visual pleasure generated by glittering lights and artificial lighting that lent film images both ever-varying levels of brightness and a magical glamor. French film theorist and director Louis Delluc (1920) even coined the term “photogénie” to denote the “cinematic” qualities of things, materials, and organic substances, including human skin, to reflect light and, therefore, to shine.

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In the following, I will examine the relationship between electric light, cinema, and diversion as a key configuration of modernity, popular culture, and consumerism. In turn, I will argue for a twofold conception of shine as a metaphor of desires elicited by the advertising and entertainment industries and as a metonym of modern light systems and shiny synthetic materials, such as nitrocellulose (cellulose nitrate), which was used at the time not only as the base for celluloid film but for numerous consumer articles, including artificial silk, nitro lacquer, glue, nail polish and others, as well. My argument focuses on Weimar Cinema of the 1920s in the context of German architect, writer, and journalist Siegfried Kracauer’s theories on modernity, consumerism, and cinema culture. Kracauer was a central figure in debates concerning the dialectics of modernity and understood the complex entanglement of bourgeois society, the entertainment industry, and shine. Between 1921 and 1933, the year he fled Germany after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, he had been employed at the renowned Frankfurter Zeitung, for which he wrote close to two thousand articles, film critiques, notes, and book reviews (Hansen 2012: 3). Kracauer contributed widely to the contemporary discussions on sensory distraction, famously referring to Berlin’s giant cinema theaters as “palaces of distraction” (Kracauer 1995: 323). Like the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, who argued for the “reception [of film] in a state of distraction” ([1935] 1969: 244), Kracauer insisted on the positive aspects of mass entertainment and diversion.2 Both critical thinkers believed in the “possibility of a new sensory relationship with the material world” (Hansen 2012: 4) enabled by the shiny surfaces of bodies, things, and materials captured on celluloid and distracting the sense perception of a mass audience. For them, cinema was one of the favorite arenas for discussing the dialectics of shine as a visual phenomenon of surface perception and as a material reality, including artificial light systems and synthetic materials.

Light in the Age of Its Technical Reproduction With the implementation of the electric light bulb in the 1880s, and even more so with the advent of the neon tube in the 1910s, city streets and squares, music halls, amusement parks, theaters, movie palaces, and other venues for popular nighttime entertainment began to be illuminated—the city became a veritable “Lichtspiel,” a “photoplay,” as the Germans then referred to the cinema.3 As philosopher Paul Virilio aptly observes, the matter of cinema is less “public image” than it is “public lighting” (Virilio [1988] 1994: 21). Likewise, luminous advertising became not only a common feature of big cities. It became sign and metaphor of modernity, spreading across the “Western” world. According to historian Janet Ward, “[m]odern advertising was the first textual presence on the street to give expression to the very power of mass culture” (Ward 2001: 98). Advertisements were positioned in prominent places, like Piccadilly Circus in London, Time Square in New York, Place Pigalle and the Grands Boulevards in Paris, or Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstraße in Berlin (Hoormann 2003: 247). The illumination of big cities by night soon became a major subject of Weimar Cinema. As early as 1905, Edwin S. Porter’s short film Coney Island at Night (Edison Mfg. Co., USA 1905) showcased the transformation of the United States’ most famous

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amusement park into a nocturnal ocean of light.4 Some twenty years later, Walther Ruttmann’s seminal avant-garde film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Gross-Stadt (Berlin. Symphony of the Big City, Deutsche Vereinsfilm AG, DE 1927) combines sequences of urban traffic and masses of people walking on the streets with recordings of nocturnal diversions in amusement parks, in bars, and in music and dancing halls. According to an anonymous film critic, Ruttmann’s film represents the restlessness of the big city “unleashed to a captivating flicker” (quot. Hoormann 2003: 281, my translation). The flickering lights in these films were effects of the reflection and refraction of artificial light sources on the surfaces of things and facades of buildings—and light-sensitive celluloid was just the right material to capture them. These films created an entire environment of shine, capturing the vivid nightlife of the German capital. Many other films of the 1920s international movie culture, such as King Vidor’s The Crowd (MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, USA 1928) or Paul Fejos’s Lonesome (Universal Pictures, USA 1928), represented the nocturnal spectacle of the illuminated city and its popular sites for entertainment. Siegfried Kracauer’s feuilleton article “Ansichtspostkarte” (Picture Postcard), published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in May 1930, reveals the illuminating qualities of the neon signs and lights from the movie palaces at Kurfürstendamm shining on the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church across the street, enveloping it in a “mysterious glow.” He writes: The mysterious glow is in reality only a reflection. Reflection of the facades of light, which, from the Ufa-Palace down to the Capitol theater and beyond, turn the night into day so as to drive the horror of the night out of the theatergoer’s workday. … The mild radiance that surrounds the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is the unintentional reflection of this dark glow. (Kracauer 1930: 241f, quoted in Federle 2001: 45)

Kracauer’s description of the “unintentional reflection” (Federle 2001: 45) of light on one of Berlin’s most prominent landmarks contrasts its illuminated appearance with the horrifying social reality of the working class in the Weimar Republic, as the dark underside of “enlightened” modernity. For Kracauer, luminous advertising and the cinema are associated with “business and distraction” (Hoormann 2003: 254, my translation). For workers and the petty bourgeoisie, he maintains, they serve as substitutes, capturing the imagination and providing an escape from the hardships of working life. As art historian Anne Hoormann argues, “switching on the electric light points the way toward leisure and entertainment” (Hoormann 2003: 281, my translation). Yet, as Kracauer observes in a short essay entitled “Analyse eines Stadtplans” (Analysis of a City Map) dating from 1926, the glaring neon signs also possess a “paradoxical quality” (Federle 2001: 46), even a sort of aggression: As dusk begins to fall, the lights go on at eye level. Undeflectable like the little balls of an abacus, the arc lamps prowl through the labyrinth of flaming arrows and Bengalese oscillations. In the centers of night life the illumination is so harsh that one has to hold one’s hands over one’s ears. Meanwhile the lights have gathered

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for their own pleasure, instead of shinning for man. Their glowing traces want to illuminate the night but succeed only in chasing it away. Their advertisements sink into the mind without allowing one to decipher them. (Kracauer 1995: 43)

For Kracauer, luminous advertisements attack the human senses and confuse them. They exceed their intention to generate visual pleasure or provoke the attention of people walking on city streets and squares to become agents of an “intense scopophilia” (Ward 2001: 128) devoted to a “semiotic fetishism: the creation of a consumerist drive” (Ward 2001: 130). In another feuilleton article from 1927, entitled “Lichtreklame” (Advertising Lights), Kracauer directly addresses the alluring symbolism of artificial light systems in the age of electricity: Advertising lights rise towards a heaven in which there are no longer angels, but also in which all is not just business. The advertising lights shoot out beyond the economy, and what is intended to be advertising becomes illumination. … One can still recognize signs and texts in this teeming of light, yet signs and texts have transcended their practical purpose, their dissolution into colorfulness has shattered them into glitter fragments that come together according to laws that differ from the usual ones. The drizzle of advertisements that the business world showers down forms constellations in a strange heaven. (Kracauer [1927] 2011: 529f, quot. in Federle 2001: 46)

Kracauer plays, here, with the term “illumination” understood not as a mere shedding of light in the profane material world but as an epiphany to a transcendent world, unreachable for the alienated modern subject. He goes on to compare the spectacle of luminous advertising and its visual instability with the flickering of the moving image. For him such advertisements look like “a blurred movie [verregneter Film]” ([1927] 2011: 531, my translation). This comparison between flickering neon signs and film images is not simply a metaphor; it is based on a concrete metonymic relationship, because film also flickers as an effect of its projection mechanism. Such metonymic relationships appear regularly in Kracauer’s essays and articles about modern “Western” society and consumerism. They express his materialisticphysiognomic view of a disenchanted and disintegrating world, a world scattered into fragments like the tiny shiny pieces of glass inside a kaleidoscope—a then popular optical device that created ever-changing visual configurations with each movement. In his enthusiastic 1924 review of Karl Grune’s film drama Die Straße. Die Geschichte einer Nacht (The Street. The History of a Night, UFA, DE 1923), the kaleidoscope advances to a metaphor for “a life deprived of substance,” which “knows nothing but isolated events that form ever new series of images” (Kracauer 2004: 56, quot. Hansen 2012: 9). Kracauer maintains that the city street in Grune’s film is the site of random encounters without establishing any substantial relationship among the city dwellers—people are only figures bumping up against each other, events take place, and one situation follows the other without continuity in empty, flowing time. Once

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again, “a neon sign flickers like a twinkling eye” (Kracauer 2004: 57, my translation), here functioning as a metaphor of the confused parallel existence of animated things and reified people. As cultural theorist Esther Leslie summarizes Kracauer’s critique, “[t]his is a swarm on the asphalt, a soulless next-to-each-other of steered cars and unsteered drives” (Leslie 2005: 159). To examine this disintegrating “kaleidoscopic” world of a meaningless “empire of lightbulbs” (Federle 2001: 46) in both practically and critically, Kracauer developed a method of surface analysis that enabled him to identify the entanglements between seemingly unrelated things and thus see them in relation to one another. For this “materialistic physiognomy of modernity” (Hansen 2012: 6), Kracauer observes and collects material on the street—and in the urban environment at large—those things that make no impression on human observers and tend to go unnoticed. He believes that these “unrelated” things can be transformed until they finally begin to shine, “comforting everyone” (Kracauer [1930] 2011: 242, my translation). In other words, shine is not only a way to perceive things but a way to encounter them, to see them in “another light”—it is, in itself, a transformative force. For Kracauer, electric lights furnish the profane material world with the comforting sublime of shine. They lead the world to transcend, to become an unreachable non-terrestrial realm of happiness and redemption. By way of his philosophical, one might even say theological, thinking, he discovers in the “unscrupulous glitter” of neon signs nothing less than “a blazing protest against the darkness of our existence” ending up in “the desperate confession to the entertainment industry” (Kracauer [1930] 2011: 242). No doubt, for Kracauer, the shine of electric lights advances to a metaphor for the dreams and desires of the underprivileged classes of the Weimar Republic. Following this argument, neon signs and film projection unite to unleash a “democratic light for the masses” (Hoormann 2003: 285, my translation)—a light that bears the promise of a better future.

Cinematic Vertigo and Kaleidoscopic Vision The electric light systems of neon signs and film projections not only turn darkness into brightness, they also reveal the shininess of surfaces. Cinema, likewise, maintains a close relationship with popular diversions and the entertainment industry in their strong affinity to shine and glamor. I would like to turn, now, to my examination of Ewald André Dupont’s film drama Varieté (UFA, DE 1925) as an example of the entangled visions of cinema and entertainment, as well as cinema’s affinity for vertigo and sensual distraction. Dupont’s film premiered on November 16, 1925, in Berlin at the glamorous Ufa Palace and quickly became one of the most successful movies of that year. The film features a trio of trapeze acrobats performing in a music hall show, taking place in the famous Berlin Wintergarten theater. The ceiling of the historical building was decorated with hundreds of electric light bulbs at the time, giving it the appearance of a night-sky full of bright stars (Figure 2.2). Varieté connects the popular sites of mass entertainment to the nightly metropolis: amusement park and music hall, on the one hand; illuminated city streets by night, occupied by masses of people in search of diversion, on the other. As a highlight, it captures a special nocturnal spectacle: a firework display with fountains of sparkling light.

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Figure 2.2  Friedrich Mäschke, Stage Performance in the Berlin Wintergarten, 1940. © Bundesarchiv Bild 146–1988-035-15/Mäschke, Friedrich

The jealousy of the male lead, played by popular German actor Emil Jannings, is the main subject matter of the film. His feelings come to a climax when the three acrobats perform their most dangerous stunt—a blindfolded triple somersault— in front of an excited audience. Shortly before this performance, he learns that his partner is having an affair with his fellow acrobat. His sudden jealousy is not only visible on his face, it is represented by the ups and downs, the twisting movements of the camera that result in blurred images (Figure 2.3). These extreme movements of the camera affected the audience on a somatic level, generating a pure “perception-image.”5 As Kracauer later recognized in his critical study of Weimar Cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, Dupont’s movie “penetrated outer reality by means of devices used originally in the outward projection of inner reality” (Kracauer 1947: 127). Dupont’s cameraman Karl Freund also used cross-dissolves and a prism as a technical means to create a distracted sense perception by provoking disorientation and dizziness in the spectator. The play with such optical devices supports a kaleidoscopic vision in Kracauer’s sense, one that makes watching the film analogue to the sensorial experience of flickering lights. That is why the film historian Heide Schlüpmann, who analyzed the close relationship between the entertainment industry, cinema, and distraction in Dupont’s film, concludes that for the spectator, distraction seems to be an effect of cinematic light technology (Schlüpmann 1992: 56f).

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Figure 2.3  E. A. Dupont, Varieté (UFA, DE 1925): Acrobat Performance in the Wintergarten. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung

In her 1950 book on Weimar Cinema The Hauted Screen, film critic Lotte H. Eisner highlights Freund’s ability to capture the exciting ups and downs or twisted movements of the acrobats: “The camera operated by the great Karl Freund, voluptuously follows the agile forms as they leap forward and fly through space, turning over and over in daring somersaults or suddenly plunging earthwards in an almost certain fall, then gliding up again in the networks of cables and rigging” (Eisner [1952] 1973: 248). According to her, the film’s dramatic love story becomes secondary in “this web and flow of light and movement” (Eisner [1952] 1973). Instead, the audience itself becomes the camera’s target, made subject to the manipulations of film aesthetics aiming to distract its perception: “[I]t [the audience] is caught in a net of a shower of sparks, it evokes the ebb and flow of a sticky tide of innumerable eyes, it is a slimy mud-pit with bubbles rising as from a lava-field” (Eisner [1952] 1973: 247). Eisner explicitly draws a connection from this distracted vision to the flickering lights of neon signs illuminating city streets by night (Eisner [1952] 1973: 246). Following this argument, the flickering lights captured by a film camera and projected on a screen in the cinema and human vision are entangled through the flow of matter and energy. In Dupont’s Varieté, the illuminated city by night and sites of popular entertainment, such as amusement parks and music halls, are closely tied. In his later movies Moulin Rouge (BIP, GB 1928), Piccadilly (BIP, GB 1929), and Salto Mortale (Harmonie-Film, DE 1931), popular sites of mass entertainment also played an important role. They appear regularly in many other films of the period, such as in Robert Wiene’s Das

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Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Decla-Film-Ges., DE 1920), Fritz Lang’s Dr. Marbuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, Uco-Film, DE 1922), or Karl Grune’s Die Straße. Die Geschichte einer Nacht (The Street. The History of a Night, UFA, DE 1923)—Weimar Cinema explicitly deals with its position and role in the modern entertainment industry. The visual pleasure in Dupont’s melodrama, however, results not only from “pure vision,” from the sensory perception of light and lighting. The erotic charm of the female lead, played by Lya de Putti, evokes another kind of visual pleasure: woman as object of the male gaze, “isolated, glamorous, displayed, sexualized” (Mulvey [1975] 1989: 19). In the film, the female figure started her career as a nameless exotic dancer, revealing her half-exposed body in a nightclub to a mostly male audience hungry for visual and other pleasures. As the story unfolds, she is metamorphized from the stereotype of the naive “strange girl” searching for shelter to that of the seductive modern vamp and star in a big music-hall show, lavished in luxurious gowns, expensive jewelry, and sporting a bob haircut. The camera captures her flat face, pale painted skin, and large, wide-open eyes again and again in close-ups, transforming it into an icon of fetishized femininity ready for giving visual pleasure to the film audience. This alluring gaze of the actress’ eye as icon renders Dupont’s film a “fetishistic scopophilia” (Mulvey [1975] 1989: 20) that turns the look itself into the subject matter of the film.6 This image of fetishized femininity is closely related to the glamorous subjectivity of the female star, lending a personal quality to the shine of bodily surfaces, clothes, and jewelry. In Weimar Cinema, the shine of the illuminated city and the shine of luxurious consumer products are entangled in a network of distraction and consumerism (Friedberg 1994). This entanglement has become the subject of Irmgard Keun’s remarkable novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl), published in 1932, where a poor young woman, Doris, wants to become a glamorous person, full of shine. For her, becoming “ein Glanz,” a “shine,” means both having money to buy luxurious consumer goods, like silk stockings, and being recognized as a bona fide personality. That is why, as she tells her diary, she wants to become a movie star—a shine on celluloid, so to speak: “But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it’s going to become even more so. […] And when I read it later on, everything will be like at the movies—I’m looking at myself in pictures” (Keun 2002: 28). For Keun’s protagonist, becoming a glamorous movie star seems to be the only way out of poverty and the only way to gain a good social reputation and a public image. The difference between luxurious “real” and much cheaper “artificial” silk, announced by the title of the novel, not only alludes to the moral distinction between a “proper” and an “improper” or “false” life, it also signifies a class distinction. In the novel, as well as in cinema, shine functions as a category of social distinction.

Distraction and Consumerism In Joe May’s film drama Asphalt (UFA, DE 1929), another example of the thenpopular genre of “street films,” the shine of city lights and the shine of precious consumer goods are explicitly visually coupled. The film dazzles its spectators with a

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“spectacular design, kaleidoscopic montage, double exposures, and creative lighting effects” (Bergfelder, Harris, Street 2007: 118), and it integrates the entanglement of desire, distraction, and consumerism into its plot. As historians of modern culture observed, “the department store became a primal form of the urban spectacle” (Gunning 1997: 31) and window-shopping was seen as a “secondhand distraction” (Gleber 1997: 60). In the Weimar “street film,” the urban environment of busy streets, junctions, and sidewalks functioned as designated “sites of desires” (Kaes 1996). May’s film relates the rush of a big city, with its hectic traffic on the streets and busy crowds on the sidewalks, to temporary diversions such as window-shopping or gawking at a window dresser putting on her artificial (Bemberg) silk stocking in front of an excited audience (Figure 2.4). Interestingly, the street scenes were shot in a former Zeppelin hangar in Berlin, where a 400-meter-long street was built and paved with asphalt. The shops that lined it were equipped with neon signs and display windows lit by thousands of light bulbs consuming huge amounts of electricity (Bergfelder, Harris, Street 2007: 124). The film architect Erich Kettelhut, whose aim was “to provide interesting details and views everywhere for the panning lens” (Bergfelder, Harris, Street 2007: 125) of the film camera, invited local businessmen and shop owners to bring their own advertising signs, neon lights, and articles for sale to the film set. This anecdote confirms the interdependency between the film industry and consumer culture. In Asphalt, the audience’s attention permanently shifts between the different visual pleasures of advertisements and shop windows, until it is confronted with a near-accident and an attempted diamond theft. This is how the melodrama starts: the young traffic cop Albert Holk (Gustav Fröhlich) accidentally encounters a young and alluring con artist by the name of Else Kramer (Betty Amann), who is caught in the act of stealing a precious diamond from a jewelry shop right across the street from where the traffic cop is doing his job. Günther Rittau’s camera captured the interaction between the elderly shop owner and the attractive diamond thief, who wears an elegant wardrobe made of shiny materials, in regular and reverse shots (Figure 2.5). These eventually culminate in close-ups of the female figure, her shimmering facial skin, and alluring eyes framed with false eyelashes. Here, again, the body of the female lead is displayed for the eye of the male spectator as an object of “fetishistic scopophilia” (Mulvey [1975] 1989: 20), shown so as to sparkle on the film screen. As Janet Ward maintains, the heroine represents “the embodiment of conspicuous consumption: it is in her that the consequence of urban commodity excess is allegorized in the film as the ultimate act of surface-cloning” (Ward 2001: 158). In this respect, the film title is telling. Asphalt is a natural material and byproduct of petroleum, which reflects light in its liquid state, or when its hardened surface becomes wet. Compressed asphalt has been used to surface roads since the mid-nineteenth century and becomes further condensed and polished over time by the many vehicles that moved over it. Under the glow of electric lights, asphalt’s glossy surface acquires a shimmer, a “black” shine that contrasts the bright shine of diamonds and human eyes, as well as the visual pleasure ascribed to them. Unsurprisingly, Kracauer recognized that in May’s Asphalt, “the pavement itself is a central motif ” (Kracauer 1947: 159). This becomes apparent already in the

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Figure 2.4  (a–b) Joe May, Asphalt (UFA, DE 1929): Window-Shopping. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung

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Figure 2.5  Joe May, Asphalt (UFA, DE 1929): Desire for Diamonds. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung

prologue of the film showing how asphalt is made and used “to pave the way for city traffic—that thundering chaos mastered … by the magic gestures of the police man” (Kracauer 1947: 159). The double-exposed images of the dark shimmering material poured out and pounded by street workers are followed by documentary footage of the city center of Berlin and its traffic, and neon signs on big city streets. In the prologue, the steaming liquid substance of asphalt, with its dark shimmer, becomes an agent of visual pleasure, generated by the light sensitivity of the black-and-white cellulose film of the time (Figure 2.6). May’s film consciously plays with the visual qualities and attributed values of different materials—with the light shine of precious diamonds or artificial silk, and with the dark shine of more ordinary materials, such as asphalt. As we see, here, film is able to relate these different materials in a “kaleidoscopic” view that extracts visual pleasure from every source. Ultimately, asphalt can also function as a black mirror for subjectivity. In a short essay entitled Langeweile (Boredom) from 1924, Kracauer describes the invasiveness of the luminous advertisements producing an eccentric vision of a different state of body and mind: “One’s body takes root in the asphalt, and, together with the enlightening revelations of the illuminations, one’s spirit—which is no longer one’s one—roams ceaselessly out of the night and into the night” (Kracauer 1995: 332). In Kracauer’s allegorical vision, asphalt—as dark as the night—provides a stable base to the “homeless” human body and shelter to the soul. Its materiality, its gravity, and its density alike play a counterpart to the volatile illuminations of the neon signs in the night sky.

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Figure 2.6  Joe May, Asphalt (UFA, DE 1929): Black Shine. © Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung

Micro-Politics of Distraction In 1912, sociologist Emilie Altenloh conducted one of the first surveys of the urban film audience. She declares, “[B]oth the cinema and those who visit it are typical products of our time, characterized by constant preoccupation and a state of nervous restlessness” (Altenloh [1913] 2001: 257). Therefore, she claims, cinema can serve as an adequate facility for relaxation and diversion for workers: “As they visit the cinema they will go in to seek some distraction for a short period of time” (Altenloh [1913] 2001: 257f). Kracauer was also interested in a veritable sociology of distraction. In his survey on the white-collar workers of the Weimar Republic, published in 1929, he observes the tricky relationship between distraction and consumerism, shine and repression. Kracauer emphasizes the desire for distraction as integral part of the lifestyle of white-collar workers, for whom diversion has become almost a duty, and their dedication to glamor: “Nothing is more characteristic of this life, which only in a restricted sense can be called a life, than its view of higher things. Not as substance but as glamour. Yielded not through concentration, but in distraction” (Kracauer [1929] 1998: 88). Glamor and distraction characterize a capitalist society that evokes desires for a higher life it cannot fulfill: “Society does not stop to urge to live amid glamour and distraction, but encourages it wherever and however it can. … Society too is dependent upon diversions … it finds it all to easier to maintain employees in the belief that a life in distraction is at the same time a higher one” (Kracauer [1929] 1998: 89).

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A few years earlier, in his now famous 1926 essay Kult der Zerstreung (Cult of Distraction), Kracauer had developed the notion of distraction as a critical micro-political mode of experience: distraction as improvisation. Here, he insisted that distraction “is meaningful only as improvisation, as a reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of our world … acknowledging the actual state of disintegration” (Kracauer 1995: 327f). For Kracauer, improvisation is the ability to recapture the power to act in situations that are not fully predetermined and open to chance. As such, improvisation seemed to be the redemption of a distraction that is dedicated to passive consumerism and a superficial subjectivity. It is through improvisation that distraction finds its true task as a mirror of the disintegrated world that is distorted, broken into scattered pieces presenting a dispersed, yet realistic image. As improvisation, distraction becomes a tool of critical thinking. In a short article published in July 1931, Kracauer underscores the emancipatory potential of distraction once more. He laments at the same time about UFA’s preoccupation with escapist film genres trying to distract the audience from the hardship and despair that many had to face in their everyday life at times of economic crisis: “Distraction is pleasant and perhaps useful as well, but if it becomes a leitmotif and completely pushes aside genuine education, its good sense is perverted” (Kracauer [1931] 2016: 348). For Kracauer, distraction should not be used to evoke visual pleasure only. Rather, it should function as a pedagogical tool. The shine of surfaces attracting and distracting the film spectator did not avert the rise of Nazism, and the coming Nazi Regime disenchanted Kracauer’s world one more time. This is the reason why Kracauer never stopped advocating for a micro-politics of distraction. Without a doubt, for him, “the antidote to modern mass culture” can only be found “within mass culture itself ” (Hansen 2012: 8).

Notes 1 Already Edison’s Kinetoscope from 1891 was distributed with “a small electric bulb with a reflector” (L. Mannoni and R. Crangle, eds., The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema [Exter: University of Exter Press, 2000], 396). In the early days of film projection, limelight was also employed. 2 The following takes up the central argument of my book Verteilte Aufmerksamkeit. Eine Mediengeschichte der Zerstreuung (Divided Attention: A Media History of Distraction). The German word “Zerstreuung” oscillates between the more literally sense of “dispersion” or “dispersal” and the more metaphorical meaning of “diversion” or “distraction.” 3 Hugo Münsterberg’s seminal film theory, The Photoplay, from 1916 was published in German under the title Das Lichtspiel. Eine psychologische Studie. 4 Ward reports an amount of 1,300,000 light bulbs on the towers of Coney Island’s Luna Park (Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 103). 5 I here refer to Gilles Deleuze’s film theory and his conception of the “perception-image,” which is for him “the purest vision of a non-human eye.” See G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, with the assistance of H. Tomlinson, and B. Habberjam, 9, print, Philosophy Film studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 81. 6 Laura Mulvey’s example for “fetishistic scopophilia” is the director Joseph von Sternberg and his main actress Marlene Dietrich.

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References Altenloh, E. ([1913] 2001), “A Sociology of the Cinema: the Audience,” trans. K. Cross with contr. from E. Carter and R. Kiss, Screen, Vol. 42, No. 3: 249–93. Benjamin, W. ([1935] 1969), “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in H. Arendt (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 217–51. Bergfelder, T., S. Harris and S. Street (2007), Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Delluc, L. (1920), Photogénie, Paris: Brunoff. Eisner, L. H. ([1952] 1973), The Haunted Screen. Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. R. Greaves, Berkeley, CA/London: University of California Press. Federle, C. (2001), “Picture Postcards. Kracauer Writes from Berlin,” in K. S. Calhoon (ed.), Peripheral Visions. The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 39–54. Freemann, E. (2014), The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of America, New York: Penguin Press. Friedberg, A. (1994), Window Shopping. Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Gleber, A. (1997), “Women on the Streets and Streets of Modernity: In Search of the Female Flaneur,” in A. Dudley (ed.), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, Austin: University of Texas, 55–85. Gunning, T. (1997), “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism and Practice, Vol. 19, No. 4: 25–61. Hansen, M. B. (2012), Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Hoormann, A. (2003), Lichtspiele. Zur Medienreflexion der Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik, Munich: Fink. Kaes, A. (1996), “Sites of Desire: The Weimar Street Film,” in D. Neumann and Donald Albrecht (eds.), Film Architecture from Metropolis to Blade Runner, Munich/New York: Prestel. Keun, I. ([1932] 2002), Das kunstseidene Mädchen, Berlin: Universitas. Keun, I. (2002), The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. Kathie von Ankum, intr. Maria Tatar: New York: Other Press. Kracauer, S. ([1927] 2011), “Lichtreklame,” in S. Kracauer and I. Mülder-Bach (ed.), Werke, vol. 5.2, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 529–32. Kracauer, S. ([1929] 1998), !e Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Q. Hoare, intr. I. Mulder-Bach, London/New York: Verso Books. Kracauer, S. ([1930] 2011), “Ansichtspostkarte,” in S. Kracauer and I. Mülder-Bach (ed.), Werke, Vol. 5, No. 3, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 241–2. Kracauer, S. ([1931] 2016), “Destitution and Distraction: On the 1931–32 Ufa Productions,” in A. Kaes, N. Baer and M. Cowan (eds.), The Promise of Cinema. German Film Theory 1907–1933, Oakland: University of California Press, 347–9. Kracauer, S. (1947), From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Kracauer, S. (1995), The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, trans., ed. and intr. T. Y. Levin, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Kracauer, S. (2004), Kleine Schri#en zum Film, I. Mülder-Bach (ed.), Werke, Vol. 6, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Lefebvre, H. ([1962] 1995), Introduction to Modernity. Twelve Preludes. September 1959– Mai 1961, trans. John Moore, London/New York: Verso. Leslie, E. (2005), Synthetic Worlds, Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, London: Reaktion Books. Löffler, P. (2014), Verteilte Aufmerksamkeit. Eine Mediengeschichte der Zerstreuung, Zürich Berlin: diaphanes. Mannoni, L. ([1995] 2000), The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. R. Crangle, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Mulvey, L. (1975), “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in L. Mulvey (ed.), Visual and Other Pleasures, Houndsmill: Macmillan, 14–26. Schlüpmann, H. (1992), “Auf dem Weg zur Kulturindustrie. Anmerkungen zur Ästhetik in Filmen Duponts,” in J. Bretschneider (ed.), Ewald André Dupont: Autor und Regisseur, München: text + kritik, 49–58. Serner, W. ([1913] 2016), “Cinema and Visual Pleasure,” in A. Kaes, N. Baer and M. Cowan (eds.), The Promise of Cinema. German Film Theory 1907–1933, Oakland: University of California Press, 41–5. Virilio, P. ([1988] 1994), Vision Machine, trans. J. Rose, Bloomington/Minneapolis: British Film Institute. Ward, J. (2001), Weimar Surfaces. Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press.

3

Matte Black/Pan-Cake—On the Negation of Shine Tom Holert

“Murdered Out” On September 12, 2016, musician, visual artist, and writer Kim Gordon released “Murdered Out” as a single on the Matador Records label. For the 3.35-minute song, Gordon collaborated with Justin Raisen, a 35-year-old producer who had gained a reputation working as a sound architect with neo-pop musicians such as Ariel Pink, Sky Ferreira, Charli XCX, or Santigold. Raisen took leftover vocals that Gordon recorded for another project of his, edited them together with a trashy drum loop and bass line, and sent the material to Gordon who went back and added more vocals. In the next round of the exchange, Raisen extended the loop into a song onto which Gordon recorded a guitar track. Stella Mozgawa, the drummer of the all-female band Warpaint, came in and played along with the original drums, which are also still in the mix.1 The outcome of this collaboration was a densely modeled, albeit crepitate, crackling, and screeching soundscape, designed of distorted guitars and throbbing drums, all minced with a lot of reverberation and Gordon’s vocals moving at the borderline between grunting, screaming, and roaring, marked by an uncannily inhuman intonation. References to punk, noise rock, goth, and industrial music, especially to the productions of Shellac’s Steve Albini or the 1990s industrial rock supergroup Pigface abound—pop-musical forms on the verge of free improvisation, experimental music, and jazz, to which Sonic Youth, the band that made Kim Gordon, as its only female member, famous and influential in the 1980s and 1990s, contributed decisively. Gordon states that the first music release under her own name—after recordings and live gigs with her post–Sonic Youth duo Body/Head—ties in with this personal and public past. She insists on the manifesto-like character of the lyrics of “Murdered Out”: Murdered out of my heart / Covered in black matte spray / Will you see when I’m not there/Black matte spray / I’m calm, do not drop / You did not even know who I became / Yeah, you want to get black matte spray / Will you get into the parking lot / Murdered out of my heart […] You’re the one who said / Do not turn away / Pull the trigger, hey / Black matte spray […] Secondhand smoke never goes away

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine / Black matt spray / Hey, do you want to get the parking lot? […] Murdered out of my heart / Black matte spray.

The overall atmosphere evoked by these lines, together with their musical envelope, is one of claustrophobia, violence, threat, and power games. The recurrent mention of “black matte spray,” in conjunction with the epitomizing formulation “murdered out,” each time supplemented by “of my heart,” sets the tone. It also situates the lyrics in a specific cultural-linguistic realm. Those who understand how to read and deploy these terms are referred to a segment of contemporary car culture in Los Angeles, where Kim Gordon lived at the time of the recording (Figure 3.1). The visual artwork produced for the release, which is also used for the YouTube presence of the song, consists of a blurry black and white photograph of the singer, wearing black trousers and a white shirt, leaning at a blacked-out lowered vintage car, featuring a black standard, that is parked on a steep road. “Kim Gordon/Murdered Out” is placed in bold letters above the scene, like a writing on the wall.

Figure 3.1  Kim Gordon, Murdered Out, 2016. © Matador Records

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Low-rider or muscle cars—lowered, often vintage, but motor-tuned American sports car models (or, more currently, SUVs)—have populated the streetscape in many areas of Los Angeles since the 1950s. They are an integral part of African-American, Hispanic, and other ethnicized lifestyles and car cultures. If a muscle car is described as “murdered out,” its painted surface has been reworked in order to turn the lacquered, shiny coat into a rough, bled, drained, and thus aggressively lusterless and, probably most importantly, extremely dark surface. As a “B-DIDDY69” writes in the entry “murdered out” in the online Urban Dictionary: “When a vehicle has black paint and black aftermarket wheels. The window tint should be really dark and other aftermarket accessories such as black taillight covers etc. should aid in blacking out the ride” (Urban Dictionary 2006). Thus, to “murder out” figures as a moniker for a variety of combined visual tactics and cultural technics, ranging from the denial of visibility, through the blackening of the appearance of a vehicle to military camouflage, such as those used for M16 rifles, airborne stealth bombers, and other vehicles with surfaces conceived to absorb rather than reflect light. Moreover, according to Gordon, who has used black matte spray color in some of her paintings of the time of the production of “Murdered Out,” deliberately crossing over between her art practice and her music,2 “blacking out the ride” is part of an anti-consumerist, fringe aesthetics of disappearance. The idiom of matte black responds to the spectacle of glamor and comments on an entire regime of consumer habits and coercions to stay visible imposed on the individual by commodity culture and its fetishization of shine. In a press release that accompanied her single—rather than a video that would otherwise have been expected by a visual cultural producer of her standing at the occasion of a new record’s release—Gordon wrote: Black matte spray. When I moved back to LA I noticed more and more cars painted with black matte spray, tinted windows, blackened logos, and black wheels. This was something I had occasionally seen in the past, part of low-rider car culture. A reclaiming of a corporate symbol of American success, The Car, from an outsider’s point of view. A statement-making rejection of the shiny brand new look, the idea of a new start, the promise of power, and the freedom on the open road. Like an option on a voting ballot, “none of the above.” […] Black-on-black matte is the ultimate expression in digging out, getting rid of, purging the soul. Like a black hole, the supreme inward look, a culture collapsing in on itself, the outsider as an unwilling participant as the “It” look. (Gordon 2016)

In the blacking-out maneuvers of low-rider culture, Gordon recognizes a liberating act of submergence, denial, and negation. She reads the practice of “murdering out,” executed in the medium of matte black spray paint, in terms of a critique of the supposed primacy of the “shiny brand new look,” and as an invitation to introspection: to a ride into a black hole of a social order that is creepily folding onto itself. As Gordon expands in an interview of the time of the single’s release, “[b]y blacking out a car, or making something completely dark, it’s made anonymous—possessing almost a protective quality. That seems to be reflected in the single artwork, too, the murdered out car and your face blurred” (Sherman 2016).

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Gordon’s confidence in such a critical valence of the “murdered out” look on the streets of LA is surprisingly uncritical on first sight, particularly regarding the conspicuously masculinist dimension of the muscle car phenomenon. However, the washed-out, moody-dark photograph that Gordon has combined with her song as its visual supplement stands in marked contrast to most of the photos found online under search terms such as “murdered out,” “black-on-black matte,” etc. An attempt to address by visual means the low-rider car culture as the dark underbelly of glitzy consumerist skins, it purposely fails to demonstrate a (arguably, male) car owner’s pride and confidence, thus serving as an argument in a battle around stealthy strength and automotive awe. For on first sight, the pictures to be found on Instagram or in the Google image search hardly invite readings along the lines of, say, a post-Situationist détournement, of a clandestine gesture that aims to unveil and subvert the ruling aesthetics of commodity culture. Instead, an aesthetic clearly dominates that refers to traditional macho attitudes associated with expensive cars and ostentatious luxury (see, e.g., Miller 2001, Conley and McLaren 2006, Landström 2006, Lumsden 2010, Balkmar 2012, Chavez 2013). Judging from these online picture catalogs of low-rider vehicles, Gordon’s political understanding of the order of black matte paint should hardly be a common one in most quarters of muscle car culture. Gordon herself tries to qualify her statement, pointing out the fact that in the year of the release of “Murdered Out,” matte black had already been a widespread fad for quite some time. She writes: “‘Murdered Out,’ as a look, is now creeping into mainstream culture as a design trend. A coffee brand. A clothing line. A nail polish color” (Sherman 2016). However, this insertion does not prevent Gordon from sticking to her position. Perhaps—and this “perhaps” is to be further qualified in this essay—for reasons related to the history of the practices of avoiding shine. Only under certain conditions, largely depending on the social status and political agency of the drivers and other protagonists, the “murdered out” look of contemporary car culture applies as a signifier of subversive, negative utopia. Other than that, as it is the case with any other color or color treatment, no matte black coating should be mistaken for per se embodying criticality or resistance. Most important however, in the cultural and political climate of the late 2010s, particularly in the United States, references to the color black can hardly be made without considering the racialized discourses targeting blackness and black life. But how should the aggressive black paint of low-rider car culture be related to such discourses? Is it already too far-fetched if the matte black phenomenon is approached via the “fact of blackness,” as Frantz Fanon ([1952]1986: 109–40) puts it, or the “case of blackness” theorized by Fred Moten (2008: 177–218)? Should it be linked to racial (in)justice and police violence, to the concerns of Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist, decolonial, queer-feminist, and civil rights movements and organizations involving people of color and, more specifically, people of African descent? Before further attending to its racial and sexual performativity, some observations on the cosmetic parlance around and the libidinal investments in the matte black fashion might be advisable.

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“It Is Not Even Black” Indifferently or disingenuously, the fashion of dull, lusterless variants of the color black, in its very own customary terms, negotiates the normative articulation of shine and beauty, while avoiding any direct reference either to the racial functioning of anti-Blackness or to the affirmative cultural discourse of blackness. The phenomenon of matte black products, be they of the cosmetic or automotive kind, took hold in the second half of the last decade. What had previously been confined to individual extravagance or a militarypolice commandment now increasingly appeared in more mainstream contexts. Probably the most striking appearance of matte black is its use on the body, on the human skin, on the lips, or as a black matte polish on nails. This phenomenon certainly is no mass trend. It should rather be seen as occupying a fashion niche whose inhabitants strategically seek distinction from a supposed mainstream by way of putting on attributes such as “punk” or “goth.” However, actual matte black differs considerably from any other black on offer, and in that it tends to stay a comparably rarified variety of the spectrum of black-color cosmetic products. Consider the post by user “nataliecrack,” who was looking forward to the release of a long-announced black MAC “Hautecore” lipstick in Athens in January 2014 but realized that the (Estée Lauder–owned, Canadian) brand may have fooled her: Never in my life have I been so disappointed. I have been expecting the Hautecore lipstick to reach Europe from the time I read about it online. Until then I had only been looking at pictures and it looked gorgeous so I had been dreaming about it and longing for its arrival, only to be left with a bittersweet taste of disappointment. […] I was happy to try it out when I finally laid my hands on it, only to be left disappointed. IT IS NOT EVEN BLACK. (MakeupAlley 2014)

At this point, in the unfulfilled desire for an uncompromising blackness of black, “nataliecrack” subsequently provides a list of the causes that made the MAC lipstick such a debacle. In the course of cataloguing these deficiencies, the blogger demonstrates a remarkable knowledge of the typologies and tropologies of shine. 1. First of all, the shade is deep purple and not black. I repeat. NOT BLACK. Maybe they made it more “wearable” and less “witchy”? If this is the case, then they should not have it in the first place, me thinks. (MakeupAlley 2014)

The cultural (or subcultural) line is drawn between an accepted and a less-accepted blackening of the lips, namely between wearability and goth witchcraft, between

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fashionable legitimacy and illegitimacy, between one type of femininity and another, another. However, any negotiation of the difference between black and black in consumer products such as cars or cosmetics belongs to a politics of negative gloss. This said, “nataliecrack”’s performance of cosmetic criticality and aesthetic despair could be read as expressing a certain jadedness. For any refusal of color and shine doesn’t necessarily escape the consumerist rule of gloss and glitz. Opting for a reduction of light and an increase of shadow may prove to be just another symbolic gamble.3

Jet-Black Yet any account of the historic semantics of matte black remains incomplete without including the very jet-black, which the fashion blogger had expected from her new “Hautecore” lipstick, but instead had to put up with purple or dark plum. Given the concern for the unlimited, deeper-than-deep black that swallows every gleam and shine, it is advisable to attend to the substance jet: Jet is fossilized wood, a precursor to coal, and a gemstone, impregnated with humus gel or bitumen, which is geologically located on the transitional layer from lignite to hard coal. Rather a mineraloid than a mineral, jet derived from wood that has decayed under extreme pressure and is thus of organic origin. Either black or dark brown, jet may show pyrite inclusions that provide for brassy color and metallic luster. Until late into the nineteenth century, jet was widely used as a noble material in the production of jewelry, reminiscent of onyx, but easier to carve. Then again, as anthropologist Charles Goodwin has pointed out with regard to chemists, “jet black (e.g., the most prototypical example of black) is not a preformulated, context-free universal color category, but instead a problematic judgment to be artfully accomplished through the deployment of a collection of systematic work practices” (1997: 111). Historically, the term “jet-black” has long been associated with minstrelsy blackfacing. White (and later also black) performers since the early nineteenth century applied burnt cork or black shoe polish on their face to emulate the deep blackness of coal or jet and the alleged culture/nature of slaves—a mimicry in the interest of white supremacy.4 As Michael Rogin (1996: 33) put it, “in appropriating AfricanAmerican virtuosity minstrels presented a masking means as if it issued forth from the essential black.” The impression of jet-black, reproduced by applying burnt cork or shoe cream, became the standard skin hue in the racializing representation of people of African descent. Beyond the denigrating and punishing function of blackfacing, black performers could make strategic use of this instrument of travesty and (self-) objectification; however, the “ministrelized black body” did not cease to release white people “from civilized self-restraint” (1996: 39). Further clarifying the history of the matte black phenomenon, particularly in its dialectical (or complementary) relationship to other levels of shine and shininess (not least in their hyperbolic bling-bling variety), it may need mention that object surfaces and the human skin are often construed as analogues: Time and again the skin serves as the central scene of the regulation and restriction of access to class-bound and racialized realms of glamorous agency. Anticipating a discussion following later in this essay, the current matte black of objects could be read as an escalation of cosmetic

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techniques, as a cultural production in the service of the avoidance of gloss and shine that operates, openly or subliminally, consciously or unconsciously, in accordance with the taboo (accompanied by the fetishization) of shiny skin as such. At the same time, matte black could be considered as embodying a tendentious negation—the deletion of the historical struggles for the recognition of a different politics, ethics, and aesthetics of the epidermis, as they have become sedimented in such cosmetic regimes of (non-) shine. On the other hand, it could be argued that the semiotics and semantics of matte black are continuing the “protean yet ardently persistent conversation between modern surface and black skin,” of which film and gender scholar Anne Anlin Cheng writes in her book about Josephine Baker’s “second skin” (2011: 14). In Cheng’s reading of Baker’s performative exposure of her own naked body as converging with the surfaces of the machine age and modernist design of the 1920s and 1930s, this “second skin” is a kind of armor to contest and to survive anti-Blackness. The agency acquired, by Baker and other black artists, through the aesthetic weaponizing of pigment and shine stands in a complicated relation to the current anti-shine of the “murdered out” phenomenon. While the heightened visibility of Baker’s “second skin” was a strategic response to the racialized hypervisibility of black people, matte black draws its appeal from highly contradictory sources that range from militaristic stealthiness and masculinist posturing to the self-assertion of marginalized communities. The reasons that lead to opting for an aesthetic of light-absorbing or shiny surfaces are historically and culturally specific; no stable meaning can be pinned to these choices; however, their genealogy can be traced archaeologically.

Abjection of Shine A significant role in the story of the cultural politics of anti-shine and anti-Blackness is played by face powder or, more broadly, makeup. After the First World War, the production and distribution of cosmetics, substances meant to improve the care of hair, finger nails, and lips, and especially skin, became a booming industry entailing entirely new markets. This success was due to a number of cultural, social, economic, and political factors, not least the provision of beauty products to the social strata beyond the aristocracy and the high bourgeoisie, a changing idea of female beauty, a democratization of access to the means of self-optimization. These changes were promoted by new relationships between mass culture and the body, and particularly by the industrial intersection of cinema and cosmetics. Film stars such as Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor entered into advertising deals with cosmetics companies, offering their faces and their celebrity status for a campaign to prevent unwanted, embarrassing shine on the skin allegedly caused by physical labor—the dermatological index of effort, exhaustion, nervousness, and distress. It may be true that everyone who works and is put under pressure exudes sweat. However, countering such inevitability, any allusion to transpiration as a sign of social inferiority and subservience had to be eliminated from the public appearance of a person. For the aristocracy of the ancien régime, the whitening powder was a means of distinguishing its members from the sweaty, sun-tanned, dark-skinned peasants, and

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enslaved people—a kind of protective shield, matte and lusterless, was to be prepared of talc, one of the softest minerals. With the invention of photography and film, the neutralizing absorption of moisture on the skin, the cause of an abject glossiness to be avoided at all cost, gained an importance that was pertinent in terms of media technology and media history. To mention just one example of this cultural articulation of makeup and media: when Technicolor technology was introduced to movie studios around the mid-1930s, the existing regime of creams and powders had to be revised and changed. The fat content of the creams in use, which was not a problem for the cameras and lighting on the sets of the black-and-white era, now triggered a veritable crisis (Cosmetics and Skin 2017). Because the light was divided into three colors in the new Technicolor Process 4 cameras, brighter bulbs were required to allow sufficient light to pass through the red, green, and blue film negative before they were combined into one single print after being processed. In this brighter light, the slightly shimmering sheen that was left by the residue of the greasy, opaque creams on the actresses’ and actors’ skins reflected the colors of the surrounding scenery. Their faces’ colorization became uncontrollable to the extent that a number of film stars initially refused to participate in Technicolor productions. Cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden recognized economic potential in solving this problem. In 1935, she acquired the DeLong Laboratories and an associated makeup studio in Hollywood, where the color-film compatible Nuchromatic makeup had already been developed, and thus founded her own “Screen and Stage” department. But it was ultimately Arden’s big competitor, Max Factor, who introduced a product that for some years proved to be more efficient in coping with the cosmetic challenge of Technicolor. After nearly two years of combined research and development in the Factor labs and directly at Technicolor, the T-D makeup—soon to be called “Pan-Cake”—was introduced in 1937 (Plate 7). Pan-Cake was a water-based, highly pigmented powder formulation that was added to a dehydrated ointment mixed with soap, lanolin, and water. The pun, which can be resolved in English and German into “pancakes,” was associated in the context of cinema of the 1930s and 1940s with the technical name “Panchromatic Film” (Technicolor), as a means to meet the needs of a visual technology that mediated between the colors. Immediately successful, PanCake displaced the Nuchromatic competition and quickly found widespread use in the studios. The first film dedicated to the new product was Irving Cummings’s Vogues of 1938 (alternative title: Walter Wanger’s Vogues of 1938), starring Joan Bennett and Warner Baxter, and shot on Technicolor Process 4 film (Figure 3.2). In a musical intrigue romance, set in the New York fashion milieu of the advanced Jazz Age, it may not be too surprising how much attention the relationship between makeup and color film was granted (in the title credits, Max Factor was especially mentioned for his “Color Harmony Make-Up”). With striking casualness, makeup and powdering became a key element of the studio’s PR strategy, as for example in a promo photo of three supporting actresses in front of a mirror table applying makeup and powder. It is then no surprise that a year later, Bennett, the female star of the movie, still featured in advertisements of Beau Cake, another brand of “cake” cosmetics.

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Figure 3.2  Dorothy “Dotty”  Saulters  among other  co-performers in  the “Cotton Club” scene of The Vogues of 1938 (Irving Cummings, United Artists, USA 1937)

Throughout it seemed self-evident that the “pan-cake” procedure to avoid shine was aimed specifically at light skin—the skin of white people. However, in the United States of the 1930s (and long before and after), the term “pan-cake,” with its allusions to pancakes, was unambiguously racist. The 2003 Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance assigns the term “pan-cake head,” used disparagingly by blacks as well, to a range of terms to which “Uncle Tom”5 also belongs—thus designating a figure who behaves spinelessly and submissively toward whites, selling off black culture (West and West 2003: 380). In 1937, the year Vogues of 1938 hit the theaters, the food manufacturer Quaker Oats registered the pancake powder “Aunt Jemima” as a brand and likewise secured as its logo the stereotyping image of the obese, black, pancake-preparing housemaid in apron and headscarf, popular since the late nineteenth century and originating in the minstrelsy revues. Between the women in the PR photography for Vogues of 1938 and images of Anna Short Harrington, who was the “Aunt Jemima” face for Quaker Oats from 1935 onward for fourteen years, there is a worrying connection—not least provided by the cosmetic technology of “pan-cake.” For the actresses it made possible and acceptable their appearances in Vogues of 1938, as it ensured the suppression of shine on white skin. In the mid-twentieth century, the racist imaginary of the white majority in the United States continued to be shaped by a nostalgic relationship to slavery, which was

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cultivated and thus maintained not least by product advertising. Far into the 1940s, the two types of ads promoting “pan-cake” entertained a peculiarly complementary relationship: the female movie star who protects herself against shininess on color film with a powder cream, and the maternal African-American icon of domestic service on behalf of a producer of baking soda claiming its Quakerism. Back in 1937 and with regard to Vogues of 1938, however, an important aspect remains to be addressed. For a revue sequence at a very early stage of the movie— which lasts almost seven minutes—is taking place in the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem (or rather its Hollywood studio version). Here, eight black dancers in silvery stole coats, sporting white faux fur trimmings, among them the singer and dancer Dorothy (“Dotty”) Saulters, perform the song “Turn on That Red Hot Heat,” whose title could easily be understood as referring to the color technology used for the film. Later on, the male dance troupe Four Hot Shots appears together with the pianist Maurice Rocco (in their extra-filmic professional life these artists regularly worked as performers in nightclubs such as the legendary Kit-Kat Club on 55th Street) (Pitet 2014). Considering that the film, whose plot and characters are exclusively placed in New York’s white upper-class milieu, was produced for a white audience in the 1930s, the African-American protagonists, anything but excluded from the main narrative, were granted sumptuous stage and frame time.6 Moreover, they do not act in an overexaggerated manner, they do not sweat, and they are not shown in states of physical excitement but remain as free of shine as the white protagonists. Yet even viewed this way, the black performers’ presence on the scene in Vogues of 1938 is just another example of the fact that, as Frantz Fanon put it, the—diegetic and extra-diegetic— white audience always anxiously, fascinatedly awaits the arrival of people of color on the movie screen.7 Despite a representation that is not explicitly exoticizing (or just because of it), a review in Variety emphasized the display of black skin in the Cotton Club sequence as particularly effective with regard to the interplay of skin hues and lighting: Seymour Felix has assisted with the dance numbers, of which the ensemble in brown, featuring Rocco, pianist, and Saulter, soprano, with a group of terp dancers, is the most elaborate and effective. Lighting effects achieved on the dark skins of the scantily dressed girls are startling and beautiful. It’s something new in the use of color. (Flin 1937: 18)

Once again, black bodies are being objectified, this time in order to demonstrate the chromatic possibilities of Technicolor film. Even if the African-American performers are given the opportunity to present themselves and their art in ways that border on the documentary in Vogues of 1938, the reading of their bodies as testing materials for Hollywood’s newest technological products proves how firmly the racializing view on black bodies was rooted in the visual industries of the 1930s and to what extent this view was constitutive for the image of sweat-free whiteness that Hollywood cultivated of itself.

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Reappropriation of Shine The abjection and suppression of shine go back, as already mentioned, to the distinction from the laboring population and especially of workers of color. Enslaved African Americans in general had (and still have) to cope with the racist invective “shine,” an allusion to their allegedly unpowdered, sweaty skin. African-American culture responded differently to the denigrating ascription of sweat and shine. To mention only two works that appropriated and redirected the meaning of the words: The 1910 song “Shine,” written by Cecil Mack, Lew Brown, and Ford Dabney, tells the story of a black man-about-town who takes “troubles all with a smile / Just because my color’s shady / Makes no difference, baby / That’s why they call me ‘Shine’.” The song premiered in an African-American road show and was later interpreted by many artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra. It obviously celebrates the shine of the protagonist’s personality, which denotes his charisma rather than his sweating skin. In 1926, African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston published her short story “Sweat” whose title refers to the sweat of Delia, the female protagonist, who works in white households while her husband abuses her. “Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!” Delia eventually complains, “Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it” (Hurston 2006: 239). As cultural historian Richard Dyer (1997: 79) puts it in his book White, “Shine connotes sweat, something inappropriate to ladies […] and also an instance of the body’s dirt; […] dark skin, especially under strong light, and notably in photography, often has shiny highlights, thus associating shininess with non-white people.” During the 1960s civil rights movement, this very shininess of nonwhite people was strategically mobilized by prominent African-American artists and athletes as a polarizing signifier, as an element of Black Power aesthetics. Thus in 1966, photographer Gordon Parks profiled a sweat-drenched Muhammad Ali, celebrating the legitimacy and sovereignty of the boxer’s agency—as an activist, athlete, and a media star.8 Moreover, Parks’s portrait could be read as a single, vehement rejection of the pan-cake privilege and the denigration of sweat. Recalling the “Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it” (of Delia in Neale Hurston’s short story), Parks and Ali together created the image of a black person’s sweat as a vital substance of his charismatic shine. Something similar might be said about Lee Friedlander’s photos taken in 1969 for the cover of Miles Davis’s record In A Silent Way, as they demonstrated how glamor and shiny skin (reflecting the exterior light as shine) do not have to exclude each other anymore but could stand in a reciprocal condition of self-assertion, thus rejecting the racializing codes inscribed in the medium of color film and photography. In another photo shooting from the same year 1969, this time with Baron Wolman, Davis seems to have delved even deeper into the archaeology of shine and its associated anthropologies and object ontologies (Plate 8). In a test of an age’s—that was already, and prematurely, called “post-racial”—colorfastness and shininess, the polished red Ferrari 275 GTB in the photograph takes on unexpected functions. Davis and photographer Wolman redirect the objectifications and exoticizations of the black body, including their glossy-phobia, onto the shiny sports car, establishing a quasi-machinic, reciprocally

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glamorizing relationship between the two. This is no naive mating of (hu)man and machine but, arguably, the afro-futurist overcoming of the pan-cake privilege.

Toward Vantablack And fifty years later? What has become of the politics of the appropriation and transfer of shine, as pursued by Ali, Davis, and others in the 1960s? In 2015, skater prodigy Theotis Beasley shared pictures showing him with his matte black Bentley, contributing to a recent social media hype around black matte cars in which numerous AfricanAmerican athletes and musicians participated (Bertucci 2015).9 Appropriating, if unknowingly, Miles Davis’s 1969 Ferrari pose, Beasley’s riffing on the subject of the black celebrity with his luxury car (this time in “murdered out” look) poignantly adds to the semiotics and semantics surrounding blackness, black aesthetics, and the matte black phenomenon. According to Kim Gordon’s statement about the “murdered out” look, Beasley’s display of ownership of a black matte car could be read as the confident refusal to participate in a system that is considered corrupt, exclusionary, and obsolete. Likewise it could be argued that Beasley not only surrenders himself to the dynamics of a selfradicalizing fashion trend, but also might be oblivious of the fact that the demonstration of the individual and collective access to symbols of masculinity and status continue to be reserved to white people in the US society, especially in times of a president who is openly in favor of white supremacist politics. To further complicate the conundrum of matte black, masculinity, and antiBlackness, Theotis Beasley might exchange his Bentley in “murdered out” look into one painted in Vantablack, the blackest currently available black pigment. This extreme color is the result of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays (VANTAs) grown under extreme heat each of which having a length of 14–50 micrometers, with a diameter of 20 nanometers (5,000 times thinner than a human hair). Possessing a precisely controllable morphology, Vantablack, once applied to a surface, seems to cut black holes into reality, thanks to its hyperabsorptive properties. The copyright on Vantablack has been controversially secured by Anish Kapoor, one of the most successful contemporary visual artists. Kapoor now claims, similarly to Yves Klein and his Yves Klein Blue (IKB), to exert control over the use of the radical pigment (Jones 2016, McGurk 2017). However, the race to break the record in creating ever blacker blacks continues. In 2019, car manufacturer BMW presented a X6 model painted in extreme Vantablack VBx2 to make it “look particularly menacing” (Hussein Al Attar, Creative Director Automotive Design at Designworks, quoted in Boeriu 2019). Is Vantablack the limit case of matte black? And if so, is this menacing black perhaps also a limit to the availability and usability, to the existence of blackness as such? Through increasing the levels of black into infinitesimal darkness, while limiting access to Vantablack to those privileged few who can afford the pigment, issues of property, methodology, and aesthetics in relation to the color black are being raised, at least

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implicitly. But it seems to be ultimately futile to link the color operations of the matte black fad or the recent nano-level Vantablack extremism to the “case of blackness.” For the political ontology of blackness is decidedly and inevitably irreducible. The condition of the possibility of a “black aesthetic” and “black critical theory” is the experience of racist violence, of exclusion, of “exhaustion.” This exhaustion, Fred Moten (2013: 738) claims, distinguishing his own theoretical and political project from the more radical afro-pessimistic agendas of theorists such as Jared Sexton or Frank B. Wilderson, is “a mode or form or way of life, which is to say sociality”—the fundamental theoretical reason for Moten to disagree with the afro-pessimistic thesis of the social death entailed by anti-Blackness. Although “black matte spray” design on the one hand and “blackness” as political ontology on the other should not be taken as being equivalent, the relation between color technology, cosmetic control and a political practice urged by the “fact” and the “case” of blackness remains to be startling. Given the history and actuality of anti-Blackness and its counterpart in black politics, the ongoing obsession with radical shades of black in car paint or cosmetics cannot be delinked from its racial dimension, albeit the wildly contradictory interests and intentions involved here. Any contemporary deployment of the color black, especially when centering on pronouncedly nonreflective, antishine surfaces, not only depends on the aesthetic ideologies supporting masculinist and military violence, but also always already has to reckon with its implication in the history of racism and anti-racist struggle.

Notes 1 Thanks to Kim Gordon for detailing the process of the song’s recording (e-mail from August 26, 2019). 2 Cf. for example, Ladies of the Paradise #8, 2015, spray paint, glitter, medium on canvas, aqua-resin and fiberglass, 172.7 × 119.4 × 11.4 cm, or mirror wreath #1-#3, 2016, spray paint on mirror (different sizes). At the occasion of the release of “Murdered Out,” Gordon told an interviewer: “I was doing these paintings with black matte spray paint on plexiglass because I was inspired by seeing it. Those lyrics found their way into the song, an art practice mixed with something more commercial.” M. Sherman, “Hear Kim Gordon’s First Song Released under Her Own Name,” NPR.org., September 12, 2016. Accessed September 3, 2019, https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=493259751. 3 The moment when the boundaries of such cosmetic-symbolic play and those of the suppressions of perceptibility by the anesthetization of reality through light-absorbing lusterless surfaces are being blurred, the symbolic gets superimposed by the materiality of weaponry and vehicles prone to exert physical violence. Lusterless cosmetics and the stealthy design of guns and armored cars—it may be a deliberately chosen moral ambiguity that makes the use of matte black coatings particularly thrilling to some. 4 The literature on the history, politics, and meanings of blackface and minstrelsy performance is vast; a recent, comprehensive collection of essays links historical and contemporary occurrences. See for example Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Stephen Johnson, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

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5 The origin of the “Uncle Tom” character is traced to the 1849 autobiography of a black slave, Josiah Henson, whose experiences and personality supposedly inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 6 Although it needs to be said that they are not mentioned in Vogues of 1938’s credits and the audience in this Hollywood version of the Cotton Club, applauding with their silver cutlery, is almost exclusively white. 7 “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [1952], trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Plutopress, 1986), 140. 8 To view the image by Gordon Parks, Muhammad Ali, Miami, Florida, dating from 1966, please refer to the following website: https://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/ publications/gordon-parks-x-muhammad-ali 9 To view the image of Theotis Beasley with his matte black Bentley GT dating from 2015, please refer to the following website: http://www.celebritycarsblog.com/2015/07/ theotis-beasley-bentley/

References Balkmar, D. (2012), On Men and Cars. An Ethnographic Study of Gendered, Risky and Dangerous Relations, Linköping Studies in Arts and Science No. 558 Linköping: Linköpings Universitet. B-DIDDY69 (2006), Urban Dictionary, December 18. Available online: https://www. urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=murdered%20outurbandictionary (accessed September 3, 2019). Bennett, J. (2017), “Pan-Cake Make-Up, Cosmetics and Skin,” Cosmetics and Skin (weblog), July 31. Available online: http://cosmeticsandskin.com/bcb/cake.php (accessed September 3, 2019). Bertucci, K. (2015), “Theotis Beasly,” DUB, July 10. Available online: http://www. dubmagazine.com/home/stars/225-athletes/8957-theotis-beasley (accessed September 3, 2019). Boeriu, H. (2019), “BMW VBX6—Vantablack—The World’s Blackest Black,” BMWblog, August 27. Available online: https://www.bmwblog.com/2019/08/27/bmw-vbx6vantablack-the-worlds-blackest-black/ (accessed September 3, 2019). Chavez, M. J. (2013), The Performance of Chicano Masculinity in Lowrider Car Culture: The Erotic Triangle, Visual Sovereignty & Rasquachismo, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of California Riverside. Cheng, A. A. (2011), Second Skin. Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conley, J., and A. T. McLaren, eds. (2006), Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility, Farnham, England: Ashgate. Dyer, R. (1997), White. Essays on Race and Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Fanon, F. ([1952] 1986), Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto Press. Flin. (1937), “The Vogues of 1938,” Variety, August 8.

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Goodwin, C. (1997), “The Blackness of Black: Color Categories as Situated Practice,” in Lauren B. Resnick, Roger Säljö, Clotilde Pontecorvo and Barbara Burge (eds.), Discourse, Tools and Reasoning. Essays on Situated Cognition, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. Gordon, K. (2016). [Statement], Matablog. News and Views from the Matador Brain Trust (and the Brains We Trust), September 12. Available online: https://matablog. matadorrecords.com/2016/09/12/kim-gordon-murdered-out/ September 3, 2019). Hurston, Z. N. (2006), “Sweat,” [1926], in X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (eds.), Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, New York: Pearson. Jones, J. (2016), “Can An Artist Ever Really Own a Color?” The Guardian, February 29. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2016/feb/29/ anish-kapoor-vantablack-paint (accessed September 3, 2019). Landström, C. (2006), “A Gendered Economy of Pleasure: Representations of Cars and Humans in Motoring Magazines,” Science Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2: 31–53. Lumsden, K. (2010), “Gendered Performances in a Male-Dominated Subculture: ‘Girl Racers’, Car Modification and the Quest for Masculinity,” Sociological Research Online, Vol. 15, No. 3: 1–11. McGurk, S. (2017), “Who’s Behind Art’s Dark Little Secret, Vantablack?” GQ, August 4. Available online: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/vantablack-anish-kapoor (accessed September 3, 2019). Miller, D., ed. (2001), Car Cultures, Oxford, New York: Berg. Moten, F. (2008), “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2: 177–218. Moten, F. (2013), “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 4: 737–80. Nataliecrack (2014), MakeUpAlley, January 24. Available online: https://www.makeupalley. com/product/showreview.asp/ItemId=168727/Hautecore-(Limited-Edition)/MACCosmetics/Lipstick (accessed September 3, 2019). Pitet, J. F. (2014), “Dotty Saulters, the Petite Singer Larger than Life,” The Hi-De-Ho Blog, May 7. Available online: http://www.thehidehoblog.com/blog/2014/07/dotty-saultersthe-petite-singer-larger-than-life-part-1 (accessed September 3, 2019). Rogin, M. (1996), Blackface, White Noise. Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. Sherman, M. (2016), “Hear Kim Gordon’s First Song Released under Her Own Name,” NPR.org, September 12. Available online: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=493259751 (accessed September 3, 2019). Stephen, J., ed. (2012), Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. West, A. and S. J. West, eds. (2003), Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, New York: Facts on File.

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Part Two

Temporalities of Shine within Material Cultures: Between Nostalgia, Appropriation, and Expropriation

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4

Fabric of Light, Surface of Displacement: Lamé and Its Shine in Early Twentieth-Century French Fashion Mei Mei Rado

Light is indispensable in mediating the look, perception, and imagination of dress, yet it is easily forgotten in the discussions of fashion’s materiality and implications. Changing luminosity and shadow condition how clothes are viewed and experienced; meanwhile, light-related qualities, such as luster, reflectivity, clarity, and transparency, are often regarded as essential attributes of a dress, imbued with symbolic meanings. The inherent ambiguity and contingency of light enable an understanding of fashion’s materiality not as fixed given but as shifting interplay between the garment, the body in movement, and its surroundings. The issue of light and shine also opens a new perspective on the fundamental question regarding the making of textiles and dress—in that sense, the “poetics” of fashion if we draw from Aristotle for the term’s original references to composition, rhythm, and spectacle. As a series of flows and constant metamorphoses, the formation and movement of light in dress echo the act of weaving milliard threads (rays), but it is also a process of undoing. Light destabilizes a static, finished textile/garment into an open-ended field and re-agitates the threads, fabrics, and decorations into contingent movements, at every turn generating new dynamics and harmony. The shine of dress creates chance encounters and conduits of communications between clothing, wearer, and audience—it entangles or envelops them in a temporary light-scape. This uncertain and transient nature of shine in textile echoes that of time and memory, opening channels for desire and imagination. Some scholars have attempted to analyze light and shine in textiles and fashion in quasi-scientific terms. Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s treatise Théorie des effets optiques que presentent les étoffes de soie (1846) represents a groundbreaking work of this kind. The French color theorist detailed the visual effects of silks of different weave structures, aiming to provide a design reference for textile manufacturers in Lyon. This treatise later lent inspiration to an experimental exhibition Jouer la lumière at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris (Leclercq 2001), which examined the changing appearances of textiles under different directions of light and gaze as well as their applications

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in garments. Fascinating and informative as they are, these projects tended to treat light in fashion as abstract and ahistorical, while isolating the textiles and dresses in question in an unspecified, neutral environment such as ateliers and museum galleries. What remain unexplored are the historical vision and imagination of light in fashion bound by specific time and space. An endeavor to address these neglected questions and to explore the interdisciplinary approaches to fashion and light, this essay examines the modern lamé—silk woven with metallic threads—which reigned the high fashion in the 1910s and 1920s. France, the center of the design, production, and fashion of lamé, provides the context of focus. Metal threads and associated luminescent ideals had a long tradition in luxury European dress dated back to the fourteenth century, but the twentieth-century lamé emerged as a new product of modern technologies and aesthetic. Lumière figured centrally in the design, manufacture, and imagination of lamé, at once as fashion’s external condition for display, compositional and pictorial inspiration, conceptual framework, and discursive implications. Three intertwined themes centering on light underlined the design and discourse of lamé and its shine—electricity, modernism, and its contest. The new metallic fabrics responded to the recently developed lighting condition—namely electric light—in modern spaces, a context that essentially mediated the design of lamé and the perceptions of its luminescence. In representing and conceptualizing light in textiles, designers and manufacturers of lamé drew a vibrant dialogue with modernist experimentations in art and design, in which light had been a major theme since the late nineteenth century. However, rather than a straightforward embracement of modernist values related to light characterized by speed, clarity, practicality, and an outlook of the future, the aesthetic of lamé often subscribed to their opposite by evoking the past, the exotic, the natural, and the fantastic, messages dramatized and intensified by its glitter. The shiny surface of lamé lent itself as a contested site where a series of equivocal ideas converged, including industrial mechanization versus handcraft, artificiality versus nature, modernity versus tradition, and orientalism versus historicism. The nuances and complexity of lamé’s shine embodied these oppositional cultural impulses in the early twentieth century, and their inherent tensions also epitomized fashion’s negotiation of conflicting categories by increasingly conflating them (Troy 2003: 191).

Lamé: Genealogy and Materiality The French term “lamé” was frequently used in the period from the 1910s to the 1930s, referring to a unique type of soft metallized textile, that is, light-weight silk woven with lavish silver, gold, and occasionally copper-wrapped silk threads. The word “lamé” came from the noun “lame,” traditionally meaning thin metal sheet, gold and silver embellishment, sword blade, as well as sea waves (Dictionnaire 1787). It is noteworthy that these linguistic roots also registered in the imagination of the twentieth-century lamé. By the 1830s, the meaning of “lame” had extended to include gold and silver threads for textile weaving, and “lamé” began to appear as an adjective (Dictionnaire 1835). Since the 1910s, “lamé” had been frequently

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used as a noun referring to textiles woven with metallic threads, along with the rise of lamé fashion. The major types of traditional European metal threads included lame or lamella (thin and flat metal strip) and filé (threads made by winding the lame around a silk or linen yarn). In 1928, the trade journal La Soierie de Lyon pointed out that the widespread contemporary term “lamé” was not precise, as the so called lamé fabrics were not woven with “lame” (Algoud 1928: 62). Indeed, most 1910s and 1920s lamé used filé threads, often in the form of laminette (flattened filé). However, it was the name lamé that captured the fascination of the epoch. From the 1940s onward, the word “lamé” gradually disappeared when fashion styles and fabrics changed, and later a new type of inexpensive electroplated metallic threads—Lurex—gained popularity from the 1960s to the 1980s. In the early modern context, precious and shiny metallic fabrics were closely associated with royalty, aristocracy, and liturgy, indicating superiority, magnificence, and otherworldliness. A saturated metal surface woven, embroidered, and trimmed with gold, such as Madame de Montespan’s dress described by Marquise de Sévigné in 1676 ([1680] 1974: 442), would have weighted considerably and shone brilliantly, thus imposing a sense of majesty and forbiddance that enshrined the wearer’s power and status. During the nineteenth century, heavy metallic silks declined in the domain of secular fashion. The time-consuming, expensive process of hand-beating gold foil also appeared inefficient when textile production became increasingly mechanized. The revival of lamé in the early twentieth century greatly benefited from new technological developments—the invention of electrically driven pneumatic hammer to produce perfectly machine-made metal threads and a new chemical process that allowed silk woven with metallic threads to be piece-dyed without causing the intertwined metal to lose its original luster (Pauletti and Peri 1999: 34). The new techniques promised that intricate designs could be achieved through a relatively facile weaving process and also permitted the polychrome fabrics to remain thin and lightweight. Lyon, the time-honored center of French silk industry, led the design and weaving of high-end lamé silks for fashion. A fine example is a 1925 lamé crêpe woven by the Lyonnais company Bianchini-Férier featuring splendid fruit motifs and executed through the piece-dyeing method (Plates 9 and 10), which will be discussed in detail later. As the foremost luxury fabric, lamé was primarily used for interior formal wear, such as evening dresses and wraps, robes de style, ball gowns, and theatre coats. Softness and brilliance were the major traits that characterized modern lamé. The supple quality of the fabric rendered it highly adaptable to changing fashion silhouettes, which, from the 1910s’ narrow hobble skirt to the 1920s’ flat, loose cut and later the 1930s’ flowing form, increasingly foregrounded the fluidity of a modern feminine body. Lamés “drape and fold themselves to any fantasy,” acclaimed a 1928 article in La Soierie de Lyon (J. A. D. 1928: 78). In lamé textiles, when metal threads as the only wefts are interwoven with very fine silk warps nearly imperceptible to naked eyes, the fabric gives an impression of a full gold or silver cloth. This type of “lamé uni,” or plain lamé, as a 1923 article in La Soierie de Lyon noted, was “a graceful and becoming material, supple billowy and filmy (à la fois souple, vaporeux, diaphane) and which can be worked up in a thousand ways” (L. de L.: 756). The 1922 evening gown “Irudrée” by the French couturier Paul Poiret, created by draping a plain lamé woven with gold wefts

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and black silk warps, produces an ethereal feel and a somber metallic tone (Figure 4.1). Its simple construction features a cylindrical silhouette consisting of a rectangular bodice and a gathered skirt gently disposed over the body, joint by an audacious hip rouleau reminiscent of both Renaissance farthingale and Nijinski’s famed costume for Schéhérazade of the Ballets Russes.1 This dress exemplified how a modernist approach

Figure 4.1  Paul  Poiret, Evening Gown “Irudrée,” France 1922, silk and metallic threads. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of the Costume Institute Gifts 2007 (2007.146). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Resource NY

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to body converged with bold historicism and exoticism. As elaborated in the next section, those ideas were not only conveyed by fashion’s silhouettes and constructions, but also through the shine of lamé.

The Shiny Surface of Displacement The prominent presence of metallic threads in lamé textiles maximized the possibility for a finished garment to reflect light. Compared to the past when gold and silver fabrics primarily connoted power and wealth, the metallic shine in early twentiethcentury fashion developed diverse and complex meanings in relation to modern life and art, both as its resonance and antithesis. Albeit a product of modern mechanizing techniques, lamé, and in particular its shine, lent itself to a profusion of fantasies including romanticized nature, cultural others, and Europe’s own past, all of which can be subsumed under the broad rubric of exoticism. Evidently nature had become an exotic other to the increasingly mechanized urban life, and “the past,” as historians remind us, “is a foreign country” (Lowenthal [1985] 2015). In conjuring up the exotic, the shiny surface of lamé facilitated an imaginary displacement in time and space. This tendency of lamé to transport itself beyond present reality resonated with the vision of exoticism pursued by the French writer and traveler Victor Segalen at the turn of the twentieth century ([1904–18] 2002). The American cultural historian James Clifford calls Segalen’s aesthetic of the diverse “a poetics of displacement.” In this “modern experience of displacement,” “self and other [underwent] a sequence of encounters, detours, with the stable identity of each at issue” (Clifford 1988: 157). The play of light figured as a central theme in the design and discourse of lamé fashion. Contemporary journals often described how lamé’s dazzling effect transformed the wearer’s body and surrounding space. For example, a 1928 article in La Soierie de Lyon noted that “this luxury [of lamé] … with affirmed preferences for brilliance and intensity of colours, could not be better satisfied, and especially for evening-dresses, that in the light, by their rich play of generous reflexes, enliven the theatre, concert, or social-gathering” (Algoud 1928: 74). Another 1922 article observed that “at the Opéra, in a stylish theater, … metal work, that is boldly and skillfully draped, silhouetting the ladies, tiny sheaths of metal glittering and of various colors, all precious in the long and supple line” (L. de L.: 611). Although metallic threads could only be woven in the weft direction on a loom, when tailored into a dress, lamé fabrics were positioned in all different directions—vertically, horizontally, and diagonally through a bias cut or manipulated drapes. The changing angles of reflections further contributed to a rich play of light. In the Poiret “Irudrée” gown, the lamé for the bodice is positioned according to its original grain; the same fabric for the skirt is turned 90 degrees, and in the rouleau, it runs spirally. Such juxtaposition abstractly echoes the shape and movement of corresponding body parts, while enriching their spectacle with subtly equivocal shimmering. For a body in motion in a salon or a dance hall, the brilliant patterns of light on a lamé dress would have been constantly changing, accentuating a lady’s silhouette while rendering it insubstantial and almost liquid in form. This interaction of light

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and moving fabrics, manifested as “tiny sheaths of metal glittering” L. de L.: 611, is a formative process in creating new surfaces, and at the same time it also optically untangles threads and dissolves the dress’s boundary. Light destabilizes a static, selfcontained textile piece into an open-ended field and regenerates a new material and visual dynamic. A passage from the highbrow fashion magazine Gazette du bon ton vividly captured the ever-changing, open-ended quality of the shine of lamé: “As for the lamés of the evening, …, over the whole surface of the fabric, a brilliant interlacing, neither beginning nor end (sans commencement ni fin) …, and where the eye, charmed by the play of the metal, is not restrained by any embarrassing motive” (“Chez Bianchini” 1924–5: 73). Luxury lamé clothes were intended for evening indoor spaces lit by artificial electric light, which conditioned how these fabrics were designed and viewed. Electric lighting developed rapidly since the 1880s in metropolis such as Paris, and by the 1920s, it had greatly outnumbered gaslight and become the primary mode of urban illumination (Schivelbusch 1988, 1992; Clayson 2019: 3–14). The instant, mechanized, and bright electric light permanently changed the ways things were lit and seen, while sparking polemic discourses between modernity defined by speed, efficiency, and freedom and a loss of the magic and romanticism associated with open flame. Contemporaries often regarded the intense and white incandescent light as too stark and harsh compared to the yellow-tinged candlelight and gaslight in the past. As the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch puts it, “[e]lectric light injected an element of rigidity, coldness, and distance” (1988: 153). Fashion was sensitive and nimble in responding to the changing lighting condition. For instance, the Parisian couture house Worth installed a special room “salon de lumière” for clients to preview the color and sheen of the dresses under intended lighting. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, it was first lit by candlelight, then gas lamps, and later electric fixtures (Groom 2012: 181). Lamé—the most reflective fashion surface in the new age of electricity—magnified the intense brilliance and impersonal starkness of artificial light. As the French writer Colette remarked in the mid-1920s: “Lamés of gold, Lamés of silver, copper, steel,—they resemble each other with a dry glare (l’éclat sec), … and with rough coldness (la froideur râpeuse)” (Colette [1922–28] 1973: 376). She also commented on the lamés made by the Lyonnais manufacturer Ducharne around the same time: “So much gold, and silver, and red copper, mixed with silk! On this fabric meant for artificial light, a sense of splendor and brutality dominates, which was necessary in the periods when fashion suffered from a poor form” (Colette [1922–28] 1973: 389). By “poor form” Colette referred to the simple, straight silhouette that was ascending to vogue, which served as a flat canvas for lamé designers to exercise extravagant fantasies. In her acute observation, Colette linked the shine of lamé, electric light, and the Zeitgeist of the epoch, all three of which were characterized by unabashed “splendor” and “brutality,” that is, a saturated sense of abandon and detachment. Fascinated by the design and weaving of lamé, Colette described how its weaver “restrains or exasperates the radiance of the metal threads, warms a background, interposes an illusory mist between the design drawing and the spectator” ([1922–28] 1973: 389). She regarded lamé’s metallic shine as an intermediary, an interposed layer

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that could be manipulated to affect the viewers. Indeed, lamé silks provided a fertile ground for artists and designers to play out the new theories and aesthetic of light, which were then masterfully interpreted through the composition and shine of metal threads. In this respect, lamé fashion shared the ongoing avant-garde artistic enthusiasm in exploring light, which since the late nineteenth century had deeply penetrated the arenas of art and performance (Gärtner 2018). Notable examples centering on textiles included the American dancer Loïe Fuller’s kinetic dance and the Russo-French artist Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous designs. Fuller palpitated voluminous crêpe de chine in her performance to “sculpt the light” and realized the idea of “painting with light” by dabbing salts on her costume for it to glow in the dark, inspired by Edison’s fluoroscope (Garelick 2007: 35–42; Gärtner 2018: 31). Delaunay experimented the concept of synchromatic movement of light in different media across painting, fashion, and décors, visualizing the collapsed temporality in polychrome circles and zigzags that resemble electric prisms (Leeuw-de Monti et al. 2011; Bellow 2015: 98–101). Likewise, the French artist Raoul Dufy tested out his theory of lumière-couleur in the textile medium when he worked as a designer for the firm Bianchini-Férier from 1912 to 1928. Many of his works, including some most exuberant and innovative lamé designed around 1925, were intended for Poiret’s couture (Perez-Tibi 1989: 65–115). The theory of lumière-couleur originated in Dufy’s painting practice during his Fauve period (1906–07) and would later guide all his oeuvre, including textiles. As Dufy explained: “When I talk about color, …, I am not talking about the colors of nature, […]. I see color itself as being nothing but a generator of light.” “Light in painting … is a light distributed throughout the composition, a ‘couleur-lumière’” (Perez-Tibi 1989: 4). Dufy regarded the light in visual art as unrelated to external natural sources and disembodied from the representation; instead, it is an inherent and constitutive component, and colors create light. His concept of color as the generator of light is no better conveyed than in his lamé silks, exemplified by a 1925 shawl composed of colorful fruits and stylized golden decorations on a black crêpe ground (also see Cora Ginsburg Gallery 2017: 2–4) (Plates 9 and 10). The metallic shine of the brocaded lamé heightens the vivid shades of the exotic fruits, and the different tensions between the metal and silk threads create a delicate crinkling effect, further contributing to a visual impression of subtly transforming light. Such shimmering colors ideally literalized Dufy’s theory of lumière–couleur. Like Dufy, another major lamé designer Michel Dubost also incorporated innovative pictorial modes in his work, but different from the former’s conceptual approach, he treated light more as an embodied and representational component. Dubost had taught textile design at the École des Beaux-arts and the École Supérieure de Tissage in Lyon; from 1922 to 1932, he served as a silk designer in the firm Ducharne (Tuchscherer 1975: 17–20; 51–3). Lamé as a textile medium of light par excellence is self-consciously reflected in Dubost’s celebrated piece L’Oiseau dans la lumière of 1925 (Figure 4.2). Each complete length, measuring about 120 cm wide and 160–170 cm long, features a large-scale, non-repeated motif of a stylized bird and flowers fragmented by overlapping parabolas. On a black crêpe ground, the density of the gold threads is masterfully manipulated to achieve varying degrees of transparency and opacity, which create an optical wonder of changing interplay of light and shadow.

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Figure 4.2  Michel Dubost, L’Oiseau dans la lumière, France, c. 1925, manufactured by Soierie F. Ducharne (Société Anonyme), silk and metallic threads. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Monsieur  et Madame Jean  Ducharne, 2004 (2004.84). ©  The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource NY

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Composition-wise, the fractured picture plane and the dynamic vortex of L’Oiseau dans la lumière were clearly informed by the Cubist principle of fragmentation and collage. In the textile, the superimposed patterns and intersecting parabolas suggest motion, energy, and transience of light, while evoking a sense of blurred reality and illusion. The bird seems to be entrapped in a floating bubble that is undergoing metamorphoses, and its uprising position suggests both struggle and ecstasy. Where the bird’s sweeping wings turn into extended arcs, the creature has become the light itself. A similar swirling composition also appeared in Thayaht’s geometric fashion illustrations for Madeleine Vionnet. A 1922 drawing of a shimmering gold dress in Gazette du bon ton shows circular rays emanated from the navel of a woman’s robe, and these electrified lines, highlighted by green and yellow to enhance the bedazzlement, merge with the contours and gestures of her body (Plate 11). Like Dubost’s bird, the woman is simultaneously enfolded and unfolded by the light that is refracted from her dress—her body and the light become one. L’Oiseau and Thayaht’s drawing betray the designers’ vision of a lamé wearer bathed in her own shine. “What is so beautiful as the sparkling of the gold and silver fabrics, which lends added charm to a woman by enfolding her in light?” claimed a fashion report in 1928 (“The Evolution of Fashion”: 84). The dimension and positioning of the pattern in the Dubost piece suggest that it was intended for an evening wrap or cloak with minimum tailoring. The 1st September issue in 1925 of Vogue (New York) presented this piece as a “winter fabric” (“Winter Fabrics” 1925: 34). When designing textiles intended for clothes, Dubost was particularly sensitive to the volume and motion of the body in relation to the placement of patterns (Tuchscherer 1975: 50). He must have conceived L’Oiseau by envisioning the coordination between the body, the decorations, and the light. In a finished coat, the pattern would extend from top to end on the back while wrapping around the wearer, whose body would have animated the sweeping vortex into more complex dynamism. Wrapped in such a coat and enveloped in metallic shine, a woman would be harmonized with the bird and come to embody the light herself. In an evening setting, the fragmented plane and gradation of gold in this piece delicately evoked the iridescence of a flying bubble or morning glow, a poetic escape from the wintry night lit by artificial light. Colette beautifully articulated this association of lamé’s shine to romanticized natural light. Upon visiting Ducharne’s atelier in the mid-1920s, she described the manufacturer, especially with the lamé products in mind, as “the one who weaves the moon, the sun, and the blue rays of the rain” (Colette ([1922–28] 1973: 391). Colette viewed metallic threads and silk yarns as rays of natural lights, and weaving as a process of orchestrating such light into an embodied material surface. The company subsequently used this phrase in its print advertisement—an abstract composition of interplaying lines and circles reminiscent of rays and nimbus, structurally similar to that of L’Oiseau dans la lumière (see Pan, 1928, n.p.). Although intended for settings with electric fixtures, lamé’s designs often purposefully distanced itself from this modern lighting condition and fabricated a fantasy realm recalling different periods and traditions. A substantial part of lamé designs evoked the aesthetic of interior light of the past. The 1910s and 1920s repertoires saw a recurrent arrangement of striking contrast between a dark, often black, background and gold and

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silver motifs. Such tonal scheme was not common in the European textile tradition but showed strong influence of the aesthetic of Japanese lacquer work maki-e, which adheres designs composed of metal foils and powders onto a dark (often black) lacquer ground. In numerous cases, even the motifs and compositions of lamé silks were directly or loosely inspired by Japanese styles, such as a 1925 Worth evening cape made of a BianchiniFérier silk designed by Jean Dunand bearing the Japonisme motif of bubble-blowing fishes (Plate 12). Japanese lacquer was imported to Europe in great quantity from the late sixteenth century through the end of the seventeenth century, and it continued to fascinate European royals and aristocrats during the eighteenth century, when small objects were collected as precious curios and fragmented older panels remounted as veneers for furniture (Impey and Kisluk-Grosheide 1994). In the wave of Japonisme that seized Europe from around the 1860s through the early twentieth century, the taste of Japanese gold and black lacquer captured wider imagination and would have paved the way for this sensibility to find renewed interests in luxury lamé textiles. In his essay In Praise of Shadow (1933), Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun’ichiro eloquently summarized the traditional aesthetic of shine entailed by Japanese lacquerwork: “Only in dim half-light is the true beauty of Japanese lacquerware reveals. […]. Lacquerware decorated in gold … should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery” ([1933] 1977: 13–15). The black and gold color scheme of lamé silks assimilated the aesthetic of candlelight doubly rooted in the Japanese tradition and French ancien régime, simulating a visual effect of metallic patterns emerging from the darkness with wavering gleams. As the examples above have shown, in lamé textiles, historicism was often paired with exoticism. These two interconnected themes frequently played out on the metallic shine, which, as a versatile medium of transformation and an immaterial surface lacking fixed boundaries, enabled an imaginary displacement through the sensations of other temporalities and cultures. In the early 1910s, Poiret was a pioneer designer to explore the newly perfected lamé for his fancy costumes and coutures alike, and he continued to favor this material throughout his career. An iconic Harem pants ensemble in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said to be worn by a guest to his famous costume ball La 1002e nuit in 1911, offers a glance of his use of lamé and the cultural implications he infused into this material (Figure 4.3). The outfit consists of a turban, a skirted tunic, and bouffant trousers (jupe-culotte) gathered around the ankle, all made of plain gold lamé with a silver tone, which dazzles beneath the embroidered gems and the sheer green gauze. Reinforcing the audacious silhouette and ornate decorations of the outfit, the shine of the lamé enhanced the extravagance and decadence of the Orient in a fantasy vision, while heightening the erotic allure of this ensemble. During the 1920s, lamé figured prominently in couture that evoked various themes of the European past or other cultures, ranging from Greece, Egypt, Byzantine, Islam to China, Japan, India, and Africa.2 Styles and symbols drawn from different times and spaces were also freely conflated and mixed. The Gazette du bon ton celebrated Poiret’s creations in 1925: “[U]nder his scepter, Byzantine and the [French] Consulate, the Middle Age and China form the most harmonious kingdoms” (“Chez Paul Poiret” 1924–5: 55).

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Figure 4.3  Paul  Poiret, Ensemble, France, 1911, metal, silk, cotton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Irene Lewisohn Trust, 1983 (1983.8a, b). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource NY

Not aiming for any cultural and historical precision, these designs rather fabricated a fictive vision of an alternative reality. Like Segalen’s journey in search of exoticism, “what remains are surfaces, mirrors, doubles—an ethnography of signs without essential contents,” and as a result, “the self, not the other, has become exotic” (Clifford 1988: 159, 161). Sensual and chameleon-like, the shine of the lamé augmented exotic

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messages, created a mysterious atmosphere, and inspired fantasies. Contemporary fashion journals had noted this transporting power, calling lamé’s shimmering reflections as evoking “a mysterious and distant voyage” (“Chez Paul Poiret” 1924– 5: 55) or describing how its gold, resembling “ancient sunlight,” “awaken[ed]… the impressions dating probably back to another life more brilliant than this one” (Vaudreuil 1922: 245). Mariano Fortuny, the versatile Spanish artist and inventor in Venice, is arguably the most singular designer in the early twentieth century who excelled at conjuring up another life and another time through metalized clothing. Fortuny did not follow the fashion cycle but returned to the handicraft tradition by producing hand-dyed, handprinted textiles inspired by Eastern and Renaissance Italian silks, which he made into loose-fitting robes resembling ancient tunics and oriental gowns. Most of Fortuny’s works have gold and silver motifs, but rather than interweaving lamé threads with the ground fabrics, he stencil-printed metallic patterns on silk velvet, gauze, or linen. The printed layer exhibits certain thickness as low relief, and the impressed metal leaves broken lines in intervals along the textile’s weft direction for the ground layer to show through. In this way, these textiles carefully mimic the woven effect of metallic weft threads intersecting with the ground warps, as if the patterns were brocaded like how they were done in the past. Parallel to the trend of modern lamé, Fortuny’s fabrics achieved lightness and suppleness by ridding off the encumbrance and weight of traditional metallic threads. However, unlike lamé, his mimetic “metal threads” shed off the traces of mechanic production and avoided the bright and crispy luminosity, but instead gleamed restrainedly and elusively as if already tarnished by time. In this sense, we may call Fortuny’s metallic fabric virtual lamé of nostalgia. Fortuny’s designs rejoiced in a fundamental anachronism, which was further mystified by the indefinable, delicate metallic shine. These clothes manifested themselves as a past resurrected for the future’s memory. The French writer Marie de Régnier, under the pen name Gérard d’Houville, captured their unusual implication of time in 1911: “In general, dresses have only a future before they are worn … However, these ones [Fortuny robes] seem to already have a past, which will add its melancholic grace to the beauty of those who will wear them tomorrow. These are the dresses of the dead … the dead who we probably were and who we surely will be” (d’Houville 1911). Stepping inside a palimpsest of historical references, in a Fortuny dress, one wore superimposed temporalities and multiple lives. There was no present time in these gowns. The past, fragmented and indefinite as a homogenous memory filtered through old painting, literature, and legends, was materialized only to be savored in an unspecified future. In the same article, de Régnier also observed how Fortuny captivated the intricate, capricious light in his garments—from haziness to translucence, from reddish gold to starry noir—the light of the changing hours and seasons in Venice refracted by its undulating water and ancient architecture. Her sensibility was later echoed by Marcel Proust, who, in his novel À la recherche du temps perdu, immortalizes a blueand-gold Fortuny indoor gown worn by Albertine, the narrator’s lover, especially its transformative glitter. The passage from the volume La Prisonière is worth quoting in full:

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The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It swarmed with Arabic ornaments like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultanas behind a screen of pierced stone, like the book covers in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, like the columns from which the Oriental birds that signified alternatively life and death were repeated in the scintillation of the fabric of dark blue which, as my gaze extended over it, turned into malleable gold, and by the same transmutations which, before the advancing gondola, change the azure of the Grand Canal into flamboyant metal. (Proust [1923] 1988: 895–6)

The golden shine of the Fortuny dress enabled the onlooker—the narrator—to displace himself from the bedroom to Venice. Through the two-way transformation between the flamboyant metal in her dress and the glistening Grand Canal, Albertine’s erotic charm and Venice’s exotic, historic allure found a shared manifestation and metaphor in the shine of the Fortuny gown. We may recall that one meaning of the French word “lame” is wave. This shared linguistic root between lamé and the undulating water makes it only natural for the Grand Canal, and by extension, Venice, to be imagined through and as a glittering feminine gold dress. Yet the robe was no more than “a phantom” (ombre), whose illusiveness and fugitiveness was only intensified by its flickering shine. The Venice it evoked was “invisible,” “hidden” (dissimulé), and fragmented, and the enrobed Albertine, when being watched attentively by her lover, shattered into millions of gold flecks like the reflection of the Grand Canal. The shine of the Fortuny dress elicited a displacement that was most illusionary and frustrating: both the woman and the city were tantalizing but fleeting, perpetuating an unfulfilled longing. The Proustian-Venetian light of metallic tone also seized the fascination of the French fashion illustrator George Barbier, who, in his 1923 essay “Venise,” wrote that the reflections, the sways, and the undulations in Venice held a particular enchantment for “worn-out souls” and “unfulfilled hearts” (1923: 199). Barbier imagined a silent encounter between Monsieur de Charlus, an eccentric aristocrat from Proust’s novel, and Mademoiselle de Maupin, a seventeenth-century swordswoman and opera singer known for cross-dressing, whose stories inspired Théophile Gautier’s 1835 eponymous fiction. In this anachronic encounter, “M. de Charlus, in pigeon grey, comes out from Hotel Danieli; he passes by Mlle. de Maupin, who has thrown a purple cape over her gold dress. They exchange a smile, without knowing each other, and the fire in their glances crossed like swords” (199). The subdued color and matte surface of Charlus’s suit form a vivid contrast to Maupin’s shiny golden dress, for which the writer probably had in mind Fortuny’s stenciled gowns or even 1920s lamé robes. Interestingly, Barbier describes the éclat in their intercrossed eyes as swords—a clash of thin metals—which recalls another meaning of “lame” as sword blade. In this passage, Barbier paints a surrealistic vignette of Venice where the metal threads unbound from a gold lamé dress float like rays of light to connect two legendary strangers, piercing through the impossible limits of time to resurrect an invented world of yesterday inhabited by the literary phantoms from Venice’s past.

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The link between Proust and metallized textiles goes beyond the literary tropes. Some fashion critics even drew a comparison between the shimmering world of lamé and Proust’s fictional universe. “All these so delicate, so subtle, so artfully evocative, that one believes to have found (retrouver) the capricious thinking of some Marcel Proust,” so exclaimed a 1925 article titled “In the Kingdom of Scintillation” (Au Royaume du chatoiement) dedicated to the lamé silks of Bianchini-Férier displayed in the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs (1924–25: 364). The visual logic (or illogic) of lamé designs resembles the novel’s narrative style, as both entangle layered reveries and untangle them in nonlinear time and sensual details. It is as if lamé furnished a ravishing material surface and visual spectacle for streams of thoughts and fantasies, arresting a chain of fragmented moments into all that glitter and shine. In particular, the author referred this comparison to the lamés with fantastic, bizarre designs (dessins étranges) (1924–25: 363). In one such example created by Dufy for Poiret, an unlikely combination of horses, sea creatures, and shells in disproportionate scales breathe life to a crêpe ground in marine blue, and the lavish silver lamé renders the motifs all the more fairy tale-like (Figure 4.4). The fabric’s chimerical, phantasmagorical charm was revealed to the best advantage when made into a Poiret dress, as shown in a mannequin in the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs: in generous uncut yards, the silk draped from one shoulder cascades into a long train on the back (Figure 4.5). The style of the dress was incongruous with contemporary fashion silhouette and indifferent to any agenda for future trends; it transcends time and stand as a pure celebration of the fabric itself. There is a sense of displacement in its extreme: the mannequin poses like a

Figure 4.4  Raoul Dufy, Chevaux marins et Coquillages, France, c. 1925, woven by BianchiniFérier, silk and metallic threads, detail.  The George Washington University Museum, Washington, DC, T-1074, Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection

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Figure 4.5  Paul  Poiret, Model of an Evening Dress, France, ca. 1925,  displayed in the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 1925. Published in Encyclopédie des arts décoratifs et industriels moderne au XXème siècle, Paris 1925, Vol. 9, PL. VII

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pagan goddess rising from the sea wielding her magical universe—all that is glittering from another world.3

Conclusion, and the Last Glitter of Lamé Lamé in the 1910s and 1920s marked one of the most splendid chapters in twentiethcentury textile and fashion history and, one may even say, the last one when dress fabrics were brimmed with unconstraint opulence and fantasy both in material and design. The shine of lamé was arguably the most intriguing and convoluted one in its time. While engaging with modern electric lighting and incorporating experimental artistic visions of light in its creations, lamé fundamentally distanced itself from the increasingly dominant modernist ideal of shine—namely clarity, progressiveness, and rationality—and an uncomplicated bright surface associated with industrial coolness, candor functionality, and good moral. By contrast, the shine of lamé attempted to mystify and enchant, mobilizing layers of reimagined histories, cultures, and savage nature evoked by the textiles’ patterns, or itself serving as an integral component of these references. The bedazzlement of lamé facilitated a suspension of the real and present, and for its wearers and viewers, it enabled an embodied experience of imaginary displacement in space and time. The 1930s saw the last glitter of lamé. Although it continued to hold the public fascination, lamé took a new discursive implication largely predicated on the Hollywood-style glamour. The plain lamé became the dominant type in accordance with the long, sinuous silhouette new in fashion, while figured lamé that once featured the most compelling designs had lost favor. Undoubtedly, the high-contrast, blackand-white cinematography of Hollywood movies contributed to the vogue of plain lamé and the feminine ideal associated with it. So did the newly developed fashion photography in the similarly style from this period, which used dramatic lighting to exaggerate the shine of pure lamé. Such effects would obscure any patterned details but instead elevated the wearer to some statute-like goddess glistening with streamlined elegance. Gone were the exotic evocations and transporting power that characterized lamé in the earlier years; its shine now mostly served to construct feminine mystique and sex allure, which often carried an implication of danger and transgression.

Notes 1 2 3

For a photograph of Vaslav Nijinski in the harem-pants costume as the Negro Slave from Schéhérazade, see Victoria and Albert Museum, Theatre and Performance Collection, THM/163. For examples, see Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009.300.2116 and Victoria and Albert Museum, T.91-1999. For another photograph showing this dress on a female model, see Perez-Tibi (1989), Fig. 106, p. 88.

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References Algoud, H. (1928), “Fabrics of Gold, Silver and Silk,” La Soierie de Lyon (February): 61–75. “Au Royaume du chatoiement” (1924–5), Gazette du bon ton, Vol. 7, No. 8: 361–4. Barbier, G. (1923), “Venise,” Gazette du bon ton, Vol. 6, No. 5: 197–200. Bellow, J. (2015), “On Time: Sonia Delaunay’s Sequential Simultanism,” in J.-C. Marcadé et al. (eds.), Sonia Delaunay, London: Tate Publishing, 98–102. Chevreul, M.-E. (1846), Théorie des effets optiques que presentent les étoffes de soie, Paris: Firmin Didot. “Chez Bianchini” (1924–5), Gazette du bon ton, Vol. 7, No. 2: 73–6. “Chez Paul Poiret” (1924–5), Gazette du bon ton, Vol. 7, No. 2: 54–6. Clayson, H. (2019), Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clifford, J. (1988), “A Poetics of Displacement: Victor Segalen,” in J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 152–63. Colette ([1922–8] 1973), “Arrière-Saison,” 375–8; “Soieries,” 388–91, in Le Voyage égoïste, Œuvres complètes de Colette, Vol. 5, Paris: Flammarion. Cora Ginsburg Gallery (2017), Catalogue of 20th and 21st Century Costume and Textiles. Dictionnaire critique de la langue française (1787), v. 2. ARTFL-FRANTEXT database. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1835), sixth edition. v. 2, ARTFL-FRANTEXT database. “The Evolution of Fashion in Lamés and Figured Fabrics” (1928), La Soierie de Lyon (February): 83–5. Garelick, R. K. (2007), Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gärtner, U. (2018), “‘I Sculpt Light.’ Visions of the Classic Avant-Garde,” in H. Arnhold (ed.), Bauhaus and America: Experiments in Light and Movement, Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 31–7. Groom, G., ed. (2012), Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. d’Houville, G. (1911), “Un Magicien,” Le Figaro, May 1: n.p. Impey, O. R. and D. O. Kisluk-Grosheide (1994), “The Japanese Connection: French Eighteenth-Century Furniture and Export Lacquer,” Apollo, Vol. 139 (January): 48–61. J. A. D. (1928), “Figured and Metal Threaded Fabrics in Fashion and Dressmaking,” La Soierie de Lyon (February): 76–82. Leclercq, J.-P. (2001), Jouer la lumière, Paris: Biro. Lowenthal, D. ([1985] 2015), The Past Is a Foreign Country: Revisited, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. L. de L. (1922), “Fashion at the Theater,” La Soierie de Lyon (December 1): 609–11. L. de L. (1923), “La Mode,” La Soierie de Lyon (November 16): 755–6. de Leeuw-de Monti, M. et al. (2011), Colour Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay, London: Thames and Hudson. Pan: Annuaire du luxe à Paris (1928), Paris: Devambez. Pauletti, A. G. and P. Peri (1999), Oro filato: Il Romanzo dei fili metallici preziosi dalle origini ad oggi, Milan: Lurex. Perez-Tibi, D. (1989), Dufy, trans. Shaun Whiteslde, New York: Abrams.

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Proust, M. ([1923] 1988), La Prisonnière, À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. III, Paris: Gallimard; Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Segalen V. ([1904–18] 2002), Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. and ed. Y. R. Schlick, Durham: Duke University Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1988), Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. A. Davies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1992), Licht, Schein und Wahn: Auftritte der elektrischen Beleuchtung im 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Ernst. Sévigné, M. de R.-C. ([1680] 1974), Correspondance T. 2, 1675–1680, letter on November 6, 1676, Paris: Gallimard. Tanizaki, J. ([1933] 1977), In Praise of Shadow, trans. T. J. Harper and E. G. Seidensticker. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books. Tuchscherer, J.-M. (1975), Les Folles années de la soie, Lyon: Musée historique des tissues. Troy, N. (2003), Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vaudreuil (1922), “Velours et lamé,” Gazette du bon ton, Vol. 5, No. 7: 245–8. “Winter Fabrics” (1925), Vogue (New York) (September 1): 33–7.

5

Gleam: Rebranding Big Steel in Postwar America Nicolas P. Maffei

In the late 1950s, after almost fifty years of dominance, the American steel industry, led by United States Steel (U.S. Steel) and the steel trade body, the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), woke up to a significantly changed commercial landscape.1 The industry found itself challenged by competition from foreign steel producers, new materials such as plastics and aluminum, labor unrest, and a public that understood Big Steel as old-fashioned (Meikle 1995). In response, the steel industry took advantage of a recent marketing revolution that focused on interpreting consumer desires and aggressively engaged in promotional efforts that sold steel as a bright, light, and modern material (Vargo and Lusch 2008; Nuccio 1964: 15). This chapter will focus on the Steelmark merchandising campaign, the first industrywide promotion of steel as a modern material, which employed a four-pointed starlike form, suggesting a glinting twinkle of reflected light and the “Gleam of Stainless Steel” marketing promotion, which associated shininess with informal, fashionable, living, while employing the gleaming Steelmark emblem (Plate 13). This study evidences a consumer-oriented emphasis in postwar institutional marketing focused on modern lifestyle where shininess was employed as a key visual and rhetorical trope. In the steel sector, this period witnessed a more public-oriented corporate identity, offering a set of goods, messages, and symbols that reflected an increased emphasis on consumption and modern living. While focusing on the influence of market research, this article seeks to show how design outcomes (e.g., logos, trademarks, retails spaces, and advertisements) originated from unique economic, political, professional, and aesthetic realities. Additionally, the chapter investigates the transformation of a once complacent, industrial giant as it responded to a rapidly emerging consumer market. The article joins a growing body of research on the relationship between design, market research, and promotional activities, including advertising and marketing campaigns (Porter 1999; Blaszczyk 2000; Nickles 2002) (Figure 5.1). The American postwar period is widely understood as one of extraordinary economic affluence and lifestyle consumption (Hine 1987; Lears 1994; Foreman 1997; Glickman 1999; Daunton and Hilton 2001; Cohen 2003). A remarkable output of academic writing of recent decades strongly associates consumption with the construction of modern identities (Campbell 1987; Featherstone 1991; Giddens 1991;

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Figure 5.1  McLouth Stainless Steel Advertisement, c. 1961: “The gleam in her eye says it’s stainless steel!”; “A Special Report on: Carefree Living for your Home, The Gleam of Stainless Steel,” American Metal Market, Section 3, February 19, 1962, 6. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, AISI Records, Box 123, Folder “Stainless Steel 2.” Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library

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Figure 5.2  “Carefree Living” trade advertisement for Armco Steel Corporation using the Gleam emblem and  Steelmark hangtag, 1962: “A Special Report on: Carefree Living for your Home, The Gleam of Stainless Steel,” American Metal Market, Section 3, February 19, 1962, 7. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, AISI Records, Box 123, Folder “Stainless Steel 2.” Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library

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Lash and Friedman 1992; Bell and Hollows 2006). In 1966, the design critic Reyner Banham in his classic appreciation of gleaming consumer goods, “All That Glitters Is Not Stainless,” linked the twentieth-century shininess of the “average parking lot and appliance showroom” to democratic patterns of consumption (Banham 1974: 156). These linkages are consistent with the steel industry’s pairing of modern living and consumer products in their postwar campaigns (Figure 5.2). Although it embraced institutional advertising relatively late, after 1935 U.S. Steel was depicted as a friendly nation-builder that contributed significantly to the public’s well-being, a useful image during the business-bashing New Deal era, and one that was developed by the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn (BBD&O) (Marchand 1998: 224, 228). In the years after the Second World War, however, Big Steel required a more modern and consumer-oriented image. A central theme of the steel industry’s promotional materials was the notion of shininess, the gleam of stainless steel in particular, as a unique and valuable quality: one that would aid the promotion of the entire steel industry. Thus, through aggressively marketing steel as innovative and stylish, the steel industry hoped to shed its image as heavy, dirty, and old-fashioned—as a U.S. Steel–sponsored consumer survey of 1955 indicated (Fleishman 1958). Likewise, promoting stainless steel, especially to homemakers, would help to diminish the public perception of steel as a backward-looking producer of bridges and railways and present a modern face for the sector as America traversed the Cold War and entered the space age. The following quote of 1949 from the Science News-Letter perhaps typifies the association of stainless steel with luminous modernity in the middle of the twentieth century and is suggestive of the kind of shining image that the steel industry wished to portray. A flashing, stream-lined railroad train. The speedy X-2 experimental jet plane that flies faster than sound. The shiny spoon on your table or the mirror-like sink in your kitchen. Rustless, all of them, because they are made of stainless steel, these metal objects in our modern world are symbolic of permanence and untarnished beauty. They are metallurgic science applied and shining most brightly. (Ewing 1949: 394)

From 1944 to 1959, with European and Japanese production capabilities ravaged by the Second World War, the American steel industry, led by U.S. Steel, was globally dominant. During most of its first 100 years, beginning in 1901, U.S. Steel was an industrial giant that dominated the American steel industry, while remaining the world’s greatest producer of steel (Warren 2001: xvii; 2). American steel capacity expanded hugely through the 1940s and 1950s largely as a result of the demands of the Second World War, the Korean and Cold wars, and the need to satisfy an increasingly voracious consumer appetite.2 During this relatively noncompetitive period, the steel industry thrived financially but was lulled into complacency. From the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, however, American steel was under threat as foreign producers competed successfully through low wages, cheap shipping costs, affordable materials, and the modernization of plant (Warren 2001: 23). If Big Steel can be understood as a symbol of American national identity, then foreign competition could be seen

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as an external threat, not just to the economy, but to the America’s industrial values of productivity and global might. Whereas the United States produced an estimated 62 percent of the world’s steel in 1945, by 1950, this had dropped to 46.6 percent, and by 1960, this figure had reached a low of 26 percent (Warren 2001: 214–15). Over the same period, U.S. Steel, the largest of America’s steel companies, saw increases in expenses, labor costs, and operating rates, and witnessed only modest increases in profits (Warren 2001: 227). In addition, domestic competition from aluminum and plastics manufacturers greatly worried steel industry leaders. Across the ferrous metal industries, increased external and internal competition spurred increased marketing. By 1964, the New York Times wrote of the intensive efforts and vast expenditures by the steel sector, noting that “Mighty steel, which only a few years ago appeared to have lost to newer metals in the battle for supremacy, has come back strong” (Nuccio 1964: 15).

Steelmark and Gleam Campaigns In the immediate postwar years, manufacturers were able to more easily sell goods due to pent-up consumer demand following the Great Depression and the Second World War. But once these needs were met, subsequent sales were much harder to achieve. It wasn’t until the postwar period that America’s “marketing revolution” occurred where a more diverse range of market research methods were widely embraced by manufacturers in order to more precisely determine the desires of consumers (Dobson 1988: 304; Dawson 2003: 39).3 In 1955 U.S. Steel hired the market research firm Alfred Politz Research, Inc. to conduct a nation-wide survey to discern the public understanding of steel and counter commercial competition. With an office staff of 200 and a field staff of 1,300, Alfred Politz Research was listed as one of America’s largest market research firms in 1958 with 8–10 long-standing retainer accounts, including Socony-Mobil Oil Company and Chrysler (Fleishman 1958; Dawson 2003). In the Politz survey, which included 4,000 interviews with people over 15 years of age, respondents said they associated steel with girders, heavy machinery, and engineering projects, and considered it “strong, heavy, and reliable, but not particularly modern or having good styling” (H. A. 1958: 101). Most people were unaware of the lighter uses of steel or its thousands of types, grades, and finishes (H. A. 1958: 101–2). In addition, the survey found that consumers often didn’t recognize products made of the material and that this was increasingly difficult with the introduction of new surface treatments like aluminum and vinyl coatings (AISI 1963a). While the plastic’s industry from the late 1940s had vigorously promoted its product as ideal for easy cleaning, or what cultural historian Jeffrey L. Meikle called “damp cloth utopianism,” the steel industry would embrace the marketing concept of shininess as a symbol of modernity over a decade later (Meikle 1995: 167–82). Spurred on by the 1955 consumer study, the plan was to develop an industry-wide campaign to promote steel as a modern material (AISI 1960b: 1). For the first time in its history, the AISI created a Committee to Promote the Use of Steel (CPUS). The Market Development Subcommittee was launched shortly afterward to promote the “lightness, brightness and versatility” of steel in products, in particular through their identification with the Steelmark insignia (AISI 1963a). Thus, under the auspices of U.S. Steel and in coordination with the AISI,

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was born the Steelmark program (an industry-wide promotion designed to “make people steel conscious and win a greater share of the consumer market”) and the company’s first “total corporate identity,” intended to unify and focus the company’s image (H. A. 1958: 100). Run by the U.S. Steel’s advertising agency Batton, Barton, Durstine and & Osborn (BBD&O) with design work by Lippincott and Margulies (L&M), a pioneer in corporate identity, the main goal of the program was to encourage consumers to associate steel with “modern living—good design—[and] beauty and style” (H. A. 1958: 100). Of course numerous factors—from economics to consumer impressions—pushed the steel company toward aggressive marketing and design activities. However, a narrative of American steel under attack also helped to sell the professional services of designers and marketers to steel executives. The Steelmark was unveiled in January 1960, though used in sales material as early as 1955 (Wright 1955). BBD&O was considered an “establishment” agency but was later responsible for the groundbreaking youth-oriented Pepsi Generation campaigns after 1961 (Frank 1997: 120; 171). U.S. Steel’s alliance with a conventional agency was consistent with their own moderate approach to business and innovation. In 1958 Industrial Design magazine reviewed U.S. Steel’s sweeping identity program and the new Steelmark. The article noted that the impetus of the identity program came from U.S. Steel’s John Veckly, Director of Advertising, who believed that with the increased use of plastics and aluminum after the Second World War and “their phenomenally successful advertising campaigns, inroads were being made in areas of the market—notably consumer goods—that U.S. Steel could and should be exploiting” (Frank 1997: 103). Veckly felt that he needed more than just a survey to convince some of U.S. Steel’s more independent affiliates. Therefore, he needed a “disinterested third party”—a design agency. Veckly thought Central Operations could more persuasively advance their arguments if he chose a design authority with a strong reputation (Frank 1997: 103). L&M seemed to satisfy this requirement, having already achieved a considerable profile through its work with some of America’s leading businesses, including the American Tobacco Company, Clairol Incorporated, Dow Corning Corporation, General Mills, and Kraft Foods Company (Design Sense, No. 9). Around 1960 the in-house branding and corporate identity publication of L&M, Design Sense, outlined the two years of “intensive” work that led to final designs of the U.S. Steel trademark and Steelmark emblem, including the “mammoth” Politz survey, a three-month tour of U.S. Steel plants and offices, and a review of “thousands of pieces of printed matter” from the various departments and divisions of the “giant corporation” (Design Sense, No. 9: 8). L&M’s conclusion, which conveniently paralleled Politz’s, was that the existing U.S. Steel trademark had “valuable equity”: research had shown it was one of the three best-known trademarks of “some hundred” tested. This finding strongly delimited the bounds of the design brief and led to a solution that offered “no essential change,” but “modernization” and the establishment of procedures for consistent application of the mark across the corporation and its affiliates. L&M staff noted that the previous “look” of U.S. Steel had constantly shifted—“at times brilliant, at times stuffy and old fashioned” resulting in “confusion” in the public’s mind and a “badly blurred image of steel as a contemporary product” (Design Sense, No. 9: 8). L&M’s redesign of the existing U.S. Steel trademark aimed to embody “the new image of steel—a light, stylish material” of “its present campaign” while maintaining

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visual continuity with the existing logo—the three serif letters “USS” within a circle. To achieve visual clarity, the redesign of the logo required dropping the serifs, increasing the distance between the letters, and widening the circle (H. A. 1958: 104). While the new trademark was accepted by U.S. Steel, its director of market development felt that in the light of intense materials competition, “something more was needed …. The consumer had to be made aware that he was buying steel and using steel products in its multifarious forms. Steel had to be promoted as an omnipresent material with manysided usefulness.” What was desired was a new slogan and a new mark “that would sell steel—anyone’s steel.” BBD&O developed the slogan, “Steel—Lightens Your Work, Brightens Your Leisure, Widens Your World,” while L&M designed the Steelmark—“a kind of hallmark as sterling is in silver … designed in such a way as to make [the] visual association with the new U.S. Steel trademark irresistible” (H. A. 1958: 105). The aim to design a hallmark suggests a conscious effort to equate steel with precious metals, thus offering a glinting promise of quality, value, and status. L&M sought to maintain visual continuity between the two marks. Both the Steelmark and the U.S. Steel logotype used the same-sized circle and similar letterforms. Both used a trio of letters (in the case of the U.S. Steel trademark) or star-like geometric forms, known as hypocycloids (in the case of the Steelmark). A blank space in the Steelmark insignia permitted the addition of the name of a steel type, such as stainless, galvanized, and the like (AISI n.d.). The tapered star-shaped forms were meant to suggest lightness and “convey versatility and up-to-dateness” (Gregor 1961: 39). The hypocycloids were described by the design firm as “concavesided ‘diamonds’,” reinforcing the bright and light qualities of modern steel, while continuing the comparison with precious materials. The “gaiety” of colors employed were meant to harmonize with the new slogan: “yellow for ‘lightens’—orange for ‘brightens’, horizon blue, suggesting sky and water, for ‘widens’.” In Design Sense, it was noted that the “three-part, star-like symbol” suggested “luminosity, modernity, brightness, airiness”—a “visual expression of U.S. Steel’s new theme” (Design Sense, No. 9: 9). In 1963, a press release for the Steelmark noted that the campaign was part of a long-standing effort to “win public recognition of modern steels that are bright and modern” and strong and durable (AISI 1963a). The look of the Steelmark emblem was consistent with contemporary postwar design imagery that evoked a new kind of modernity, one that rejected the grid and embraced the organic, while suggesting the possibility of orbital space flight and the energy and power of the atom (Crowley and Pavitt 2008). This trend was perhaps typified by the use of parabolic shapes in logos, such as the mark for the contemporary office furniture company, Herman Miller, by the George Nelson office, and structures, such as Eero Saarinen’s innovative stainless steel Gateway Arch for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis (competition 1947–48; built 1959–64), which celebrated the American project of national expansion (Handlin 2004: 249; Berry 2005: 28) (Plate 14). Saarinen said he chose the parabolic-like catenary curve because he considered it “pure,” “dynamic,” and “timeless” and that he chose stainless steel because of its “permanence” and because it “belong[ed] to our time” (Saarinen 1968: 22). With the launch and orbit of the Russian satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, the parabolic orbital path would have been strongly associated with the space race—its

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technological achievements, global anxiety, and the promise of advanced consumer goods. In America, space exploration promised not only scientific discovery and military prowess, but consumer applications of space-age materials and innovations. The Steelmark could be considered as a Cold War weapon in the battle between the Soviet Union and America. While the USSR may have launched the first man-made object into space, the United States set the pace for consumerism. The Steelmark, a twinkling combination of parabolic forms, could therefore be seen as appropriating the orbital imagery of the Sputnik, while promoting America’s advanced consumer economy. Such meanings can be associated with the kind of modernity the AISI desired for “new” metals, a modernity of innovation, novelty, and contemporary living. After testing the Steelmark for a year in 1959, using the mark on over 12,000,000 consumer goods, U.S. Steel presented the unregistered symbol to the steel industry for use as a merchandising device (“Producers Agree on Symbol to Appear on Products”: 45, 52; “U.S. Steel Tests Plan in South”). In 1960, the AISI announced: “The Entire Steel Industry Adopts Broad Identification Program” (AISI 1960b: n.p.). Typical of the embrace of the Steelmark across the sector was the announcement in 1960, in a leading steel trade journal, Iron Age, that “[s]tainless producers are dropping their old symbol to join the Steelmark campaign” (“Steel Stresses Product Identity”: 50). The use of the Steelmark by stainless steel producers and manufacturers was particularly appropriate, as they were in competition with hallmarked silver in the flatware market. The use of the Steelmark across the industry suggested a familial, or even paternal, relationship with U.S. Steel, while creating a more unified identity for the entire trade. The Steelmark was intended for use in a variety of promotional contexts, including window displays, hang tags, point-of-sale display materials, packaging, catalogues, sales literature, signage, livery, and print and television advertising (Wright 1955). It appeared in numerous steel company advertising campaigns in trade and consumer magazines, including Look, Good Housekeeping, Time, Newsweek, and many others (AISI 1961: 1). There were even local Steel Days, three-day events where steel was celebrated through speeches, parades, and fireworks. In 1963, the emblem was even adopted as the symbol for the American football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. A press release of 1963 estimated that the Steelmark tag appeared on 40 million products and, continuing the association with hallmarking, that an estimated 6 billion “impressions” of the Steelmark have been made through printing on packaging, product literature, and in advertisements (AISI 1963a). It was claimed that in 1964, around 2,000 manufacturers of steel products used the Steelmark (Nuccio 1964: 15).

Selling Gleam: Stainless Steel Promotion Because of its shininess, association with contemporary design, use in cuttingedge technology, and its resistance to rust, stainless steel was the ideal material to communicate the qualities of modern steel to the general public. Of course, the unique characteristics of the material had long been foregrounded in its publicity. Stainless steel, with its emphasis on brightness and novelty, can be seen as having paved the way for the Steelmark campaign. It certainly helped to illustrate the diversity of steel during

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the campaign. In fact, the annual two-week “Gleam of Stainless Steel” department store promotion prominently displayed the Steelmark alongside the gleam symbol, an op art version of a Steelmark hypocycloid. In the prewar years, the public would have witnessed the gleam of stainless steel in numerous contexts. In the 1930s, bright stainless steel was used to draw the eye to numerous artifacts, including architecture, trains, and automobiles. The stainless crown ornamentation of the 1931 Chrysler Building was perhaps the most flamboyant use of the material in architecture in that decade. But it was also widely used in other prominent tall buildings, including the lobbies of the International Style 1932 Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building. In 1933, the Budd Company built the attention-grabbing experimental stainless steel streamliner, the Pioneer Zephyr for the Burlington Lines. In 1936, Allegheny Ludlum and the Ford Motor Company teamed up to produce a half-dozen presentation cars with all stainless steel bodies (Meldrum 1957). An AISI report of 1952 drew attention to where the public might encounter stainless steel, noting the percentage of stainless shipments for 1948 was 3.7 percent for aircraft; 5.5 percent for rail transport; 23.6 percent for appliances, utensils, and cutlery; and 28 percent for automobiles, where it was used for trim, hub caps, and other bright work (Basford n.d.). In the 1950s, the AISI’s Committee of Stainless Steel Producers (CSSP), based in New York and made up of members from around twenty steel- and alloy-producing companies, including U.S. Steel, energetically promoted the material through the “Gleam” promotion, exhibitions, and television, but primarily through print publicity aimed at consumers, retailers, steel manufacturers, architecture and building trades, and industrial and commercial users. By the early 1960s, the committee focused on education, research, fact files, and publicity aimed at the steel and business press. Language used in the print publicity emphasized the stylishness, strength, beauty, hygiene, and luminous qualities of stainless steel (AISI 1960a).4 In the 1960s, Steelmarketing, an internal publication for the steel industry, urged its readers to emphasize steel’s shining modernity in contrast to competing materials such as plastics and aluminum. A 1963 survey in the article “New Images Are Made, Not Born” found that luster was considered a quality lacking in steel among those involved in the “selection and specification” of materials. The author warned, “[I]mpressions such as these will not disappear of their own accord. People at all levels in our industry must work at telling the story of modern steels” (AISI 1963b: 3). Perhaps guided by a CSSP press release, the magazine Industrial Design in 1961 reminded readers of the “popular attributes” of stainless: its “lustre, sleekness” and “its own natural surface,” which provide a significant visual “accent” to product design (Gregor 1961: 43). The stainless steel industry’s promotional publications, in-house newsletters and sales pamphlets, consistently promoted the material in relation to its physical attributes: its shininess, durability, and hygienic qualities. However, style and lack of upkeep, compared to silver, were also put forward as beneficial characteristics. Terms such as “luster,” “brightness,” and “gleam” were often used interchangeably to denote the modern qualities of domestic products made of stainless steel. Such qualities could be used to suggest a range of meanings associated with consumer modernity, including stylishness, novelty, cleanliness, and even a kind of domestic “magic.”

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Steel firms understood that the reflective qualities of stainless steel could be marshalled to their advantage. An industry publication of 1956 advised retail sales staff to emphasize the shininess of stainless steel in their displays. “The finish of stainless steel suggests strength, hardness, durability, brilliance, and clean definite lines. Therefore, it can be displayed to best advantage to accent these qualities, by surrounding it with contrasting finishes and textures. Wood grain, cloth textures, and dull, soft finishes” (Republic Steel 1956: 6). In a sales pamphlet published by the CSSP in 1956, the author waxed lyrical about cookware that provided “stove to table magic” and “bright and shining” cutlery that was almost indestructible, noting that “[s]tainless steel is synonymous with modern design” (CSSP 1956: n.p.). An AISI pamphlet for sales staff explained why “stainless steel is good to buy,” proclaiming it “[s]tays bright” and “doesn’t disappoint” by getting “shabby and spoiling pride of ownership,” making an obvious reference to the tarnishing of silver (CSSP n.d.: n.p.). Hoping to distance the material from the negative associations of metal surface coatings, another publication warned, “All that glitters is not chrome” (CSSP 1956: n.p.). In 1956, the shine of stainless steel was associated with modernity and status goods by Miss Stainless Steel, Gloria Wright, “an experienced diplomat for stainless steel producers” to various “opening day ceremonies” at department stores across the United States, who proclaimed it “the modern metal for today’s modern designs” with “lustrous beauty [that] lasts,” “at home with fine china and crystal” (Wright 1955; Trench 1961: 18). While the stainless steel industry had long promoted the material as gleaming, hygienic, durable, and attractive, it wasn’t until early 1959, coinciding with the piloting of the Steelmark by U.S. Steel, that a national campaign promoted stainless steel as a modern consumer-oriented material. At the outset, the annual two-week “Gleam of Stainless Steel” department store promotion was conceived and supported by Inco, the International Nickel Company. The “three-dimensional” trademark, a checkerboard, red, white, and blue star, was an “adaptation” of the “familiar” Steelmark symbol and was used in promotional materials and store displays (AISI 1962: 33) (Figure 5.2). The use of a receding grid pattern was reminiscent of the work of the op art painter, Bridget Riley, in particular “Movement in Squares” of 1961. In the early to mid1960s, op art became a craze and the “Op Art Look” was widely appropriated and adapted in numerous examples of popular visual and material culture (Follin 2004: 171). The deliberate use of such imagery by the steel industry further evidenced the desire to identify their business with modern lifestyles and identities, while distancing themselves from their old-fashioned image. In its first year, the “Gleam” promotion involved thirty-two leading department stores and numerous manufacturers of stainless steel appliances, flatware, and utensils. In 1960, it was extended to sixty stores and their branches (Trench 1961: 19). By 1961, major stainless steel producers had joined the promotion, supported by a nation-wide print and radio advertising campaign and the continued participation of over sixty of the nation’s major department stores. In 1962, the CSSP and the AISI took over the sponsorship and coordination of the “Gleam” promotions (Larson 1964: 9). The CSSP provided promotional materials for participating department stores, including in-store posters, banners, and counter cards, as well as suggestions for window displays and newspaper and radio advertising. Manufacturers assisted with the release and

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Figure 5.3  Title page of “A Special Report on … The Gleam of Stainless Steel,” American Metal Market, Section 2, January 25, 1961. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, AISI Records, Box 123, Folder “Stainless Steel 2.” Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library

promotion of new products and by staging in-store demonstrations (Larson 1964: 9). Key to the promotion was the installation in the stores of a permanent stainless steel “shop” featuring household utensils and small appliances (Trench 1961: 18) (Figure 5.3). By having a shop within a shop, producers could squeeze out competitors, including producers of aluminum and plastics and importers of stainless steel. The design of the shop could also present a contemporary and stylish environment for stainless steel, thus reminding consumers that steel and the steel industry were as modern as their non-ferrous competitors. The CSSP reported that the promotion increased stainless steel sales by 34 percent in 1960 and 22 percent in 1961 in forty-eight department stores and exposed 46,000,000 people to the “Gleam of Stainless Steel” advertising (CSSP 1962: n.p.)

Conclusion During the immediate postwar years, the American steel industry thrived as a result of a buoyant consumer society, the needs of the Korean and Cold wars, a stable labor

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market, and lack of competition from foreign producers and competing materials. However, by the late 1950s, this period of relative calm had turned to one of intense anxiety. The Korean War had ended; steel’s relation with labor had soured; and competition from imports and domestic non-ferrous materials, such as plastics and aluminum, had substantially increased. Additionally, U.S. Steel, the industry colossus, suffered from its own lack of innovative agility, lagging behind technologically and thus losing out to competition (Warren 2001: 4). In an attempt to counter the public’s view of steel as dirty and old-fashioned, the once complacent industry embraced an aggressive and forward-looking policy of design and marketing aimed at producing a gleaming modern image of the sector and its products. While Big Steels’ responsiveness to technological change was sluggish, its reaction to consumer perceptions was more immediate. The designs of a contemporary logo for U.S. Steel, the nation’s leading steel producer, a glinting Steelmark on millions of product tags, packaging and marketing materials, and an aggressive “Gleam of Stainless Steel” campaign, quickly brought the industry’s image up to date, emphasizing stylish consumerism and recasting the behemoth of Big Steel as quintessentially modern and consumer oriented. In the early 1960s imported steel continued to challenge the industry, thus reducing domestic demand. At the same time, U.S. Steel faced competition from “mini-mills,” domestic enterprises that undercut the larger producers. Despite the introduction of a shiny new identity—a clearer image of steel—reflecting modernity and stylishness, by the mid-1970s, with a stagnant economy and unfulfilled hopes for government import restrictions, the steel industry had reached a monumental commercial crisis. The continuing tribulations of U.S. Steel throughout the 1960s and beyond reveal that institutional and corporate image reorientation were no panacea against the commercial realities of big business.

Notes 1 2 3

4

This chapter is based on Maffei (2013). On the history of the United States Steel Corporation, see Warren (2001). In 1945, Americans spent $120 billion on personal consumption. However, this rose dramatically to $325 billion in 1960. Glickman (1999). Packard (1957: 23–4) used the phrase “marketing revolution.” On the prewar rise of market research as a profession, see Laird (1998); Witowski (2010). For a critique of the periodization of market research and observations on its prewar origins, see Schwarzkopf (2009). Lury and Warde (1997) note that there is no consensus in the social sciences on how to understand, predict, and analyze consumer behavior. In her study of General Motors in the prewar years, Clarke (2007: 129–37) discusses the impossibility of judging specific purchasing preferences based on quantitative surveys. Nickles (2002: 599) notes that the class bias of market researchers was often reflected in their studies. The 1955 budget was projected at $94,975. Paret (1960: n.p).

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CSSP (n. d.) [c. 1950s], What to Remember about STAINLESS STEEL—So That You Can Select Products You’ll Love to Use, New York: AISI, n.p. Daunton, M. and M. Hilton, eds. (2001), The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, Oxford: Berg. Dawson, M. (2003), The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Design Sense (n.d.) [c. 1960], No. 9. Design Sense (1961), No. 12. Dobson, J. M. (1988), A History of American Enterprise, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Ewing, E. (1949), “Shineless Stainless Steel,” Science News-Letter, Vol. 55, No. 25: 394–5. Featherstone, M. (1991), Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London: Sage. Fleishman, A. (1958), “Market Research—Part I,” Industrial Design, Vol. 5, No. 1: 26–43. Follin, F. (2004), Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties, London: Thames and Hudson. Foreman, J., ed. (1997), The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Frank, T. (1997), The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giddens, A. (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Glickman, L. B., ed. (1999), Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gregor, A. (1961), “Material—Steel’s Renewed Glow,” Industrial Design, Vol. 8, No. 2: 32–48. H. A. (1958), “United States Steel: A New Corporate Identity Program,” Industrial Design, Vol. 5, No. 10: 100–7. Handlin, D. P. (2004), American Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson. Hine, T. (1987), Populuxe, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Laird, P. W. (1998), Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Larson, L. R. (1964) [Vice President, Marketing Services, The International Nickel Company, Inc.] as cited in A. W. P. Trench. “Market Support Opening New Outlets,” in American Metal Market (March 30), AISI, Section 2, Hagley Museum and Archive, Delaware, 9. Lash, S. and J. Friedman (1992), Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. Lears, L. (1994), Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, New York: Basic Books. Lury, C. and A. Warde (1997), “Investing in the Imaginary Consumer: Conjectures Regarding Power, Knowledge and Advertising,” in M. Nava et al. (eds.), Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption, London: Routledge, 87–102. Maffei, N. P. (2013), “Selling Gleam: Making Steel Modern in Postwar America,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 26, No. 3: 304–20. Marchand, R. (1998), Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business, Berkeley: University of California Press. Meikle, J. (1995), American Plastic: A Cultural History, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Meldrum, D. G. (1957), “Stainless Steel and Fabrication,” Industrial Design, Vol. 4, No. 5: 86–101.

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Nickles, S. (2002), “More Is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America,” American Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 4: 581–622. Nuccio, S. (1964), “Mighty Steel on the Offensive: Institute Campaigns Aimed at Invading New Markets,” The New York Times (November 1), Section F: 15. Packard, V. (1957), Hidden Persuaders, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Paret, R. E. (1960), “Annual Progress Report, The CSSP,” December, ACC 1631, AISI, Vertical Files, Box 124, folder “Stainless Steel 7,” Hagley Museum and Archive, Delaware. Porter, G. (1999), “Cultural Forces and Commercial Constraints: Designing Packaging in the Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 12, No. 1: 25–43. “Producers Agree on Symbol to Appear on Products” (1960a), The New York Times (January 14). Republic Steel (1956), Enduro Era (November/December), Hagley Museum and Archive, Delaware, 6. Saarinen, A. B. (1968), Eero Saarinen and His Work, New Haven: Yale University Press. Schwarzkopf, S. (2009), “Discovering the Consumer: Market Research, Product Innovation, and the Creation of Brand Loyalty in Britain and the United States in the Interwar Years,” Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 29, No. 1: 8–20. “Steel Stresses Product Identity” (1960b), Iron Age, January 21. Trench, A. W. P. (1961), “Meaning of Metals Marketing,” in W. L. Smith (ed.), A Special Report on…The Gleam of Stainless Steel, 1961’s Top Metal Promotion: American Metal Market, AISI, Section 3, Hagley Museum and Archive, Delaware. “U.S. Steel Tests Plan in South” (1959), Editor & Publisher (April 25). Vargo, S. and R. Lusch. (2008), “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing,” in M. Tadajewski and D. B. Jones (eds.), The History of Marketing Thought 3, Los Angeles: Sage, 253–83. Warren, K. (2001), Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation, 1901–2001, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Witowski, T. H. (2010), “The Marketing Discipline Comes of Age, 1934–1936,” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 2, No. 4: 370–96. Wright, G. (1955), Some Hints on Selling Stainless Steel, New York: Committee of Stainless Steel Producers (CSSP), AISI.

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The Sheen of Shellac—From Reflective Material to Self-Reflective Medium Elodie A. Roy

In this chapter, I consider lac and shellac—two culturally significant by-products of the Laccifer lacca insect—as discrete, necessarily partial entry points into the heterogeneous and unstable realm of shine. Combining anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2007) proposal to “follow” the materials of culture with an emphasis on narrativity and (inter)mediality, I argue for a transversal and modular approach to materiality, exploring situated moments, stories, and artifacts in the long media-material history of lac and shellac—ranging from early cosmetics to mirrors and gramophone discs. On the one hand, this chapter aims to illuminate the little-known—yet critically and culturally significant—media-material history of lac and shellac, with particular regard to the (female) labor-intensive production and maintenance of shine. On the other hand, it introduces innovative theoretical and methodological pathways to attend to—and mediate—the heterogeneous stories, imaginaries, and materialities of shine. I propose that to study shine may be a means to interrogate the process-oriented nature of things themselves, the movement, or the activity occurring within (or beneath) apparently benign, everyday materialities. Accordingly, a focus on shine productively destabilizes, displaces, and decenters this enquiry, thus allowing us to momentarily seize the substrate as it erupts to the surface. My chapter attends to three key aspects: firstly, it retraces the long, geohistorical trajectory of lac and shellac from visuality to plasticity; secondly, it examines the production and maintenance of shine, highlighting in particular the hidden labor of shellac Indian workers; lastly, it surveys the intermediality and cultural endurance of shellac in the first half of the twentieth century (with particular relation to phonography and photography). Before turning to these aspects, however, I provide a methodological and theoretical framework contextualizing shine within material culture studies.

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Blurred Boundaries: Materiality and the Mobility of Shine The current research seeks to put in relation material, visual, and textual sources— including literary sources. I believe that this cumulative process and work of intermedial linking may yield some valuable insights where no systemic or univocal study of a given material is possible. Accordingly, it is necessary to work in an intersectional, provisional, perhaps even polyphonic, manner. Media theorist Sean Cubitt once defended “anecdotal evidence” as “our least superficial mode of enquiry” (Cubitt 2013: 4, 5), considering narratives and anecdotes to be critical “partner[s] in dialogue” (Cubitt 2013). Storytelling, in the broader sense of the word, becomes a linkage operation (Schwenger 2006: 144), connecting asymmetrical fragments and refractions. It is worthwhile to note here that the French term for “shine”—the word éclat—means simultaneously “shine” and “shard”: it combines the diffuse, elusive quality of a reflected light with the situated density of the fragment, alluding both to the temporal and the spatial. It follows that shine—which is liminal—cannot be directly accessed in and for itself: it can only be determined and understood within the momentary, delimited shape of both an object and a narrative. Shine therefore appears as an equivocal and destabilizing object of enquiry: as it literally assumes several voices, it keeps resisting or deferring possession. It cannot be owned, constructed, or cognitively secured as a finite object. It is much rather encountered. On a phenomenological level, shine therefore constitutes a property of the object without being a permanent feature. Rather, it incessantly blurs the edges of the artifact. It makes the line tremble, intoxicating both the object and its viewer. Shine is best understood as a relation, a point of contact, comparable to philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s (1963: 198 my translation) description of color where “[c]olor is not a true attribute of substance. It is an activity—or, rather, a re-activity which manifests itself in determined conditions” (my translation). These words resonate with British painter and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s thoughts on the short-lived incandescence of the color red: “Red is a moment in time. […] Red is quickly spent. An explosion of intensity. It burns itself. Disappears like fiery sparks into the gathering shadow” ([1997] 2000: 37). The underlying conception of shine as relation leads me to ask more precisely: What does shine do to material culture studies? By focusing on precarious and transient aspects, we are apparently losing our grip: how can a cultural history of shine be more than an inventory of passing effects or impressions? In order to address the instability of shine, we need to coin a more rhapsodic, reticular methodology to approach materiality beyond (or before) finite objects. Tim Ingold persuasively encourages us to dynamically “follow” the materials of culture in order to recognize their multitudes of states, potentials, and valences (2007). Historian of science Lorraine Daston’s rigid assertion that the “brute intransigence of matter, everywhere and always the same” opposes “the plasticity of meaning, bound to specific times and places” (2004: 17) may therefore be revised or expanded in order to accommodate the temporality of materials themselves, and the fluctuant interrelation uniting geological, historical, and cultural times. Art historians Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith have demonstrated that materials themselves,

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despite their apparent a-historicity (or rigidity), are actively enmeshed within broader, mutable sociohistorical formations and stories (2015: 12).1

From Visuality to Plasticity: Cultural History and Stories of Lac and Shellac Lac and shellac are two distinct substances obtained from the Laccifer lacca (also known as Tachardia lacca), a parasitic insect breeding on certain species of trees in the forest regions of Central India, Southeast Asia, and some parts of China. On the one hand, the term “lac” refers to the reddish precipitate obtained from boiling the powdered insects with water containing a little alkali and some albumen in order to produce a coloring dye (Thompson [1936] 1956: 109). The coloring matter, once dissolved in water, could be dried and sold. In 1863, the French philologist Hippolyte Fauche translated the Sanskrit poem “Çiçoupâla-badha” from Sanskrit into French. Fauche’s translation, for all its orientalism, provides us with valuable, early insights into some of the ritual uses and cultural, gendered imagination of the lac material. The Tétrade (as rendered by Fauche), originally written by seventh-century Sanskrit poet Māgha, takes the form of twenty songs of love and longing. Throughout the text, the image of an unattached woman, walking, keeps recurring. Her face is barely described, but we learn that she leaves red, evocative footprints wherever she walks. Her feet are covered in a natural coloring made out of lac, a natural dye originating from the Laccifer lacca insect. The woman portrayed in Māgha’s poem goes barefoot, “dyeing the earth with lac” (Fauche 1863: 204, my translation). Her identity is intimately bound with the intricate patterns she traces as she walks. Symptomatically, the long poem was written and translated by men, and perhaps ultimately read by male readers: the red footprints create a system of mobile, ephemeral inscriptions—mirroring the impermanent, fleeting traces of desire itself and opposing the more permanent impressions left by words. On the other hand, the word “shellac” refers to the glossy thermoplastic resin secreted by the female beetle as she dies to give birth to a new generation of insects, burying herself in her scales (Berenbaum 1995: 120–1). In Nelson S. Knaggs’s suggestive words, the female beetles “make their own coffins or mummy cases, which not only serve as tombs for their dead bodies and act as fortresses against their enemies, but also as incubators for the next generation of insects” (1947: 208; emphasis is mine). The production and reproduction of shellac (and its shine) thus bear an ancient, quasiprimal link with female labor and femininity. Both lac and shellac became culturally important and valued at various points in time and had a long premodern and premediatic history before reaching Europe on a large scale in the sixteenth century through the new colonial trade routes (Knaggs 1947: 209). For instance, the lac dye—whose color “tend[s] towards crimson, with a faint flush of blue” (Taylor 2015: 134)—was known as early as 80 AD in India (Hicks 1961: 11) where it was extensively used as a dye for silk and cloth. It was also an everyday cosmetic for the face, hands, and feet—as evoked in Māgha’s poem. The British and the Dutch (via their East India Companies, established respectively in 1600 and 1602) played a central role in the

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wider European dissemination of lac and shellac—contributing to the diversification of their uses.2 Following their increased availability in the sixteenth century, lac and shellac became valuable materials for artisans (including textile dyers and furniture-makers) and painters across Europe (in particular in the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France).3 While lac was primarily used as a dye (often in combination with cochineal), shellac principally served to lacquer furniture, floorboards, and other discrete wooden objects (including musical instruments such as violins) as well as protecting and enhancing the shine of paintings, lending them a smooth, warm finish. In his 1596 travel diary, the Dutch merchant and historian Jan Huyghen van Linschoten provided an evocative account of shellac. He remarked on its beautiful luster, writing that it would “shine like glass, most pleasant to behold” (as quoted in Knaggs 1947: 210). Lacquering was to reach a peak of popularity in the seventeenth century under the impulse of the Jesuit missionary friars who had traveled to Orient (and particularly China) alongside the East Indian Companies, bringing back to Europe the taste for lacquered furniture. Jesuits such as the German Athanasius Kircher and his student Filippo Bonnani were also responsible for writing detailed “recipes” on how to make lacquer (Gheroldi 1999: 30). The taste for Oriental lacquer work was to endure well through the eighteenth century (Gheroldi 1999: 30). These practical treatises were circulated among craftsmen, painters, as well as an increasing public of amateurs. By the eighteenth century, making varnish had become a gentile and exacting pastime of the bourgeois,4 kindled for a while by the fashion for miniature painting. Another central aspect in connection to shellac was its versatility and imitative properties. In his Libro dell’ Arte, a pioneering handbook of painting techniques written in fifteenth-century Florence, Cennino d’Andrea Cennini had already remarked that shellacked silver would produce the illusion of gold.5 D. V. Thompson, Cennini’s keen translator and commentator, further notices that shellacked silver would imitate gold’s powers of reflection where “[i]f the surface of the gold is smooth and even, it acts as a mirror” ([1936] 1956: 197). Theophilus, in his early writings on painting, similarly celebrated the arresting gold-like effect achieved by shellacked tin leaves (Brill 1980: 108).6 So shellac—which could imitate other more valuable substances—constituted from the outset as much a material of preservation as it was of imitation or reproduction.7 As such, it contained the suggestion—however fleeting—of something other than itself; its very shapelessness implied a quasi-infinite number of potential shapes. Because of its thermoplastic properties, shellac could indeed be easily transformed, shaped, and even recycled. The industrial casting and dissemination of shellac-based objects developed in the West in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when the versatile resin became more valuable than the dye.8 At this point, shellac was used to cast myriad small domestic objects such as toys, decorative items, and bangles (Parry 1935: 173), thus discretely announcing the age of mass production and plastic. The US daguerreotypist Samuel Peck patented his sleek, folding photographic frames—the Union Cases—in 1854; those were cast in shellac, to which a little wood flour was added (Meikle [1995] 1997: 4). The Union Cases largely appealed to the fast-growing middle classes in the United States, while other elegant shellac-based objects—aimed at

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affluent female consumers on both sides of the Atlantic—included handheld mirrors, dressing-table articles (such as brushes or powder cases), but also hats, patent shoes, and jewelry.9 Its use in the food (where it serves as a glaze) and cosmetic industry endures until today.10 Indeed, there is no important early-twentieth-century-industry that did not partially or entirely rely on shellac supplies: food, textile, pharmaceutics, cosmetics, phonography, photography—all of these made use of the material.11 One of the most enduring and memorable applications of shellac was to be found when Emile Berliner first used it to mold and mass-produce gramophone discs in 1897 ten years after he patented the disc. Berliner, born in the German town of Hanover (then capital of the Kingdom of Hanover) and settled in the United States since 1870, discovered that the material, already known for its thermoplastic qualities, could accurately reproduce a sound signal in a “loud” and “crisp” fashion (Berliner 1913: 192). In a commemorative talk given at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where he had first demonstrated his gramophone in 1888, Berliner explained his long struggle to find a suitable material basis for his discs.12 He had unsuccessfully experimented with a range of malleable substances (including celluloid, rubber, and wax) before resorting to the more reliable shellac.13 Berliner’s shiny gramophone record may be regarded as a true “geological medium” (Parikka 2015), composed of several natural or seminatural elements beside shellac (including copal, silica, rosin, and vinsol; Shellac 1956: 94)—it is as much a “product of the earth with its geological time frame” (Anderson, Dunlop and Smith 2015: 12) as it is an unmistakable culmination of the thriving latenineteenth-century technological mind. “Natural” shellac records would be pressed until the turn of the 1950s in the Western world (before being replaced by polyvinyl long-playing discs), while they continued to be manufactured well into the 1990s in India (Berenbaum 1995: 122). With the advent of phonography, the material was thus displaced from the realm of vision to the realm of sound. It remained however a potent surface of inscription and self-inscription (or graphein), and we will see in the last part of the chapter that the interplay of vision and sound assumed an important role in the early phonographic era.

Producing Shine: Maintenance, Performativity, and the Labor of Shine The shine of shellac—and shine in general—may be admired and enjoyed as if it were an autonomous, self-generating effect. However, what shine dissimulates is the complex infrastructure, political instances, and intermediaries, which are necessary to obtain or extract it. Contrary to some other naturally glossy materials, the sheen of shellac was not given but produced or revealed through a series of well-ordered practices. Accordingly, it is possible to look at luster in a media-geological or media-archaeological fashion and dig beneath its dazzling surface (Parikka 2015). In what follows, I engage with the repressed histories of labor contained within the production of shellac. The production (and consumption) of lac and shellac relied on a vast chain of nonhuman and human actors, an asymmetrical division of labor (involving both human and insect activity) distributed across the Western and Eastern worlds. While

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the early shellac factories were established between Calcutta and Central India, by the second half of the nineteenth century, factories were exclusively concentrated along the new railway lines built in the region of Calcutta by the British colonial power; lac and shellac were shipped to North America and Europe (particularly the UK and Germany) from the port of Calcutta (Hicks 1961: 27). The production of commercial shellac followed a three-step process of refinement carried out by Indian native workers, including children, women, and men. Twice a year, workers collected the whole branches or sticks on which the insect secretion was deposited. This “stick lac,” as it was called, was then separated by hand from its various impurities such as “twigs, dead leaves, larvae” (Bell 1936: 28) (Figure 6.1). The cleansing was principally allocated to women and children because of their small, nimble hands. Once the first washing had taken place, the secretion was placed in canvas bags or stockings through which it was filtered from the residual impurities, which had not been manually removed (Parry 1935: 65; Bell 1936: 28). This operation required two male workers: one experienced operator—known as the karigar—who would tightly twist and squeeze the bag while his assistant—the pherki—checked that no impurity clogged it. The whole process took place near a fire or an open oven, which allowed for the lac to remain fluid. When it emerged from the bag, the liquid lac fell on a cold plate where it solidified in the shape of slabs (Bell 1936: 28). These thick slabs were later warmed again by the fire to remain pliable, and they were stretched by the male bhilwaya using his hands and feet to grasp their four corners (Bell 1936: 29) (Figure 6.2). The thin sheets were then cooled down and broken down into tiny shell-shaped pieces, which gave the material its name of “shellac” and were known for

Figure 6.1  Cleansing Stick Lack, c. 1900. Knaggs, N. S. (1947), Adventures in Man’s First Plastic. The Romance of Natural Waxes, New York: Reinhold, n.p. Courtesy Wm. Zinsser & Co

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Figure 6.2  Bhilwaya Stretching Shellac, c. 1900. Anon. (1956), Shellac, Angelo Brothers Limited: Calcutta, 40. Photography: Col. W. F. Rhodes

their “high gloss and powerful adhesive properties, […] toughness and […] hardness” (Bell 1936). As described above, the production of shine assimilated generations of shadow workers, consuming and absorbing its workforce—an anonymous workforce not so dissimilar from the female beetles entombed (effaced) within the resin they produced as they died.14 In many ways, the production of shine contained its own principle of erasure (or overwriting) and oblivion. Paradoxically, the shine of shellac thus emerged out of dirt, out of rough, organic matter. But, once in circulation, it became a commodity fetish, given in a flash—implicitly concealing and obscuring its origins. Shine, which is produced, is therefore an activity; in the English language “shine” is, incidentally, both a noun and a verb, a result and a performance. But this performance, rather than stopping with the industrial production of the material,15 continues in the sphere of domestic consumption. Already in 1596, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten noted the importance of cultivating shine and continually reviving it within the home (Knaggs 1947: 210). With the passing of time, shellacked surfaces lose their brilliance;

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they become dull and tarnished. Shining and polishing are part of an everyday culture of repair (Strasser 1999) so that the history of shine could be recast as a history of maintenance and expanded energy, an operation mainly performed by the female and/ or servant classes. However, while shine constitutes “a sign of labour and exertion” (Leslie 2016: 236), this laborious cultivation may also anticipate a possibility of positive emancipation (or production) of the (Western) female self.16 The following section discusses the connections that shellac entertained with the (potentially laborious) production of femininity and its psyche, in particular, with regard to phonography and photography.17

(Inter)medial Mirrors: Gramophone Records, Reflectivity, and the Brilliance of Sound Shellac is a reflective material in a first, basic sense. At the turn of the twentieth century, mirrors and gramophone records were both partially made of shellac, although those resulted from widely different manufacturing processes. With their circular shapes, they superficially resembled one another and, until 1904, gramophone records were one sided, with the side where the label was glued being casually called the “mirror” (“Spiegel” in German). The German Odeon firm, which introduced the first doublesided records, used this linguistic correlation in its advertisement (the pun was lost, however, as the advertisement was translated in other European languages) (Figure 6.3). The artistic and commercial visual culture of the interwar period continued to exploit the curious affinity between records and mirrors.18 Indeed, the superimposition of a record and of a women’s face was a frequent, stereotypical trick in many advertisements, films, and photographs of the period. The record was staged as reflective surface in works such as the 1929 close-up portraits of the French actress Marie Bell by photographer François Kollar. In Kollar’s two Etudes Publicitaires pour “Magic Phono,” made of layered negatives, Bell’s face appears to be floating, curiously inexpressive, phantom-like, basking in the glow of a mass-produced gramophone record (Figure 6.4). The sheen of shellac became used as a strong metaphor for the reflective reflexivity and self-reflexivity of recorded sound. The shine of the record provided a metaphorical surface of reflection, a visual mirroring of the voice. Adorno elaborated upon the “mirror function” of the gramophone record, where “[w]hat the gramophone listener actually wants to hear is himself, and the artist merely offers him a substitute for the sounding image of his own person, which he would like to safeguard as a possession” ([1927] 1990: 54). The black mirror of the record simultaneously absorbs and reflects the voice: in doing so, it also engulfs what it seeks to preserve. Kollar’s picture further suggests that the time-based and the spatial forms—sound and vision, traditionally seen as radically different cognitive forms—may eventually collapse into one another (Halliday 2013). The voice can be viewed, face to face as it were. On the one hand, recorded sound implies a splitting (between the voice and the recording, the living subject and its reified trace). On the other, a mimetic encounter takes place between the body and the material, where “mimesis shifts the hierarchical

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Figure 6.3  Odeon Advertisement for Double-Sided Discs, 1904. Author’s personal collection

relationship between subject and object, indeed dissolves the dichotomy between the two, such that erstwhile objects take on the physical, material qualities of objects, while objects take on the perceptive and knowledgeable qualities of subjects” (Marks 2000: 141). If mimesis is understood as a flattening or blurring of differences (a literal confusion), it threatens any potential mediation (which always presupposes difference). The listener becomes objectified as the recorded voice is humanized. Ideally, no

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Figure 6.4  François Kollar, Etude publicitaire pour Magic Phono, portrait de Marie Bell en photomontage, 1929. © RMN—Gestion droit d'auteur François Kollar Localisation: Charentonle-Pont, Médiathèquede l'Architectureet du Patrimoine. Photo © Ministèrede la Culture— Médiathèquede l'architectureet du patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/François Kollar

difference exists between the voice and its mirror. The narcissistic-mimetic trope of the “mirror of the voice,” as one of the French Pathé’s mottos playfully ran, was constantly used to promote gramophone records and convey to listeners the notion of life-like expressivity.

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There would be further scope for recalling the early association of women with talking machines, the early feminization of gramophones, and of phonographic spaces. If the mirror allowed for the woman to reflectively possess herself, it reciprocally and implicitly allowed for her to be possessed as a detached object or image. With the advent of recording, she became a form of commoditized siren, miniaturized and captured within the record. Indeed, the record always contained the implicit—but inexorably delayed—promise of the body. Visual artists such as Kollar took advantage of techniques of photographic superimposition, layering the surface of the record with the most expressive parts of the human body—particularly the face and the hands. But we may feel compelled to compare these glamorous photomontages with the archival images showing us the anonymous hands mobilized for the manufacture of shellac. The leisurely modes of individualization and identity-formation, which came to prevail in the Westernized world, extensively relied on the routine work performed collectively and anonymously in the environment of the Indian shellac factory. These two aspects—that of the hyper-self and of the obliterated self—were (and remain) interdependent poles of modern industrial capitalism. Moreover, independently of its aesthetic and ontologized reading, the shine of shellac served a technical and practical purpose. Home-recordists of the interwar period would use it to visually test the sound quality of their recording. By exposing their record to a source of light they would be able to determine the “perfection” of the grooves they had cut—the “reflection method” was described in great detail in sound manuals. According to one such 1940 home-recording handbook, “[i]f the wall [of the record] is smooth it will give a shiny and narrow reflection, if rough it will appear dull and wide. By observing the reflection of rays of light cast obliquely across the cut surface of a record, one may readily determine the perfection (smoothness) of both walls of the groove” (1940: 49): the quality of the record is assessed visually without having to play it. The term “brilliant” would further be used in the gramophone industry to describe a “sound that is good in respect to reproduction of high frequencies” (How to Make Good Recordings 1940: 116). This sympathy between visualizing and hearing the grooves endured through to the vinyl era, as if to betray a secret kinship between the eye and the ear.19 The first traces of (male) phono-fetishism are to be found in the interwar period, a period when visual artists (and particularly photographers) persistently sought to recapture the record, to compete with it, to absorb, or “cannibalize” it (to reuse Paul Young’s expression, see Young 2006). The audible was navigated, consumed, and literally comprehended through acts of seeing. Visual artists of the interwar period were particularly entranced by the record as surface of inscription; they tried to reconcile the writing with light (photography) with the writing with sound (phonography) (Knelman 2016: 54). In his 1934 essay “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” Adorno entertained the dream of directly reading the grooves of the gramophone record, but photographers also tried to decipher the writing of sound. I argue that, through photographing records, they flattened or liquidated sound into pure light again, thus reviving the first visual uses of shellac. But they did more than this: they photo-mechanically captured and contracted the speed of sound within the speed of light. For instance, in his book Painting Photography Film (1925), artist

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László Moholy-Nagy juxtaposes the close-up of a record and the street, thus creating an aesthetics of transport and transience (Makarius 2016: 61). Scales are flattened; the record is reduced to a screen, a surface of light projection in keeping with the artist’s agenda.20 A picture of sound is a paradoxical picture of movement: through the felt instability of shine, the still medium of the photograph is able to render the time-based nature of sound, and Moholy-Nagy’s photograph of the record effectively expresses the temporal within the spatial.21

Afterglow In keeping with Ingold’s insistence on following the materials of culture, this chapter has synthetically retraced the early geographical and cultural journeys of lac and shellac, highlighting the progressive shift from visuality to plasticity. Digging beneath the surface-level description, and beyond the visual enchantment of shine, it has acknowledged the laborious, gendered (re)production of shine, stressing its links with colonial extractivism. Finally it has related shine to the ambiguous production of the psyche and the realm of self-knowledge in the Western world through the example of phonography. The moments described above, however, are not autonomous but continuously interfere with one another: the act of narrating materials does not produce a linear, homogeneous, or final story. Rather, it allows us to address multivalent, unfinished cultural moments with lasting reverberations in the contemporary era. In her book Liquid Crystals, cultural theorist Esther Leslie historicizes shine, proposing that it once was a “condition of [twentieth-century] visual cultures” (Leslie 2016: 234). She continues: “Sheen was its quality, as well as the quality of the polished shop windows, glassy screens ribboning through the cities” (Leslie 2016: 34). This leads her to oppose shine to glow, which, for her, characterizes “today’s screen conditions” (Leslie 2016: 234). She writes about today’s images glowing on LCD and LED screens and notes that “in its digital manifestation, glow is not just a reflection of light […] but is also a self-reflection of light, light produced from within” (Leslie 2016: 235). Sheen therefore indexes and archives a bygone regime of the visual. Yet, through its material endurance, it remains trapped within the grain of the contemporary. It reaches us as a delayed trace, in an interval of visibility—a signal sent from the analogue past to the digital present, seized as temporary coincidence or synchronicity. But as a delayed trace it reaches us too late, like a reflection from a dead star: and it may be that shine is always perceived as an afterimage or, to readapt Vladimir Jankélévitch’s formula, as a “disappearing apparition” (Jankélévitch 1960: 202). Shine, which appears as pure presence, paradoxically erases the traces of its becoming. But, against such instantaneity, there is a deep time of shine. Materials such as lac and shellac prompt us to excavate shine’s sociohistorical, political, and physical conditions of emergence and presence. As demonstrated in this chapter, a focus on materials allows us to address the cultural violence deeply woven into the loveliness of luster. In the meantime, it may be possible to cultivate, through unearthed narratives, a counter or critical flashback—a partial but necessary site of response.

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Notes 1 2

On the mutability and narrativity of materials, see also Domínguez Rubio (2016). The British gained increased control over the Indian lac factories and contributed to their modernization up until the Second World War. 3 Renaissance painters, such as the Dutch Rogier van der Weyden (1400–64), would meticulously glaze their paintings with a thin layer of lac to naturally enhance their colors while protecting them from the adverse effects of time, notably the darkening of colors (Taylor 2015: 133). 4 Making varnish was indeed considered to be an “entertainment,” as suggested by the title of a famous Trattenimenti sulle vernicci published in 1788 in Ravenna. Gheroldi, Varnishes and Very Curious Secrets, 9. 5 Cennini’s guide contains many “recipes” based on lac and shellac; see notably his chapter “On the Character of a Red Called Lac.” C. A. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook. The Italian “Il Libro dell’ Arte” (New York: Dover Publications, 1954 [1933]), 28–7. 6 Theophilus was the pseudonym used by the author of Schedula diversarum atrium, an important and early description of medieval arts compiled in the twelfth century— the real identity of the author has continued to be debated to this day. 7 Anecdotally, shellac itself, a prepared composition, was seen by connoisseurs as an inferior “imitation lacquer”—while shellac emulated the effects of Japanese and Chinese lacquer work, original lacquer was simply the “natural sap of a tree used since ancient times in China and Japan as protective and decorative varnish.” M. Goodwin, The Country Life Pocket Dictionary of Collector’s Terms (London: Country Life Limited, 1967), 170. 8 Demand for natural dyes had almost disappeared in the wake of British chemist William Henry Perkin’s discovery and commercialization of synthetic aniline dyes. 9 Goldsmiths frequently used shellac as a filler, for instance, in earrings. 10 It is to be found in some nail polish, for instance, and in the first half of the twentieth century, it was even used in hairspray to literally lacquer hairdos. 11 During the First World War, shellac entered into further combinations as the material was used in the manufacture of grenades and detonating compositions. 12 The history of media technologies can indeed be retold as “a long story of experimenting with materials.” J. Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 25. 13 He had first encountered the material in 1879 when working at the Bell Telephone Factory. Berliner, E., “The Development of the Talking Machine,” 191. 14 This is also the case of mica, another material used in the manufacture of radio and shiny cosmetics, sometimes in combination with shellac. 15 Machine-made shellac became increasingly available in the interwar period. 16 In The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (2008 [1985]), philosopher Michel Serres wrote moving, if ambiguous, passages about the rituals of shining and making up the face. He suggested that making up is there not to superficially conceal but to exteriorize and performatively realize the latent identity of the subject (Serres 1985: 32). As a result, it is the contrary of an alienating mundane activity: it “makes real.” See also Serres’s multifaceted discussions on shine, epistemology, and spirituality (Serres 1989 [1987]: 233; 2018 [2003]: 161). 17 We may recall here that shellac was made of thousands of dead female insects’ bodies, resonating with cycles of fertility, growth, and death.

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18 Another interesting trope to do with shine was the depiction of the gramophone record as the sun in some record companies’ advertisement (Odeon notably exploited this image at the turn of the twentieth century). 19 The cover of Robert Crumb’s book-and-CD reissue of 1978’s recordings, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of (2006), shows a self-portrait of the cartoonist and record collector, closely examining a glossy shellac disc in rapturous frenzy (Crumb produced a shine effect by way of high contrast drawing). Beads of sweat have formed on the collector’s forehead, and a thought bubble invites us into his mind: “Look at the luster of those grooves!” (emphasis in the original). Here, audiophiliac pleasure is anticipated by the visual appraisal and consumption of sound. 20 The same effect also occurs in the work of Dutch graphic designer Paul Schuitema, notably his 1929 long-exposure photograph entitled Playing Gramophone, where the movement is signified by fluid, ribbon-like trails of light. 21 We can contrast this with Stieglitz’s warm and quietly arrested vision of The Glow of Night—New York, 1897. Commenting on Moholy-Nagy’s juxtaposition, Knelman notes that “the record’s circularity and dynamism are echoed by the luminous orbs of street lamps and headlight trails on the page opposite. Deprived of depth and scale, we are left with equivocal etchings of modern and mechanized surfaces.” Knelman, S., “Photographs & Phonographs,” 54. It must be noted that Moholy-Nagy’s formal explorations of the record were continued in the works of European photographers such as Ludwig Windstosser, Pierre Dubreuil, or Peter Keetman, to name only a few. Examples of works combining photography and phonography are countless and would deserve a deeper analysis of their own. See also Marchel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (1935) and his resurfaced records.

References Adorno, T. W. ([1927] 1990), “The Curves of the Needle,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, Vol. 55: 48–55. Adorno, T. W. (1990), “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, Vol. 55: 56–61. Anderson, C., A. Dunlop and P. H. Smith, eds. (2015), The Matter of Art. Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bachelard, G. (1963), Le matérialisme rationnel, second edition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bell, L. M. T. (1936), The Making & Moulding of Plastics, London: Hutchinson’s Scientific & Technical Publications. Berenbaum, M. (1995), Bugs in the System. Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs, Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Berliner, E. (1913), “The Development of the Talking Machine,” Journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 176, No. 2: 189–99. Brill, T. B. (1980), Light. Its Interaction with Art and Antiquities, New York and London: Plenum Press. Cennini, C. A. ([1933] 1954), “The Craftsman’s Handbook,” in The Italian “Il Libro dell’ Arte,” trans. D. V. Thompson, New York: Dover Publications. Cubitt, S. (2013), “Anecdotal Evidence,” NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, Spring. Available online: https://necsus-ejms.org/anecdotal-evidence/

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Daston, L. (2004), “Introduction. Speechless,” in L. Daston (ed.), Things That Talk. Object Lessons from Art and Science, New York: Zone books, 9–24. Domínguez Rubio, F. (2016), “On the Discrepancy between Objects and Things: An Ecological Approach,” Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 21, No. 1: 59–86. Fauche, Hippolyte (1863), Une Tétrade ou Drame, Hymne, Roman et Poème traduits pour la première fois du sanscrit en français, Paris: Benjamin Duprat. Gheroldi, V., ed. (1999), Varnishes and Very Curious Secrets. Cremona 1747. Cremona: Cremonabooks. Goodwin, M. (1967), The Country Life Pocket Dictionary of Collector’s Terms, London: Country Life Limited. Halliday, S. (2013), Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hicks, E. (1961), Shellac. Its Origin and Applications, New York: Chemical Publishing Co., Inc. How to Make Good Recordings (1940), New York: Audio Devices, Inc. Ingold, T. (2007), “Comment,” in V. O. Jorge and J. Thomas (eds.), Overcoming the Modern Invention of Material Culture, special issue of the Journal of Iberian Archaeology, Vol. 9/10, Porto: 313–17. Jankélévitch, V. (1960), Le Pur et l’Impur, Paris: Flammarion. Jarman, D. ([1994] 2000), Chroma: A Book of Colour—June ’93, London: Vintage. Knaggs, N. S. (1947), Adventures in Man’s First Plastic. The Romance of Natural Waxes, New York: Reinhold. Knelman, S. (2016), “Photographs & Phonographs,” Aperture, Vol. 224: 53–9. Leslie, E. (2016), Liquid Crystals. The Science and Art of a Fluid Form, London: Reaktion Books. Makarius, M. (2016), Une histoire du flou. Aux frontières du visible, Paris: Le Félin. Marks, L. U. (2000), The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Meikle, J. L. ([1955] 1997), American Plastic. A Cultural History, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Parikka, J. (2015), A Geology of Media, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Parry, E. J. (1935), Shellac, London: Pitman & Sons. Schwenger, P. (2006), The Tears of Things. Melancholy and Physical Objects, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Serres, M. (1985), Les cinq sens. Philosophie des corps mêlés—1, Paris: Grasset. Serres, M. (1989), Statues. Le second livre des fondations, Paris: Flammarion. Serres, M. ([2003] 2018), The Incandescent, trans. Randolph Burk, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Shellac (1956), Angelo Brothers Limited: Calcutta. Strasser, S. (1999), Waste and Want. A Social History of Trash, New York: Owl Book. Taylor, P. (2015), Condition. The Ageing of Art, London: Paul Holberton publishing. Thompson, D. V. ([1936] 1956), The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, New York: Dover Publications. Young, P. (2006), The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals. Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Part Three

Glimmer, Sparkle, Glitter: Performing Queer Identities

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All That Sparkles and Shines: Deco, Dissidence, and the Design of Glamorous Modern Interiors John Potvin

Throughout its original eight-season run (1998–2006), the American television program Will and Grace offered its audience and fans alike countless, humorous, and poignant moments defining, affirming, and even stereotyping aspects of queer life and identity. Important, at least for our purposes here, were the “shiny little objects” used repeatedly not only to lure and manipulate the queerest of the show’s characters Jack McFarland (played by Sean Hayes) and Karen Walker (played by Megan Mullally), it also served as important manifestations of queer style. In Season Five, Episode Three, Karen asserts the particularly queer lure and impact of shine when she boldly, but not unproblematically, claims: “The gays love their presents. Yeah, just wave something shiny in front of their faces, you can get whatever you want. That’s how we got Manhattan from the gay Indians.” In Season Five, Episode Five, we find Jack at Karen’s penthouse where he is attempting to distract her from entering into her husband’s den, where he is in the process of having an affair with another woman. Karen asks, “What–what are you trying to hide, Heidi?” Jack responds, “Nothing! Look, uh, a shiny object.” Jack picks up a shiny object off the table in front of them and begins to wave it in front of Karen’s face. She is quickly mesmerized by it and begins to “oohhhh.” However, despite his best efforts, it is Jack himself who quickly becomes transfixed by the object also “oohing,” allowing Karen to awaken from her mesmerized state and steal herself away to open the doors of the den only to see her husband with another woman. Moments like these abound in the series and, in spite and as a result of the queer humor of these situations, they highlight the queer attraction to shiny design and its importance in the formation of a queer sense of self, glamor, and the camp of certain modern identities. “Shine,” state the organizers in their abstract for the symposium that originated this volume, “allures and awakens desire. As a phenomenon of perception, of refraction and reflection, shiny things, cloths and materials fascinate and tantalize. They are a formative element of material culture, promising luxury (possession), social distinction (prestige/glamor) and the hope of limitless experience and excess.” Its very existence is predicated on a sort of outward momentum, precisely because it radiates

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audaciously in the open. Its efficaciousness—predicated on its literal brilliance—is in the very act of its exposure. In short, by its very nature, shine cannot be hidden; it cannot be closeted. This chapter returns in time to those shiny little objects that formed integral components of the design of modern—or moderne as the French referred to it at the time—Art Deco interiors of the interwar period. More specifically, I turn my gaze to two specific contemporaneous figures, English socialite Stephen James Napier Tennant (1906–87) and Russian-born, Paris-based artist Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980), as exemplary of the complicated relationship between light, photography, self-fashioning, sexuality and modern interiors, and the importance shine played at the nexus of these different elements. Shine as seen in the photographs of the interiors of these dissident figures, I argue, was not simply the haphazard byproduct of technical effects, but a purposeful staging and design management of a distinctly queer and camp sense of self-fashioned glamor (at once modern and dissident) that set itself in opposition to moralizing and normalizing notions of gender and sexuality. Moreover, I claim that shine was a vital and integral part of “stage-set modernism” and “photogenic architecture” in which interiors formed ideal backdrops for the display and performance of certain modern metropolitan identities. In short, these figures deployed the allure of shine through their own subjective ends toward defining a distinctly queer modernism.

Genealogies of Shine: Precedents in the Interior Within the history and development of the modern interior, shine occupies a rather sorted and complicated position. It is all too often the victim (though, at times, the hero) of the vagaries of fashionable living and the developments of design reform movements, which have long adhered to strict guidelines of good, healthy and, therefore, moral design. In his essay on homosexuality and the aesthetic interior, art historian Michael Hatt has shown how throughout the 1880s design reformers, moralists and writers viewed shine as something to be avoided at all costs (Hatt 2007: 112–13). However, shine was not typically understood as an aspect of home décor in and of itself but as part of a larger decorative program that veered too readily into the domain of excess, luxury, and decadence—terms also used, I wish to underscore, to describe the newly identified figure of the homosexual. Architect Robert William Edis (1839–1927), for example, proclaimed, In these days of luxury and artistic proclivities, large sums of money are spent upon internal decoration and furniture, without much idea of taste or common sense; money is frittered away in pretentious extravagance, in the shape of gaudy decoration, or elaborately carved and inlaid furniture, and hangings, of most expensive character, which have little or no real claim to be called artistic or beautiful; a profusion of elaborate ornament is recklessly thrown upon the walls and ceilings, without knowledge and without taste. (Edis 1881: 15–16)

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Perhaps even more significant for Edis were the notions of “fitness and absolute truth,” for within these seeming absolutes, one could locate a proper means of decoration for the home, wherein “by a careful regard to this we may make our homes and habitations, if not absolutely shrines of beauty and good taste, at least pleasant places where the educated eye may look around, without being shocked and offended by some vulgarity and gaudy commonplaceness” (Edis 1881: 25). Walter Hamilton (1844–99), the first to write about the Aesthetic Movement and its value, was more direct in his accusations against shine and glitter, making a clear case for the calming influence of the natural, arguing that “[John] Ruskin’s volumes all tend in the same direction. Away with all shams; study pure art purely for art’s sake; avoid false gold and pretentious glitter; adopt a simple style molded on the forms and colors of nature” (Hamilton 1882: 186). The painter and embroiderer Lucy Orrinsmith (1839–1910), whose decorating treatise from 1878 specifically turned its attention to the drawing room, wrote, “[P]aint, which, when used on walls, should be of soft tints, light tones, and should never be varnished, the shiny surface of varnish being objectionable” (Orrinsmith 1878: 19). She too asserted the importance of the natural in the decor of the interior. By the end of the century, in the face of the growing predominance of industrial objects and increasingly glossy finishes, shine swiftly became indexical of an anti-naturalism seemingly antithetical to ideal living conditions and aesthetic concerns. However, shine was also itself part of a much larger consideration given to the importance of where to rest the eyes. The motif of where to focus one’s gaze or rest one’s eyes was so central, in fact, that it was commonly held that visual and sensory overstimulation would result in an oversaturation of and an assault on the nervous system, as clearly outlined by arch-conservative physician Max Nordau (1848–1923), for example. In his infamous treatise, Degeneration, originally published in French in 1892, Nordau lays out what he identifies as the “the symptoms” of the fin-de-siècle degenerate. His description of the dwellings of the male of the species conveys a clear impression: In the dining-room the walls are hung with the whole stock-in-trade of a porcelain shop, costly silver is displayed in an old farmhouse dresser, and on the table bloom aristocratic orchids, and proud silver vessels shine between rustic stone-ware plates and ewers. In the evening, lamps of the stature of a man illumine these rooms with light both subdued and tinted by sprawling shades, red, yellow or green of hue, and even covered by black lace. Hence the inmates appear, now bathed in variegated diaphanous mist, now suffused with coloured radiance, while the corners and backgrounds are shrouded in depths of artfullyeffected clair-obscur, and the furniture and bric-à-brac are dyed in unreal chords of colour. […] Everything in these houses aims at exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses. The disconnected and antithetical effects in all arrangements, the constant contradiction between form and purpose, the outlandishness of most objects, is intended to be bewildering […] He who enters here must not doze, but be thrilled. (Nordau 1895: 10–11)

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However, essayist and art critic Walter Pater (1839–94) provides us with a glimmering and seductive antidote to the naturalist inclinations of his contemporaries who would presage the functionalism and moral implications of the early twentiethcentury modernists by evoking a contradictory and novel impression of Greek sculpture. For Pater, as described in his Greek Studies, Alcinous’s palace yielded a shimmering, sumptuous, and certainly saturated description: In the midst is the king’s house, all glittering, again, with curiously wrought metal; its brightness is “as the brightness of the sun or of the moon” [ ….] The walls were massy brass; the cornice high Blue metals crowned in colours of the sky; Rich plates of gold the folding-doors incase; The pillars silver on a brazen base; Silver the lintels deep-projecting o’er; And gold the ringlets that command the door. Dogs of the same precious metals keep watch on either side […] Within doors the burning lights at supper-time are supported in the hands of golden images of boys, while the guests recline on a couch running all along the wall, covered with peculiarly sumptuous women’s work. (Pater 1895: 195–6)

While much could be said about Pater’s well-known and well documented queer life and style, what I wish to highlight here is not simply the way in which shine and glitter evoke the materiality of desire and of perception itself, but also how the use of silver and various metals are critical decorative agents that engender shine and glitter, the very material that will become the hallmarks of early twentieth-century interior design.

Designing Modern Glamor: Identities in the Interior The bedroom in a house, more than any other room, give the interested observer a clue to the personality of the owner. Remember this, but don’t be afraid of giving yourself away.

(Löbel 1938: 89)

The modern interior was a product of a mass image and of claims that architecture was less a physical site than a sight—or image—to behold through cinema, periodicals, photographs, theater, and important exhibitions. It is crucial, then, to see the modern interior as a product of both objects and spaces, as well as, and perhaps more importantly for the case studies I explore here, the outcome of an artfully and purposefully staged series of photographs that were themselves products of desire on which to rest the eyes. As I hope to show, what the case studies here share in common is a clear understanding

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of the role photography played not simply in the creation and subsequent advertising of identity, but also the role it performed in the perpetuation of a distinctly modern lifestyle. Even more precisely, the images and interiors I showcase demonstrate the importance of shine in the creation and staging of what has been identified as stageset modernism and photogenic architecture (Cohen 2006: 178; Gronberg 2004: 51), design ideals that suggested the border marking private from public was artificial and even undesirable. In Paris, Russian émigré aristocrat-turned-painter Tamara de Lempicka (1898– 1980) knew all too well the power of seduction, advertising, and the role of the interior in this context, when in 1929 she purchased an atelier flat at 29 Rue Méchain in Montparnasse built by the modernist architect and designer Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886–1945). The purchase was not only a clear indication of her increased success as an Art Deco portraitist, but also of her desire to showcase her professional status in a distinctly modern style, as well as to provide a venue to live out her sexually fluid and adventurously free lifestyle. It is important, however, to acknowledge that her concern for the promotion of her image as a successful woman artist predates the acquisition of her new apartment. As Tag Gronberg has demonstrated, “[a]s someone [who was] well aware of the powers of photography, in particular its promotional potential, De Lempicka was perhaps especially appreciative of Mallet Stevens’ concerns with what he referred to as ‘photogenic architecture’” (2004: 51). Here, Gronberg makes reference to the fact that Mallet-Stevens had garnered for himself an impressive reputation as a stage designer for the cinema, to say nothing of his countless architectural backgrounds that were used as stages for photo shoots for fashion magazines. Mallet-Stevens was highly attuned to the staging and managing of interior spaces that could be filmed or photographed to their best advantage and create stages in which their occupants could perform their modern identities. The interior design of Lempicka’s flat, however, was coordinated by her sister, architect Adrienne Gorska, who, in addition to using some of her own products, also incorporated furniture and decorative features by René Herbst, Djo-Bourgeois, Tétard Frères, Perzel, and J. Martel. The double-height living room was a sensational means to showcase the artist’s paintings, while also creating a perfect background for the spectacle of the glamorous modern lifestyle she was attempting to translate to the customers, peers, and magazine editors she invited regularly to her soirée cocktail parties. Lifestyle, identity, and decor were so artfully orchestrated that even the pillows, for example, had the artist’s initials embroidered in bold geometric patterns (Plate 15). De Lempicka’s stylish flat was covered widely by the contemporary design and social press as well as in documentary films. In an extensive photographic essay published in 1931 in Mobilier et Décoration, for example, Georges Remon makes good use of and comments on the way the Russian artist deploys gleaming metal and shiny, reflective surfaces. He notes how “Adrienne Gorska’s installation of the bar and shelves form perfectly studied devices (Figure 7.1). Thus, elsewhere, these colored moleskin blinds, whose shiny and cold sparkle have resonances that do not surprise in a house where metal—chrome or nickel—play an important part” (Remon 1931: 10). Metals were used extensively throughout the spaces of her interior, from the glass and iron entrance door with its horizontal chrome tubular motif, which immediately gave way to the mirrored and metal wall unit, to the silite table with its concave

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Figure 7.1  Thérèse Bonney, Bar on Studio Balcony of the Apartment of the Artist Tamara de Lempicka, Rue Méchain, 1925. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

base of high-polished metal and the tall metal folding screen used in the sitting area (Figure 7.2 and Figure 7.3). Hailed as an exemplary model of modern design, the steel railings, tubular-metal modernist furniture, and glimmering, shimmering silver screens enable light to ricochet off their surfaces, revealing at once a pristine, sleek image, while also suggesting a seductive tantalizing space in which sight is

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Figure 7.2  Thérese Bonney, Aluminum Screen. Rectangular Vase. Maple Table with a DeepSea-Blue Green Glass Top, 1925. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

not the only sense being activated. The shine expressed through modern design is also importantly a product of various lighting effects, not unlike the effects we see in photographs of the period. “Activated by the play of light, its effects range from dazzling gloss to lustrous matt played out on diverse surfaces, from aged and pitted aluminum building panels to buffed and polished leather […] when understood

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Figure 7.3  Thérese Bonney, Entrance Hall of the Domicile of Tamara de Lempicka, 9, Rue Méchain, c. 1931. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the CooperHewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

in historically specific contexts luminous things may become conceptually stable” (Maffei and Fisher 2013: 238). In the early decades of the twentieth century, light played an increasingly important role in the fashioning of modern interiors, namely, the psychological and emotional well-being of its occupants. The Wall-Paper News and Interior Decorator, for instance,

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suggested that “[s]ince the lighting may enhance or ruin the beauty of a decorative treatment and may make the occupants of a room appear to advantage, or otherwise, it is essential to consider it and much may be learned from the investigation recently conducted in stage lighting” (“Lighting and Decoration” 1913: 10). For her part, former actress–turned–glamor expert Sali Löbel maintained that as part of achieving glamor in the everyday, “light plays a most important part in our lives’ and is “every bit as important as the actual furnishing.” Narrow slit windows provide just enough sunlight in de Lempicka’s mezzanine level bar to create a powerful halo effect directing the pathway for the eye to the refracted light set off against the metals and polished wood surfaces. In a photograph of the space of the bar, the play between metal surface, tubular steel, and generous amounts of sunshine provides a second-floor mezzanine suggestive of a modern articulation of Pater’s description of Alcinous’s palace. In the photographs of the space, despite the small size of the rectangular slit-sized windows, light seems to burst its way in and saturate the space. Even the exquisite maple wood used for the bar allows the light to shine and refract off its glossy surface. The use of light as source of seduction and surface play is also rendered clearly tangible in an iconic photograph of the artist in her pink-tinted bedroom, in which she was famously photographed alluringly drawing back the diaphanous curtains, eyes turned seductively downward. “In her self-representation as well as in her other work, she appropriated a number of ideas from the film industry, the celebrity photograph as well as the stylised expressions of glamourous actresses, to depict a desirable, modern form of femininity” (Gronberg 2004: 53). Here, in this picture of her bedroom, the space, as much as the artist, plays with the seductive layers of fabric, flesh, light, and exposure. Steven Connor has noted the effective use of various types of screens. On the silver screen, in particular, he considers the important use of female beauty, where [t]he relationship between the face of the female star on the cinema screen and the magical, glowing light of the screen itself was often emphasized by the use of soft focus, achieved by the veiling of the camera, or even the smearing of the lens with Vaseline […]. The cinema screen is both shiny, immaculate, untouchable, and sticky with our longings. (Connor 2000: n.p.)

Screens and mirrors are also ambivalent by nature, as their “shine is a sign both of something organically moist and of something mineral or metallic. The luster of the silver screen solicits touch, even in seeming to prohibit it, as something profane” (Connor 2000: n.p.). The ultimate power of shine resides in its ability to elicit more than an optical effect. It evokes an inducement to touch that further deepens its pleasure, power, and efficaciousness. The allure of shiny, glamorous lifestyles, as seen in de Lempicka’s seductive interiors, elicits a desire to possess, that is, to at once emulate and take hold sexually. It is clear that shine is the effect not simply of the way light plays off of certain types of surfaces but of the way the photographic lens plays with light. The seemingly odd combination of seduction and halo-effect lighting was perhaps best set in relief in the work of queer British photographer, stage designer, and member of the coterie of The

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Bright Young Things of the 1920s Cecil Beaton in several photographs he took of his sister Barbara (affectionately referred to as “Baba”) throughout the decade. In a first instance, Baba is fashioned as a modern Ophelia (1925) in which she lays on a shiny black velvet fabric, her head sharply illuminated as if a halo surrounded it. Through the technological possibilities of the time, Beaton conjures a secular, seductive saintly figure, whose halo is the effect of light, fabric, and a sharp contrast of illumination. The shadow and light of black-and-white photography makes possible and even amplifies the effect of shine and its otherworldly affect. Perhaps even more iconic, and in keeping with fashionable interior design, is his portrait, once again, of Baba, personified as a Symphony in Silver, also from 1925. She appears as a metallic siren in the photograph, where body, clothing, and interior design merge to create a perfect personification of shine itself. However, it is his iconic photograph from 1933 that is perhaps the most useful to understanding yet another queer choreography of the interior and the dazzling affect of shine. In what appears as a highly staged image and interior, Beaton deploys the holy trinity of shine, photographic light, metal surface, and mirrored glass, to once again represent Baba. Designed by fashionable and celebrity interior decorator Syrie Maugham (1879–1955), the so-called queen of white celebrated for her all-white parties, interiors, and pickled and bleached furniture, the photograph of an interior in King’s Road featured a parchment screen (to hide a black piano) and shagreen coffee table, both by French designer Jean-Michel Frank (1895– 1941); two tailored velvet cream-colored; fringed sofas; a glass-mirrored stand, on which a vase of white lilies rests; and, of course, the tall folding screen of narrow mirrored panes set in chrome-plated frames. The room, like de Lempicka’s flat, was considered the height of glamor and modern sophistication, further amplified by the newly fashionable penchant for all-white and monochromatic color schemes. White walls coupled with shiny metal objects and furniture augmented the effects of shine, glimmer, and glamor. Beaton’s photographic reach also extended to documenting the interiors of his dear friend Bright Young Thing Stephen Tennant. In what would become a life-long program of redecorating his living spaces, Tennant first tried his hand at decorating in 1926 when he transformed his bedroom in his family’s Mulberry House in Smith Square, Westminster, into what would become known as the Silver Room (Plate 16). Using sheets of silver foil, like the ones in Beaton’s Symphony of Silver (1925), the otherworldly glitter of the luster walls was made to shimmer. The effects of shine were also significantly enhanced by the silver tabletops and large silver, brocade-covered bed. The cool metallic atmospheric sheen of the room was enhanced by the seemingly obligatory staples of early twentieth-century queer style, such as tuberoses and white lilies, a polar bear’s skin, and a shimmering sapphire-blue ceiling (see Potvin 2014). The overall effect was shocking, original, and noteworthy. Even The Sunday Express, for example, thought the room worthy of comment, noting the peculiarity of the room, “where his originality has expressed itself in a Silver Room” (The Sunday Express 1927b: n.p.). The use of silver and gold foil as wallpaper in modern European interiors spread throughout the 1920s and 1930s and was reported on in the American press with fascination and interest. In an article in Good Furniture Magazine from 1927, the author

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admits that “Americans appear to be conservative on the matter of home decoration and take to innovations slowly” (“Featured Modernistic Furnishings: They Bring in Potential Customers” 1927a: 83). To assuage any fears of the novelty and difference of the so-called French “style moderne,” one shop of note seems to have struck the right balance between exotic novelty and conservative good taste. As seen in the third floor of the Modes and Manners Shop in Paris, the walls are in gold leaf with a large lead mirror set into the back wall. Another article, from the same magazine that same year, turned its attention to memorable designers’ showrooms in London. Of particular note was one room, spotlighted for its overall “frigid” color scheme, which was “intensified by the metallic finish to the walls and ceilings.” The bedroom, designed by Mrs. Wilfred Ashley, had walls treated with silver in various tones of transparent glaze paint, giving the overall effect of mother-of-pearl (“Featured Modernistic Furnishings: They Bring in Potential Customers” 1927a: 84). On the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, Tennant commissioned his friend Beaton to shoot a series of photographs of him in various poses and states of (un)dress (Figure 7.4). The photographs document a camp staging of a coming of age in which posed performances of the self are set in relief to a unique and highly idiosyncratically styled interior. Additionally, these photographs of Tennant in his beloved bedroom, which expose his camp performance of identity, serve less as documentation than as a testament to Tennant’s and Beaton’s commonly held queer aesthetic. In another context, Walter Benjamin concludes that “[p]hotography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being” (Benjamin 1969: 255). We might do well to remember that the proliferation and success of modern and especially modernist and Art Deco interiors were made possible and attractive precisely because of photography and magazine culture (see Colomina 1994; Rice 2007). Their commonly held queer aesthetic, which formed part of The Bright Young Things, set its sights on overturning both world and gender order, which had brought about the chaos and devastation of the First World War. For his part, novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) satirized this group of aesthetic decadents as vile bodies and attacked them for their perceived perversions and debauched lifestyle (Waugh 1930). Tennant’s Silver Room can be read “as a sort of reliquary to this priestly figure of decadence; a resting place for a body plagued by consumption, which had been diagnosed three years earlier” (Potvin 2016). As Susan Sontag claims, “through fantasies […] TB was thought of—as a decorative, often lyrical death” (Sontag 1978: 20). In an early elaboration of camp, Jack Babuscio contends that gay sensibility is “a creative energy reflecting a consciousness that is different from the mainstream; a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that spring from the fact of social oppression; in short, a perception of the world which is colored, shaped, directed, and defined by the fact of one’s gayness” ([1978] 1994: 19). He identifies four main elements endemic to the experience and expression of camp: irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor. For the purposes of my argument here, I focus exclusively on the role aestheticism plays in the camp performances I consider endemic to the queer culture of interior design in the interwar period. Referring to Oscar Wilde’s dictum, “It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid

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Figure 7.4  Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, c. 1927. © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sothbey’s

perils of actual existence,” Babuscio contends that the Irish playwright highlights the way in which camp aesthetics work in “opposition to puritan morality” (Wilde and Babuscio 1978: 21). A critical aspect of the aestheticism of camp is “an emphasis on sensuous surfaces, textures, imagery, and the evocation of mood as stylistic devices— not simply because they are appropriate to the plot, but as fascinating in themselves” (Babuscio [1978] 1994: 22). Importantly,

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camp emphasizes style as a means of self-projection, a conveyor of meaning, and expression of emotional tone […] Clothes and décor, for example, can be a means of asserting one’s identity, as well as a form of justification in a society which denies one’s essential validity […] so many of our community find in the decorative arts and the cultivation of exquisite taste a means of making something positive from a discredited social identity. (Babuscio [1978] 1994: 23)

Camp and what can be described as a queer sensibility have never been explored in relation to design and interiors. This chapter is an important attempt to begin this process.

Glamorous Effects: In the Modern Interior In 1938, Sali Löbel maintained there were two different types of glamor. The first, particularly resonant for our purposes here, is quite simply what she called “photographic glamour”; the second was the “glamour of reality.” While far more banal, the glamor of reality was the result of what women, in particular, could achieve through diet, exercise, fashion, and interiors, especially if they followed the regime she laid out in her book, Glamour and How to Achieve It. Glamor, for Löbel, was an entire lifestyle of the everyday. This second type of glamor was, of course, initiated, informed, and influenced by the former, that is, photographic glamor (Löbel 1938:11). As Stephen Gundle asserts, formulas like Löbel’s “show that glamour is uniquely appealing as a source of self-definition and even empowerment and becomes a means of self-protection, deception, a projection of the self to the outside world that is at once bewitching and beguiling” (2008: 4). Glamor became the weapon of choice for a capitalist elite precisely because it was the product of self-fashioning rather than an assumed, natural inheritance. Within the auspices of this capitalist-driven self-fashioning, “materialism, beauty, and theatricality” were the primary means to ascend to the celestial realm of celebrity and high society (Gundle 2008: 6–7). Shine, I maintain, was integral to the aesthetic dimension and cultural efficaciousness of glamor; for it is the very thing that allows capitalism to flourish and emboldens its claims of desirability. Shine is market capitalism’s modus operandi, tantalizing us since at least the time of the Industrial Revolution to desire and take (perverse) comfort in objects seemingly created for our exclusive pleasure. As an engine of modern market capitalism and glamor itself, shine, it must be said, is the bastard child of academia, the thing one should not discuss let alone acknowledge. Yet I contend that shine marks a vital expression of embodied identities. Camp, glamor, shine, and modern design share much in common, not least, their associations with the economies of surfaces, which render them legible, meaningful, and enticing. Photographs and magazines in the interwar period grew in number and popularity, awakening a new interest in celebrity culture, including their homes, interiors, and shiny, glamorous lifestyles. Art Deco and modernism are perennially seen as distinct and antagonistic— especially as characterized by Swiss-born, Paris-based Le Corbusier (1887–1965). What

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the architect set out to attack was the decorative and ornamentalism of the past and the Art Deco style that he saw as embodied in the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. However, it is important to recognize that the French did not use these two distinct terms to distinguish Art Deco from modernism, but rather referred to both as “le style moderne.” The term blurred the distinction between the two, referring to objects, furniture and interiors that reflected—and refracted— the spirit and shininess of the modern. Modernism set itself apart from Art Deco by avoiding an interest in glamor and any attending lifestyle. Rather, its primary driving force was to produce forms best suited to the function of twentieth-century modern living for as many as possible rather than a limited “glitterati.” The supposed decadence of Art Deco style was set in relief against “the machine for living” famously advocated by Le Corbusier, who seemingly attempted at every turn to dull the potential of shine, despite his love of machine aesthetic. Yet the white backgrounds espoused by the architect, despite his best efforts to the contrary, were seen as the height of fashion (see Wigley 2001) and helped heighten the effects of shine. Yet the importance of tubular steel was certainly integral to the aesthetic of the Bauhaus, for example, whose work made its way to the United States through the relentless efforts of the MoMA’s first curator Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–81) and architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005). Like the reportage of the style moderne by countless American periodicals, Barr and Johnson would also help to usher in a distinctly American version of design that would seamlessly wed the cold functionalism of the international style with the warmth and decadence of Art Deco (see Hanks 2015). On US soil, streamlined modernism wedded shine and function, capitalism and democratic design. Capitalism, modernism, and democracy are easy bedfellows given their mutually beneficial goal of attracting the masses. With the onset of the Depression, shiny and glamorous design made its way to the silver screen, a fictive space through which “stage-set modernism” and “photogenic architecture” were transformed into spaces for lifestyle management and in which steel and gleaming surfaces were meant to attract the eye and inspire main-stream consumer taste—a democratic ideal propelled under the auspices of market capitalism. Silver foil or metallic and mirrored screens are not only a matter of decoration but of the screening of modern identities complicated by the dynamic interplay between shine, photography, and public performances. One of the stated goals of this symposium was to “examine the progressive democratization and participation in the consumption of luxury goods, as well as to theoretically reflect on the processes and methods of subjectification inherent to democratization.” Moving as I did from the queer individual to the masses, I wish to conclude this brief discussion of interwar queer identities and interiors by simply asking: At what cost does this so-called democratization and its universalizing tendencies come for the queer subject who is lured and mesmerized by those little shiny objects? Part of the democratization process briefly outlined here also suggested a visual and material democratization that showcased different types of identities. Penny Sparke maintains that the notion “of bodily cleansing becomes a metaphor for cultural cleansing within modernist architecture and it found its most obvious aesthetic expression in the dominance of the color white” (Sparke 1994: 116). For Le Corbusier,

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white walls were a clear “manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people” (Le Corbusier 1925: 192). Modernist architecture for modernists like Le Corbusier was seen as a “new body, a fit body made available by the new culture of mechanization” (Wigley 2001: xviii). Le Corbusier’s ideas around degeneration are clearly associated not simply with a misogyny but a homophobia endemic to modernist ideals (see also Colomina 1994: 10). His single-minded, whitewashed aesthetic was not only a means to expose dirt and, therefore, offer a more hygienic and thus moral alternative to the heavy wallpapers used by many, it also provided a removal of the perceived femininity and decadence of decoration and ornamentation. Yet I would contend that the white walls used, for example, in de Lempicka’s home provided the opposite of Le Corbusier’s desired effect and set in relief a decorative decadence that helped to queer modernism itself. Indeed, the answer to the place shine plays in the history of art and design is not to be found, I assert, in the so-called homogenizing, universal truths established by and perpetuated in modernist histories, but rather in the particular, individual, and idiosyncratic queer performances of figures like Stephen Tennant and Tamara de Lempicka, whose unique expressions of modernism have long been written out of the collective record precisely because of their sexuality and gender. In these instances, shine is both a material affect, or material condition, as much as it is a technique to shed light on (or let shine) the cultures, bodies, and identities of glamorous dissident and queer figures. These spaces, the height of fashion and modernity, were an unabashed celebration of nonconformist sexual and gender identities, a clear affront to the ideals of normative society, precisely because they deployed modernist ideals toward their own distinct and queer ends. These dissident identities and interiors were displayed, staged, and performed in the open through the publicity of modern technologies (photography, film, interior design magazines among others) refusing to be closeted and resisting assimilation into the grand narrative of modernist design history.

References Babuscio, J. ([1978] 1994). “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” in D. Bergman (ed.), Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 19–38. Benjamin, W. (1969), “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and with a Preface by Leon Wieseltier, New York: Schocken, 245–55. Cohen, D. (2006), Households Gods: The British and Their Possessions, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Colomina, B. (1994), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edis, R. (1881), Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses, London: Kegan Paul. “Featured Modernistic Furnishings: They Bring in Potential Customers” (1927a), Good Furniture Magazine (February): 83–4. Gronberg, T. (2004), “Le Peintre installé par la femme’: Femininity and the Woman Painter,” in A. Blondel and I. Brugger (eds.), Tamara de Lempicka: Deco Icon, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 46–57.

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Gundle, S. (2008), Glamour: A History, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, W. ([1882] 2011), Aesthetic Movement in England, London: Pumpernickle Press. Hanks, D. A. (2015), Partners in Design Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson, New York: Monacelli Press. Hatt, M. (2007). “Space, Surface, Self: Homosexuality and the Aesthetic Interior,” Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Summer): 105–28. Le, Corbusier. ([1925] 1987), Decorative Art Today, Cambridge: The MIT Press. “Lighting and Decoration” (1913), The Wall-Paper News and Interior Decorator, Vol. XLI, No. 6 (June): 10. Löbel, S. (1938), Glamour and How to Achieve It, London: Hutchinson. Maffei, N. P. and T. Fisher. (2013), “Historicizing Shininess in Design: Finding Meaning in an Unstable Phenomenon,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 26, No. 3: 231–40. Nordau, M. [1892] (1895), Degeneration, trans. from the second edition of the German Work, New York: D. Appleton and Co. Orrinsmith, L. (1878), The Drawing-Room: Its Decorations and Furniture, New York: Macmillan. Pater, W. (1895), “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture,” in W. Pater and C. L. Shadwell (eds.), Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, London: Macmillan, 187–250. Potvin, J. (2014), Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Potvin, J. (2016), “From Bright Young Thing to Vile Body to Posthumous Reliquary: Stephen Tennant, Queer Excess and the Decadent Interior,” in F. Fischer and P. Sparke (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Design Studies, New York and London: Routledge, 197–206. Remon, G. (1931), “L’Architecture Modernes: L’Atelier de Tamara de Lempicka,” Mobilier et Décoration. Revue mensuelle des arts décoratifs appliqués et de l’architecture modern, Vol. 7 (January): 1–10. Rice, C. (2007), The Emergence of the Interior, London and New York: Routledge. Sontag, S. (1978), Illness as a Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sparke, P. (1994), As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, London and San Francisco: Pandora. Steven, C. (2000), “Screens,” transcript of a radio talk on BBC Radio 4, January 23. Available online: www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/eng/skc/magic/screens.htm. (updated link: http:// www.stevenconnor.com/magic/screens.htm) (accessed February 2, 2017). The Sunday Express (1927b), (February 6): n.p. Waugh, E. ([1930] 1996), Vile Bodies, London: Penguin Books. Wigley, M. (2001), White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

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Cosmic Surfaces: Materiality and Portraiture in Queer Modernism Antje Krause-Wahl

A narrative about queer communities raising awareness and empowering themselves must talk about shine. Yet most studies of this light phenomenon and its perception focus on the role of monochromatic shine, which arises from light reflected on metal surfaces. My contribution spotlights the very convergence of color and shine that occurs on already colored surfaces, or also, and this is very important for my argument, that emerges through the diffraction of light rays on particular surfaces that break down light into colors—into iridescent surfaces. Iridescence describes both “the intermingling and interchange of brilliant colors as in the rainbow, soap-bubbles, and mother-of-pearl” and “a play of glittering and changing colors” (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989: 73). Iridescence is caused by the refraction of light on transparent layers. As a result of transitioning from one layer to another, the light waves of the spectral colors that make up white light are deflected to different degrees, isolated from each other, and basically superimposed again. This phenomenon manifests itself in contemporary art. In 2015 at the Grand Palais in Paris, Wu Tsang exhibited a sculpture made of over 235,000 Swarovski crystals suspended on strings attached to a five-and-a-half-meters-high cylindrical structure with a cone-shaped top. LED lights attached to the sculpture also emit pulsating, colorful light, which is refracted on the polished surfaces of the synthetic crystals and produces an ever-changing color play. The work’s title Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain (2015) refers to a scene in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, MGM, USA 1939), the film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). The colorful, magic, and shiny land of Emerald City, together with the protagonist’s rendition (Dorothy is played by camp icon Judy Garland) of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” has made this Technicolor film into a queer classic (Doty 2002). The fantasy land of Dorothy and her companions is juxtaposed to normative farm life in Kansas, where Dorothy comes from and where the Wizard of Oz, the “man behind the curtain,” wants to bring her back to. Tsang steers our attention on the colorful shine of 1930s popular culture, but iridescence is essential to this period my essay focuses on. Painter, as well as stage and costume designer, Pavel Tchelitchew was part of the cosmopolitan and queer

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Figure 8.1  Pavel Tchelitchew, Phenomena, 1936–38, oil on canvas, 200 × 270.5 cm. Tretyakov Gallery. © Tretyakov Gallery, Moskow

avant-garde of the 1930s, whose members he portrayed in numerous paintings and to which he dedicated his large-format painting Phenomena (1936–38). The work depicts this “community of dazzling eccentrics” in a kind of circus arena as a freak show (Rosenblum 1998: 107) (Figure 8.1). To achieve the colorfulness of the innumerable figures distorted through multiple perspectives, the artist systematically employs spectral colors so that the entire painting seems as if illuminated by stripes produced through prismatic refraction.1 Art critic Clement Greenberg dismissed Tchelitchew’s “shrill saccharine colors,” mockingly labeling them “gelatinous symbolism” (Greenberg and O’Brian 1990: 122). According to Greenberg, his works are in of themselves no self-reflexive, analytical examinations of painting that mobilize a process of cognition and enable a transcendental experience of the subject. Looking at his stage sets and paintings, I argue that Tchelitchew’s shiny figurations contest perception and influence questions of identity formation through iridescent shine. It thus becomes relevant for a queer aesthetic within modern and contemporary art that stands for an epistemological and experimental consciousness, for seeing and existence in the world.

Cosmic Light Tchelitchew, born in Moscow in 1898, came from a wealthy Russian family and left Russia after the revolution of 1917 (Kuznetsov 2012). He lived in Berlin, Paris, London, and moved to New York in 1934 with Charles Henri Ford, his partner until

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Tchelitchew’s death in 1957. Tchelitchew counted American playwright and art collector Gertrude Stein and poet Edith Sitwell as his patrons. He was close friends with photographer Cecil Beaton, Surrealist poet Edward James, and also poet and art critic Parker Tyler, who together with Ford edited the surrealist magazine View and also cowrote The Young and the Evil (1933), a novel explicitly describing and depicting the queer New York of the 1930s.2 He had close ties with the dance scene, with Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian ballet, and with Lincoln Kirstein, cofounder of the New York City Ballet. Both Tyler and Kirstein wrote biographies on the artist (Tyler 1967; Kirstein 1994). His art has been exhibited in Paris, London, and New York: in the United States, influential curators Everett Austin and Alfred Barr exhibited his work at the Wadsworth Athenaeum and the Museum of Modern Art, respectively, and in 1942, the Museum of Modern Art dedicated a solo exhibition to him, where his painting Hide and Seek (1940–42) was one of the most popular works (Katz 2010). Light, shine, and color were part of Tchelitchew’s aesthetics in his stage designs and paintings. In 1928 Tchelitchew and Pierre Charbonnier, commissioned by Boris Kochno for the Sarah Bernhardt Theater in Paris, designed the stage for the ballet Ode; the choreography came from Léonide Massine, the music from Nicolas Nabokov (Cook 1998). Ode was based on a text by polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65), a Russian scientist and poet, who studied chemistry, physics, metallurgy, and astronomy, and also investigated the physical nature of the northern lights, the particular light phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis.3 Lomonosov’s poem An Evening Reflection upon God’s Grandeur Prompted by the Great Northern Lights (1743) was a hymn to Empress Elizabeth of Russia, in which he metaphorized the basic nature of auroras in verse, posing questions like: “Why do the bright rays sparkle in the night?” (Chernouss 2012: 107–8). Tchelitchew made the production into his own. Within two strings leading to a vanishing point in the background of the stage, white cords were stretched across the stage, marking a second space resembling the outline of a crystal (Figure 8.2). The dancers’ dresses and the dresses of the miniature dolls hanging on the two framing white cords were made out of white or gray crinoline with star-shaped reflective sequins. The bodysuits of the dancers were black, white, blue, and gray with painted circles out of zinc and barium paint at the joints. Painted lines connect the circles, and thus the movements of the dancers, who also held the strings in their hands, formed shifting star constellations. Tchelitchew used different types of light, including neon, and cinematographic projections. What could be seen was a coexistence of projected, reflected, and phosphorescent light, creating an impressive visual and dynamic spectacle, as described by his contemporaries: Projected on the screen behind, as if in the midst of flames, is a pagan fête, a sort of bacchanal with nude men and women. […] Lights jump about and tremble, multiply and turn into fixed signs of the heavens. Like a fireworks spectacle, stars, balls of fire, lightnings, spirals appear and play about. A general light now turns green, blue, yellow, orange, red in quick succession; at last, a quivering white. In sudden changes, this alternates with red, which finally becomes incredibly bright, like fire, and remains. The background lights have been fading and now are bright, silvery reflections, all pulsating. (Tyler 1967: 333)

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Figure 8.2  Ode,  Ballets Diaghilev  1928,  stage design: Pavel  Tchelitchew,  photographer: Boris Lipnitzki. © Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet

Or: Mannequins, indistinguishable from the dancers and hung in space to create a false perspective, aided the light in creating an illusion of endless space in which the action was seen ideally from all sides at once as the acrobats in the ring are seen by the circle of spectators. […] The acrobats, building in space and supported only by light begin to phosphorescently create the earth. The stage caught the light as the fog over a bright metropolis catches the city illuminating at dusk and perspective gave emphasis to all the details. The acrobats had created the world and the apotheosis was the sunburst of the Aurora Borealis, a pyrotechnical explosion created behind the screens with neon and a blinding light turned on to the gazes of the audience. (Windham 1944: 30)

The light projected onto the stage, and reflected back from the applications on the dancers’ clothes, countered the onstage perspective construction created through the two tensed cords. The light seems to emanate from the costumes of the dancers themselves, and in the end, even the audience was blinded. Tchelitchew’s stage design used the crystal as metaphor to visualize a world in the making. The allegedly universal construction of perspective is questioned, and the world presented as one formed through light phenomena, that is, energies. These are activated and visualized by the glittering and phosphorescent materials and matters, projections, light, and especially the moving dancers. Tchelitchew’s own interest in astronomy and mathematics parallels with changing perceptions of the natural world due to scientific findings at the time (Kuznetsov 2012: 43). In the early twentieth century, quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity

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understood space and matter as energy levels.4 Tchelitchew, however, raises above all the question of the subject within this dynamic, new world order. Kirstein describes, with reference to later paintings by Tchelitchew, how optical instruments such as binoculars or the telescope, which seem to shorten distance, actually enhance artistic decomposition of space; whereas the microscope influences perceptions of the body: “whose atoms are no less odd or complex than those of trees or stars” (Kirstein 1991 (1948): 256–7). Following Kirstein, the body becomes for Tchelitchew yet another universe to be explored. This reappraisal of the subject is already found in Tchelitchew’s paintings and drawings from the late 1920s. The basic concept for the stage design can already be seen in a painting done in dark blue tones entitled Personage (1927), which shows a seated figure without recognizable facial features who rests a hand on one leg with the palm facing up (Plate 17). Patches of coffee grounds were applied to the joints, the pasty surface of which contrasts clearly with the smooth varnish of the painting. A crystalline grid is overlaid the painted figure, partly connecting the joints, while simultaneously forming a new geometric body that slides into and over the painted figure. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the figure seems to hold a cluster of coffee ground in the one hand, while the other one is covered in coffee ground as is the mask covering the face. In this abstract portrait, Tchelitchew attempts to free the body from its fixation to the pictorial surface by means of geometric constructions and use of material. The cover of Ode’s program booklet also questioned painterly conventions of representing human bodies. In Tchelitchew’s illustration, two dancers with their backs turned toward each other, who alluding to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1490) are encased in a circle, which they actually hold with their hands. Through the inclusion of a fifth leg, the figures mutate into a third being, whose movements break the rigid geometric circular form, which upholds (hetero)normative and humanist conceptions of the human. One of the dancers is covered with a dotted pattern that recalls the reflective circles painted on the bodysuits but now seems more reminiscent of an animal skin. A folder in Ford’s archive labeled “Pavel Tchelitchew Collection/ Influences (1937–1956)” contains a photograph of a squid exhibiting just such a dotted pattern. This pattern is actually composed of small organs—chromatophores—that reveal or hide color to provide camouflage. But the dots might also resemble sequins, which Tchelitchew used in several paintings throughout the 1930s.

Cosmic Skin In 1934 Tchelitchew finished a portrait of his partner and poet Charles Henri Ford (Plate 18). After initially doing the portrait in pink-brown shades, he modeled the skin with sequins in different sizes. Sequins are compacted onto and, in some cases, superimposed, raising areas such as the forehead, cheeks, or lips with a shiny crust. In order to elaborate the texture of the portrait, Tchelitchew modified the sequins, overpainting and scratching off the paint. The decoration was not limited to the skin alone, but also the eyes are covered with sequins; they are braided into the hairs, which

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coalesce into a strand connecting the portrait with the surrounding space covered with sequins as well. Sequins have been used in paintings before. The futurist Gino Severini, for example, decorated the clothes of Parisian nightclub dancers. In Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912), colored sequins were worked into a violet-colored cascading petticoat. These function as an assemblage imitating the actual sequins on the then popular evening dresses. Their shine enhances the rendered movements of the dancers. Furthermore, the viewers become involved in the painting’s movement, since only if one moves back and forth in front of the picture, as if dancing, do the sequins start to sparkle. But contrary to Severini, Tchelitchew decorated a portrait with sequins.5 This so-to-speak embellishment of the figure results first and foremost in the effect of the portrait appearing to swing back and forth—it oscillates: either the sparkling highlights or the painted face is perceived. This oscillation depends on lighting and the viewers’ movements as well, but there are other implications embedded in the image, which I now come to. In 1934 Tchelitchew painted a sequined portrait of cosmetic mogul and art collector Helena Rubinstein (Portrait of Helena Rubinstein, 1934, guache with sequins on wood, 66 × 50.2 cm). A black and white photograph of her apartment provides an impression of this oscillation’s perceptual register; the portrait hangs above the fireplace, the lighting, which stages a well-lit Rubinstein in a dark room, renders visible how the sequins on the painting sparkle and thus enhance the glamorous atmosphere in the photograph. Rubenstein’s original portrait within the picture is painted in a three-quarter profile. The gouache’s shades of green and blue, varnished on wood, are superimposed over each other, and her face is framed by a gleaming surface painted in white as in a glamor photograph. Here too, sequins were incorporated during the creation to both cover the face and decorate the surrounding space in the painting. The painted sequin portraits pick up on the aesthetics of glamor photography, in which portraits are submerged in shine and a halo appears behind the subject, thus seemingly transposing the person into another space. In juxtaposition to the smooth skin surfaces of glamor photography, the sequins transform the skin’s glow and shine into multiple sparkling lights, which in turn produce shimmering color. Sequins were part of the shine economy of the fashion industry during the first half of the twentieth century. After sequins had initially been made of metals such as gold, silver, steel, and copper, experiments were carried out with gelatin, but above all with synthetic materials: with cellulose nitrates and other polymer compounds. The advantage of these materials was that there were no limitations in size, shape, and design; the disadvantage was their durability (Scott and Williams 2010). Cellulose nitrate, also known as celluloid, is based on a cellulose pulp, which also forms the basis of another synthetically produced material, which numerous artists of the queer avant-garde during the same time period became associated with: cellophane. Florine Stettheimer used cellophane foil for the costumes and stage decor of the opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) composed by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson (Gammel 2011). Tchelitchew himself used cellophane for the costume that Ford’s sister, Ruth Ford, wore to the 1934 Paper Ball, a costume ball with a parade that Tchelitchew designed and produced at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut. Cellophane is found in Cecil Beaton’s numerous portraits, which he took mainly of

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women and for fashion magazines: of his sister Nancy Beaton; the marquise and model Paula Gellibrand; the socialites Lady Louise Mountbatten and Annie Armstrong Jones; the actresses Tallulah Bankhead, Norma Shearer, or Anna May Wong. In 1927 he photographed poetess Edith Sitwell with the help of a mirror, which he placed on a cellophane-covered underground. Sitwell wears a kimono-like garment covered with floral patterns and lays her hands on the cellophane. Her body is obscured by the mirror occupying half of the image, while simultaneously reflecting Sitwell, who as a result mutates into a Janus-like being. A blinding beam of light emerges from under her arm (https://moma.org/collection/works/44281). Judith Brown, who dedicated an entire chapter to cellophane in Glamour in Six Dimensions, describes how “the paper-thin, impermeable layer of cellulose sheeting offered the modern imagination new ways of seeing the mundane world; the glassy sheen of cellophane provided a protective veneer from dusty reality, and, like lightweight and mobile glass, cellophane could wrap anything and thus transform it into a sparkling play of light” (Brown 2009: 150–1). The idea of transformation was, according to Brown, further supported by the specific materiality of the cellophane, since synthetic materials stood for the idea that new technologies could be used to change the appearance of objects and subjects alike. If, however, Brown claims that the transparency of the material stands for the structural emptiness of modernism (Brown 2009: 158), I would argue that through the glitter that results from the folds, crumples, and superimpositions of the material, cellophane becomes part of an aesthetic in which the gaze is redirected to the manifold textures surfacing through various refractions of light, thus addressing other sensory perceptions. Such an aesthetic can be described as one of “affective excess,” as Elspeth H. Brown has argued with regard to the photographs of Baron de Meyer, who like Beaton worked for fashion magazines (Brown 2009: 10). An aesthetic that emphasizes the sensual attraction of materials evokes affects, which stand in opposition to modernity’s rationale. This aesthetic is one of “non-normative” subjects who are nevertheless not united by a common identity, but instead by the way “in which they perform affect” (Muñoz 1999: 68).6 But this aesthetic of “affective excess” is not colorless, as an advertisement for cosmetic products for Elisabeth Arden photographed by Baron de Meyer conveys. Circular cellophane cutouts with iridescent sheen structure the image’s background, in which a model poses behind liquid products for personal care kept in glossy transparent bottles resting on a mirrored table (Figure 8.3). While the bright colors of this shine become lost in the black-and-white stageset photography of modernism, Tchelitchew’s paintings render the colorful shine emanating from his sequins visible and as part of the modernist aesthetic. And it was regarded as an important part of painting’s subject matter. In Parker Tyler’s description of Rubinstein’s portrait the sequins shine in an iridescent manner: “Pavlik’s [i.e. Pavel’s] burning monomania will compass Helena Rubinstein’s portrait aflame with the pale iridescence of sequins. […] The over life-sized head is studded with sequins as if with star-streams” (Tyler 1967: 333). Moreover, Tchelitchew applied on Ford’s portrait not only colored sequins, but also iridescent ones. The sequins on the painting become a particular type of decoration, which to paraphrase Georg Simmel “increases or enhances the impression of the personality,

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Figure 8.3  Advertisement for Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics, photographer: Baron de Meyer, different issues of Vogue 1931. Duke University Digital Collections. © Duke University Digital Collections, Ad Archive

while it functions as its, as it were, radiation” (Simmel 2009 (1908): 333). Through the iridescent sequins, Tchelitchew portrays Ford and also Rubinstein not as subjects with a specific personality, but as subjects that dissolve into their shine. The shine on Ford’s portrait is created with the help of synthetic materials worked into the portrait, at times over the painted color surface, at other times under it. The body’s surface as a boundary itself thus becomes the object of reflection. And it is above all iridescent shine, which renders the subjects as being part of the cosmos.

Cosmic Communities In the queer and cosmopolitan circles of the 1930s, a large number of portraits were created as an expression of existing bonds between artists. During visits and joint travels, friends were painted, drawn, and photographed. These pictures were intended for private use; they “circulated among a coterie of trusted friends” and were a “gesture of intimacy” (Kahan 2013: 356; see also Earnest 2019). The attractive bodies of the British socialite Stephen Tennant or the Senegalese dancer Féral Benga were staged as objects to be desired—either because they were portrayed in erotic poses, or the depictions contained numerous erotic

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allusions (Meyer 2019), or their bodies were glazed with shine in both painting and photography (Smalls 2013). Tchelitchew also drew numerous portraits during his travels with Beaton, Tyler, and Ford among others or at the country estate of Edward James. In his extensive oeuvre there are also explicitly sexual drawings and paintings of men holding erotic poses. However, his use of shine is different from the shiny aesthetic of homoerotic desire (see Potvin in this volume). Tchelitchew used a variety of shiny matters to communicate emotional bonds. After meeting Ford in Paris, he painted Blue Boy with a Pitcher (1933). In this painting, which has an overall blue hue, Ford is portrayed by night, holding between his hands a glass jug that reflects a street with it’s lights (Figure 8.4). Ford’s right hand touches the transparent glass that emits light waves. A distorted figure on the lower part of the jug appears to be lying at Ford’s feet. The painted waves symbolize the erotic energy between the painter, who is reflected on the vase, and his partner.7 Portrait of Charles Henri Ford (1934) was probably made for Ford himself, perhaps even as a gift. Due to the glittering sequins applied to the portrait, Ford appears to be, so to speak, admired; he seems to become the center of a sphere of light rays that encloses the gazing eye. The glittering surface activates that which Jacques Lacan described as the impulsive, economic reality of an image, whose presence is only constituted through the desire of the viewer. The decisive factor is that the observer himself “participates on the appearance of that sparkling presence, by which they allow themselves to be fascinated” (Cremonini 2008: 114).8 The personal relationship between Tchelitchew and Ford is translated into shine. The sequins worked into the portrait reflect the light irregularly, so that, as it approaches the viewer, the depicted becomes unrecognizable. It is therefore less about the fetishizing shine of a homoerotic desire as discussed in relation to photography and much more instead about a queer desire toward unfixable forms of subjectivity brought into existence through shine. Tchelitchew applies this shine to portraits of both Ford and women who were important to him as patrons. Besides Rubinstein, who supported him when he first arrived in New York City, Tchelitchew was friends with, as already mentioned, the eccentric British poet Sitwell, who fell somewhat unhappily in love with the painter in 1927 (she dedicated to him the elegy “The Hambone and the Heart” [1927]). They maintained an ambivalent relationship until the Second World War. In accordance with the queer modernist aesthetic her poems are pervaded by colorful shine that entangle subjects and objects from nature into affecting entities, like, for example, in “The Sleeping Beauty” (1924): “Her head, a mount of diamonds bald and big / In the ostrich feathers that compose her wig. / Her dwarfs as round as oranges of amber. / Among the tall trees of the shadow clamber” (Sitwell 1957: 57). The description of the objects distracts from language’s capability to represent the world through words and focuses instead on the form and sound of language (Dowson 2002). Tchelitchew painted Sitwell, also known for her fondness of opulent jewelry, several times—yet only once wearing a jewel. In a portrait from 1937, known as Sibyl, she is wearing a brown frock against a background where on a canvas the fingers of two hands form the initials, “E.S.” (Skipwith 1994: 137). She is holding a quill and a letter between

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Figure 8.4  Pavel Tchelitchew, Portrait of a Boy with Blue Pitcher (Charles Henri Ford), 1933, gouache on cardboard, 104 × 76 cm. Courtesy of Natalia Kournikova

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her hands while wearing a large, bejeweled brooch attached to her chest, whose colors starkly contrast the paintings’ earthier tones. The oversized brooch – reflecting the then fashionable preference for custom jewelry made from rhinestones – consists of eight stones braced by gold clasps. The gemstones shine from the inside out. On the chest, to return to Simmel again, the “flash of the precious stone seems to be directed at the other—like the lightning of the glance the eye addresses to him—it carries the social meaning of jewels, the being-for-the-other, which returns to the subject as the enlargement of his own sphere of significance” (Simmel 1950 [1908]: 342). Painted by Tchelitchew, they become a symbol for the emotional bond between the poetess and the painter. The portraits by Tchelitchew communicate this bond, however, not only through the painted objects in the picture, but also through the painted surfaces themselves: Sitwell describes the colorful shine of one of the portraits as iridescent: “It has a strange eternity and peace about it: and by daylight the colour is luminous like mother of pearl” (Greene 2012: 215). If shine generates attraction, iridescence articulates multilayered emotional bonds.9

Iridescent Worlds Tchelitchew’s friends continue to resurface in relation to iridescent shine as a quality of his painted surfaces. Hide and Seek (1940–42) was inspired by a tree the artist saw on the estate of surrealist poet Edward James in Sussex. The title makes reference to the children’s game of the same name. The canvas is filled by a tree trunk with multiple branches forking out and a girl standing with her back turned against the viewer in front of the tree. Several children hide among the branches, or rather, they are born out of the branches. Characterized as spring, summer, autumn, or winter, they form a ring around the tree. In this image puzzle, many hands and feet stem out of the tree’s surface, holding and touching each other. The tree branches from which the bodies grow out of extend like veins into the bodies of the children. Kirstein describes their skin as follows: “In the lower right-hand quarter, in that section devoted to winter and fixed in rime-sprayed twiglets, we can uncover a frosty youth in profile whose shadowy vertebrae are x-rayed beneath a mother-of-pearl surface, whose blown-glass columnar bones are translucent through to their icicle articulation” (Kirstein 1991: 260). Kirstein uses iridescence to indicate that Tchelitchew’s paintings are not merely transparent bodies enabling views of the interior, but subjects who mesh with their surroundings precisely through these multilayered, carefully crafted surfaces. In her considerations on the ontology of iridescence, Tavi Meraud argues that it is closely related to the phenomenon of camouflage. An iridescent skin can also hide, since its changing colors depend on the wearer or the observer’s movement. Thus the surface becomes ambiguous and the camouflaged subject cannot be easily identified (Meraud 2015: 3). Following her argument, the painting Hide and Seek is the representation of a child’s game of hiding oneself where subjects are able to elude the world of representation through their iridescent surfaces. Iridescent shine as a phenomenon

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predominates in Tchelitchew’s application of paint and other materials. The sequins’ shine interrupts the unity of the figure and consequently the operation of seeing. At the same time these are part of the affective shine cultures that bring the subject and the object into a reciprocity embracing various gender relations. Considering that iridescence as a light phenomenon counts as part of other phenomena in the cosmos, Tchelitchew employs it to entangle subjects with their environment. In this case iridescence becomes a meditation on the representative function of painting itself, as evidenced by the fact that objects are no longer painted to mimic their local or natural colors, but to dissolve instead into colorful iridescence. Tavi Meraud has emphasized how iridescence offers a dynamic context composed by different optical impressions that become bundled in shimmer: it “constellates a conception of the surface precisely not as boundary, but as a scintillating site of intractable multiplicities” (Meraud 2013: 3). And it is these “intractable multiplicities” of the aesthetics of iridescent shine that connects the works of Tchelitchew with those of Wu Tsang. The colorfully iridescent crystals of Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain come across numerous works Tsang created in collaboration with poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten and performance artist boychild (Plate 19). In the video installation Girl Talk (2015), Moten wears crystals as jewelry, which glitter in the sun rays and because of Moten’s oscillatory dance movements. They have been used for costumes in performances, hung in exhibitions as chains suspended from a room’s ceiling, thus unfolding their iridescent color play according to the viewer’s movement. This shine is created by a synthetically produced material with a specific history. In the eighteenth century it became possible to mix glass with metal powder to produce artificial crystals in large quantities. In Austria, the glass cutter Daniel Swarovksi, who founded the company of the same name in 1895, produced glass with a high proportion of lead oxide, which was characterized by both its transparency and reflection.10 In 1956, Swarovski produced with Christian Dior the Aurora Borealis Stone through a special vacuum coating—a process superimposing multiple layers of materials—that gave it an iridescent shimmer (Campell 2010: 8). Tsang uses the shine from synthetic objects reproducing a natural phenomenon. In doing so, the artist reestablishes the fascination for the transformative potential of synthetic materials that could already be observed in the use of cellophane and sequins in the 1930s. Iridescence can be especially appreciated on sequins made out of cellulose nitrate, the transparent thermoplastic, as stated earlier, commonly known as cellophane. Iridescence was achieved through the addition of fluorescent dyes or phosphorescent pigments. In Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain the transformative potential of synthetic materials is conceptually related to trans bodies being part of a posthuman world, where species—natural and synthetically constructed—are equated to each other. Tchelitchew’s sequins are indeed still a coating of the skin, but they are, as I have argued, worked into the skin, becoming part of the skin, and thus transformed into surfaces of resistance through which separations between man and the cosmos, and between gendered identities, are questioned. His use of sequins within the context of a 1930s fascination for synthetic materials enables us, at least

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from a contemporary perspective, to understand Tchelitchew more as part of a queer trans aesthetic. In contemporary queer practices, iridescence plays a critical role; due to the iridescent shine of crystals, it becomes difficult to truly capture the objects’ form. The concern behind Wu Tsang’s work is explicitly formulated by their collaborators. In the introduction to Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2016), Jack Halberstam describes current queer politics as a search for alternative forms of rendering marginalized people visible: [B]lack people, indigenous people, queers and poor people … refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls … we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. (Halberstam 2013: 6)

The Undercommons proposes a utopian community beyond a politics of representation that offers no possibilities for representing subjects outside of (hetero)normativity. In Tsang’s works, the iridescent crystals are the objects that in the exhibition space materialize this unrepresentability. They are objects that enable the questioning of visibility and can be used at the same time to create relationships. The iridescent colors of the rainbow that Judy Garland sings about, as taken up in the painted surfaces as well as in the iridescent shine of the sequins and crystals, are more than mere symbols of gay liberation. They are part of a queer aesthetic that advocates a different perspective on the world and which, with Muñoz, “lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (Muñoz 2009: 1). This is the world artists worked on in the 1930s and today, creating bonds across history. Tsang’s work renders visible how queer iridescent glow supersedes desire for another body and instead grows into a desire to become something else—a desire that Tchelitchew expresses through his paintings’ iridescent surfaces, which in and of themselves become a reflection on representation and subject formation and consider painting’s potential to elaborate a different perspective on a world of multiple entanglements.

Notes 1 Acclaimed poet William Carlos Williams remembers Tchelitchew describing the painting in his own words: “That is why I have painted it as a double rainbow” (Williams 2008 [1937]: 121). 2 For The Young and Evil (Ford and Tyler 1933), Tchelitchew painted not only his friend Ford but also females and men of different ethnic backgrounds. Some faces are covered—with a luminous butterfly or heavy make-up—but there is also the purple paint covering and uniting some faces regardless of their differences.

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3

An aurora borealis is produced by exalted nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere and occurs in polar regions when accelerated charged particles from the Earth’s magnetosphere hit the atmosphere (Chernouss 2012). 4 Niels Bohr published work on quantum field theory, nuclear physics, and cosmic radiation (Bohr 1933). 5 Often working with fashion magazines, Tchelitchew completely decorated a dress for the cover issue of Vogue with sequins. The initial draft also saw the face of the model covered in sequins. 6 For Muñoz this aesthetic is one of putting up resistance to ruling classes because indulgement and excess oppose control and controlled forms. The political thrust of Muñoz cannot be simply reapplied, because the queer cosmopolitan avant-garde consists of privileged social sphere. 7 Comparable attempts to register erotic energies with the help of energetic currents can also be found in the works of another artist who was in Paris at the same time and may have known Tchelitchew. In his portfolio Électricité (1931) for La Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Électricité, Man Ray visualizes the invisible power of electricity by depicting wave-shaped cables in rayograms. Among these is one in which a cable lies over a woman’s body, therefore equating electricity to erotic tension. 8 Translation of the author. The original source reads: “das der Betrachter an der Erscheinung jener strahlenden Präsenz, durch die er/sie sich faszinieren lässt, selbst beteiligt ist.” 9 Poet Carlos Williams describes two paintings of Charles Henri Ford and his sister Ruth Ford in a similar manner: “Their faces were made to radiate the opalescent colors he loves” (Williams 2008 [1937]: 122). 10 Rhinestones derive their name from the crystals that were found in the Rhine River, cut and grounded with lead so that they reflect the light passing through the stone, generating a sparkle.

References Bohr, N. (1933), “Light and Life,” Nature, Vol. 131: 421–3. Brown, E. (2009), “De Meyer at Vogue: Commercializing Queer Affect in First World War-Era Fashion Photography,” Photography & Culture, Vol. 2, No. 3 (November): 253–74. Brown, J. (2009), Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Campell, J. (2010), Creating Glamorous Jewelry with Swarovski Elements: Classic Hollywood Designs with Crystal Beads and Stones. Minneapolis, MN: Creative Pub. Chernouss, S. A. (2012), “Ideas of Lomonosov in Auroral Research,” Geophysica, Vol. 48, No. 1–2: 107–15. Cook, J. J. (1998), The Transformed Body: Pavel Tchelitchew’s Representation of the Modernist Body, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Cremonini, A. (2008), “Was ins Auge sticht. Zur Homologie von Glanz und Blick,” in G. Boehm, B. Mersmann, C. Spies (eds.), Movens Bild. Zwischen Evidenz und Affekt, München: Wilhelm Fink, 93–118. Doty, A. (2002), “My Beautiful Wickedness”: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy,” in A. Doty, Flaming Classics Queering the Film Canon. London: Routledge, 49–79.

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Dowson, J. (2002), Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity, Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate. Earnest, J. (2019), “A Brief History of Intimacy,” in J. Earnest (ed.), The Young and Evil. Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955, New York: David Zwirner Books, 7–15. Ford, C. H. and P. Tyler (1933), The Young and Evil, Paris: Obelisk Press. Gammel, I. (2011), “Wrapped in Cellophane: Florine Stettheimer’s Visual Poetics,” in Woman’s Art Journal 32, no. 2 (Fall/Winter): 14–21. Greenberg, C., and John O’Brian (1990), The Collected Essays and Criticism. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greene, R., and E. Sitwell (2012), Edith Sitwell Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius, London: Virago. Halberstam, J. (2013), “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons,” in S. Harney, and F. Moten (eds.), The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2–13. Kahan, B. (2013), “Queer Modernism,” in J. M. Rabaté (ed.), A Handbook of Modernism Studies, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 347–61. Katz, J. D., and D. Ward (2010), Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Kirstein, L. (1991), “The Interior Landscape of Pavel Tchelitchev,” in Nicholas Jenkins (ed.), By With To & From. A Lincoln Kirstein Reader, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 254–63. Kirstein, L. (1994), Tchelitchev, Santa Fe: Twelvetrees Press. Kuznetsov, A. (2012), Pavel Tchelitchew: Metamorphoses, Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers. Meraud, T. (2015), “Iridescence, Intimacies,” e-flux Journal 61 (January): 1–12. Meyer, R. (2019), “Threesomes: Lincoln Kirstein’s Queer Arithmetic,” in S. Friedman and J. Hauptman (eds.), exh. cat. Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern, New York: MoMa Publications, 98–105. Muñoz, J. E. (1999), Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz, J. E. (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: London: New York University Press. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989), second edition, ed. James Murray, Vol. 15, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paulocik, C., and R. S. Williams (2010), “The Chemical Composition and Conservation of Late 19th and Early 20th Century Sequins,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Conservation, Vol. 35: 46–61. Rosenblum, R. (1998), “Pavel Tchelitchew,” Artforum, Vol. 37, No. 3 (November): 107–9. Simmel, G. ([1908] 2009), Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, trans. A. J. Blasi, A. K. Jacobs and M. J. Kanjirathinkal, Leiden/Boston: Brill. Sitwell, E. (1957), Collected Poems, London: Macmillan. Skipwith, J. (1994), The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s, London: National Portrait Gallery Publications. Smalls, J. (2013), “Creating Homoutopia: Feral Benga’s Body in the Matrix of Modernism,” in F. Sweeney and K. Marsh (eds.), Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the AvantGarde, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 62–100. Tyler, P. (1967), The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography, New York: Fleet Publishing.

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Williams, W. C. (1937), “An Afternoon with Tchelitchew,” in W. C. Williams, and B. Dijkstra (2008), A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. New York: New Directions: 119–23. Windham, D. (1944), “The Stage and Ballet Designs of Pavel Tchelitchew,” Dance Index, Vol. 3, No. 1–2: 4–32.

9

Double Shiny: Leigh Bowery’s Costume Design for Because We Must (1987/1989) Alistair O’Neill

This chapter examines two surviving examples of stage costume designed by Leigh Bowery for choreographer Michael Clark’s work, Because We Must, first performed in 1987 at Sadler’s Wells, London, and subsequently made into a film in 1989 (of the same title), directed and edited by artist-filmmaker Charles Atlas.1 It considers the representation of the costume design in three contexts: firstly, as museum objects in the Theatre and Performance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; secondly, as performing costumes commissioned for a sequence in a contemporary dance work; and thirdly, their visual citation in an artist’s film of the work performed. It ranges from an object-based analysis of the costume design, its function as stage costume in a dance sequence, and the visual analysis of its representation as moving image employing visual effects. The costume design is spectacular in form, involving graduated, colored sequin stockings, and a waisted body with cape and covered head, surface decorated with embroidery and sequins (Plate 20). The principal fabric is decorated in crewelwork, an embroidery technique using two-ply worsted wool first developed in the baroque period in England. It is also embroidered with large sequins (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). The overly embellished nature of the costume design draws specific attention to the role of visual effects—in the interaction between lighting and costume—with the identification of a figure on stage from the sightline of the audience. In sum, the costume design raises an understanding of stagecraft and surface aesthetics. The costumes appear in the film of the contemporary dance work in a sequence choreographed to “Venus in Furs” by the Velvet Underground. In the song, the lyric to each verse begins with the words, “Shiny, shiny” underscoring the apparition of the shimmering costumes worn by the dancers and the doubling of shine, as an effect seen and heard. Furthermore, the background to the dance is not a stage, but a moving image inserted into the footage of the dancers performing using chroma key technology. It shows the decorated surface of the costume design spinning in changing color combinations. In the year between the staging of Because We Must and its completion as a film, Martin Jay published an essay that confirmed three models of vision in the scopic

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Figure 9.1  Front view of female ensemble for Because We Must, 1987, Leigh Bowery (designer),  Mr. Pearl (maker), Museum no.  S.102:1 to 3-2010. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

regime for making art in the postmodern period: Cartesian perspectivism established in the Renaissance; “the art of description” found in Dutch seventeenth-century stilllife painting; and the baroque, which revels in “the dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of images” and also bearing “a strongly tactile or haptic quality” (Jay 1988: 17). Jay’s identification of the baroque is informed by the works of Christine Buci-

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Figure 9.2  Back view of female ensemble for Because We Must, 1987, Leigh Bowery (designer),  Mr. Pearl (maker), Museum no.  S.102:1 to 3-2010. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Glucksman who has described it as “madness of vision,” invoking the symbol of a curved mirror to convey how it distorts the visual image “by showing its dependence on the materiality of the medium of reflection” (Jay 1988: 17). To watch the “Venus in Furs” sequence in Because We Must is to be confronted by a form of visual excess defined by the surface of moving image and the surface

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of moving textile, which both convey bodies in movement. It posits the idea of the baroque having a double imprint defined in both subject/object and representation, and this is echoed by the words sung by Lou Reed as the soundtrack, “Shiny, Shiny.” Christopher Pinney’s work on the register of the baroque in postcolonial portrait photography argues that “the appeal to a haptic surface” (Pinney 2003: 210) can be found in many forms of media and not just in the baroque age. He identifies the double nature of imagery in portraits by Malian photographer Sedou Keita, as combinations of highly textured backdrops and clothes, which produce “a photographic surfacism that engages with texture, where everything springs out of the photograph toward the viewer, rather than a field of spatio-temporal certainty receding within the image” (Pinney 2003: 216). And it is this sense of the baroque doubled that I wish to examine in Bowery’s costume design and as represented in Atlas’s film: as double shiny. Bowery’s use of crewelwork and sequins can be taken as representative of the material practices of shine and visual excess found in queer expressions of visuality and illuminates the role of visual effects in such representations. The reflective surface of the sequin, the costume, and the mirror all privilege the visual at the interface between image, identity, and identification. The large sequin should therefore be read as another kind of symbolic mirror connected to surface aesthetics—as a disk with two surfaces, a double baroque effect.

Glinting from Afar The two surviving stage costume designs (another is owned by a private collector) are displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Theatre and Performance galleries, first opened in 2009 as the first dedicated space to the collection after the closing of the Theatre Museum, Covent Garden, in 2007. The costumes were acquired by the museum a year later in 2010, purchased from Matthew Hawkins, a former dancer in Michael Clark Company and Mark Erskine-Pullen, known professionally as the corsetiere, Mr. Pearl. One encounters them at the back of a large glass vitrine dimly illuminated by lowlevel lighting (for textile conservation), positioned behind a principal costume from the American stage production of The Lion King (1994), a costume for an aerial performer in the British production Chameleon (1990), and a tutu worn by Margot Fonteyn for her 1964 performance of Swan Lake with Rudolph Nureyev at Covent Garden. Even from this disadvantaged position, the costumes throw themselves toward the viewer, as the large plastic sequins appliqued to their surface glint back; except this is not in order to be seen from the back of the theater under stage light, but from standing in front of the gallery vitrine in reduced light. The viewing conditions afforded by the gallery are a poor substitute for seeing the costume design on stage, but it does offer another way to appreciate their surface aesthetics. To look at the costumes through the glass divide is to be separated from their visual offer, and although they call out for attention, they refute connection remaining sealed off in their cabinet devoted to stages past. In this, they operate in a way that is very

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similar to the earliest stage costumes designed to be worn indoors in the baroque age. Early seventeenth-century Italy developed indoor theaters inspired by the Roman amphitheater, and this new style of staging soon spread to Europe, including London, where it was imported by Inigo Jones for the staging of his masques. While bringing the stage indoors afforded scenery protected from the elements, candlelight brought new challenges to how costume could amplify the visual sight of actors on stage. Colors became muted under the soft and imprecise flickering light, so strong shades were favored, complimented by the appliqued use of reflective materials. Diana de Marly describes the encrustation of gold, silver, copper, metal, semi-precious jewels, and crystal in baroque theater costumes as “the assistance clothes could give as another source of light.” This is substantiated by de Marly quoting from a poem titled “The Stage” written by a Mr. Webster of Christ’s College, Oxford, in 1713, which describes a typically opulent stage scene: Beads, Plumes and Spangles, in Confusion rife, Whilst rocks of Cornish Diamonds reach the Skies. Crests, corslets, all the Pomp of Battle join, In one Efflugence, one promiscuous Shine. (De Marly 1982: 24)

From the perspective of the indoor baroque stage, these radiant effects formed from beads, feathers, and metal sequins (then known as spangles) produced a bodily illumination, an efflugence (meaning brightness taken to the extreme), which dazzled the audience from afar. The poem’s description of shine as promiscuous, however, is not in the modern sense of the word as being “indiscreet in sexual relations” (which comes into use in the midnineteenth century) but to an earlier meaning of a “disorderly mix” (“promiscuous” 1996: n.p.) of things (early seventeenth century). The use of this word in relation to shine is likely to have been informed by how surface decoration is stitched to fabric by hand in order to look natural; where the intention is not to follow a pattern or any form of order, but to apply things randomly so as to appear unaffected and as if made without manufacture. Thus the “promiscuous shine” of the constructed textile surface is both costume and visual effect combined.

Object Analysis of the Costumes Bowery’s costume design is unashamedly informed by the style and techniques of baroque theater costume and, in the use of crewelwork, draws upon another textile style of the baroque age. The costumes were made in Bowery’s home studio, by a team of makers that included Mr. Pearl, who made the costumes, and Nicola Bateman and her sister, Christine, who surface-decorated them. Each dancer was measured for their costume by Mr. Pearl who then cut bespoke patterns and toiles before the final fabric panels were machine-sewn together. The costumes were then hand-decorated with crewelwork embroidery and appliqued sequins by Nicola and Christine Bateman.

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The surviving costumes belonging to the V&A are a male and female costume, made for company dancers, Leslie Bryant (who also performed as Les Child) and Leesa Phillips, respectively. They are based on an earlier outfit Bowery designed for himself based on a structured body with covered head in a fabric surface decorated with crewelwork and sequins. Both costumes have covered legs to imitate bare legs with stockings comprising stirrup dance tights of flesh-pink satin and graduated colored sequins—the male costume running down the leg from magenta to pink, the female from orange to pink. The surface of the knee is not fully appliqued to allow freedom of movement. The male costume has a structured body with pale pink vertical bound seams to create a corseted look allowing freedom of movement in the torso. At the back of the body, the lines continue to follow the curvature of the buttocks; at the front is a sequined codpiece. The arms are covered, and over this is a capelet rising to a covered head with cutouts for the eyes and mouth with pale pink bound seams. The crewelwork depicts coiling flower heads and birds in green, yellow, and brown yarn, finished with green and orange sequins. The female costume has a structured body with pink vertical bound seams to create a corseted look, which follow the line of padded hips in the style of trunk hose and rise to encircle the breasts. The arms are covered, and the left arm has a leg-omutton sleeve; the right arm is covered by a cape, which is full length at the back with a hot pink lining, the front cut away to the left shoulder to reveal the sleeve head. The cape is connected to a covered head with cutouts for the eyes and mouth with pink bound seams. The crewelwork depicts coiling flower heads in purple, pink, green, and yellow yarn, finished with purple, white, orange, and green sequins. Both costumes are accessorized with white cotton gloves. By 1987 Bowery was already known for his provocative use of pattern. For example, the large spotted fabric he employed in his costume design for Clark’s New Puritans (1984) was also based on one of his club outfits. When worn with matching spots of rouge across the face, the look speaks of measles as much as polka dots. His use of pattern was informed by him buying dead stock from inexpensive fabric shops in the East End of London and putting them together in clashing combinations. It was also a strategy practiced by a number of fashion designers in London at this time, such as John Galliano, who made his first commercial collection from fabric patch-worked with tartan fabric swatches with brass farthings for buttons, or Christopher Nemeth, who made clothes out of Royal Mail hessian post sacks and coils of jute rope. But the use of crewelwork and sequins is a combination clash of a different order, revealing Bowery and those who worked in his studio as well versed in textile history. The pairing is first found in English late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century fashionable textile designs that imitated nature with detached floral motifs, coiling stems, and intertwining branches. Many of these designs were informed by newly complied publications about the plant and animal kingdoms. The baroque period in England marked the formulation of a style partly inspired by native flora and fauna, but also referring to exotic imports such as the influence of Indian printed cotton known as palampores imported by the East India Trading Company and chinoiserie motifs brought in by Dutch traders. Crewelwork was not

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just found in textiles for clothing, such as jackets, bodices, and waistcoats, but also in interior textiles for the Jacobean home, such as bed hangings, curtains, window seats, and cushions. Bowery is likely to have accessed information about crewelwork from illustrated practical guidance books such as English Crewel Designs by Mary Eirwen Jones, which was illustrated with V&A examples and included diagram drawings on how to reproduce them. In 1913, professional embroiderer Louisa Pesel was invited by the V&A’s textile department to compile an inventory of embroidery stitches found in the museum’s collection. For crewelwork, Pesel identified four categories: stitches that interpret the line of a design; stitches that give a solid effect, decorative fillings; and stiches that give a light effect. In the final grouping it is clear that these stitches offer a dappled effect or a means of covering an area of fabric with a looser form of decoration. But looking at finished designs, it is also possible to categorize these stitches as giving the effect of reflecting light on an object within a stitched design. They are therefore seventeenthcentury textile effects, which denote visual radiance. In Bowery’s costume design, this radiance is complimented by the application of plastic sequins, sewed on by hand by his assistant and soon-to-be wife, Nicola Bateman, and her sister. Each sequin in the design is sewn on with a matching colored bead sewn on top to stop the white cotton thread from showing. Bowery’s biographer, Sue Tilley, recounts him cruelly, telling Michael Clark of the long hours Bateman spent in his flat hand-sewing and that she had “no friends so she gave each sequin a name” (Tilley 1997: 89). Sequins occupy a particular place in Bowery’s design vocabulary and were informed by his love of Busby Berkeley films and their costumed dance routines. In addition to making his own costumes and those for the stage, Bowery started to consult for British fashion designer Rifat Ozbek in the late 1980s, to help him with the building of his seasonal collections. This included for A/W 1990 a collection that featured a skin-tight all-in-one in graduated sequins that went from red at the shoulders through to gold, blues, and greens at the ankles that retailed, according to the Chicago Tribune, for $6,000 (“British Designer Adds Pizazz to Fall” 1990: n.p.). The design is informed by graduated sequin stockings of the Because We Must costume design and was also hand-beaded by Nicola Batemen with each garment taking 10 days to complete.2 As a gay fashion designer, costume designer, and performer known for his appearances in London’s club culture, Bowery coalesced the shiny with the queer in his specially designed outfits as twinned false surfaces. The expression of polarities was a hallmark of his design; he once remarked at interview: “I’m interested in a jarring aesthetic and the tension between contradictions—the idea that something can be frightening and heroic and pathetic all at the same time” (Tilley 1997: 112). Pamela Karantonis has written about Bowery’s “self-fashioned post-punk performative,” describing his outfits as if made by “choices that seemed ill-fitting or excessive” (Karantonis 2015: n.p.). Bowery regularly appeared in the British-style press of the 1980s in a number of guises: photographed out in clubs wearing his own outfits, editorial shoots featuring his fashion designs sold at Hyper Hyper, or interviewed as a subject in his own right. When i-D magazine fashion editor, Caryn

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Franklin, was cast as a presenter for the BBC TV program, The Clothes Show, it brokered a feature on Bowery set in London department store Harrods screened in December 1987, which showed his designs and advertised Clark’s production. The sequence is indicative of the expanded potential for subcultural creative practice on mainstream television at this time, matched by the adventurous commissioning of arts television on Channel 4, which included Atlas’s Because We Must, first screened on January 1, 1990. In an entertaining performance, Bowery appears on The Clothes Show as an influential fashion designer (the rather traditional, British mid-century kind, likely to have designed the odd ballet), interviewed over afternoon tea at the department store in a variety of outfits bearing little visual restraint. Bowery explicitly states his interest in sequins for the season, seen in the surface decoration of dresses with covered head, stockings, and gloves. When Franklin asks: “Now these are the sort of clothes that you can be seen wearing at clubs and parties, but what would you wear for a special occasion?” Bowery replies, dressed in his crewelwork and sequins outfit, “Well actually this garment is being worn for a special occasion and that is Michael Clark’s new show, at Sadler’s Wells currently” (Cochrane 2018: n.p.). Clark employed Bowery as a costume designer for his productions not just because of his design talent or the fact they were friends, but because Bowery’s notoriety drew a large audience of young clubbers unfamiliar with attending contemporary dance. His use of sequins in his own “fashionable” outfits and in his subsequent costume design was therefore a visual means of drawing attention: not just to himself, but also to the company of dancers dressed in his image. At the time of the stage production, Bowery noted in an interview that “the reason I use sequins at the moment is because if I cannot cast the light at least I can reflect it” (Marriott 2017: n.p.). While the statement can be read as Bowery identifying with the reflective potential of sequin as a fabric surface, it is important to read it as bound up in perceptions toward Bowery’s contribution to Michael Clark Company productions and his identified role as both costume designer and dancer.

The Costumes in Performance Critical writing about Clark’s work balances his ability as a choreographer and classically trained dancer, with derogatory remarks about the shock tactics he employs in his productions—referred to by critic Clement Crisp as “gimmicks and what might best be known as dirty tricks” (Burt 2003: 160). In a review of Because We Must, critic Alastair Macaulay described them in detail: Clark is an anything goes anarchist: Nudity, obscenity, fancy dress, the chain saw, dancing to the National Anthem, Knees Up Mother Brown, Elvis singing “Silent Night”. Loud rock music accompanying the quaint woodland scenery of La Sylphide … all that and more, all that to give you one frisson or another. (Macaulary 1988: n.p.)

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Bowery’s stage costume (as it later appeared in the 1990 touring production) was read as part of a wider tapestry, including other costume designs by British fashion designers, BodyMap (Stevie Stewart and David Holah). Bowery first started working with Clark on costumes for Flippin’ eck oh thweet myth-tery of life (1984), but he was also invited to take the role of dancer (notable for his untrained body) in Because We Must. It marked a new departure for Bowery, who reported, “I get more pleasure out of being on stage than I ever did from people looking at my clothes” (Tilley 1997: 184). Bowery makes numerous appearances in the production, and in the “Venus in Furs” sequence is cast in the rear end of the pantomime horse (itself a reference to the horse Picasso designed for the 1916–17 Ballet Russes production, Parade). Bowery took the role, as he knew to the play the back end of a horse is to be cast as the fool. The “Venus in Furs” sequence features the stage performance of four company dancers wearing the Bowery stage costume design. It also includes the two-figure horse, a naked man and woman, and a graphic college at the end of the sequence (which was originally back-projected on stage) featuring an assortment of imagery including pictorial symbols, pornography, words, and foodstuffs (Plate 21). The choreography deals with physical manifestations of domination and submission, such as being head restrained by a leash and led to crawl across the floor, or spun around on your back by being held by others by your legs. There is also a strong sense of dance as ritual, aided by the dancers holding lit candles in both hands. With their covered heads, eye cutouts, capes, codpieces, gloves and stockings, the dancers perform a ceremony of difference, which is unexplained and impenetrable. Constant throughout is the moving textile background, which denies any sense of a stage from which the dancers move upon, lending an eerie suspension. This is further accentuated by the layering of their movements, so that figures arise in the same scene from different perspectives, dissolving the perspectivism of the proscenium arch in the theater into a televisual space without walls. The Charles Atlas film Because We Must was shot on video with professional television cameras on Beta SP tape. The film was shot in several locations: Sadler’s Wells Theatre, a public house, a living room in a house, and a studio, where for one day the walls were painted Ultimatt green for keying to enable shooting for the “Venus in Furs” sequence, which employs a composite visual effect produced from chroma key technology—also known as green screen. Atlas had worked with chroma key technology as early as the mid-1970s, when he produced the Merce Cunningham film Blue Studio (1976), shot on early VHS film cameras, which placed the American choreographer and his dancers first in the studio, and then in a series of unexpected landscapes, where the dancers are further multiplied and overlaid. In the mid-1970s, chroma key was a time-intensive process, where each scene had to be combined one frame at a time, aligning up to five layers. The process was streamlined with the advent of quad optical printers, specially developed for the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, Lucasfilm Ltd., USA 1980).

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This places Atlas as an artist-filmmaker at the vanguard of visual effects, so by the time he returned to chroma key in the late 1980s, he had sophisticated its use. In the scene, the textile design appears in reversed terms and spins. Within the negative space of the design, you see through to a lower layer, which is again of the textile design, but at a different section. The live action, through a number of subsequent layers, is played out over these base layers. Atlas informed me that “Venus in Furs was shot in the green screen studio and was edited in a post-production house in Ireland. There are five layers of composited video. To do the final edit I had to use 10 one-inch video tape machines at once. It was before computer compositing.” The moving textile background was in fact achieved from it being filmed “with two people rotating it by hand” (Atlas 2019). The tension between the hand and the machine is structured throughout the sequence, especially in the use of the layers of moving imagery. When a dancer raises their leg as if to have their boot of shiny, shiny leather kissed, we see at the base of the leg a section, which has failed to register in chroma key, a rough edge depicted by a white outline, which is usually the result of inconsistent lighting (Plate 22). This visual mistake would have registered with Atlas, who would have known how to correct it, so it is knowingly retained. It is, in fact, produced from the sequins reflecting the studio lights, but what is so striking about it is how it turns the material immaterial, the dancer thus reduced to surfaces and dissolved by the feedback from the visual effect. Atlas wouldn’t be drawn on the intention, merely stating, “It’s part of the look” (Atlas 2019). The sequence is representative of the emphasis Judith Butler has placed on the visual surface of the body as a stage for the performance of gender and sexuality, over and above its interiors and depths (Butler 2006). But what is particular about the sequence is how the costume covering the body registers as its surface—as a shiny, second skin. In doing so, it enmeshes a queer definition of surface with the attention Guiliana Bruno has paid to the idea of surface in digital images as a kind of skin that carries material traces (Bruno 2016). Atlas’s film posits that both readings of surface overlay in the visual effects employed in his film, producing a haptic quality. What the crewelwork and sequined costumes also raise in their surface is a visual register of difference. This is in terms of being differentiated from the traditional costumes of ballet or contemporary dance, differentiated by sexual orientation and sexual practices, and finally as differentiated from the notion of fetish and deviance articulated by “Venus in Furs.” The song is inspired to the themes of sadomasochism, submission, and bondage that are raised in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella of the same name (1870). In the Atlas film, the choreography clearly draws a relation between the sentiments of the lyrics and the gestured movements. For example, “Whiplash girl child in the dark” is matched with a dancer held on a pink velvet leash and dog collar; “Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather” is linked to a dancer kissing the foot of another. But the costumes are not in fur and leather; there are no bells, belts, or whips. Instead, they are replaced with crewelwork and sequins, which catch the light and produce colors, perhaps aligned to the lyrics.

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A thousand dreams that would awake me different colors made of tears (Reed 1967). Thus, we have a different order of fetish, and not one linked to an absence of color, in the poetry of wearing and associating with the color black (as the Velvet Underground and sadomasochists do), but to an extreme palette of color and texture that connects to an aesthetic of spectacle and dress found in American underground queer cinema of the 1960s and in London’s club culture in the 1980s. It is an alternative narrative of pleasure and pain, and not one necessarily defined by sexuality alone. I identify this notion of difference with Lorenzo Fusi’s definition, “as a category in its own right, independent and prior to it being viewed as a social or political category, marked by an historical period from the 1960s until the early 1990s that facilitated gender studies, personal studies, the study of sexuality and cultural plurality” (Fusi 2012: n.p.). Fusi identifies in the films of Jack Smith and the photographs of Peter Hujar and Mark Morrisroe a mode of articulating difference from the mainstream through forms of visual representation that raise the inability to recognize the self in the parent culture. As a gay filmmaker, Atlas connects to a broader trajectory of queer filmmaking that revolves around an interest in modes of self-presentation and transformation— from Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment, to Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures—these films delineate a trajectory of queer aesthetics that bear upon a reading of Because We Must and Bowery’s stage costume design, for raising, what film historian Tom Gunning has termed, “A Coney Island of the Avant-Garde” (Gunning 1990: 70) in their use of inexpensive clothing, textiles, and accessories to conjure the spectacular and baroque.

“I’ll be Your Mirror” When Bowery stated, “the reason I am using sequins at the moment, is because if I cannot cast the light at least I can reflect it” (Marriott 2017: n.p.), he suggests there is a thread between the sequin, the self, and the reflective surface. Combined they convey the projection of stage costume in performance, but they also refer to other meanings. The costume design in question is based on an outfit Bowery designed first for himself, so it can be claimed as a mirror image of the original design. The large sequins embroidered to the surface of the costumes, which catch the light, are a circular reflective form, visually analogous to a mirror. And on the flip side to “Venus in Furs” on the Velvet Underground & Nico vinyl album (and an object visually similar in its circular form and sheen to the sequin) is the song “I’ll be your Mirror.” In October 1988, contemporary art dealer Anthony D’Offay gave Bowery a weeklong exhibition in his gallery. The room was divided in two by a one-way mirror, with Bowery on a chaise longue posing at his own reflection unable to see the audience on the other side watching him. Bowery’s outfits changed daily, as did the style of his performance, but what remained constant was his inability to connect with his audience. In Dick Jewell’s film of the exhibition “What’s Your Reaction to the Show” visitors are asked of their opinion of the show interspersed with shots of Bowery performing in silence unaware of those watching him.

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D’Offay was unusual at the time in appreciating the crossovers that Clark, Bowery, and their colleagues were making in contemporary dance, art, fashion, music, and film. When interviewed for Bowery’s biography D’Offay describes him, intriguingly, as a mirror. He was clearly someone who was totally unique, remarkable and unlike anyone else, since he had this factor of holding this very, very clear mirror up to people to see themselves but they didn’t become Leigh or want to be Leigh, you looked at him and saw yourself. It’s a very curious thing that part of yourself was in Leigh. He unlocked a key in you, you would see this shiny mirror, it was an amazing thing and I thought that would be an interesting thing to invite him to do something at the gallery. (Tilley 1997: 215)

D’Offay paints Bowery as a distorting mirror glinting back at the viewer, a knowingly false radiating subject—a kind of mirror that art historian John Potvin has identified in the work of fashion photographer Cecil Beaton as a sign of the queer and the modern (Potvin 2018). And the distorting mirror is also how Christine Buci-Glucksmann characterizes the baroque, as a reflecting glass either concave or convex, as a means of disfiguring the visual image thorough its curved reflective surface. D’Offay described Bowery as “a very bright shiny mirror” who “allowed you to see yourself in this strange shape that he took” (Tilley 1997: 216). And like Bowery, the baroque is defined as an unusual shape—as the term is derived from the Portuguese word for an irregularly shaped natural pearl. It is this etymological return, from a mode of vision to a lustrous decorative sphere, which parallels Bowery’s stage costume with a definition of the baroque as a double imprint, both a haptic surface and a visual effect.

Conclusion At the end of 1994 after Bowery’s premature death from AIDS, and Clark recuperating from methadone addiction at his mother’s home in Scotland, the storage unit where Michael Clark Company held its archive lay unpaid, until its contents were sold to recuperate the financial loss. One Sunday morning, Matthew Hawkins who had danced for Clark in a number of productions was called by a friend who had seen Bowery’s costumes on a stall for sale in Camden Market. Hawkins went to the market and bought them, before being acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Without this act, the costumes may well have been lost, as have many others attributed to Michael Clark Company. In time, Leigh and Nicola Bowery (formerly Bateman) became models for the artist Lucian Freud, as did Sue Tilley. In Freud’s painting Evening in the Studio (1993) Nicola Bowery is depicted seated hand-embroidering sequins onto a crewelwork cloth (Plate 23). Below her, naked, lies Sue Tilley while a whippet dog reclines on a castiron bed. The absence of Leigh Bowery’s towering figure, the subject of so many other paintings by Freud between 1990 and 1995, is notable. Instead, he is represented in the

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crewelwork cloth on Nicola Bowery’s lap. Like the stage costume for Because We Must, it too glints with a visual order unnatural from the crewelwork cloth, or the colors and tones of the rest of the painting. It is placed at the back of the painted scene, but its depiction sits somewhat forward. Seventeenth-century crewelwork was regarded in its day as a reflection of the natural world, both the kind underfoot and the kind imported from afar. Bowery’s use of crewelwork is conscious in its historical reference but raises an unnatural late twentieth-century world of “hyperbolic artificiality” as Francesca Granata describes it—one that is man made, produced from long hours of handwork, using synthetic materials in technicolor that shine and sparkle (Granata 2017: 67). The other difference Bowery’s handling brings is in the definition of “promiscuous shine.” Bowery’s stage costume design is as much about the disorderly mix of surface decoration and fabrics, as it is about the sexual inhibition of the subcultural queer community Bowery was such a vibrant part of. And the figurative absence of Bowery in Freud’s painting is a poignant reminder of the great losses his creative generation experienced as a result. The surviving material legacy is that the sequins continue to reflect the light.

Notes 1

2

The author would like to thank Kate Coyne, Associate Director, Michael Clark Company. The costumes were not in fact a feature of the original production in 1987, but were added to the tour of the production in 1990 (23 November – 2 December 1990, PARCO Department Store Theater, Tokyo (part of Tokyo International Theatre Festival); 4 December, Osaka; 6 December, Nagoya). The “Venus in Furs” track is not listed for the 1987 production, the first listing is for Heterospective (14-24 October 1989, Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London). It was later reproduced in an editorial on Ozbek as “The King of Color” in the September issue of American Vogue in 1990 featuring Jade Jagger as a model. The collection also had a promotional film shown on MTV made by Ozbek and Bowery’s friend, John Maybury, who developed a dual career as an artist-filmmaker and a music video director. It is as an early example of fashion film for television. Finally, a sequined body stocking based on this all-in-one design is worn by Michael Clark as a stage costume in Michael Clark’s Modern Masterpiece (and later Mmm...) (1992), also credited to Bowery.

References Atlas, C. (2019), Interview with author (February 16). “British Designer Adds Pizazz to Fall” (1990), Chicago Tribune (March 13): n.p. Bruno, G. (2016), Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Burt, R. (2003), The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacles, Sexualities, London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2006), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge.

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Cochrane, L. (2018), “Sex, Sin and Sausages: The Debauched Brilliance of Leigh Bowery,” The Guardian, August 13. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/13/sex-sinand-sausages-the-debauched-brilliance-of-leigh-bowery (accessed March 29, 2019). De Marly, D. (1982), Costume on the Stage, 1600–1940, London: Barnes & Noble. Fusi, L. (2012), Changing Difference: Queer Politics and Shifting Identities: Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Smith, Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale. Granata, F. (2017), Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body, London: I.B. Tauris. Gunning, T. (1990), “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde,” in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, London: British Film Institute Publishing, 56–62. Jay, M. (1988), “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in H. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, 2–23. Karantonis, P. (2015), “Punk’s Dead, Michael: Artifice, Independence and Authenticity in Leigh Bowery’s Self-fashioned Post-punk Performative,” Punk & Post Punk, Vol. 4, No. 2–3: 205–22. Macaulary, A. (1988), “The Addict of Camp: Michael Clark, Because We Must,” Dancing Times (February): n.p. Marriott, H. (2017), “Glam rocks! Why Sequins Are Having Their Brightest Party Season Yet,” The Guardian, November 14. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/nov/14/ sequins-party-season-ashish-gupta-michael-halpern (accessed March 29, 2019). Pinney, C. (2003), “Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism,” in C. Pinney and N. Peterson (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 202–20. Potvin, J. (2018), Quote at “Cultures of Shine” conference. “Promiscuous” (1996), in T. F. Hoad (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, n.p. Reed, L. (1967), “Venus in Furs,” The Velvet Underground & Nico. Rumbold, J. (1987), “Dressed to Dance,” The Guardian, December 21: 9. Tilley, S. (1997), Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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“Inevitable Plastic Palace”: A Surface Reading of Andy Warhol’s Factory Barbara Reisinger

In an unwarranted simplification, the art critic Robert Pincus-Witten (1988: 229) offered up what he saw as the “one motivating idea” of Andy Warhol to posterity in an oral history interview in 1988: “He was interested in the idea of glamour. Glamour fascinated him,” the critic said and elaborated on the “ineffable” quality of celebrity, fame, and Hollywood stars of the 1930s. Warhol’s quaint fascination with the famous, rich, and glamorous is well established. Still, Pincus-Witten’s claim that this constitutes the single, central idea in Warhol needs to be put in perspective. Since the young journalist Gretchen Berg ([1966] 2004) published her notes from conversations with Warhol in 1966 under the heading “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” surface has come up as the preeminent trope of Warhol’s critical reception. The notion of the artist’s genuine superficiality wittily devaluates the aspiration in Berg’s title, as the famous words that she put in Warhol’s mouth assert: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and my films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (Berg [1966] 2004: 91). If we try to peer behind the surface, there is no “true story” of Andy Warhol to be found. Rather, the difficulty to locate a single motivating idea in Warhol’s art and persona requires a closer look. I argue for a reading of the Warholian surface as a myriad of surface effects that add up to a complex, at times contradictory, picture. In doing so, I follow Nicholas de Villiers, who puts forth the “queer opacity” of Warhol’s persona to counter the search for a “hidden depth” (Villiers 2012: 6). In monosyllabic interviews and the gossipy tone of Warhol’s books, “we insistently encounter Warhol’s opacity and his discursive tactics of deferral, proxy, impersonation, and in-authenticity. Are these merely forms of evasion? I would maintain instead that what opens up is a space for a different mode of discourse whose concern is not the truth” (116). Taking up de Villiers’s notion of a discourse unconcerned with the truth, I go beyond his focus on discursive and textual strategies and draw attention to the surfaces of Warhol’s famous Silver Factory as such: layers of aluminum foil and paint, crumbling walls and floors, found furniture. These materials produced a variety of effects, from shine and glitter to dusty softness. In my reading of the Factory, I frame these effects as a

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well-orchestrated effort in interior decoration and draw out the significance of the Factory as a space where the dichotomy of privacy and publicity was continuously and performatively undone. Despite its famed glamour and mystery, the Factory’s shiny interior has yet to be analyzed in detail, as an impromptu work of interior decoration realized by Warhol’s friend, some-time lover, and “the Factory’s superintendent and concierge” Billy Linich (Bourdon [1989] 1995: 171).1 The purpose of what I call a “surface reading” of the Factory is to piece together a description of Linich’s interior decoration from photographs, films, videos, and the published records of visitors’ impressions. Surprisingly little has been written on the Factory’s appearance, with most publications focusing on the social milieu, Warhol’s filmmaking, and his mystifying persona. In her seminal study, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, Caroline A. Jones (1996: 190–8) touches on similarities of Warhol’s studio interior with actual factory designs, but her focus remains on the rationalization of the artist’s labor and Warhol’s production process. My approach takes a different route by maintaining close attention to the look—the shine and surface qualities—of the Factory. In my description, I take cues from a curious account that qualifies as the most elaborate description of the Factory’s interior to have been published, notwithstanding its relative obscurity. In a 1967 adult pop-up book released as Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) and put together mostly by Linich, Factory habitué Ingrid Superstar provides a lengthy listing of things to be found in the Factory. Her tone is subjective and betrays some dissatisfaction with the task of describing what she sees. The point of the two pages of slowly moving observations, apparently transcribed from a tape recording, is their superficiality. Envisioning a verbal inventory of the Factory, Superstar’s gaze moves from one area to the next: Well the studio is … there’s a big wide arch of aluminum foil on the ceiling with white on each side with the pipes … And one side of the wall is painted silver and part of the wall by the window is in aluminum foil and there’s a big old dilapidated hog jaw with a red couch over there, and there’s silk screens all over the place and wrapped up whatever they are—I don’t know what they are. And there’s a big clock that, of course, doesn’t work, and there’s a mirror over on that side and the walls aren’t painted silver on that side, they’re just white, sort of like bricks showing through. And there’s an old fan hanging on a pipe. It really looks like a loft and an all-purpose workshop … The floor is silver—just about everything in this inevitable plastic palace is silver, except for the lights and there’s a gigantic light bulb over Gerard [Malanga]’s desk and there’s a red light over the exit sign on the door. (Superstar 1967)

Ingrid Superstar’s description highlights the silvered surfaces and lingers over several objects and furnishings in disarray. Even though she asserts that parts of the walls are “just white,” further into the account she pictures “just about everything” as silver. When she terms the Factory an “inevitable plastic palace,” her phrasing echoes the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the media spectacles Warhol devised for The Velvet Underground in

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1966.2 As she directs attention to the lighting, she seems to imply an interconnection between these strobe-lit multimedia events and Warhol’s studio, both constructing highly artificial environments with the means of lights and atmospheric interventions. Superstar’s conjoint consideration of the messy details as well as the lights and the atmospheric whole reverberates in the assessments of the press. Journalists call the Factory a “glittering arena” (Rosenblum 1964: 103), an “enchanted silver playroom” (Lester 1966: 169), all the while being aware that the “shiny tinfoil” was attached to “an enormous, dark, cluttered loft” (Shecter 1966). The apparent contradiction between the glamorous whole and its grubby parts remains intact and unresolved.3 Like Ingrid Superstar, I attend to the observable surfaces and effects—the silver cladding, furnishings, and lights—and take inconsistencies into account. Part of an “ephemeral, largely performative body of work” produced by an amphetamine-prone community around the Factory, Linich’s work is almost too transient and attached to its moment to be framed as a work of art, as Juan A. Suárez (2014: 623) has put it: “It was art in a minor mode, made without any thought of solidity or permanence, to be consumed on the run, and, at best, live on in memory.” The Factory was not formed as a secluded artist’s studio but as an otherworldly salon where stage-like exposure met those who sought it, diversified crowds gathered for glamorous parties, and yet, films and silkscreens were produced at unprecedented rates (Frei and Printz 2004: 15–16). Warhol’s own prolific film production, Linich’s photography, and the cameras of TV crews and journalists, who often visited the Factory, transformed Linich’s silvered capsule into a media sphere. In Linich’s words, “it was almost as if the Factory became a big box camera—you’d walk in, expose yourself and develop yourself ” (Schor 1997: 18). The shiny surfaces of the Factory offer insights into tactics of disguise and revelation of self, entanglements of the private, even intimate, and the public, without constituting these terms as opposites. Reading the Factory’s surface effects elucidates how these boundaries were blurred, and how the mise-en-scène of Warhol’s and Linich’s work and personae were entangled in the Factory decoration and its echo in various media. Linich’s decoration of the loft that would become the Factory took place in a period of close interconnection of Warhol’s circles with the underground scene that was Linich’s turf (Wolf 1997: 38–45). By the time Warhol moved his studio in early 1964, he was already notorious as a pop artist, known for paintings of soup cans and sculptures of packaging cartons that puzzled art public and professionals alike. Warhol’s canvases had started to take on a more sinister tone when he took up horrifying car accidents, suicide scenes, and electric chairs as subjects for his silk screens in 1963. His earliest movies started with the acquisition of a camera in the same year and reflected a fascination with simple actions and their duration, captured in mostly static frames. The new studio became Warhol’s space for presenting his work and entertaining guests, as well as the epicenter of Linich’s and Warhol’s social life that seemed to have at least partially intersected at this point. Linich was involved with the closely knit experimental dance and poetry scene as a lighting designer. Around the time when he got involved with Warhol, he did the lights for dance concerts at the Living Theater and the Judson Church, venues that made (art) history as birth places of happenings and performance art (Banes 1993: 131; Janevski and Lax 2018: 115–16).

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Linich hosted a so-called haircutting party at his apartment, where Warhol was taken to by Fluxus artist Ray Johnson, and which marks the oft-narrated primal scene of the Silver Factory (Bourdon [1989] 1995: 170–1; Bockris [1989] 1997: 191–3; Watson 2003: 118–19).4 There, Warhol encountered the completely silvered interior of Linich’s place and commissioned his friend to decorate the newly rented studio space in the same style. While working on the Factory decoration for three months in early 1964, Linich gave up his own apartment and moved into the loft. This constellation set the scene for the entanglement of Linich’s and Warhol’s self-fashioning and of private and public functions.

Surface Effects The Factory was an open plot loft located on the fourth floor of a nineteenthcentury brick building that had formerly housed cold storage and, most recently, an upholstering manufacturer (Kiedrowsky 2011: 70). Aluminum foil, commonly used to wrap foodstuffs and to provide insulation from heat and light, was the most prominent material in the Factory decor. Linich employed the foil in several different ways, achieving a variety of surface qualities with relatively smooth, almost mirroring areas on one end of the spectrum, and uneven, crinkled parts on the other. Long, wide strips of foil covered the middle arch of the vaulted ceiling, as well as the wall facing the street. Lined-up hanging strips were used like curtains to conceal the windows and as decorations along pipes and strutting where the back wall met the ceiling. A single fragile layer of foil was wrapped around each of the four round pillars upon which the Factory ceiling rested. The pipes running along the walls were encased in thick crumpled jackets of foil, the surface reflecting back glittering jots of light. The surface variations and different values of shine and reflectiveness charged the interior with a multiplicity of sensory impulses, set off by an interplay of contrasts in the decor. Even the floor of the Factory seems to have undergone some sort of silvering. Its dusty gray was of a subdued shine, in slight contrast to the white and black parts of wall and ceiling. Mirrors of various sizes were placed throughout the loft, puncturing the cavelike environment with reflected expanse and brightness (Figure 10.1). In addition to aluminum foil, Linich used industrial paint to coat the entirety of the right sidewall with silver sheen. A smooth gloss emanated from the wall, textured by the brick structure showing through the thick paint. Reminiscing about the repainting of a bridge near his hometown Poughkeepsie, New York, with the same paint he would later use at the Factory, Linich highlighted the industrial quality of the paint in a later lecture (Miller 1994: 28n4). The art public of the early 1960s would have rather associated the silver paint with Jackson Pollock’s use of enamel in his drip paintings around 1950 and with Frank Stella’s silver striped canvases. More than the glitz of aluminum foil, the gloss of silver paint was thus already codified within the realm of art, signifying a flat, literally repellent surface opposed to the immersive depth characteristic of oil paint (Jones 1996: 211–12; Egenhofer 2008: 207–13). It can be said that the exteriority associated with the silver sheen in painting was transferred to the Factory interior with Linich’s design, yet the foil with its creases and tears made for a

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Figure 10.1  Ugo Mulas, Warhol’s Factory, New York 1964. Photo Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved.

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much-cheaper, less-industrial, less-sturdy look that was however richer in glitter and shininess. This trashy exuberance infused the presumably cold and machine-like silver with a polyvalence that is hard to pin down: artificial and ephemeral, more industrial than individual, yet highly idiosyncratic and obsessive; glamorous, but unclean and easy to damage. Linich had not only decorated the walls, floor, and ceiling but furnished the whole loft. Often in disarray, several furnishings and objects, most of them spray-painted in silver, were assembled in the Factory: a mannequin’s torso, several boxes, desks, and an assortment of chairs. A half sphere disco ball with a cylindrical base, covered in little circular mirror plates, was among the most conspicuous furnishings. The history of the mirror ball is tied to the development of artificial environments shaped by glitter and light, geared toward a public eager to escape their everyday life. Within this history that Änne Söll maps out in her contribution to this volume, the Factory’s disco ball possibly assumes not just the position of a precursor of 1970s disco culture, but that of an artwork that reflects on the mirror’s capacity for infinite multiplication. A large red elliptical couch that Linich allegedly dragged in from the streets and an Art Deco cabinet of ebonized wood with silver elements and mirrors on the bottom doors, like the disco ball, made appearances in Warhol’s films and distinctly shaped the atmosphere (Warhol and Hackett 1980: 63–4).5 In the back of the Factory, two bathroom booths were the only spaces in the loft that offered some privacy. One of them doubled as a dark room for Linich. The stark contrast in the decoration of the bathrooms indicates that there was some method to the madness of Linich’s interior design scheme. While one of the booths was papered in foil floor to ceiling, the toilet bowl sprayed silver, and the tank crowned by an oval mirror broken in half, its counterpart was completely bare of gloss and decor with the raw brick wall showing. A Warhol film of 1964 shows art and dance critic Jill Johnston performing a choreography that involves both bathrooms. Linich captured the scene in rare series of color photographs (Plate 24). The raw brick chamber is embellished with the spinning disco ball hanging from the ceiling and thus demonstrates how the contrast of glitz and dimness could be used for atmosphere. Johnston’s dance is dramatized by an eerie shine that animates the environment and emanates from the foiled parts. The intense gloss of the silvered bathroom booth marks a transition into bright light. Like a set design, Linich’s Factory decoration shapes and frames the unfolding of Johnston’s choreography (Plate 25). The lighting of the Factory was by no means incidental or just practical, but inspired by Linich’s former ventures into lighting design. In Warhol’s studio, he used dramatic spotlights for stark contrasts and maximum reflectivity. In pictures, one can see bright beams emanating from spots on the ceiling that illuminate circular patches of Factory floor in rather regular intervals. Additional lights were clipped onto columns and stands at approximate eye level and could presumably be moved wherever more light was needed. Reports of Linich’s use of extra bright halogen lamps are consistent with the appearance of the environment: Some parts were veiled in darkness, and others intensely bright (Miller 1994: 11; Angell 2006: 14, 16). The lighting made sure that the Factory was not fully transparent to the gaze but rather animated by the contrast between blinding lights and dark corners. The artificiality of the stage-like scenery is emphasized by the many Factory denizens who sport sunglasses indoors. Convenient

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beyond the mere projection of fashionable coolness, shades could be of actual use to shield one’s eyes from the intense light. Tracing Linich’s influences in lighting design leads to two figures that were both involved in the formation of new experimental art forms in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Linich’s mentor, Nick Cernovich, had studied at Black Mountain College and had likely engaged with John Cage’s aesthetics that were marked by an attraction to duration and boredom (Wolf 1997: 164n26). Linich did the lights for their common friend, dancer, and choreographer James Waring, who practiced an exuberant camp style. When performing, Waring and his dancers would characteristically wear elaborate, often self-fashioned costumes and employ an eclectic mix of classical ballet, vaudeville, and every day non-dance movement (Satin 2003; Janevski and Lax 2018: 18).6 Linich and the older Waring shared an interest in Zen and Fluxus, and both met the fate of being sidelined in many art historical accounts of the era, as they were not just producers but also enablers of more prominent and more permanent work. Their collaborations provide a hint toward Linich’s continuous engagement with campy, queer, and avant-garde practices that live on in the early Warhol films. Waring makes a brief appearance in one of the Haircut movies that were premised on Linich’s skill with scissors and set in his community of underground performers, like Freddy Herko, and poet John Daley. The latter composed the poem “Billy Linich’s Party,” partitioned in sections headed by “First Haircut,” “Second Haircut,” and so on, for circulation in the Floating Bear newsletter, an underground medium that frequently featured and alluded to Linich, Waring, and Warhol (Wolf 1997: 40–3; Daley’s poem is reprinted: 153–5). Linich’s sensibility became most tangible in the glittering interior he created for Warhol. It was in no small part the silver glitz of the Factory and its sheer outlandishness as an interior space that helped the taciturn, pale Pop artist shape his illusive aura.

Mediating Interiority The domestic interior in modernity has been idealized, in the words of John Potvin (2010: 4), as “a site of mastery and control, a space prescribed by codes of stability, longevity and moral rectitude.” This notion of private space as a safe haven neatly separated from the public sphere became pertinent only when fast-paced city life was perceived as an assault on the modern subject. The second half of the nineteenth century saw an intensified identification of the domestic interior with an extension of the self. The importance of the home as a space affecting the self and at the same time expressing psychological impulses externally was based on Jean-Martin Charcot’s and Hippolyte Bernheim’s theorizing of the nervous system, as Deborah Silverman (1989: 75–106) argues. From their vantage point, interiority appeared to be an obscure, unconscious sphere that was susceptible to external stimuli. Silverman writes: “Accompanying Bernheim’s discovery of the mind as a febrile, permeable chamber was the notion that the individual projected this animated imagistic material back out, shaping the external environment in accord with his inner vision” (87). The conception of a psychological bond between the subject’s mind and its environment would impact the function of private space. While the doctors conceived of the public space of the

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modern city as a corrosive influence on the nervous system with its dazzling lights, constant movement, and change, the bourgeois home could be controlled. Interior decoration was to reflect stability and comfort in accordance with the subjectivity of its inhabitants (Potvin 2010). Columns, magazines, and handbooks offered advice to women whose duties as housekeepers included imposing soothing color schemes on the house to offer repose from exciting nervous impulses (Silverman 1989: 81). Mirrors, shiny materials, and surface finishes in the house were to be applied with moderation (Eastlake 1869), as their effects were regarded as part of the exterior world of the modern metropolis from which the domestic interior would offer protection. Many of the advice books on interior decoration that proliferated in the late nineteenth century, in fact, advised strongly against the use of shiny materials. As John Potvin argues in his contribution to this volume, glitter was deemed to be more than a threat to the delicate nervous system: The values of healthy and thus morally good design branded the shiny as a venture into the territory of luxury and decadence and a signifier of homosexual sensibility. It was only with the Art Deco look of the 1920s and 1930s that shiny wallpaper entered European homes and their cold and unnatural exuberance was enjoyed for its queer elegance. If the pleasurably extravagant was abhorred in the nineteenth-century domestic sphere, it was a famed characteristic of the Parisian city scape. Artificial lights figured as an important component of the arcades that fascinated Walter Benjamin ([1935] 2002), and the brothers Goncourt described the interior of the Eldorado, a Parisian café concert, as “salle plaquée d’or et de faux marbre, des lustres aveuglants de lumière” (all gilt and painted with false marble, dazzling chandeliers; Goncourt E. and J. 1891: 241–2).7 A glimpse of such an artificially lit, all mirrored and marbled meeting place is presented in Edouard Manet’s painting A Bar at the FoliesBergère (1882), complete with an unhomely cast of an empty-eyed bartender, and her reflection in the mirror behind her dealing with a bourgeois gentleman, who is by implication her suitor (Clark 1999: 243–4). The grubby interior of Warhol’s Factory may claim a place at the other end of this genealogy of bright and glamorous spaces, by virtue of its dazzling surfaces and lights, and its semi-public status enhanced by the media attention it generated. Linich’s foil, paint, and lights transposed the artificial glitz of night-time etablissements to the artist’s studio and thereby contributed to the transformation of the latter into a mediatized hybrid of public and private space. The elaborate interiors of the Tenth Street studios in which Gilded Age painters entertained their patrons, and displayed their art and their collections of extravagant and exotic objects, may be understood as distant forerunners of the Factory decoration (Burns 1996). Like William Chase and his contemporaries, Warhol opened his work space to an illustrious public and to the media. The publicity he attracted, however, was unprecedented and deliberately bent toward a queering of the austere work spaces of Warhol’s manly predecessors, the abstract expressionists (Jones 1996). Furthermore, the fact that Linich was in residence at the Factory imbued the Warholian media sphere with a domestic touch. When Linich devised the glamorous interior, the Factory became his “home,” and he shaped it “in accord with his inner vision” to take up Silverman’s words. Whereas the Factory’s shine incorporated everything from the Parisian nineteenth-century café concert to early Hollywood glamour, Linich’s interiority belonged distinctly to the 1960s.

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Linich and his peer group were colloquially known as “A-men” (read amphetamine men) around the Factory (Warhol and Hackett 1980: 54), and, as Warhol’s memoir POPism indicates, it is hard to overestimate the significance of their drug-saturated attention and sensibility.8 Reflecting back on Linich’s silvering of the Factory, Warhol wrote: “Why he loved silver so much I don’t know. It must have been an amphetamine thing—everything always went back to that” (64). In fact, Chelsea Wheathers asserts that “obsessive tinkering, as well as preoccupation with mechanical or shiny objects, is a documented symptom of prolonged or high-dose amphetamine use” (Wheathers 2014: 663). If Linich’s decoration of the Factory appeared somewhat outlandish to perception under normal conditions, it seems to have been perfectly attuned to the mind on speed.9 A sensorium reprogrammed to intense concentration on surface details and an artificially modified biorhythm read like ideal conditions for enjoying the Factory glitter. The sensations of surface variations and lights were all enhanced by the effects of amphetamine, as increased levels of dopamine and adrenaline intensified peripheral perception and suppressed the need for sleep. Insulated from daylight, the Factory provided a uniform stretch of time, quite removed from the rhythm of day and night that governs everyday life. Here, an externalized interiority shaped by chemical effects replaces the normality of the domestic sphere. The model for the subject’s relation to its environment is not premised on the obscure febrile chamber of psychoanalysis,10 but on the possibility to program the mind with carefully administered substances, effectively applying traits of personality from the outside. Warhol had alluded to the possibility of programming the minds of the masses already when he was interviewed by Gene Swenson for ARTnews in 1963, but in a rather queer way as Jennifer Sichel’s (2018a) transcript from Swenson’s tapes reveals. The famous quotes “I want everybody to think alike” and “I think everybody should be a machine” (Warhol [1963] 2004: 16) were uttered in the context of an elaboration on queer intersubjectivity between Swenson, Warhol, and Malanga—and thoroughly censored from the published interview as Sichel (2018b: 61) carefully establishes. Warhol’s notion of machine-like “liking” refers to repetitive affirmation regardless of gender or sexual preference (Sichel 2018a: 4). Similarly, an extended discussion whether everybody can be made to think alike without government pressure shows Warhol musing on the effects of mass consumption. His affirmative tone and humorous side notes on everyone wearing the same clothes—“Very tight pants?,” as an unidentified interlocutor interjects—make clear that Warhol’s stakes in having everybody think alike are not primarily related to mass psychology (Sichel 2018a: 15). Rather, he seems invested in eliminating the threat of rejection from intersubjective relations and appears to be thrilled by the possibility to chemically attune people to one another.11 A sustained, indiscriminatory attention even for the most monotonous tasks was among the main effects of amphetamine and methamphetamine, which is why the drugs were prescribed not only to tackle housewives’ depressions, but also used in military operations to sustain fighter pilots (Rasmussen 2008: 975–6). The drug would draw the subject closer to the material world, as Suárez (2014: 631) puts it: “[W]hen consumed for short periods in moderate doses, [it] did not prompt a loss of the world but a deeper immersion into its rhythms, sounds, and striations.” This immersion into the world’s surfaces, Suárez maintains, implicates the queer sensibility and sexuality

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foregrounded in Warhol’s films. Sensuality is presented as an extended attentiveness to delicate variations and micromovements over long stretches of time; it is attached to the skin “of actual organic bodies on screen but also the skin of the world and of the film” (645). Without climax or a privileging of erogenous zones, the mind on speed and the gaze of Warhol’s camera activated the world’s surfaces as attractive and intensely interesting. Another quotable one-liner from Gretchen Berg’s ([1966] 2004: 93) notes suggests Warhol’s approval: “The artificial fascinates me, the bright and shiny.” The shine of the Factory was tailored to queer surface attention. Rather than offering protection from the public sphere, the intimate scenes set in Warhol’s “plastic palace” were publicized through the films and photographs produced in the Factory. In these media, the boundaries between public and private evaporate, and simultaneously, the distinctions between Warhol’s and Linich’s subjectivities are blurred. In the press, the silver environment was assigned to Warhol. A 1966 account, published in the New York Times by Elenore Lester, introduces the Factory as an artist’s studio occupied by a community of misfits and outcasts, its milieu sitting uncomfortably between a public place for exposure and an intimate mode of communality: “They find their way to him [Andy], the neglected, rejected, over-psychoanalyzed children of the rich, and the runaways from jobs as supermarket check-out clerks in the bleak suburbs of New Jersey. They find their way to the enchanted silver playroom on East 47th Street, to Mother Andy—neutral, cool and withdrawn in his goggles and leather jacket“ (Lester 1966: 169). Lester depicts Warhol as cold and distanced, yet a “mother” to his hotchpotch of society’s rejects, a tension that is echoed in many attempts to denounce Warhol as cruel and sadistic (Villiers 2012: 107). The intimacy of the Factory is thus oftentimes dismissed as power play, and outrage is sustained by a desire to pin down the supposedly deep but shallow motivations behind Warhol’s alleged actions and words. It is precisely this logic of exoneration and laying blame that a discourse “unconcerned with the truth” circumnavigates. Linich’s environment and Warhol’s films put forth a different sense of exchange and substitution, in which Linich could stand in as Warhol’s proxy and vice versa. If his later musings in POPism are to be believed, Warhol’s adoption of Linich as a model for his public persona went beyond the Factory decoration: “I picked up a lot from Billy, actually—just studying him. He didn’t say much, and when he did, it was either very practical and mundane or very enigmatic” (Warhol and Hackett 1980: 63). For the public eye, like Lester’s account demonstrates, images of the silver studio could act as a metaphor of the artist’s somewhat uncanny superficiality. Like the shine reflecting from the cold silver walls, he was perceived as repellent, a transient, and intangible phenomenon of fashion. In the lighting of Warhol’s films, Warhol’s and Linich’s work becomes impossible to disentangle. The Screen Tests (1964–67)—almost five hundred filmic portraits of Factory visitors instructed to neither move nor blink for the duration of filming— displays the experiments with lighting conducted at the Factory. In her Catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s Screen Tests, Callie Angell notes a transition from early, evenly lit settings to later films that are dramatically lit with halogen lights (Angell 2006: 15–16). The lighting was “often arranged by Linich” but could equally be “something of a group effort” or done by Warhol alone (17). The intense chiaroscuro of Linich’s photographs mirrors the effects of the later Screen Tests and of films for which Linich

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Figure 10.2  Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Billy Linich [ST194], 1964. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.  Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

is credited with lighting design, such as Vinyl. Linich’s own Screen Test showcases the use of light as a blinding, almost physical force. The glare reflects back from the dark sunglasses the sitter wears to confront the lights. Protected from the intense brightness, Linich is able to give a completely impassive performance that Angell highlights as “the perfect image of impenetrable Factory ‘cool’” (118) (Figure 10.2). Whereas Warhol had incorporated traits of Linich’s character and appeared to be perfectly mirrored in his silvered environment, in this Screen Test Linich reappropriates typical Warholian inexpressiveness, and it becomes hard to ascertain whose attribute the “cool” was in the first place. Linich’s performance seems to react to the claims to neutrality and anonymity that are implicit in Warhol’s desire to be like a machine. I surmise that similar ideas were at play, when Linich decided to change his name to “Name.” The blurring between Warhol’s and Linich’s authorship proved as ephemeral as the Silver Factory itself: It was most likely apparent to the ones involved at the time, and even a constituent of Warhol’s persona that was built on operations of deferral and substitution. Nevertheless, the success of Warhol’s name as a brand and a reception with a desire for the truth for the most part effectively subsumed Linich’s work as part of Warhol’s. The Factory’s glittering surfaces were simultaneously mute and overdetermined. Subtle variations in texture and shine, concerted to a chemically altered sensorium, infused the Factory “cool” with an intimacy beyond the controlled conditions provided

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by a private space sealed off from exterior influences. Linich’s stage lights, Warhol’s recording devices, and the media attention devoted to the Factory opened the interior to publicity and operated multiple channels without unifying the message: Warhol’s interviews, his “dirty” and potentially outrageous films promised the confessional insights that the media was after without gratifying the search for the revelatory “reality.” The shiny Factory decoration offered an appropriate environment for the intertwining of concealment and exposure, with both features built into the decor from the grand scheme to the micro-level, catering to media attention and intimate experience alike.

Notes 1

Linich would change his name to Billy Name in 1966. Because most of the events referred to in this text took place before Linich’s name change, I will use his civil name throughout. 2 For more on the EPI, see Joseph (2002). 3 As a recent volume on camp aesthetics suggests, dirty details may even be instrumental to campy notions of glamour, see Bergmann, Holtz-Davies and Vogt (2018). 4 In late 1963 Warhol made three Haircut movies starring Linich; concurrently poems on haircuts and “Billy Linich’s Party” were circulating in the underground scene (Wolf 1997: 38–45). Unlike the alleged parties none of the three Haircut movies is set in Linich’s apartment. 5 The disco ball is prominently featured in Vinyl (1965) and Camp (1965). In the latter, the cabinet makes an appearance as a “closet” opened dramatically by Jack Smith. The red couch as the setting of Couch (1964) gave the movie its title. 6 Waring gave composition classes at the Living Theater in 1959 and 1960. Among his students were Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, and Freddy Herko. 7 The translation is T.J. Clark’s (1999: 207). 8 POPism has lots of pages of detail on Linich’s and the “A-men’s” lifestyle and the impact that amphetamine had on their attention to detail and love for glitter (Warhol and Hackett 1980: 54–78, 157–60). Warhol admits to taking diet-pills that kept him awake (33), but remains ambiguous about getting high on speed himself. Suárez (2014) convincingly argues for the impact of speed on the sensibility of the Factory and on the queer sexuality represented in many of the Warhol movies. 9 It is worth noting that Linich’s sensibility was not as far out as it seems. Throughout the 60s the US produced 8 billion standard doses of amphetamine per year (for a population of roughly 200 million). Amphetamine was used for diet pills, antidepressants, and to treat non-specific pain, but non-medical use is documented far beyond the underground circles of so-called speed freaks that Linich was part of. See Rasmussen (2008). 10 Between 1884 and 1886 Sigmund Freud studied hypnosis and suggestion with Bernheim and Charcot (Silverman 1989: 83). 11 Warhol uses “chemicals” to explain his own feelings, especially his affections toward others, in his Philosophy, published in 1975: “The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad” (Warhol 1975: 47).

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References Angell, C. (2006), Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol, Catalogue raisonné, Vol. 1, New York: Abrams. Banes, S. (1993), Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964, Durham: Duke University Press. Benjamin, W. ([1935] 2002), “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé of 1935,” in W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 3–13. Berg, G. ([1966] 2004), “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” in K. Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror. The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, New York: Caroll & Graf, 85–96. Bergmann, F., I. Holtz-Davies and G. Vogt (2018), The Dark Side of Camp Aesthetics: Queer Economies of Dirt, Dust, and Patina, London: Routledge. Bockris, V. ([1989] 1997), Warhol. The Biography, reprint, New York: Da Capo Press. Bourdon, D. ([1989] 1995), Warhol, reprint, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Burns, S. (1996), Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America, New Haven: Yale University Press. Clark, T. J. (1999), The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, revised edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eastlake, C. (1869), Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details, second revised edn, London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Egenhofer, S. (2008), Abstraktion—Kapitalismus—Subjektivität: Die Wahrheitsfunktion des Werks in der Moderne, Munich: Fink. Frei, G. and N. Printz (2004), The Andy Warhol Catalogue raisonné. Paintings and Sculptures, 1964–1969, Vol. 02A, London: Phaidon. Goncourt, E. d. and J. d. (1891), Journal des Goncourt: Mémoires de la Vie littéraire, Vol. 2 of 9, Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier. Janevski, A. and T. J. Lax (2018), Judson Dance Theater. The Work Is Never Done, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Jones, C. A. (1996), Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joseph, B. W. (2002), “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room, 8 (Summer): 80–107. Kiedrowski, T. (2011), Andy Warhol’s New York City. Four Walks Uptown to Downtown, New York: The Little Bookroom. Lester, E. (1966), “So He Stopped Painting Brillo Boxes and Bought a Movie Camera,” New York Times, December 11: 169. Miller, D. (1994), Billy Name. Stills from the Warhol Films, Munich: Prestel. Pincus-Witten, R. (1988), interviewed by P. Smith, in Smith, P., Warhol. Conversations about the Artist, Ann Arbour, MI: UMI Research Press. Potvin, J. (2010), “The Velvet Masquerade: Fashion, Interior Design and the Furnished Body,” in J. Potvin and A. Myzelev (eds.), Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, Burlington: Ashgate, 1–17. Rasmussen, N. (2008), “America’s First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929–1971: A Quantitative and Qualitative Retrospective with Implications for the Present,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 98, No. 6: 974–85. Rosenblum, R. (1964), “Saint Andrew,” Newsweek, December 7: 103. Satin, L. (2003), “James Waring and the Judson Dance Theater: Influences, Intersections, and Divergences,” in S. Banes (ed.), Reinventing Dance in the 1960s. Everything Was Possible, Madion: University of Wisconsin Press, 51–80.

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Schor, C. (1997), “A Talk with Billy Name,” in M. Slotover (ed.), All Tomorrow’s Parties. Billy Name’s Photographs of Andy Warhol’s Factory, London: Frieze, 16–29. Shecter, L. (1966), “The Warhol Factory,” unattributed news clipping, Leo Castelli Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. Sichel, J. (2018a), “What Is Pop Art’A Revised Transcript of Gene Swenson’s 1963 Interview with Andy Warhol’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1: 1–16. Sichel, J. (2018b), “‘Do You Think Pop Art’s Queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1: 59–83. Silverman, D. L. (1989), Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France. Politics, Psychology, and Style, Berkeley: University of California Press. Suárez, J. A. (2014), “Warhol’s 1960s’ Films, Amphetamine, and Queer Materiality,” Criticism, Vol. 56, No. 3: 623–51. Superstar, I. (1967), “‘****’ Ingrid Superstar on the Factory,” in A. Warhol (ed.), Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), New York: Random House, n.p. Villiers, N. d. (2012), Opacity and the Closet. Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Warhol, A. ([1963] 2004), “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” interviewed by G. Swenson, in K. Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror. The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, New York: Caroll & Graf, 15–20. Warhol, A. (1975), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), New York; London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Warhol, A. and P. Hackett (1980), POPism: The Warhol ’60s, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Watson, S. (2003), Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, New York: Pantheon Books. Weathers, C. (2014), “Drugtime,” Criticism, Vol. 56, No. 3: 653–85. Wolf, R. (1997), Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Part Four

Shiny Surfaces in the Art of the 1960s (and Beyond)

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Against the Biological Metaphor: Robert Smithson’s Crystalline Figuration Eva Ehninger

In the mid-1960s the US artist Robert Smithson produced two large-scale wall pieces. In form and material, they are reminiscent of the late modernist aesthetics of Frank Stella’s shaped canvases and Donald Judd’s shiny minimalist boxes. This relation is no friendly nod to the older artists’ sober reconfiguration of modernism’s medium specificity, however. Smithson appropriated their minimalist vocabulary for his own agenda (Figure 11.1). For Quick Millions (1965) he assembled a rectangular sheet of baby-blue corrugated acrylic and four triangular panels of rust-red glimmering plexiglass in a metal frame shaped like a futuristic spaceship. The panels are divided by strips of black plexiglass, which lend a strong internal structure to the form. For Fling (1965) Smithson chose a similar point of departure, positioning a vertical rectangular sheet of bright-green corrugated acrylic in the center and adding two strips of glittering blue plexiglass and two narrow triangles of sparkling green to the sides. Though Smithson’s wall pieces invoke the glossy surfaces and industrial make of both minimalist art and contemporary commercial infrastructure, upon closer examination they turn out to be quite opaque. The dull surface of the corrugated plastic reflects little light, and the glitter embedded in the red and green plexiglass encloses all mirroring effects into the sheets themselves. Their former physical state as a viscous mass is still comprehensible in their shallow depths. But hardened into smooth surfaces, they allow no way into their glimmering plastic interior. Smithson found admiring words for Stella’s paintings, emphasizing the contrast between the unambiguous geometric form and the indeterminate, shiny materiality of the older artist’s shaped canvasses. They could just as well be applied to his own wall pieces: “The iridescent purple, green, and silver surfaces that followed Stella’s all-black works, conveyed a rather lurid presence through their symmetries. An exacerbated, gorgeous color gives a chilling bite to the purist context. Immaculate beginnings are subsumed by glittering ends. (…) These inaccessible surfaces deny any definite meaning in the most definite way” (Smithson 1996a: 20). For Smithson the crystal is a means to illustrate this suspension of rational form, which results in optical confusion—an effect he also envisions for his strictly geometric,

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Figure 11.1  Robert Smithson, Quick Millions, 1965, red, glitter, light blue and black plastic panels, 137.2 × 142.2 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

yet shimmering and glittering wall pieces. Smithson’s positioning of the crystal on the threshold between nature and artifice has been in the foreground of much scholarship on the artist. Most prominently, it is related to his interest in entropy (Reynolds 2004; Roberts 2004). The crystal’s complex, irregular polyhedron seems to oscillate between a precise, geometric form and its chaotic dissolution. For Smithson it functions as both tool and metaphor to call into question all anthropocentric certainties about the organization of space and time. He envisions the contemporary world as petrified into a rock-hard, shiny structure of glittering surfaces. The concept of the crystal allows him to suspend progress, development, and change. The artist’s nonchalant application of the second rule of thermodynamics to the material and social makeup of the contemporary world, and his apparent neutrality toward this imminent condition of chaotic stasis, has been variously criticized as an elitist and carefree withdrawal

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or applauded as an intelligent conceptual engagement with the realities of life in a postindustrial society ruled by rampant capitalism.1 This ambivalence between withdrawal and engagement can be diagnosed for Smithson’s crystalline examination of the human subject as well. At an early moment in his career, the human figure played an important role in a suite of elaborate figurative drawings executed between 1963 and 1965. They have been largely ignored by the limitless scholarship on Smithson. If they are mentioned at all, they are mostly regarded as a neglectable (and regrettable) early phase between Smithson’s student work and his maturity as a conceptual artist. Smithson himself is not blameless in the devaluation of these early works. By the second half of the 1960s, he had all but eliminated the human figure from his art, and in his concurrent writings he took a definitive stand against the artistic representation of the human subject. During his lifetime, he also never included the drawings in an exhibition. Besides Smithson’s renouncing of the human figure, the artist’s use of homoerotic imagery also factors into the ready dismissal of these drawings. Scholars who did take note of them were at pains to emphasize that the gay erotica the artist integrated into his work are by no means an indication of Smithson’s own sexual orientation. They pointed out that he must have had ready access to such visual material during the 1960s in his neighborhood around 42nd Street in New York City.2 With the current and long-overdue revaluation of the canon of art history from the perspective of queer theory and queer art history, Smithson’s drawings are bound to garner renewed interest (Muñoz 2009; Davis 2010; Reed 2011). The homoerotic movie and magazine production of the early 1960s needs to be taken seriously as an important context of Smithson’s work. However, the latent focus on the artist’s sexual identity—be it dismissive or affirmative—hinders the analysis of his figurative drawings in the context of Smithson’s larger argument against modernist anthropomorphism.3 Clearly, the fact that Smithson used homoerotic images points to the new visibility of the gay community in mid-1960s United States, which, leading up to Stonewall in 1969, successfully sought broader aesthetic, commercial, and political platforms. Smithson, however, was no active participant in this struggle. He made use of gay erotica—just as he integrated images of the quintessentially heteronormative pinup girl in his drawings—in search for a visual vocabulary for his critique of anthropocentric subjectivity, a critique that would also be at the basis of his later conceptual, site-specific, and conspicuously human-free work.4 However, to devalue Smithson’s integration of homoerotic imagery as the gesture of a deeply bourgeois artist-prince, who cunningly appropriated the aesthetics and rhetoric of the counter-culture for shock effect, would be just as misdirected as to resurrect him as a figurehead for socially engaged, activist gay art. Instead, I want to examine how the sexuality depicted in these erotica, their aesthetics as well as their distribution and use played into Smithson’s idea of a crystallized present: a world made up of shiny, sparkling, and inanimate surface structures. Smithson was without question well versed in contemporary theories of subjectivity. They included Norbert Wiener’s cancellation of anthropocentrism in the face of cybernetics and entropy on one end of the spectrum, and Herbert Marcuse’s safeguarding of the modern subject by means of creative and productive outlets

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that were not yet subsumed by rationalistic ideals of progress and performance on the other—such as art and sex, for example (Wiener after Smithson 1996b: 35). Smithson’s application of the crystal to the human body enters into this contemporary discourse. On the basis of the entropic condition of the world, anthropocentric subjectivity becomes untenable, a consequence he visualizes by means of the paradox of crystallized figuration. For his early drawings, the artist sought—and found in the erotic magazines of his time—a visual resource of hardened, flattened, flawless figures for his application of the human body in an essentially anti-anthropomorphist way. Nowhere did Smithson tackle the paradox of crystallized life more directly than in these early works, which in their humorous, playful, neon-colored queerness provide an overlooked but essential perspective on Smithson’s well-respected conceptual art. In what follows I begin my discussion with Smithson’s argument against the residual figuration found in abstract expressionist painting and his championing of minimal art in contrast to such latent anthropomorphism.5 Smithson’s use of the human figure in his early drawings already works toward his anti-anthropocentric argument. For this, the blatant display of sexuality wedged into the strictly geometric organization of the drawings’ surface is of great importance, and it has illustrious art historical predecessors, which Smithson was surely aware of. In closing, I will argue that Smithson’s application of the figure as an agglomeration of shiny surfaces can be understood as an informed reply to counter-cultural rescue attempts of contemporary subjectivity.

Against the Biological Metaphor: Abstract Expressionism versus Minimal Art Smithson formulates a fundamental critique against abstract expressionist painting in his essay Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space (1966). Under the chapter heading The Anatomy of Expressionism he argues that the study of anatomy since the Renaissance has led to a notion of art in terms of biology. To him, abstract expressionism blindly follows this notion. As a consequence, it is nothing but disintegrated “figure painting,” a form of decomposed anthropomorphism, which still adheres to those biomorphic conventions that have dominated art since the fourteenth century. Smithson illustrates his claim with black-and-white reproductions of a painting from Willem de Kooning’s Woman series and of an early work by Jackson Pollock, which despite its advanced gestural abstraction features figurative elements as well (Figures 11.2 and 11.3). According to him, both painters still observe, possibly without any awareness, the “biological metaphor” of traditional art. Not only do their abstractions refer back to the human figure. What is more, their method and style of painting align creativity with biological processes of “seeding, sprouting, growing, loving, fighting, decaying, rebirth.”6 In an interview two years later, in 1968, Smithson explicates the difference between abstract expressionism’s modernist obedience to biology and his own language of form: “I don’t think artists know anything about geometry—they’re always resorting

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Figure 11.2  Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1949, enamel and coal on canvas, 152.4 × 121.6 cm. Collection of Mr. Boris Leavitt. © The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

to biomorphical shapes. […] Practically the whole history of modernism seems to be full of these kidney and organic writhing shapes.” He positions his crystalline aesthetic against this evolutionary paradigm of art: “I think that we have to go outside of modernism to find our coordinates, our language, which is more in the area of geometry.”7

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Figure 11.3  Jackson Pollock, The Blue Unconscious, 1946, oil on canvas, 213.4 × 142.1 cm. © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

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The artist’s championing of geometry as an inanimate and inhuman, but nonetheless organic and natural form corresponds with Norbert Wiener’s anti-anthropocentric account of the world’s necessary movement toward complete stasis. In his publications Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society (1950), Wiener claimed that in contrast to the modernist belief in unending technical, social, and industrial progress, the physical world actually followed rules of entropy and was fast on its way toward complete equilibrium. Both publications were taken up in the writings of popular authors such as the media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Gene Youngblood, the sociologist Lewis Mumford, or the art critic Jack Burnham. They were also required reading for contemporary artists, and Smithson regularly refers directly and indirectly to Wiener in his own texts. Minimal art is according to Smithson a fitting “metaphor” for the petrification and crystallization of life. It mirrors the contemporary reality of the advanced industrial US society. In a report about a “crystal-hunting” excursion to New Jersey with Judd, Smithson describes the suburban surroundings with the same crystalline terms that he had used for Judd’s serial boxes: The terrain is flat and loaded with “middle-income” housing developments […] on and on they go, forming tiny boxlike arrangements. Most of the houses are painted white, but many are painted petal pink, frosted mint, buttercup, fudge, rose beige, antique green, Cape Cod brown, lilac, and so on. The highways crisscross through the towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome diners to glass windows of shopping centers, a sense of the crystalline prevails.8

According to Smithson, then, the minimalist object is the perfect “representation” of the crystallized condition of the world. In a review of an exhibition of Judd he writes that the minimalist object provides a “visible analog” for entropy. Within its structure and surface, it excludes the idea of biological evolution or linear progress.9 It acts as a metaphor for nonlinear time and calls into question modernist ideals of progressive history as well as postmodernist rejections of any structuring of time at all.10 Especially the minimalist use of synthetic materials—plastic, chrome, or electric light—eliminates any reference to life and death.11 Instead these objects relate to the candy-colored suburban housing developments or shiny commercial buildings of New Jersey, which Smithson calls the “architecture of entropy.” With their industrially produced and commercially distributed plexiglass palette Smithson’s own wall pieces from 1965 assume the aesthetics of the crystallized present as well. Humans, it seems, have no place in this world, as life has come to a halt.

All Hard and Shiny Surface: Smithson’s Figure Drawings It is surprising, then, to see Smithson’s drawings from the years directly preceding his appropriation of minimalist aesthetics for his theory and practice of

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non-anthropomorphism; they are populated by lively naked figures engaged in all kinds of physical activities. Between 1963 and 1965, Smithson realized a significant number of elaborate, colorful drawings of substantial size (76.5 × 55.8 cm). They function like an inverted decorative frame. Their central field is variously filled out with abstract patterns, collaged-in sheets of vinyl or black-and-white reproductions of classical sculptures, covered by colored pencil. The excessively broad border framing each center features male and female nudes equipped with the latest accessories such as telephones, guns, motorbikes and ice cream cones, and sporting sunglasses, cowboy hats, boots, garter belts, and often magnificent, colorful wings. The figures present their bodies in suggestive poses, and in a number of drawings, sex scenes are played out between the winged youngsters. In my opinion, Smithson’s application of the human figure is an alternative to the latent biomorphism he attests to abstract expressionism in 1966, albeit in a formal vocabulary wholly different from the smooth industrial surfaces of his glittering wall pieces. In these drawings Smithson transforms the living, loving human body into shiny, artificial, mediated matter. He flattens his playful nudes into paper-thin outlines, drains their actions of movement and purpose, and arranges their bodies into an ornamental network of surfaces. In Untitled (Pink Linoleum Center) (1965) (Plate 26), for example, a female nude with large, pointed breasts reclines on a hot-pink starburst bed. A male figure to her left licks lasciviously on an orange ice cream cone. He lounges with open legs on a biomorphic form that liquefies into heavy orange drops. They are ready to fall on the second female figure, riding horseback in the nude, equipped with hat, saddle, and a pair of spiky wings. In the lower right-hand corner, another winged male collects the urine flow of his male companion in a golden cup, who stands in heavy biker boots on a soft and dripping rose-colored ledge, wearing uniform cap and sunglasses. Though the figures are situated on the shared image plane of the decorative frame, they barely interact with each other. Even when they are engaged in sexual acts, such as the two young men in (Plate 27) Untitled (Venus with Lightning Bolts) (1964, Plate 27), they seem to be arrested in static, predetermined poses, turning to the viewer with empty, lifeless eyes for confirmation of their staged flirtation and love-making. The reason for the dry artificiality of their actions and gestures is that Smithson has traced the figures from contemporary erotic journals. In their original contexts, his pinup girls and beautiful boys were posing for the consumers of these images, which in the case of homoerotic magazines were still illegal in the mid-1960s. The magazine Physique Pictorial served as one of Smithson’s templates. A number of scenes that he restages in his drawings are regular features of the magazine: young men speaking urgently into a telephone, for example, men on motorbikes, with military attire, or wearing a feather headdress reminiscent of a native American chief (or rather his Hollywood adaptation). What is more, Smithson copied a specific design feature of Physique Pictorial, soft light radiating from behind the figures, and transformed it in hard-edged yellow beams, such as in Untitled (Man in Colonial American Dress and Indian) (1963)12 (Figures 11.4 and 11.5). In contrast to the painterly practices of abstract expressionism, which Smithson aligned with biological processes of “seeding and sprouting,” tracing is a practice of

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Figure 11.4  Image, Physique Pictorial, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 1, Bob Mizer Foundation

appropriation and recontextualization. Smithson does not faithfully copy the figures out of their journal contexts. Instead, he modifies their appearance and reorganizes their positions at will. While in erotic magazines of the 1960s men and women were not shown completely naked, for example, Smithson strips them of their scanty clothes and adds large breasts and well-defined penises to their bodies. By emphasizing the contour of the figures, he flattens them into outlines devoid of bodily presence. He applies neon color only to their accessories, their hats and helmets, stockings, high heels, and their spiky wings. The figures themselves remain pencil gray. What is more, Smithson traces different bodies of various sizes from diverse sources and integrates them onto one pictorial level. Their relationships to one another are a result of this formal synthesis, which does not adhere to any narrative consistency. This also becomes apparent in the interplay between male and female nudes, which answered to the desires of a different group of consumers—the pinup girl to heterosexual men, the male models to the gay community. Smithson lifts both out of their original contexts— where they were engaged in staged physical acts suggesting sexual encounters not

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Figure 11.5  Robert Smithson, Untitled (Man in Colonial American Dress and Indian), 1963, mixed media with collage on paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

aimed at reproductive sex—and congeals their corporeality and sexuality into a flattened, hard-edged, and rigid decorative framework. These excessively broad borders enter into a complex interplay with various central designs. In Untitled (Pink Linoleum Center) (1965), for example, the rectangular linoleum sheet functions as an abstract analogy for the skin of the naked figures crowding its frame. Their nudity is clearly presented, but in no way marked by means of color.13 The figures’ bodies, so sharply and unambiguously demarcated, are redirected and confirmed in the abstracted rectangle, whose surface seems to imitate the intricate pattern of skin under a microscope. The pink linoleum successfully holds its own as the drawing’s center because of this mimetic feat. For photographed skin, the pattern

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of the plastic contact sheet might begin to look too regular. But the connection to body surface and the sexual implications of such surface are not easily dismissed, as the synthetic gloss of this artificial skin registers tactility.14 In Untitled (Venus with Lightning Bolts) (1964) the connection between center and frame is conjured up by the figures’ corresponding poses and glances. The central rectangle is occupied by the black-and-white reproduction of a Venus figure bashfully, though conveniently unsuccessfully, covering her sex. She is framed by two columns of comic lightning bolts and further set apart by a penciled double frame. Her surface— that of her body and that of its black-and-white reproduction—is equally covered in stylized TV wavelengths. A male youth, clad in a black leather jacket and equipped with purple wings, stands on the margins and crowds her prominent space. On the other side, another young naked man spreads his magnificent technicolored wings to envelop the reproduced Venus figure, all the while speaking urgently into a baby-pink telephone. His naked body is concealed by the central Venus. Smithson’s doubled-collage technique—the composition of figures and poses from multiple sources and the integration of the central rectangle into the drawing— results in a highly complex play of references between different pictorial planes. These references are by no means stable, and their ambivalence illustrates the impossibility of direct spatial interaction on the part of the protagonists and explicit interpretation on the part of their audience. Besides the center-frame correspondence no dominant compositional strategy or linear narration can be detected.15 Smithson emphasizes this intended lack of narration by showing unsuccessful acts of communication. His figures are surrounded by mass media—telephones, radio waves, commercial billboards and writing, electric discharge—but their communication does not work; their decontextualized pose is aimed at their initial consumers and not intended for each other; they speak into a telephone with no corresponding device; even their sexual intercourse remains a dry act of bodily collage, and the radicality of the depicted sex scenes (for 1960s tastes) is in stark contrast to their artificial and rigid poses.

Geometric Order: The Arabesque and the Crystal Smithson’s valorization of the frame, which due to its elaborate and figurative design becomes an equal counterpart to the image center, refers to the romantic form of the arabesque. Though the artist does not mention this predecessor, a quick glance at an arabesque by Phillip Otto Runge confirms the close relationship of Smithson’s drawings to this important concept of Romanticism (Figure 11.6). In Runge’s Day (1807) from the famous Day Times series chubby little putti inquisitively bend over the etching’s upper corners to get a glimpse at the center scene. There the Day, personified as a mother figure and surrounded by playful children, sits at a well, whose depth seems to continue beyond the center field into the frame, where another putto in a light-filled vignette defines the origin of the arabesque. At this point lies the shared source of both nature and art, from which everything else is organized in geometrical order. In its form the Romantic arabesque embodies the transition from geometry to biology, from shapelessness to structure, and from amorphousness to figure. It is not based on

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Figure 11.6  Philipp Otto Runge, Der Tag, 1807, etching, 72 × 48.4 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. © bpk, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Elke Estel, Hans-Peter Klut

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the principle of the imitation of nature but has an abstract-geometrical foundation and is highly artificial, integrating natural and fantastic phenomena, figurative and abstract elements in a non-hierarchic, planar structure. Within its very structure the arabesque denies any organization of time and space that is built on a rational and linear logic. It is based on the declaration that the world can only be experienced in fragments and that these fragments of reality make a unitary perception impossible. Frame and center are supposed to balance their respective deficits without codifying any definitive meaning. Instead, their shared and simultaneous existence and their reference to each other are a plea to the vision of a future unity (See Busch 2014; Büttner 2014). During the nineteenth century the arabesque was understood as a tool to scrutinize central beliefs of the enlightenment, the faith in progress and linear development, for example, the value of predictability, clarity, propriety, and the faithful imitation of nature. All of these normative values were called into question by means of this formal concept. Smithson employs it in a similar vein; he counteracts the abstract geometrical framework of the arabesque with unrestrained and promiscuous sexuality. The recurrent motif of the crystal plays an important role in this play of suspension. The sticky bodily fluids and dripping ice cream cones of his protagonists are penned in by pencil-sharp outlines. Hard-edged suns, stars, and spiky wing tips lend a crystalline impression to the scene. The well-defined, oiled bodies of Smithson’s cutout models were originally presented as gleaming surfaces in the “glossies”—magazines like Physique Pictorial, which served as catalogues and advertisement for mail-order erotic films. In the process of tracing they lose their commercial shine, whereas their brilliantly colored synthetic accessories stand out, just like the suburban New Jersey architecture in “petal pink” or “frosted mint” as “analogs of entropy.” Employed both as a formal principle and as a subject matter, the crystal points to a different kind of abstraction than abstract expressionism, whose “damp materialism” ends up in “organic, biomorphic paint smearing,” says Smithson.16 The concept of the arabesque gives him the possibility to embrace abstraction and artifice without abandoning figuration. In contrast to its Romantic predecessor, Smithson’s arabesque indicates no movement from geometry to biology, or from amorphousness to figure. The figures Smithson shows are always abstractions to begin with: inanimate, flat, colorless reproductions of the living human figure. With Smithson, then, there is no future unity in sight. He employs the arabesque’s ambivalence between corporeality and flatness, between figurative plausibility and contour drawing, to present subjectivity as a residual product of contemporary consumer culture. His figures are just as shiny and lifeless as the glittering surfaces of the shopping malls, the prefab houses of suburbia, or Donald Judd’s minimal box. Smithson’s mediated outlines of corporeality exemplify the entropic state of postmodernism instead of transcending it as living, loving bodies.

Beyond “Seeding”: Entropy and Sex In contrast the philosopher Herbert Marcuse was committed to salvage radical and active subjectivity from the contemporary technocratic and capitalist society. Marcuse, an important voice of the counterculture, names both sexual promiscuity and homosexuality as welcome alternatives to the ideal of performance and progress

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underlying reproductive sex in a heteronormative relationship. For Marcuse, conventional, heteronormative sexuality is part of the rationalistic pressure to perform, which is at the heart of modernist thought. This repressive form of life, which affects all areas of life, needs to be overcome in order be able to lead a self-determined life based on individual freedom and creativity. When sexuality is granted value outside of human reproduction it is not bound to social necessity anymore, but to individual desires and preferences. Marcuse’s writings garnered immense public interest, and nonconformist movements such as feminism or the gay liberation movement regularly referred to him, as did many contemporary artists, who in the face of massive social upheaval questioned and redefined their own role in society. In the summer of 1969, the art critic Gregory Battcock published a series of articles in Arts Magazine, in which he reviewed the philosopher’s theories specifically with an eye toward the role of art in contemporary society. Marcuse assigns to art an important position in the transformation from performance to pleasure principle. That art which has not (yet) been appropriated by capitalism—Marcuse calls it “Anti-Art”—can function as a place of critical inquiry, as it resists the paradigm of progress and profit. Battcock offers an idea as to what kind of creative output Marcuse might have in mind. He writes: One new form that may be considered at least partially a genuine “anti-art” agent may be the new underground “sex” papers that have recently emerged upon the newsstands to confront the “intellectual” imagination. They differ from the traditional sex oriented tabloids in many ways. Their appeal is mainly to the “new sensibility” that views sexual matters as outside the sphere of morality and guilt. They do not accept the established definition of “obscenity” and their editors publicly subscribe to Marcuse’s dictum that “Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.” (Battcock 1969a, 1969b: 4)

Judging from Battcock’s discussion of the term “obscenity” he talks about homoerotic publications such as Physique Pictorial. According to Battock this kind of erotic imagery a tool for the counter-cultural revolution, because its visual vocabulary does not adhere to the norms of the performance principle, which guide capitalist society.17 When Smithson had integrated this potentially revolutionary visual material into his drawings a few years earlier, however, he had done so with no counter-cultural aim in mind. Rather, he tested a formal vocabulary for his critique of a modernist evolutionary logic, while at the same time rejecting the ideal of individual subjectivity that Marcuse would try to salvage by the end of the 1960s. The aesthetics of erotic magazines served as a means to this end. A return to the text that was the starting point of my inquiry, Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space (1966), might clarify this point (Figure 11.7). The essay’s outline mirrors the structural makeup of Smithson’s drawings, but transforms their colorful sexuality into the sober black-and-white print aesthetics of conceptual art. The opening sentence of the essay clarifies the status of its margins: “Around four blocks of print I shall postulate four ultra-mundane margins that shall contain indeterminate information as well as reproduced reproductions.”18 In the essay, Smithson’s text occupies the center rectangle

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Figure 11.7  Robert Smithson, Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space (title page), 1966. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

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while in the margins the traced bodies are replaced by black-and-white reproductions. Their splintered aesthetics and information as well as their questionable relationship to the essay printed in the center fields is further evidence for Smithson’s critique of linear, “biological” time. The artist assembles photographs of ancient architectures, such as the labyrinth or the pyramid, whose cross-section and elevation adhere to a crystalline aesthetic. He includes diagrams by artists and poets, installation shots of artworks by contemporaries and old masters, and quotes from the science fiction author J. G. Ballard, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, art theorists such as Wilhelm Worringer or George Kubler, as well as from Norbert Wiener. One of these marginal quotes, from Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), reads: Although inanimate things remain our most tangible evidence that the old human past really existed, the conventional metaphors used to describe this visible past are mainly biological.

In reference to this quote Smithson laments in his central essay: “Most notions of time (Progress, Evolution, Avant-garde) are put in terms of biology.” One way to work against such a temporal order is to “detemporalize” certain organic properties. A prime example for this “detemporialization” is, of course, the crystal. Smithson’s page design maintains the structure of the arabesque he developed in his earlier drawings in that it juxtaposes the subjects under discussion rather than integrating them. In doing so, they are, just like the drawings, a case in point for his rejection of the “biological metaphor” with its implications of linear progress and productivity. In QuasiInfinities and the Waning of Space Smithson has translated the promiscuous sexuality of his traced figures, the dismissal of reproductive sex implied both by pornography and homosexuality, into a textual format that spells out this very critique. Drawings and text tackle the crystallization and petrification of evolutionary progress. The sterile, commercial, formulaic figures, which Smithson quotes in the margins as “reproductions of reproductions,” are in opposition to individual sexual desire. Pornographic sex, whether it is homo- or heterosexual, cannot well serve as an expression of radical subjectivity. As the desires of the paying customer are projected onto the paper-thin copulating bodies, sex becomes a commodity value. With his superimposition of desire and pornography, body and crystal, biology and technology, Smithson seems to put into perspective Marcuse’s utopia of a future society living according to the pleasure principle, as well as the philosopher’s ideal of individual subjectivity. Figuration is employed by Smithson “against” the biological metaphor. It is a figuration outside of biology, evolution, and progress. In the article Entropy and the New Monuments, also written in 1966, the artist names as an art historical role model of this kind of “crystalline” figuration Parmigianino’s figure painting. According to Smithson, though Mannerist painting is focused on the human form, it still remains conspicuously devoid of anthropomorphism. Movement does not yield action, eyes do not meet, human body outlines organize themselves into two-dimensional patterns that break with the temporal scale of lived experience. Smithson maintains approvingly that Parmigianino’s figures are “an assembly of surfaces, nothing is contained within these surfaces.”19 Like the shiny minimalist boxes and the perfect bodies traced from commercial erotic magazines, such figures are fitting metaphors for the entropic state

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of the world. What is more, Smithson found in Mannerist painting an interest in elaborately painted frames. A publication on Mannerism by the art historian Jacques Bousquet, which Smithson quotes in his essay Abstract Mannerism (1966), is illustrated for example with a painting of Venus and Minerva, which featured a massive painted frame with bare-breasted, multicolored mystical creatures (Figure 11.8).20

Figure 11.8  Pellegrino Tibaldi (circle of), Venus and Minerva, c. 1590–1620, oil on copper, 31 × 22.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain (CC0 1.0 Universal)

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Smithson’s glittering wall pieces serve, then, as a hinge between his early figurative drawings and his later, canonical post-minimalism. The shared form and concept of these diverse practices—figurative drawing, glittery wall pieces, and conceptual nonsites—are that of the crystal. As a natural phenomenon with artificial connotations it serves Smithson to superimpose natural and industrial processes and aesthetics as well as prehistorical and futuristic notions of the world. The crystal reflects, refracts, and distorts. It destroys visual order and works against semantic clarity and temporal linearity. For Smithson it functions both formally and metaphorically against the modern ideal of progress. The common denominator is the petrification of progress, the ossification of reproduction, growth, and advancement. In his drawings, the glossy shine of erotic magazines, the models’ toned but flat body outlines, and sparkly props combined with static and incoherent poses indicate a rejection of narration and development. The crystallization of time and ossification of progress, themes that are at the basis of Smithson’s later non-sites, are narrated and conceptualized in his figurative drawings. The softness, warmth, and agility of the living body are congealed into a flat ornament of blatant sexuality. His glittering plexiglass sheets provide a material equivalent for this ambivalent corporeality: Their hard-edged surface competes with their indeterminate, glimmering depth. Smithson’s utilization of contemporary erotica in his drawings was an important step toward his abstract vocabulary, then, as it provided him with a tool to picture the paradox of crystallized figuration.

Notes 1

2

3 4

In a letter to the editor of Artforum Golub (1968) vented his anger about Smithson’s apparent detachment from the political reality of his time in a scathing persiflage of Smithson’s own prose. With this Golub reacted to Smithson (1968). In an interview of the same year Smithson confirms his standpoint that artists should not be politically engaged through their work; cf. Smithson and Ross (2013). Tsai (1991: 24) emphasizes that according to the artist’s widow Nancy Holt, the raunchy drawings were for private use only: “It is important to note that Smithson regarded the cartouche drawings as private and of a diaristic nature. (…) They were left in a drawer when he was not working on them and were rarely shown even to fellow artists.” According to Tsai, Smithson stumbled upon such subject matter due to his proximity to the movie theaters on 42nd Street, as they “reflect the sleaze element associated with the Time Square area.” Ratcliff (1985: 135) calls the early drawings “juvenilia,” as they predate what the artist himself called his mature work. Most other Smithson scholars ignore them altogether. One exception is Jones (1996: 295–8), who discusses the drawings and their affiliations with Smithson’s later conceptual work. As Waugh (1996: 217) points out, the consumption and manipulation of homosexual erotica were without question political during the early 1960s. This might be one reason as to why Smithson refrained from showing his drawings publicly during his lifetime.

Robert Smithson’s Crystalline Figuration 5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13

14 15

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Smithson (1996c: 66–7) ignores that contemporary criticism ascribes to minimal art just that: latent anthropomorphism. Fried’s (1995) interpretation of minimal art was in turn the target of scathing criticism by Smithson. With this list Smithson quotes the art critic Lawrence Alloway Smithson (1996b: 35). Smithson and Ross (2013: 291). For Smithson’s championing of geometry, see Nagel (2013). See also Smithson (1996d, 1996e). Smithson (1996f: 8 [1966]). Smithson’s title “The Crystal World” is in reference to the science fiction bestseller by J. G. Ballard, also published in 1966. In Ballard’s novel, a West African jungle has begun to mysteriously metamorphose into crystals, creating the bizarre phenomenon of jewel-encrusted flora and fauna, a transformation Smithson saw in evidence in the suburbs New Jersey as well. Smithson (1996b) is illustrated with one of Donald Judd’s progressions, which Smithson describes as a “solid form” that succeeds in containing an idea of time without becoming a metaphor for temporal progression. In Smithson (1996a: 15) he mentions the work of Robert Morris to illustrate minimalism’s apparent rejection of metaphors of biological fertility and growth: “Morris also discloses this backward looking future with ‘erections’ and ‘vaginas’ embedded in lead. They tend to illustrate fossilized sexuality.” That Smithson was annoyed by a contemporary understanding of postmodernism as a “transcendence” of modernist ideals becomes clear in Smithson and Roth (1996). “Judd is always on the lookout for new finishes, like Lavax Wrinkle Finish, which, a company pamphlet says, ‘combines beauty with durability’” (Smithson 1996f: 4). In this review, Smithson also names Stella and Judd as brothers in arms in the renewed focus on materiality, which is in contrast to late modern painting such as Barnett Newman’s Colorfields. Physique Pictorial was launched in 1951 by Bob Mizer, who had founded the Athletic Model Guild in 1945, a physique photography studio and “talent agency” that operated out of the house he shared with his mother near downtown Los Angeles. Though Physique Pictorial featured the work of multiple artists and photographers, including Tom of Finland and Bruce of Los Angeles, Mizer shot the majority of the photographs himself, for which he conjured abstract, iridescent backdrops by projecting light through pieces of his mother’s Fostoria glass collection. See Lord and Meyer (2013: 118). The journal was possibly particularly interesting to Smithson because of its level of abstraction. Not only was it, for financial reasons, produced entirely in black and white on inexpensive paper. Its images and image series also served primarily as the promotion of homoerotic movies, which could be ordered via mail. Smithson would later use the format of a storyboard as a segmented, motionless representation of a movie narrative in his own work. We do find numerous shades of pink in the accessories of the figures. In the upper left-hand corner the man sports pink boots, and in clockwise direction there is a hot pink spike bed, a cloud dotted with pink, a man standing on dripping baby-pink body fluid, a woman’s magenta cowboy hat, and saddlecloth. For the depiction of skin as a means to motivate tactile sensibilities see, e.g., Marks (1998) and Rath, Trempler and Wenderholm (2013). Jones (1996) argues that the conceptual bracketing of the technological hardness, which she finds in the drawing’s centers, is continuously being threatened by the libidinal excess that surrounds it.

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16 “For me, I exclude nature. (…) I’m more interested in artifice. I would say artifice is an infinite sphere, its center is everywhere, circumference nowhere” (Smithson and Ross 2013: 294–5). 17 Battcock took a lecture Marcuse had given at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, as the starting point for his inquiry (cf. Battcock 1969a, 1969b). Similar to Marcuse, Battcock expects that such new, subversive, and unconventional visual vocabulary runs the risk of being quickly integrated into mainstream culture (Battcock 1969a: 18). See also Marcuse (1969). 18 Smithson (1996b: 34). “Ultramundane” also seems to be a fitting term for the margins of his early drawings, which contain “indeterminate information” and “reproduced reproductions” as well; see Lee (2001). Linder (1999) sees parallels between the essay’s layout and the artist’s non-sites. 19 Smithson (1996a: 20) refers to the art historian and specialist in Italian Renaissance painting Sydney Freedberg with this quote. 20 Bousquet (1963). The painting was at the time attributed to Rottenhammer but is now attributed to the circle of Pellegrino Tibaldi.

References Battcock, G. (1969a), “Marcuse and Anti-Art,” artsmagazine, Vol. 43, No. 8: 17–19. Battcock, G. (1969b), “Marcuse and Anti-Art II,” artsmagazine, Vol. 44, No. 2: 20–2. Bousquet, J. (1963), Malerei des Manierismus. Die Kunst Europas von 1520 bis 1620, Munich: Bruckmann. Busch, W. (2014), “Die Arabeske—Ornament als Bedeutungsträger: Eine Einführung,” in W. Busch and P. Maisak (eds.), Verwandlung der Welt: Die romantische Arabeske, Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 13–27. Büttner, F. (2014), “Philipp Otto Runges Zyklus ‚Vier Zeiten,” in W. Busch and P. Maisak (eds.), Verwandlung der Welt: Die romantische Arabeske, Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 101–10. Davis, W. (2010), Queer Beauty. Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond, New York: Columbia University Press. Fried, M. (1995), “Art and Objecthood,” in G. Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 116–47. Golub, L. (1968), “Letter to the Editor,” Artforum, Vol. 7, No. 3: n.p. Jones, C. A. (1996), Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 295–8. Lee, P. M. (2001), “Ultramoderne’: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in Sixties Art,” Grey Room, Vol. 2: 46–77. Linder, M. (1999), “Sitely Windows: Robert Smithson’s Architectural Criticism,” Assemblage, Vol. 39: 6–35. Lord, C. and R. Meyer, eds. (2013), Art & Queer Culture, New York: Phaidon. Marcuse, H. (1969), An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press. Marks, L. U. (1998), “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen, Vol. 39, No. 4: 331–48. Muñoz, J. E. (2009), Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press. Nagel, A. (2013), “Robert Smithson Removed from the Source,” RES: Anthropology & Aesthetics, Vol. 63–64: 285–8.

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Ratcliff, C. (1985), “Robert Smithson at Diane Brown,” Art in America, Vol. 73, No. 7: 135–6. Rath, M., J. Trempler and I. Wenderholm (2013), Das haptische Bild: Körperhafte Bilderfahrung in der Neuzeit, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Reed, C. (2011), Art and Homosexuality. A History of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, A. (2004), Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Roberts, J. L. (2004), Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, New Haven: Yale University Press. Smithson, R. (1968), “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” Artforum, Vol. 7, No. 1: 82–91. Smithson, R. (1996a), “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 10–23. Smithson, R. (1996b), “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 34–7. Smithson, R. (1996c), “Letter to the Editor,” in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 66–7. Smithson, R. (1996d), “A Refutation of Historical Humanism,” in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 336–7. Smithson, R. (1996e), “The Pathetic Fallacy in Esthetics,” in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 337–8. Smithson, R. (1996f), “The Crystal Land,” in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 7–9. Smithson, R. and C. Ross (2013), “Robert Smithson: An Interview,” RES: Anthropology & Aesthetics, Vol. 63–64: 289–98. Smithson, R. and M. Roth (1996), “Robert Smithson on Duchamp,” in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 310–12. Tsai, E. (1991), Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings, New York: Columbia University Press. Waugh, T. (1996), Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Shiny, Glossy, and Smooth: Commodity Surfaces in 1960s and 1970s Painting Christian Spies

Suppressed Shine Flat and self-reflexive were the aesthetic conditions fixed for contemporary painting within the heyday of abstract expressionism in the 1950s. Through “progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium”—its “flatness”—painting became completely limited to itself and as such focused entirely on the self-reflection of its own medium and material conditions (Greenberg 1986a: 32). Flatness and self-reflexivity, following Greenberg, almost inevitably lead to a third one: the perfect surface had to be matte. Only through matteness could a painting become an autonomous and independent object detached from the world. For a modernist sensibility, any form of painted shine or gloss would on the one hand signify a relapse into the old illusion of trompe l’oeil. On the other hand, any shiny surface on the painting mirrors back and therefore allows real space to enter the autonomous image as external reflection. In other words, through its very surface the painting threatens to become part of everyday reality—to become an object among other objects. These two characteristics of shine and gloss, the relationship to the illusion of representation and to everyday reality, will be the topic of the following remarks. First I will ask to which extent shine and gloss have always been part of a modernist program. Secondly, I will show how the modernist commitment to matte surfaces was transformed into an aesthetic of shine in 1960s pop painting. Moreover, in pop the distance between the work of art and the everyday object was purposefully neglected. And the possibilities of depicting shine were provocatively pushed even further under the conditions of photorealism, as I will discuss in a third step. Starting with their denial, moving to acceptance and finally to their embrace, the development of shine and gloss stands for changing conceptions of the artwork in New York between the 1950s and 1970s. Nobody has feared the risks of shiny surfaces more than the New York painter Ad Reinhardt, who has defined his paintings above all by their negation: “[A] matte, flat, free-hand, painted surface (glossless, textureless, non linear, no hard-edge, no

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soft edge), which does not reflect its surroundings” (Reinhardt 1991: 82). Albeit less dogmatically, Greenberg argues similarly in his early essay “Avantgarde and Kitsch” (1939). He compares two painters—Ilya Repin and Pablo Picasso—by what he calls “‘reflected’ effect.” And he differentiates their artistic strategies through their handle of effect: “Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect” (Greenberg 1986b: 16). In the case of kitsch-painter Repin, the “‘reflected’ effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment” (Greenberg 1986b: 16). By contrast, an avant-garde painting by Picasso causes a reflection on the part of the observer, which is more than just a simple effect. The painter had to inscribe himself into the painting’s surface (cf. Shiff 1987), either by gestural brush strokes or at best by an interplay of matte and shiny surfaces, as Greenberg described the paintings of Clyfford Still. No matter how shiny and sometime highly varnished Still’s paintings were, Greenberg asserts in “American Type Painting” (1955) that their “dry skin” testifies to sophisticated and serious art. Nevertheless, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko would have been even more consequent with their complete renunciation of tactility and linearity, reaching such an openness of color and painting in matte surfaces that Greenberg, not unimportantly, describes these as indeterminate spaces. The paintings do not merge with surrounding space; they preserve—when they succeed–their integrity and separate unity. But neither do they sit there in space like isolated, insulated objects; in short, they are hardly easel pictures—and because they are hardly that, they have escaped the “object” (and luxury-object) associations that attach themselves increasingly to the easel picture. (Greenberg 1989: 227)

However, already in the early 1950s Greenberg had to compromise about this ideal of a completely detached painting surface and take into account Willem de Kooning’s preference for industrial enamel and Jackson Pollock’s use of silver aluminum paint. As much as those enamel paints were originally intended for common objects like radiators and pipes, their use in artworks for Greenberg implies a risk: the everyday is reflected in fact twice. Not only the inclusion of mirroring surfaces, but also of banal, ordinary materials threatens the distinction between the surface of the painting and everyday surfaces. The gestural inscriptions alone, as Greenberg argues with Pollock’s dripping technique, enable painting to reassert its autonomy from everyday objects. Even with regard to Silver Discs (1954) by Morris Louis, done almost entirely in silver enamel paint, Greenberg also emphasizes the Pollock-like gestures and therefore considers it a successful painting. Frank Stella’s aluminum paintings, started a few years later in the 1960s, mark a rupture. Silver paint has now become a problem—as Michael Fried points out in his follow-up on Greenberg—inasmuch as the distinction between image and mere object threatens to disappear. Not only because of the logical structure inherent to the stripes, as it is often argued, but even more so due to the mirroring surfaces through which painting actually threatens to become an object of everyday life interacting with its surroundings. In the course of the 1960s, painting became detached from the wall and placed in actual spaces as the three-dimensional objects they are. Their highly finished and

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reflective surfaces remind of industrial products from everyday life all the more. And this analogy is not unintentional: objecthood was the new paradigm through which younger generations of artists could once again distinguish themselves from the weight of abstract expressionism. Whereas the artwork’s autonomy was supported by the matte, nonreflective surfaces of the 1950s, the highly finished and mirroring objects of the 1960s stood for the very opposition: the commodification of the work of art (cf. Egenhofer 2008). As much as mundane surroundings were supposed to enter the work of art through mirroring surfaces, the opposite was intended as well—that the artwork enters the everyday and therefore accepting all risks this fraying of the boundary between art and life implicates. Various artists in the early 1960s stemming from different movements and styles such as minimal, land and pop art agreed. Not only the highly polished boxes of Donald Judd meet Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds but also the mirror surfaces of Walter de Maria or Robert Smithson. Not to forget West Coast artists, for whom the phenomenon of highly finished, shiny surfaces was introduced by John Coplans under the meaningful title “finish fetish” (Coplans 1966: 3). Compared to their New York counterparts, as Coplans writes, LA artists were even more interested in perfect surfaces, using novel industrial materials and manufacturing methods. Perfect examples are the high-gloss surfaces of John McCracken’s sculptures, for which paint and coating techniques from the automobile industry were essential. Not without reason have references to LA car culture been made during the 1960s, especially the automobile as a fetish-object influencing McCracken’s sculptures significantly. Compared to their New York counterparts, as Coplans writes, LA artists were even more interested in perfect surfaces, using novel industrial materials and manufacturing methods. Perfect examples are the high-gloss surfaces of John McCracken’s sculptures, for which paint and coating techniques from the automobile industry were essential. Not without reason have references to LA car culture been made during the 1960s already, especially the automobile as a fetish-object influencing McCracken’s sculptures significantly.1 These observations ought to be sufficient to show how a much younger generation of artists in the mid-1960s explicitly defined themselves by the shiny and reflective surfaces of their artworks. The lack of distinction between work of art and everyday object has not only been discussed as a result before,2 but also as fetishization of commodities (cf. Greenberg 1968).

Depicted Shine In this section I would like to start with a more specific point: with the distinction between two different types of “reflected effects,” as already mentioned in Greenberg’s comparison of Repin and Picasso. In the former’s paintings (kitsch) “the ‘reflected’ effect has already been included in the picture,” a depicted effect “ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment” (Greenberg 1986b: 16). Therefore, the spectator— as Greenberg argues—is somehow caught by the image; he becomes a passive consumer who only reacts, while for Picasso (avant-garde) the spectator is an active counterpart to the painting. The reflection arises when the spectator addresses the painting: “They

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are not immediately or externally present in Picasso’s painting but must be projected into it by the spectator” (Greenberg 1986b: 16). To reiterate, shortly: “Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect” (Greenberg 1986b: 16). Yet again, this distinction conveys how Greenberg’s thinking in the 1930s adheres to the tradition of critical theory. Not only is his distinction between avant-garde and kitsch based on Marx’s theory of a cultural economy. Even more poignantly, it recalls Walter Benjamin, who himself advanced Marx’s commodity fetishism, especially regarding the seductive surfaces of capitalist society (cf. Tiedemann 1982: 27). Benjamin is concerned with “the pomp and the splendor with which commodityproducing society surrounds itself ” and how that splendor becomes the expression of commodity fetishism in modernism (Benjamin 2002: 15). It is no coincidence that Benjamin argues for Haussmann’s transformation of Paris into a modern metropolis and distribution center as the basis for this “splendor.” The splendor of Benjamin’s commodity-producing society in the late-nineteenthcentury Paris differs from conventional concepts of beauty within idealistic aesthetics (cf. Tiedemann 1982: 27). Whereas the beauty of art is marked by an “inherent purposiveness” as Kant writes, the splendor of the commodity-producing society always aims for an external purpose: the fetishization of commodities. In short, their purchasability will be phantasmagorically glorified within the splendor of the modern city. Such a splendor puts the buyer in the passive position of consumer. He is captivated by the shine in the same way Greenberg would describe for kitsch paintings (Repin) a few years later. Similarly, Theodor W. Adorno also complains on the passive observer of an artwork, which in the culture industry is caused by a simple effect: The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. (Adorno 1991: 98–9)

Following Adorno, within the cultural-industrial paradigm each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement (Adorno 1991: 100). This tradition of Kulturkritik (Marx, Benjamin, Adorno) therefore leads to a critical understanding of the effects of reflection, splendor, and shine, which Greenberg alludes to in his discussion of 1950s New York painting. The danger lies in the effect manifested by the splendor of commodities, thus transforming an active observer into a passive consumer. Painting had to be protected throughout the 1950s against such a “superficiality,” made clearly distinguishable from the shiny and glossy surfaces of everyday life. It has to be flat, self-reflexive, and matte instead. All the more challenging were provocations arising in the early sixties under the buzzword of pop. It turned out to be a double challenge. On the one hand, the new motifs depicted the world of everyday life, consumer culture, and advertisement that

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had already entered the painting scene in the mid-1950s. Just think of Jasper Johns’s paintings of flags and targets or Robert Rauschenberg’s early combine paintings, which include found objects and mass media images. Nevertheless, these new motifs were still detached from their everyday use under the term “Hand-Painted Pop” (cf. MOCA 1992). Painting was inscribed as texture onto the clean und smooth surfaces of everyday images and objects; for example, the thick patches of oil paint in Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, as well as the crusty surfaces of Johns’s encaustic paintings. Contrastingly, paintings by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein from 1961 and onward also further breach the boundary between painting and everyday object. The clean and smooth surfaces of everyday images and objects were now “effectively” transferred to painting. And in the process, these early pop painters immediately correspond with Benjamin: the shiny surfaces are the decisive factor, addressing observers as buyers. Or, following Greenberg’s argument once more: the active observer is addressed as a passive consumer. And the “reflected effect” is included in the paintings as a depicted motif already—it is painted. Andy Warhol’s Storm Door 1 from 1961 (Figure 12.1) is one of his early iconic paintings, executed by hand before switching to silk screen about a year later. Using a small black-and-white newspaper clipping as template, an advertisement for a storm door is significantly enlarged to fit the canvas. The eye-catching price tag of $12.88 inevitably attests to the origin of the motif, although other telling elements of the advertisement have been purposefully removed. Only some of the lettering remains: the name of the presumable production company can be found at the top of the painting. Further lettering “Made to … ” (originally “Made to Fit”) below the center of the painting opens onto a blank space, just like the black circle on the right edge of the canvas does. Moreover, the depiction of the “Storm Door” follows the aesthetics of a typical black-and-white newspaper advertisement of the 1950s. Most importantly, the mirroring reflections of the door’s two glass panels stand out, of which the top panel is mounted vertically and the bottom one tilted backward diagonally. These were the typical stylized mirroring reflections for a contemporary advertising aesthetic in the 1960s that presented objects to potential buyers. This is exactly how Warhol himself described his images on the occasion of the first exhibition of Storm Door 1 in 1961: “My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us” (Alloway 1974: 109). Nevertheless, this shiny symbol of commodification in the 1961 painting stands in contrast with the artist’s gestures above all in the gray brush strokes on the picture’s upper edge as well as in paint drippings on the canvas. In a second version of the same motif from the following year, Warhol notably renounces these painterly traces of the hand. In addition to the now even larger price tag, he adds two black stripes at the bottom and at the top of the painting, rendering the image into a reduced yet, even more stylized and hard-edged version of the original. Consequently, the mirroring reflections on the two glass panels stand out all the more, and the storm-proof door is advertised as the only shiny object. It is not without reason that Warhol has used the

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Figure 12.1  Andy Warhol, Storm Door I, 1961,  oil on canvas,  117 × 107 cm.  Daros Collection, Zürich. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York and DACS London

same hard-edged style for his Coca-Cola bottle paintings a few month later, which denote more generally a typical commercial strategy—see it, buy it, and enjoy it! While Warhol gave up those particular advertising techniques a few months later in favor of his silkscreen paintings, his colleague Roy Lichtenstein remained faithful to painting gloss effects (Figure 12.2). He first adopted this style from comic aesthetics, as it is obvious in the mirroring water surface in his first comic painting Hey Mickey from 1962. Soon, however, he applied this comic style in his paintings of daily consumer goods, also alluding to a commercial advertisement through the hard-edged style (Figure 12.3). Coupled with the Ben-Day dot technique, the artist also builds upon the effects of painting gloss and shine in order to provoke the observer’s desire for the often

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Figure 12.2  Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey!, 1961, oil on canvas, 122 × 175 cm. National Gallery of Arts, Washington. © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

very banal products. They are perfect, sharp, and shiny and—as in advertising—simply waiting for someone to look and be tempted to consume. The history of still-life painting, at least since Jean-Baptiste Chardin, has been driven by the representation of illusion through different qualities of surface—shiny highlights against blurry shadows, smooth and glossy surfaces against textured and matted ones. In pop painting, the advertising aesthetic smoothens these differently rendered surfaces through simplified gloss effects. Everything is “shiny, glossy and smooth,” as cheap to buy as it is easy to consume—just as Lichtenstein had also learned from the printed commercials he had used; “ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment,” to once again quote Greenberg’s phrase regarding the effect that is easy to consume (Greenberg 1986b: 16). It is no coincidence that many of the products Lichtenstein has painted and drawn throughout the first half of the 1960s were products typical of flourishing post–world war US consumer society. Depictions of steaks, ice cream, or hot dogs incite the observer’s desire to consume, utilizing the same gloss effects (Plate 28). Even a plain slice of toast is declared a high-gloss product, achieved through the stylization of the different surfaces of the plate, bread, marmalade, and knife into different hard-edged gloss effects. Lichtenstein outdid once again the gloss effects of his bread-on-a-plate and made an edition with the same motive in enamel technique on metal. The painting itself is coated by the enamel’s gloss. Everything—the depicted materials as well as paint applied by hand—is leveled out in the smooth and glossy surface of melted-down enamel pigments.

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Figure 12.3  Roy Lichtenstein, Ice Cream Soda, 1962, oil on canvas, 164 × 82 cm. Private Collection. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Lichtenstein was not the only artist who excessively pushed this fraternization of painting with consumer culture’s gloss and shine in the early 1960s (Figure 12.4). Another striking example is the more than 26-meter-long mural F-111 (1965) by James Rosenquist. Painting, as Rosenquist described his endeavor, “is probably much more exciting than advertising, so why should not it be done with power and gusto, with that impact why shouldn’t it be done with the same power and taste, the same impact” (Swenson 1964: 64). Rosenquist wants to outdo even the typical “Pop” approach of merging painting, consumer, and advertising culture together. At the time, the F-111 Bomber was the newest and most advanced military aircraft, which Rosenquist depicts in his room-filling mural with glossy aluminum shell shootings from left to right over a cross-section of everyday consumer culture. There is no difference any more between a car tire, a smiling child sitting under a hair salon’s dryer hood, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and a plate full of spaghetti in tomato sauce. Everything is embalmed in the shine of industrially produced consumer products. This

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Figure 12.4  James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964–65, oil on canvas with aluminum, twenty-three sections, 304 × 2621 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of James Rosenquist/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

gloss underlies the entirety of the painting, of which large parts are painted on polished aluminum panels—the same material of the F-111 Bomber’s outer shell. On both ends of the mural, the viewer is confronted by the shiny unpainted metal as a mirror.

Obscene Shine From pop’s shine climax, the leap to photorealism’s ubiquitous high-glossed, mirrored surfaces from 1967 onward might seem logical. Materials like glass, car lacquer, and chrome are as omnipresent as the juicy, greasy, and glazed surfaces of industrially manufactured food products. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental distinction to be made between pop of the first half of the 1960s and photorealism during the second. In pop (Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist) the reconciliation of art and life was ultimately a critical approach, not only on the level of representation, where the motif of commodity culture is purposely revealed in all its shallow commercialism. In terms of painting, the flat and matte surfaces of abstract expressionism, which certainly stood for painting as craft, were replaced by the smooth and shiny surfaces of industrial production. Adorno’s critique of pop as culture industry was ironically already included in pop’s own critical approach. The following generation of photorealists did not offer such a critical approach, at least not at first sight. The even more perfectly reproduced shiny and glossy surfaces were first of all understood as results of virtuoso craftsmanship, especially when perfection seemed to degenerate into an end in itself.

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It is no coincidence that German reviews of documenta V (1972) in Kassel, where photorealism was first presented to an international audience, reacted rather irritably to what they called “latest American chic.” One critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) writes on July 8, 1972, “These are truly gems for the dining room, and some rather for the bedroom”; everything is “made according to the best doctrines, pedantry replaces genius and these are the most pedantic gallantry accessories” (FAZ 1972: n.p. transl. C.S.). Already in February of that same year, another FAZ colleague put it even more clearly: “If there is an obscene art, then the one who is now flaunting the latest avant-garde” (FAZ 1972). A short time later, one of the editors smugly remarks: “The new ones preferably paint buttocks and what corresponds to these on the front-sides” (FAZ 1972). Polished banalities, perfect kitsch, and sometimes even obscenities? Such descriptions were usually not limited to the exposed back and front sides the prudish FAZ authors dare not name. The same is true for the shiny radiator grilles of cars (Figure 12.5) or the glossy chewing gum balls whose exposed surfaces should not cause any less desire than a naked body. Keeping these artistic strategies in perspective, the early 1970s critics were probably far more fascinated by the seductive surfaces than they could help to warn their readers. What is desirable and tangible here, as we all know, are less than depicted surfaces and objects themselves. It is rather their image, that is, their photographic reproduction. Any shine or reflection is by definition just a reproduction of an original shine and reflection. In between stood the camera, whose sobering and distorting view

Figure 12.5  Ralph Goings, Airstream, 1970, oil on canvas, 152 × 213 cm. mumok, Vienna, On Loan from the Ludwig Foundation, Aachen. © Ralph Goings

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also transferred into the painting. It therefore follows that proximity to highly finished and desirable objects is always mediated, denied, and set at a distance. Their shine is always second-order shine. Let me conclude with a final example that is especially symptomatic for this ambiguity of the shine reproduced in photorealism (Plate 29). Nothing more is to be seen on Ben Schonzeit’s painting than the title Cauliflower states: cauliflower, more precisely, a whole lot of them, each individually wrapped in cellophane foil. As the inscriptions convey, they come from California, grown and traded by the company “Deardorff-Jackson & Co, Oxnard, California”. Art historically speaking, we would probably have to call this image, “supermarket still life” (analog to the established term “kitchen still life”). The cauliflower has become a commodity, not just because of branding and display, but all the more due to wrapping cellophane’s glossy surface. There is one decisive difference to the ordinary supermarket display stimulating buyers to grab and buy shiny products. Schonzeit’s painted cauliflower cannot be easily grabbed and put in the cart since the glossy surface of the photograph stands in between. Every fold on the cellophane foil is reproduced in different degrees of sharpness, strongly lit yet blurred in the front, while the background seems sharper but less shiny. The wrapped cauliflowers as motifs are subordinate; the actual subject of representation is the photograph itself. The glossy surfaces of the presented goods that at first seem to jump at the eye have been yet again distanced. Furthermore, two glossy surfaces stand between viewer and vegetable, not just the cellophane wrapping foils, but also the photography’s surface. It is through this gloss alone, paradoxically, that both the represented subject and the reproduced image are set apart from tangible, everyday life. Instead of catching one’s eye, the gloss marks instead a distance that distinguishes the painting not only from common advertising images, but also from commercial goods in a brightly lit supermarket. The more offensively the image is offered as a commodity, the more clearly must its tangibility be prevented.

Notes 1 Some of the finish fetish artists even trained themselves in automotive lacquering technics and used the suitable equipment (cf. Rivenc et al. 2011). 2 As it is well known this lack of distinction between works of art and everyday object has been discussed first of all for the new sculptural objects by Minimal Artists in the early 1960s, most famously by Michael Fried (cf. Fried 1968).

References Adorno. T. W. (1991), “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), Theodor W. Adorno: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge, 98–106. Alloway, L. (1974), American Pop Art, New York: Collier Books.

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Benjamin, W. (2002), “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: ‘Exposé of 1939’,” in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 14–26. Coplans, J. (1966), “Introduction,” in Five Los Angeles Sculptors: Larry Bell, Tony DeLap, David Gray, John McCracken, Kenneth Price, Irvine: The University Art Gallery, 3. Egenhofer, S. (2008), Abstraktion—Kapitalismus—Subjektivität. Die Wahrheitsfunktion des Werks in der Moderne, Munich: Wilhelm Fink. FAZ (1972), documenta V, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (July 8): n.p. Fried, M. (1968), “Art and Objecthood,” in G. Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 116–47. Greenberg, C. (1968), “Recentness of Sculpture,” in G. Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 180–6. Greenberg, C. (1986a), “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in J. O’Brian (ed.), C. Greenberg. The Collected Essays and Criticism 1: Perceptions and Judgments, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 23–37. Greenberg, C. (1986b), “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in J. O’Brian (ed.), C. Greenberg. The Collected Essays and Criticism 1: Perceptions and Judgments, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 5–22. Greenberg, C. (1989), “American Type Painting,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston: Beacon Press, 208–29. MOCA (1992), P. Schimmel et al. (eds.), exh. cat. Hand-Painted Pop. American Art in Transition 1955–62, New York: Rizzoli International Publications. Reinhardt, A. (1991), “The Black Square-Paintings,” in Barbara Rose (ed.), Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 82. Rivenc, R., E. Richardson and T. Learner (2011), “The LA Look from Start to Finish: Materials, Processes and Conservation of Works by the Finish Fetish Artists.” Available online: https://www.getty.edu/conservation/our_projects/science/art_LA/ article_2011_icom_cc.pdf (accessed August 7, 2019). Shiff, R. (1987), “Performing an Appearance: On the Surfaces of Abstract Expressionism,” in M. Auping (ed.), Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, New York: Abrams G, 94–123. Swenson, G. (1964), “What Is Pop Art?: Interview with James Rosenquist, Part II,” ARTnews, Vol. 62, No. 10: 62–7. Tiedemann, R. (1982), “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in R. Tiedemann (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Das Passagen-Werk, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 9–41.

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Finish Fetish: Judy Chicago in LA Kathrin Rottmann

In 1964, artist Judy Chicago chose industrially mass-produced steel for her immaculately shiny works, and disregarded materials traditionally considered as valuable, such as gold, silver, or porcelain. Chicago, then still called Gerowitz, did not polish the steel surface, as one might have expected of postmodern stainless steel fashion but coated it with industrial enamels. For Car Hood, she painted the bonnet of an automobile and hung it on the wall, so that it is no longer viewed horizontally, as it usually protects the engine block, but vertically like a painting (Plate 30). Unlike Jackson Pollock, who dripped such paint onto the canvas, she applied the glossy car lacquer homogenously with a spray gun used in the automotive industry, professional paint shops, and workshops. Significantly, in most museum photographs the bonnet looks almost matte, although its highly finished surface shines brilliantly and inevitably shows the reflections of the lighting in the exhibition space. The so-called finish fetish, which Chicago has worked out on the sheet metal, was usually deemed somehow male, cool, and technological, in conformity with the discourse of art history and critique of the 1960s, determined by the aesthetics of minimal art. However, according to the research focusing on “finish fetish,” as the West Coast or “California version of Minimalism” (McCracken 1998: 86) was referred to, these features seem not to align with Chicago’s work, as the studies mention it only marginally. Therefore, this chapter has a twofold aim: First, it seeks to examine different attributions of the finish fetish, which was part of varying social practices in subcultures as well as by the petty bourgeoisie, with the result that this type of shine is consequently hidden in museum photographs, as if it were a kind of obscenity. In order to reveal the characteristics of the finish fetish of shiny car lacquer, this study concentrates on the surface and its manufacture, taking its cue from a Practical Aesthetic for technicians, artists, and art lovers, developed at the height of industrialization. Referring to art theorist and architect Gottfried Semper’s Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, published in German in 1860, I aim to examine the conditions of the elaborately crafted brilliance, that is, the “material,” the “tools and procedures” (Semper [1860] 2004: 107), used to produce shine on lacquer and steel and, moreover, to consider the context in which such gloss effects were made and staged. Second, this chapter

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argues that shine, in this case, is of gender-political and feminist significance and that Chicago altered the prevalent attributions of the finish fetish by blurring its seemingly clear gender code. In Southern California in the 1960s, a number of painters, sculptors, and lacquerers worked with new materials and processes borrowed from industry, producing glittering and dazzling surfaces. Literary critic Fredric Jameson understood such reflective surfaces as a characteristic of postmodernism (Jameson 1984: 60), in which the traditional notion of fathoming depth had been replaced by a multitude of new surfaces that could not be analyzed with hermeneutic methods. Such a literal superficiality was decisive for the objects described as “L.A. Look,” that is “cool, semitechnological, industrially pretty art made in and around Los Angeles” out of polished metal, deep-drawn plexiglass, polyester resin, or fiberglass (Plagens 1974: 120). Their shimmering surfaces needed absolute care, “for the slightest imperfection would mar [sic] a surface and create an unwanted point of focus” (Coplans 1966: 36), and were thus characterized by John Coplans, co-founder of Artforum, as “surface finish” (Coplans 1966: 33), “Finish Fetish” or “Fetish Finish” (Rivenc 2016: 10). Despite their anonymous, industrial character, the processing of the objects required an amount of manual labor, which cannot be traced because their surfaces glisten so perfectly that the physical work they contain seems to vanish in the light. Interestingly, this inconsistent correlation of look and manufacture feeds their peculiar appearance. “[M]aking an art in which the difficulty of its manufacture is part of its content” (Rose 1966: 111), the brilliance owes itself to an artistry that transforms objects into precious artifacts and yet resembles the “common industrial finishes” (Coplans 1967: 23) of mass-produced goods made from the same industrially processed materials. The gloss therefore “at once seemed to rival old-world art materials like bronze and marble, and also to mock them” (Fallon 2014: 159). The artists working on the “finish fetish,” a term that not all producers agreed with (McCracken 1998: 87), cultivated surfaces polished to a high shine, which was created by elaborate handicraft that sought to erase its traces. The seemingly simplistic dichotomy of industrial and manual work, which has today become obsolete in view of smart materials and high-tech surfaces, was already out of date in the 1960s.

Hypermasculine Gloss on Cars The characteristic brilliance of the works created in California in the 1960s, which visually evoke the glitter of Hollywood’s film industry, was attributed to the atmosphere as well as industry. Based on a climate theory similar to art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s ideas in the eighteenth century (Winckelmann 1764: 23, 25), it was said that the light, air conditions, and the location by the sea produced a special “‘L.A. sensibility’” (Rose 1966: 111), which was reflected in the shiny surfaces of the works of art, on which the light refracted like the sun on the Pacific. Coupled with this environment, the material conditions of these “California surfaces,” as artist Robert Smithson has called them (Smithson 1996: 20), included the Southern Californian aviation, plastics, and chemical industries as well, which had been expanding for

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civilian use since the end of the Second World War (Rivenc 2016: 16–21). They had suggested the usage of new industrial compounds and procedures much more obvious than the application of traditional artistic materials such as bronze, marble, or oil paint (C. Wolfe 1965: 20–1). Moreover, in California, where more cars were registered in the 1960s than in any other state (Fox 2001: 202), shine also referred to the products of the Detroit automotive industry, that is, to the shine of the glossy enamels of a large number of mass-produced cars visible on the streets of Los Angeles. With the painting of Car Hood, Chicago utilized a technique that was already established in Los Angeles among the consistently white male members of the socalled cool school (Leider 1964: 47; McKenna 2009: 206), who staged themselves as surfing, racing macho men’s clubs for exhibitions in the Ferus Gallery, exhibited their works under the title The Studs, and posed in the driver’s seats of their cars for the pinup calendar L.A. Artists in Their Cars, published by Joe Goode in 1969 under the pseudonym José Bueno. Billy Al Bengston, one of the cool school artists, who worked as a stuntman, drove motorcycle races, and lolls naked out of his car’s window on the June calendar page, has used spray guns, enamel, and industrial materials such as wood fiber boards and metals for a series of works around 1960. In his painting Mesquite Western Series (Figure 13.1), sprayed on aluminum sheet, the hard sheen of the paint overlies the pink and turquoise chevron, which is emblazoned like a trademark on the dented ground. The extreme shine, which plays on the surface with distorted light spots, competes with the colors pink, red, and turquoise, which are neatly separated by means of taping and then gently merge into each other through the airy application of paint with the spray gun. By contrast, sprayed paint mists are not to be found on Chicago’s Car Hood, a flat painting in bright colors overlaid by white amorphous light spots. The hood shows a blue-violet and orange target placed above the center of the bonnet on a red rectangle that runs like a drop to the lower edge of the painting against a brown background. A vertical black arrow superimposes it in the middle and also divides the narrow blue stripe that follows the wedge shape of the hood at the upper edge of the sheet metal. The picture is framed by two vertical white stripes with green ornaments that resemble pearl necklaces and are set with orange pinstripes. The symmetrical, frontal arrangement is reminiscent of paintings in which Chicago, while studying sculpture and painting at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a “biomorphic” pictorial language recalling “phalluses, vaginas, testicles, wombs, hearts, ovaries, and other body parts” (Chicago [1975] 1982: 33), allegedly derived from her female body. In Car Hood, she argues, “[t]he vaginal form, penetrated by a phallic arrow, was mounted on the ‘masculine’ hood of a car, a very clear symbol of my state of mind at this time” (Chicago [1975] 1982: 36–7), and an expression of her Struggle as a Woman Artist, according to the subtitle of her autobiography published in 1975. She appropriated the virile horsepower machine by means of avowedly feminine forms, which, though had their prominent place as radiator figures on engine hoods anyway. Most of the biomorphic paintings created at the time in colors such as yellow, pink, and turquoise, which were consistently rejected by her teachers (Chicago [1975] 1982: 34–5), have been destroyed. However, in 2011, Chicago completed three more bonnets she had begun in 1965. With their flashy candy colors and a much more explicit biomorphic formal imagery, they would probably have completely undermined her

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Figure 13.1  Billy Al  Bengston,  Mesquite Western Series, 1969, lacquer, polyester resin on aluminum, 58.42 × 55.88 cm. © Courtesy of Billy Al Bengston

“reputation as a Minimalist” (Gourbe 2018: 82), which had earned her participation in the 1966 Primary Structures exhibition in New York. The hard shine of Car Hood, caused by the curved metal, the paint, and the spraying process, is created directly on the surface of the standard bonnet from a Chevrolet Corvair Chicago used (Chao, Rivenc and Wolfe 2012). The sheet metal provokes glossy effects that only become apparent in Bengston’s work because of the dents. Although Chicago’s hood hangs on the wall like a picture, it is not as flat as a canvas, but has been machine-pressed into shape. At its front edge, it arches in the direction of the radiator grille, with its central part lowered between the fenders as if ducking dynamically into the airstream that a small raised fin, which captures the light, pretends to divide. Unlike the photorealistic paintings by Don Eddy or Tom Blackwell, who have painted such gloss effects on cars and motorcycles

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(Meisel 1980: 83–7, 175–7), or John Baldessari’s as well as Jan Dibbet’s photographs of reflective car paint, the shine of the bonnet is physically present in the exhibition space. It unfolds depending on the viewer’s point of view and movement, whereas, for example, John Chamberlain’s sculptures made of old, scratched, and dented body parts are barely able to shine anymore. In contrast to Chicago’s biomorphic paintings of the 1960s in which the focus was primarily on forms rather than on craft (Chicago [1975] 1982: 34–5), Car Hood aims at the flawless surface, which shines like the paint of a new car. Chicago was working on it while she was learning how to spray professionally. After graduating, she was the only woman among 250 men, including other UCLA graduates, to attend a course for car painters, which she completed with the coating of “an old Ford truck with metallic chartreuse paint” (Chicago [1975] 1982: 36). In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicago acquired a number of “fringe techniques” such as fiberglass and pyrotechnics in workshops (Chicago and Hamrol 1974: 13). They may have been without history or tradition, but they were considered male at the time, as was technology (Moorhouse 1999: 289). In the male-dominated art world, Chicago sought to use the skills of these techniques to underscore the “seriousness” of her concern, as she reasoned in an interview with Lucy Lippard (Chicago 1974: 60), because “some knowledge of craft, process, and technique” (Chicago [1975] 1982: 32) had been decisive in being taken seriously as an artist. Apart from adopting the techniques regarded as male, Judy Gerowitz reacted to the explicitly virile car culture in 1970 by appropriating a masculine habitus (Chicago [1975] 1982: 35). In two prominently placed full-page advertisements in the art magazine Artforum, founded a few years earlier in San Francisco, she staged herself as a “macha” (Gourbe 2018: 82). On the occasion of her two-part “one man woman show” at California State University, Fullerton, she announced that she officially discarded her surname, previously determined by “male social dominance,” that is to say filiation and marriage, in order to name herself instead after her birthplace (Chicago 1970a: 20); in addition, a few weeks later, she posed for the advertisement of the exhibition opening like a tough guy in a boxing ring (Chicago 1970b: 36).

Materials, Tools, and Procedures The homogeneous gloss of the paint used was created by the flawless application in several layers, with a final additional layer of clear lacquer (Chao, Rivenc and Wolfe 2012). Chicago did not use nitrocellulose, as is often the case (Crook and Learner 2000: 17), but industrial paint materials, which could finish the surfaces with “semigloss,” “high gloss,” or “satin finish,” depending on their properties (Crewdson 1948: 28). In addition to Bengston’s work and the spray-painting course, the sculptor Oliver Andrews, who taught at UCLA and employed Chicago as a teaching assistant, suggested the use of industrial paints, enamels, and painting techniques. For instance, in his posthumously published manual Living Materials, Andrews encouraged artists to use materials and “adapt the tools of industry to the needs of sculpture” and to acquire “practices of the garage, the machine shop, the factory and the scientific laboratory” so that all available materials and surfaces could unfold their “active presence” and

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“assertiveness” to interact with (Andrews 1983: xi–xii, 1). He recommended a whole range of tools and products from various manufacturers, including Ditzler automotive finishes, Duco synthetic enamels, and polyester resins from Cadillac Plastics and Chemical Co (Andrews 1983: 165). In view of Andrew’s enthusiasm for industry, by producing a cold gleam on the bonnet, Chicago affirmed the origin of the sheet metal from the automotive industry and transferred its shine to the exhibition space. A few years later she provoked lustrous effects reminiscent of the shimmer of pearls instead. Her Iridescent Domes #2 (Small) are made of deep-drawn acrylic glass and are painted translucently with acrylic paint on the inside (Figure 13.2). Because of their shape, their small size, and the iridescent “aristocratic finish” (Crewdson 1948: 112), which is doubled by the golden-tinted mirror, they look like precious pearl pieces, since the pigments shimmer and softly refract the light through multiple reflections. The glimmer thus seems to emerge in the depth of the lacquer layer, similar to some biomorphic works Craig Kauffman made of acrylic glass in Los Angeles at the time (Rivenc 2016: 44). It is shrunk, though, to a size that would hardly have been conceivable for Kauffman’s phallic-shaped bubbles, so that Chicago’s work counteracts the hypermasculine shine even through the format. On the bonnet, in contrast, the shine becomes visible as a pure surface shine that marks the sheet of metal as part of a mass-produced automobile. The paint was atomized by the compressed air operation of the spray gun and applied in countless wafer-thin layers so that no drops, let alone brush marks, are visible on the

Figure 13.2  Judy Chicago,  Iridescent Domes #2, 1968, sprayed acrylic inside successive formed clear acrylic domes, 38.1 × 38.1 × 10.16 cm. © 2019 Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman. © Photo courtesy of Judy Chicago/ Art Resource, NY

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Figure 13.3  How to Spray Common Materials …, double-page spread from How to Paint 6 Times Faster. Craftsman Paint Sprayers, Sears, Roebuck & Co, 1950

surface, which could be left behind by manual application of paint. Spray guns (Figure 13.3) were utilized to save labor in the production of advertising graphics, for facade painting at, for example, the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, for domestic usage, and, as long as they painted only furniture, even for women’s using. In the United States, spray guns have also enabled the automotive industry to deliver flawless, uniformly mass-produced surfaces as quickly as possible since the 1920s (Crewdson 1948: 9–10). At about the same time, artists in both the United States and Europe propagated their use in order to create contemporary painting techniques based on the model of industry. For example, Oskar Nerlinger sprayed his paintings and with it avoided any individual artistic traces or brushstrokes on the pictorial ground (Schröder-Kehler 1984: 195–204). Instead, his works show the marks of the spray gun, the fine droplets of paint standing on the matte paper. Henryk Berlewi advocated the mechanization of facture as well (Berlewi 1924: 159). In 1924, he programmatically exhibited his abstract paintings and graphics, titled Mechano-faktura, at an automobile salon in Warsaw, so that the allegedly technically produced paintings were reflected like city lights on the lacquer of the industrially produced Daimler, whose shine thus created the most modern mechanic facture of the exhibition (Rübel 2016: 32). In Los Angeles the use of spray guns had a longer tradition, too. David Alfaro Siqueiros, named Il Duco after the enamel paint he used, explained in 1932 in a lecture at the John Reed Club in Hollywood that the hand brush was a primitive, anachronistic instrument and said that he therefore used spray guns for his murals (Siqueiros 1975: 18).

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By contrast, in the 1960s, the Californian use of the industrial tool was not based on the ideology of artistic progress analogous to industrial advance, but on its application in the garages of do-it-yourselfers, hobbyists, and subcultures. Apart from the massproduced car, the glossy painted sheet metal and the body part used by Chicago also reminded of custom cars and “kustom kars,” the k marking its affiliation to subculture. The objects of the Californian minimalism were compared to the individually reworked Detroit cars as well as to surfboards in almost every critique because of their surfaces and materials. The resemblance between kustom kars and finish fetish called up in reviews was visually suggested by the TV documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, which the architectural theorist shot for the BBC in 1972, shortly after he had published his written homage to the city (Banham 1971). Banham drove through the streets in his Baede-Kar, disregarding some recommendations of this auto-travel guide and instead visited the workshops in Venice, where artisans polished sculptures made of acrylic glass as well as surfboards, and he attended parking lots with kustom kars, for whose paintwork he was enthusiastic. The “craftsmanship that goes with power tools, advanced plastics and space age chemistry, the sort of craftsmanship that now seems native to Los Angeles” was characteristic of art and industry that shared the “common admiration for high finish and high style,” as he explained (Banham 1972). The kustom kars had received greater national attention only a few years earlier, in 1963, when the journalist Tom Wolfe in the Esquire published his reportage on Californian subculture of the postwar period There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (THPHHHHH!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhhh!) around the Bend (BRUM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM … Regardless of the finish fetish he declared, “you have to reach the conclusion that these customized cars are art objects, at least if you use the standards applied in a civilized society” and he characterized the processed cars as “sculpture” and the workshops of the painters as “gallery” and “studio,” where George Barris, for example, mixed lacquers that possessed such incredible brilliance that their colors actually went deep (Wolfe 1963: 114–15, 118, 160): all the shiny flashy tones, candy colors, and dazzling lacquers that Chicago used as well. Some of the painters and sculptors from Los Angeles, such as Bengston, DeWain Valentine, Robert Irwin, or Kenneth Price, had worked themselves in garages on “kandy-apple paint jobs and ‘Baroque’ sculpture of customized automobiles” (Plagens 1974: 122; Bordeaux 1979: 103; Fallon 2014: 156)— or attended spray-painting courses like Chicago. “In addition to the traditional oil on canvas, Los Angeles ‘painters’ adopted some of the paints and techniques developed for the custom finishes of the hot-car culture,” as has been argued (Winer 1972: 122). Significantly, they used the glossy surfaces of the “funky, masculine, industrial folk art” (Danieli 1967: 26) to make the boundaries between what was considered high art and low art blur. About Chicago’s Iridescent Domes, for instance, it was said that they did not seem “as tough, theoretical New York type art,” but rather like a kind of “spreading baroqueness,” evoking “the innocent lyricism of a bag of marbles, a pretty lady’s beads, or a ‘36 Ford” (Levin 2007: 132). “Baroque” was the magic word that marked the transformation of a Detroit car into a kustom kar, through its shapes, its brilliance, its colors, “metallic or lustrous elements added to the paint […] finished in multi-layers of acrylic lacquer to achieve a maximum glisten” and features such as the

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pinstripes Chicago used, for which Von Dutch and Ed Big Daddy Roth were famous at the time (Wolfe 1963: 118; Lindsley 1968: 114).

Working on the Shine Until well into the twentieth century, the surfaces of works of art were appreciated because they were supposed to contain traces of the artistic creative process and seemed to guarantee the authenticity of the artwork, although even in workshops and studios work was divided (Rübel 2016: 28). For instance, Constantin Brancusi, insisting on his authorship, repeatedly claimed that he finished his highly polished sculptures made of marble, bronze, and brass by himself by hand (Rose 1999: 48– 50), although it is reported that assistants, like Isamu Noguchi, spent their time with polishing the flawless surfaces as well (Herrera 2015: 87). In the 1960s, minimal art objects took up this kind of machine aesthetics of the 1920s. In 1965 Donald Judd, for example, reorganized his manufacturing and delegated the production of his “specific objects” (Judd 1975: 181–9) made of sometimes shiny industrially produced materials to specialized workshops in order to avoid any increase in meaning associated with individual processing of material and surface. Likewise, the works of the “cool school” are said to be characterized by the “absolute expulsion of expressive valeurs on the surface,” by a “surface design as if produced by a mechanical process” (Heißenbüttel 1972: 9), so that only the gloss effects define the surface. But this shine was hand produced, albeit sometimes with the help of small mechanical machines. The “high degree of lustre or shine” may seem mechanical, but makes visible an “insistence on the highest order of craftsmanship,” as Coplans noted (Coplans 1966: 35–7). Chicago, for example, recalls having finally applied several layers of clear lacquer so that she could polish the bonnet to a high gloss without removing the paint (Chao, Rivenc and Wolfe 2012). Similarly, Bengston also did not just rely on the gloss produced by the enamel either too. He polished the surfaces of his paintings (Peabody, Perchuk, Phillips and Singh 2012: 158), just as car paints can be coated with hard wax or polishes with a protective layer that only begins to reflect the light through subsequent rubbing. The gloss of his ceramics, on the other hand, could only be modified during the firing process, unless the clay was sprayed with candy-colored car paints like Kenneth Price did (Coplans 1963: 4). John McCracken, who observed the paintwork of Californian kustom kars “to see colors and surfaces” (McCracken 1998: 88), described a similar procedure. He reported that he grinds and polishes his works, which are also coated with car paint, and that they only look rough and dusty during this protracted process: “But then I finally get to the end of it and put on the final coat of wax, and bang! The color is suddenly clear” (McCracken 1998: 89), as if it was only the shine that the restorers in the museum are supposed to preserve by polishing with Megiuar’s Deep Crystal Deep Gloss Polish (Rivenc 2016: 124), which makes it visible. Furthermore, in his book Living Materials, sculptor Andrews also recommended “auto buffing compound and a lamb’s wool bonnet,” detergents and polishes for high-gloss surfaces, which promise to regain or even surpass the shine of new cars by restoring a “MirrorGlaze” (Andrews 1983: 152, 165).

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The shine on cars was usually understood as hard, cold, and due to the automobile’s gender-based attribution, as a male shine, despite the fact that women have also finished and driven cars (Moorhouse 1999: 294). The work on the splendor, however, brought such attributions to shimmer, because of its resemblance to the so-called reproductive or housework (Quick 2008: 308–14) (Figure 13.4). “If you see someone who has a can of polish in one hand and a polish cloth in the other, it could be your mother. If it’s not your mother, it must be the owner of a custom car,” Ed Radlauer wittily characterized the similarities of both gloss practices in one of his numerous photo books on motorsports and custom cars for young readers (Radlauer [1968] 1974: 3). The use of polishes was widespread, even outside subcultures, as the psychologist Ernest Dichter explained in 1964 in his Handbook of Consumer Motivations, a fundamental work of market psychology that he understood as a kind of “contemporary cultural anthropology of modern man” (Dichter 1964: v): “People polish their cars in a sort of self-display. The car is treated as an extension of the personality much the same

Figure 13.4  Custom Cars, written and photographed by Ed  Radlauer, 1968, Glendale, CA: Bowmar, 1974. © Ed Radlauer

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way as the owner’s clothes” (Dichter 1964: 273). This claim applied in a similar way to all the surfaces inside: “Surfaces in the home are expressions of the orderliness and abilities of the housewife. By keeping such surfaces in order by cleaning and protecting them, she is, in a way, keeping herself in order” (Dichter 1964: 149). About car polish, Dichter stated: “As far as an ideal car polish is concerned, most people are dreaming about one that would not require any hard work” (Dichter 1964: 274). Yet this assumption did not apply to completing the finish fetish. The enormous amount of labor involved in perfecting the shine was not just a means to an end, for one’s own image or to prove cleanliness. Working on brilliance, like the effect itself, was an integral part of the perfectly finished paintings and objects (McCracken 1998: 88)— an approach to work similar to that of the kustom kar communities, whose members cultivated high gloss while fostering a do-it-yourself work ethic, but did not shy away from technical innovations such as hand-polishing machines. This attitude to work, “feeling good by working hard” (Moorhouse 1999: 294), notably contradicts the cliché of California that was widespread among artists and critics. In 1971, in particular, Joseph Masheck exaggeratedly assumed that in Los Angeles everyone was only on the beach and that it was easier than nowhere else to be an artist, because there, like the “hip young drop-out types” in Venice, one could simply make “fancy baubles for the rich” on the side (Masheck 1971: 72–3). Meanwhile, on the east coast, Judd had his objects made, and Laurence Weiner designed sprayed works that could have been done by anyone or not at all, while the sculptures painted and polished by Anne Truitt herself were effeminated as grandmotherly and home-made perfectionist (Meyer 2001: 227). In the same way, Pablo Picasso taunted Brancusi, who, as he claimed, polished his extremely reflective sculptures all day long like a woman cleaning her pots (Richardson 2007: 453). Thus, working on gloss provoked different attributions of meaning. In the context of light and space the brilliance was connoted with metaphysical implications and theories of perception (Plagens 1974: 129), whereas most critiques perceived the purely sensory, non-intellectually comprehensible shine as sensual and erotic, also because of its spatial proximity and similarity to the oiled skin of bodybuilders and sun worshippers (Rose 1966: 114). Lippard for example characterized the surfaces of McCracken’s work as “decidedly hedonist and luxuriously sensuous despite its industrial connotations” (Lippard 1966: 34–5). These “polished, slippery surfaces in sculpture and creamy or touchable textures in painting” (Rose 1966: 114), “slick and gleaming as though it were wet” (Lindsley 1968: 115), were said to correspond to the “pervasive eroticism” (Rose 1966: 112) of the city of Los Angeles. Yet, while McCracken described that it was dreadfully boring to produce the gloss (Rivenc 2016: 114), underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger staged the work on the hypermasculine finish fetish in 1965 as dazzling eroticism that feeds on the surfaces and their processing (Plate 31). His three-minute film Kustom Kar Kommandos shows a young man, dressed in tight light-blue trousers and T-shirt, who does not work in a garage, but polishes his car against a pink background with a huge, delicate pink powder puff, the hairs of which seem to tremble with excitement. The camera moves as close and as slowly as he gently strokes the tassel, over the car’s interior lined with bright red velvet, chrome, and shiny steel, the chrome engine, the shiny chassis, and over the young man’s body.

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While the Paris Sisters in their version of Bobby Darin’s song yearn for their Dream Lover, the close-ups of the car savor the elaborately illuminated surfaces reflecting the red velvet, the pink background and the body of the car owner. In the remaining fragment of the film, which Anger financed with funds from the Ford Foundation, the polished car is staged not as a Marxist fetish but as a Freudian fetish, in, according to Anger, “a definite eroticization of the automobile, in its dual aspect of narcissistic identification as virile power symbol and its more elusive role: seductive, attentiongrabbing, gaudy or glittering mechanical mistress paraded for the benefit of his peers” (Sitney 2002: 111). Its cultivation is hardly reminiscent of the heteronormative machoman world of the Californian art scene of the 1960s or of Freud’s heteronormative view of the fetish (Freud [1927] 1977: 345–57). Instead, Anger’s staging of the kustom kar, whose reflective surfaces collapse the boundaries of subject and object, interior and exterior, and the “gender-based codes” of hard polished steel and soft red velvet, calls forth homo- and literally auto-erotic allusions (Cagle 1994: 24–6). By working on the shine, the car owner cultivates his image, for he reflects himself on the paint like a Californian narcissist, caressing his own reflection while polishing just as closely as the camera follows him. The end of the film suggests the satisfaction of the “protracted and intense process of rubbing, an implicitly masturbatory activity,” as Brancusi’s polishing has been characterized as well (Chave 1993: 78–9), when the young man in the close-up of the running engine does not polish with the powder puff but takes a dirty cloth to wipe away a supposed stain from the radiator. In light of underground films, subculture garages, and households, the working on brilliant surfaces in different contexts suggests that the attributions to the supposedly cool, male, and industriallooking shine of the finish fetish may vary. As can be seen, finish fetish was subject to heterogeneous gloss practices, whose different social values contribute to the peculiar aesthetic resistance inherent in these cool-looking works despite their smooth, high-gloss surfaces, inconsistently correlating an industrial look with its laborious manufacture. In 1966, the art critic Barbara Rose wrote about the finish fetish that in view of the care applied to the surfaces, one could hardly resist the impression that in Los Angeles art was also “some kind of exotic subculture,” that is “a local cult with its own insignia and rituals,” which included polishing the shiny surfaces (Rose 1966: 111). At the same time Tom Wolfe called the subculture of kustom kar artists and lovers “the new culture makers” (T. Wolfe 1965: 79). Similarly, only a decade later, in 1976, Hans Magnus Enzensberger characterized in his Kursbuch the often disregarded petty bourgeoisie, “the class in between,” “the floating class [which] is always the disturbing class,” as the new creators of culture (Enzensberger [1976] 2011: 200): “[I]t is the petty bourgeoisie that has the cultural hegemony today in all highly industrialized societies. […] It is the one that takes care of innovation. It decides what is beautiful and desirable; it decides what is thought. […] It invents ideologies, sciences, technologies. […] It is the only class that produces art and fashion, philosophy and architecture, criticism and design” (Enzensberger [1976] 2011: 204). According to Enzensberger, the petty bourgeoisie shaped the entire mass consumption, for example, of automobiles and television, enforced all apparatuses of

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the superstructure, and at the same time inevitably absorbed all subcultural, alternative impulses (Enzensberger [1976] 2011: 204). The shiny surfaces were cultivated by members of the subcultures as well as by the petty bourgeoisie, in garages as well as in studios. Polishing the shine made boundaries shimmer. Moreover, the gloss of the surfaces, which seemingly afforded no physical labor, perfectly fitted the ideology of the “post-industrial society” (Bell 1973), which favored science and technology instead of hard work in heavy industry. Working on shine, the petty bourgeoisie, who was “employed in nonproductive labor” (Dixon 1976: 6), found a way to work physically, immediately erasing the traces of its work.

The Splendor of Female Subculture In the mid-1960s, Chicago declared that she was “finished with the surface & craft preoccupation of the Ferus boys. It’s a dead end that leads to preciousness” (Levin 2007: 121) and instead began to work with untreated fiberglass. A few years later, however, she countered the hypermasculine shine of the bonnet creating the “ultimate finish fetish” (Meyer 1996: 71) of her installation of a festively laid table for a utopian Dinner Party for thirty-nine women from mythology and history, who do not cook but eat. For its implementation, Chicago acquired the splendor of a “female subculture” (Chicago [1975] 1982: 208) carried out in kitchens and living rooms, that is to say the skills of porcelain painting. On the thirty-nine individually designed porcelain plates one can see the biomorphic labial and vulvar forms and patterns. In several layers of fired glaze, a hyperfeminine luster unfolds in vibrant colors, shimmering satin-like in some places and almost physically moist in others (Figure 13.5): “Every set is a fetish” (Auffermann 1987). In this case, the shine of the highly finished object was regarded as female, because, apart from the biomorphic forms, Chicago responded to the industrial character of the LA finish fetish with handicraft, that is elaborate stitching on runners, potteries, and porcelain paintings, which was deemed to be feminine labor. In contrast to polished car paints, which aim at seemingly industrially produced surfaces, the work needed to produce the highly finished objects of the Dinner Party is not hidden behind an industrial-looking shine, but made visible in the crafted glazes and silk embroideries, featuring a feminist approach, and is thus charged with the political impetus of legitimizing crafts as art, of making visible “women’s work.” However, the shine of the Dinner Party’s plates and settings does not convey the work of the multitude of actors who have been involved in the production of Chicago’s installation over the years. In her Dinner Party, Chicago used brilliant surfaces to literally make women’s work shine, whereas the burnish of the bonnets did not imply one meaning alone. Chicago used the splendor of Car Hood to undermine heteronormative attributions and expectations by evoking different social practices and values as well as the contradictory correlation between the industrial appearance of shine and its artisanal manufacture.

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Figure 13.5  Judy Chicago,  Virginia Woolf Place Setting, from  The Dinner Party, 1979, mixed media. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York. © 2019 Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © Photo: Sarah Ross

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The history of the mirror ball remains to be written. Covered in tiny mirrored tiles and experienced predominantly as an object hanging from a ceiling, rotating and reflecting lights aimed directly at it, the mirror ball is most commonly associated with the disco era of the 1970s. Yet it dates back at least to some half a century earlier, having already illuminated dance halls and bars in the 1920s.1 The first patent to describe such an object, in this case, a ball covered in small round mirrors, was granted in 1917 to Louis Bernard Woeste of Newport, Kentucky, who then manufactured the “Myriad Reflector” and, according to one advertisement, sold it to “Ballrooms, Night Clubs, Dance Pavilions, Skating Rinks” (Berlin 2015) (Figure 14.1).2 As this advertisement indicates, right from the start, the mirror ball was intended for and used chiefly in recreational contexts. As such, it must be considered part of the budding entertainment industry, creating novel dance and night club experiences. I would like, first, to roughly chart the mirror ball’s journey through the history of the entertainment industry before turning to the main focus of this essay, namely how artists have dealt with the mirror ball reflecting the issues attached to it since the 1960s and 1970s. How has the shine of the mirror ball and its special shape been used, altered, and to what effects? How has the age of disco been taken up in artist’s works featuring disco balls? How, through the glittering lights of the disco ball, do the world of popular entertainment and the art world intersect? What type of shine, glitter, and glitz has been employed and what does it signify? What concerns me, here, is not the smooth, polished metal ball but the faceted, mirrored ball that reflects light on its small mirrored surfaces. Combining reflection and motion, the mirror ball—or disco ball, as it commonly known today3—scatters light around rooms, covering walls and objects with moving specks of light. Owing to its small, most commonly square facets, it appears to be a shiny, sparkling ball similar to a large cut diamond or crystal. Far from any natural, solid precious stone, cut into shape, however, the mirror ball is a man-made construction from its inception. It is an artificial surface of small mirrors crafted onto a ball that, in most cases, is hollow. The mirror ball unites two basic geometric forms, the sphere and the square: Most mirror balls are covered with small, square mirrors applied in a very tight, even grid that mimics longitude and latitude lines. Through these squares, the ball forfeits its smooth

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Figure 14.1  Cover of a brochure for Woeste’s Myriad Reflector, “World's Most Novel Lighting Effect,” c. 1920. Image from a blog in Kay Corney’s honor, the granddaughter of the inventor

surface and its ability to roll evenly. Instead, it takes on a crystalline surface structure, cutting its mirrored surroundings into tiny segments of light and color. Hung from the middle of the ceiling of predominantly closed, windowless and, therefore, dark rooms or halls and revolving around its own axis, the mirror ball resembles a globe or a planet. It can also replace other lighting devices such as lamps or chandeliers that, in combination with shiny metals, crystals, and mirrors, can

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produce similar effects to the mirror ball. The play of light is generated by a more or less complex lighting system focused directly at the revolving ball; if there are several balls in one space the light reflections are sent back and forth between them. The effect conveys the impression that we are in the midst of a system of blinking stars, looking at a sparkling globe that sends out myriad reflections into the room or—in a figurative sense—into the universe. This so obviously artificial, technical, and extremely fleeting glitter effect clearly associates the disco ball with “cheap,” mass entertainment. Its shine does not connote durability and value, as with precious stones or expensive chandeliers. Instead, the disco ball can be aligned with “the alleged instability and superficiality of postmodern culture, yet signifies technological modernity” (Maffei and Fisher 2013: 231). The disco ball’s glitter, then, makes apparent the unstable and constantly shifting nature of shine, exaggerating and exploiting it to its full advantage.

The Mirror Ball as Entertainment Prop As mentioned above, the history of the mirror ball is much older than we suspect. Rather than being a product of the 1970s, it surfaces in the United States around 1910, perhaps even earlier. By the 1920s, it had become an integral part of the entertainment industry on both sides of the Atlantic: Its appearance in 1920s German movies, such as Walther Ruttman’s Berlin-Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin-Symphony of a Metropolis) from 1927 or Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) from 1929/1930, provides evidence that the mirror ball had, by then, become part of Weimar Modernity. In Ruttman’s essayistic film about a day in Berlin, it appears in the context of a dance scene and is shown as a physical object in the room. In Der Blaue Engel, we never see the ball, but its light reflects glitter on the stage where the femme fatale Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich, performs. The mirror ball appears as a fixture of night life and dance culture and is used as such in German films of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Große Freiheit Nr. 7 (1943) and Wasser für Canitoga (1939), as well as in American movies of the 1950s, such as the classic Some Like It Hot (1959). Here, similar to Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe sings under the rotating mirror ball of a glittering night club in 1920s Chicago. It is also in the 1920s that The Illustrated News continues to marvel at the new invention in an article featuring a picture of a mirror ball sending out beams of light into the dark and a description of the novel effect: No, this is not a photograph of the heavens, the Milky Way, or a new constellation. It was made at a dance palace in Dayton Ohio. Two spotlights directed on the ball are refracted into thousand smaller beams by small mirrors all over the surface of the sphere. As the ball turns, these tiny varicolored beams produce a sort of “dizzy” effect as the shafts of light move slowly in all directions on the walls, ceiling and floor of the hall. (Anonymous 1921)

By 1921, then, the mirror ball was becoming part of modern mass entertainment in the United States and what Janet Ward has described as “electric modernity” (Ward 2001, 101–4).4 This was equally true in Germany, where mirror balls were a feature

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of the luxurious and modern interior decoration scheme of the “Residenz-Casino,” or “Resi,” a large popular cafe and dance hall in 1920s Berlin. The glittering balls were advertised as “Resi-Konfetti-Lichtkugel” and were one of its main attractions. These mirror balls were not only able to rotate, they were also able to open and reveal a small fountain of water. As one contemporary described the atmosphere of the “Resi,” “At sun down the light subsides and flares up again to become glittering bright. Thousands of mirrors reflect the light and sometimes the whole room becomes dark. It is then that small flecks of colored light move over the dancing crowd, like burning confetti” (Moreck [1931] 1987: 191, my translation). In addition to this impressive light show, the “Resi” also featured telephones at every table and a pneumatic post system with which visitors could contact each other and send small things such as chocolates and cigarettes (Knud 1992: 123). Insofar, the mirror ball must be seen as part of an overall shift in modern evening entertainment that turned dining out and dancing into a technological event at which club goers interacted with one another in the midst of and even by means of the technologies surrounding them. Judging from a photograph taken of the “Resi” in the 1950s, the mirror ball survived the Second World War, at least physically, and was still hanging in the midst of the Resi’s main dining and dance hall (Knud 1992: 126). However, the sedate mood of the 1950s hall pictured here is a far cry from the hot and glittering disco ambience associated with the mirror ball of the 1970s. The mirror ball was a central element of 1970s New York nightlife, featured in the interior decoration of private clubs like David Mancuso’s “The Loft” or Nick and Joe Siano’s “The Gallery.” In both venues, it was surrounded by colored balloons that covered the ceiling to create an atmosphere of improvised festivity more akin to a private party than an official club (Lawrence 2004: 136; Lawrence 2018: 90). According to Tim Lawrence, all other mirrors in the Loft were removed to maintain the dancers’ focus on the group experience. As the only mirrored object in Mancuso’s Loft, the disco ball was turned on “at the height of the party to give a hint of the endless possibilities of a different world” (Lawrence 2018: 91). For Lawrence, these venues stand for disco as an alternative dance movement with roots in gay and Afro-American subculture (Poschardt 1995: 134–9; Echols 2010: 1–38 and 39–70), its values of interaction and its communal experience before its commercialization in the late 1970s. According to Alice Echols “gay men were among the genre’s first and most legendary deejays, its earliest audience, and at the height of glitter ball mania practically ran the industry” (Echols 2010: 40). Constituting the dance floor as a place of encounter rather than individual performance, the disco ball gave these alternative venues an ambience of “outer space.” As Tom Smucker depicts the disco wave, these clubs “created a new space for public movement without having to revive a new version of counterculture” (Smucker [1976] 1980: 434). It was “optimistic and positive” and “unlike some earlier manifestations of the superficial— Andy Warhol for example—disco reduced everything to surface without elitist irony” (Smucker [1976] 1980: 433). The disco ball’s glitter, its simple technology, and room-encompassing light effects were the perfect match for a way of dancing that was boosted by LSD and other drugs and aimed at “a communal music experience” (Lawrence 2018: 91). In this way, the use of the disco ball in the early 1970s encourages a sense of community and togetherness while at the same time implying an open and

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receptive space that is connected not only to the actual dancing venue, but to the universe at large, possibly creating an alternative world. In contrast to a spot light that singles out the performer in it, the mirror ball has the ability to spread small specs of light evenly throughout the room. Thus, in accordance with the heterotopic space of early club life, the glittering light effects of the disco ball can be called inclusive, offering a dance experience for many and not singling out any dancer in particular. The disco ball shines for “everybody,” so to speak, and through its evenly distributed, moving light pattern, it joins together all isolated dancers on the dance floor in “one” universal dance experience. However, it is not the use of the mirror ball in private clubs that transformed it into a universal sign for dancing and clubbing. What made the mirror ball stand for disco and club culture is most certainly the movie Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, Paramount, USA 1977), featuring a young John Travolta, who reveals himself to be a very gifted dancer. In the central dance scenes of the movie, the disco ball glitters above Travolta’s head and practically crowns his confident and sexy dance performances. The disco ball is integrated into a colorful light show that is dominated by an illuminated floor whose tiles flash in blue, red, and yellow in sync with the rhythm of the music. It is the disco ball, however, that has since been singled out as the visual symbol for “disco” and, as such, was detached from its beginnings in the 1920s. One of the most widely circulated film stills of Saturday Night Fever featured in the poster advertisements for the movie is of Travolta practically touching the disco ball with his stretched-out arm. The movie turned the disco ball into a staple of dance culture, a ubiquitous and international sign for nightlife and “party” that can sparkle in commercial clubs, as much as in private homes. While light technology has undergone significant development and the use of neon, laser, and LED lighting, among others, is wide spread, the disco ball and its relatively simple technique of reflecting light remains a general cipher for club life (Bell 2015: 293). In a twenty-first-century culture that depends heavily on short-lived musical trends, the disco ball paradoxically projects a certain stability and continuity that nostalgically connects all currently developing and future music and dance styles with their roots in 1960s and 1970s club culture—and, as we have seen, even with the first mass entertainment of the 1920s. Now associated mainly with the commercialized disco wave of the 1970s, the mirror ball is part of and sign for mainstream pop music and dance culture. On the other hand, it connects the main stream with its subcultural and historical roots, signaling a party that will never end. It comes as no surprise, then, that the disco ball has appeared on numerous LP covers, including those of Neil Young, the Pet Shop Boys, or Justin Timberlake. Whereas the cover of Neil Young’s album “Mirror Ball” from 1995 combines the disco ball with an image of a dense concert crowd, the cover of the Pet Shop Boys’ single “Thursday” from 2013 shows the mirror ball substituting for the head of a man clad in a thin silver jacket. On the cover of his album “Futuresex/Lovesounds” (2006), we see Justin Timberlake crushing a disco ball with the heel of his shoe. Vastly enlarged, the mirror ball has been used as a stage prop for shows by performers including Pink Floyd, U2, and Madonna, who produced a two-ton mirror ball embellished with a myriad of glass crystals for her “Confessions Tour” in 2006. It seems that the disco ball is a “sign” accessible not only to dance music and its changing styles, but to a

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variety of music genres. It can be cited ironically, as in the case of Neil Young’s classic rock album. It can also be used to declare the will to supersede disco music, as in the case of Justin Timberlake, or it can imply complete dedication to the genre of pop, as in the case of the Pet Shop Boys. As stage prop, the glittering disco ball not only functions as an eye-catcher but connects stage and auditorium, shooting light back and forth between the two, transforming both into one large discotheque. In all cases, the disco ball functions as a reference to a shared past that, akin to what Tom Holert and Heike Munder have called the “glamor of community” (Holert and Munder 2004: 18), signifies a continuous body of dancers and an experience of celebration, even ecstasy, albeit to completely different rhythms and sounds.

The Mirror Ball as Art Object The inclusion, citation, appropriation, or deformation of the disco ball in the fine arts is part of what Tom Holert has coined a “reciprocal vampirism” of the world of glamor and pop culture and the fine arts (Holert 2004: 67). As he aptly notes, this world of glamor “has become second nature to art” (Holert 2004: 69). With the advent of pop art, particularly the work of Andy Warhol, glamorous objects and style have been increasingly incorporated into artistic strategies and vice versa. Since most of the works I discuss here reference the mirror ball as a symbol for “disco” and club culture starting in the 1970s, they also allude to a time when the world of glamor, and entertainment was no longer the elusive sphere of stars but was becoming more and more accessible and “available even for counter-glamorous movements” (Holert 2004: 79). While the use of the disco ball in the first disco spaces such as Mancuno’s Loft might be regarded as a camp, a citation of the modern glamor industry of the 1920s and 1930s, the 1970s disco ball is associated with mass entertainment and cheap “glamour for all,” with little connection to an elitist culture of stars, wealth, and power. What is more, the disco wave of the late 1970s is generally characterized as a fully compromised culture, depoliticized and exploited by the music and entertainment industry (Faulstich 1986: 134–5). Its aesthetics are typically described by contemporary critics as a conglomeration of stylized and fetishized surfaces for which the mirror ball has become the obvious sign (Naumann and Penth 1978: 123–31). Seen in the light of a Marxist critique of consumer fetishism, disco fascinates us and thrives on its shininess, its fake nobility, its shallowness and apparent safeness, in short, because of its commodity character (Naumann and Penth 1978). Nevertheless, similar to more recent phenomena, such as techno culture or rave, disco is about “ecstasy: a place where the DJ choreographed music and lighting to manipulate the mood on the dance floor until everyone was lost in movement […] By design, disco was merely a soundtrack for communal dance ecstasy” (Smucker [1976] 1980: 425). It is this, its main attraction, that has made disco so appealing for its resuscitation and musical appropriation. The late resurgence and pervasiveness of disco has been attributed to the idea that disco music “can be played and listened to uncritically and it can be indulged in by wouldbe hipsters through the self-protective stance of irony. Above all it is safe music that

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crosses generational and racial lines in ways that much rock and rap don’t” (Echols 2010: 239). As a symbol of commercial dance music and club culture, the disco ball holds an ambiguous position as a sign with little critical potential and the promise of a communal experience that is not part of everyday life, which is potentially accessible and still sellable to all. The art world has taken up the disco ball in three different ways: Firstly, artists have referenced the light effects of the mirror ball and used them in varying ways in installations employing mirrors and light, or both, playing on or highlighting the ball’s function as glittering globe and its power to create “a universe” of communal dancing or experience of space, as such. Secondly, they have enlarged or distorted the shape or grid of the mirror ball itself, enhancing, changing, or minimizing its original light effects to question its promise of an enduring communal dance culture or even alternative universe. Thirdly, they have left the disco ball intact and featured it specifically as an object of club culture and its social structures of inclusion and exclusion.5 Naturally, these approaches can intersect. What unites the installations and kinetic sculptures discussed below is their reference to the mirror ball’s shininess, its flickering light effects, and its grid surface structure or the negation of it. Let us begin with the first category.

The Universe: Spheres of Infinity and Distraction The mirror ball and related objects, such as light balls, first appear on the art scene in the wake of the appropriation strategies of 1960s pop art and the interest of Fluxus in kinetic objects. In Germany, Otto Piene produced a “Hängende Lichtkugel” in 1972 (hanging light ball) that emits rays of light through a regular grid of small holes. Although it does not use mirrors, this ball produces a similar effect to the disco ball in as much as it creates a light pattern that encompasses the entire room and its visitors. A similar “all-over” effect is achieved by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity” installations, which she began developing in 1965 with “Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field.” Today, Kusama’s Infinity Installations, such as “Fireflies with water” from 2000, sometimes include small lights and full-length mirrors, while others use chandeliers or polished silver balls. All of them interpolate the viewer in an endless universe of dotted, sparkling light. While these works reference the mirror ball’s all-over light reflection, the mirror balls by Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian play on the mirror ball’s grid surface structure (Figure 14.2). Strictly speaking, Farmanfarmaian’s mirror balls are sculptures and are also presented as such: They are neither suspended from the ceiling nor do they rotate. Lying on white pedestals, the viewer can look at the intricate and complicated patterns of small glass pieces that neatly mesh together. Though Farmanfarmaian was living and working in New York in the 1950s and 1960s and was a colleague and friend of Andy Warhol, who owned one of her mirror balls, Farmanfarmaian’s works are not associated with the disco ball and its use in dance clubs. Instead, Suzanne Cotter, the curator of Farmanfarmaian’s last retrospective, insists that

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Figure 14.2  Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mirror Ball, c. 1974, mirror on plaster ball, 19 × 19 × 19 cm. Collection of Nima Isham, Clyde Park, Montana © Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. © Photo: Filipe Braga. © Fundação de Serralves–Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal

their spherical form, which in Islamic thought alludes to the archetypal shape of the circle and symbolizes the lightness and mobility of the spirit, was inspired by the sight of young children playing soccer on the street of Tehran. Using similar soccer balls as a physical support, [Farmanfarmaian] exploited their

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portability and lightness in experiments in surface composition and the associated dematerializing effect of reflected colour and light. (Cotter 2015: 23)

Nevertheless, a photograph taken by John Naar, first published in the New York Herald Tribune magazine in August 1965, shows a round object covered in small mirrors and resembling Farmanfarmaian’s glittering balls on the ground in front of Warhol’s infamous red couch. Thus, complementing the shiny surfaces of his aluminum-covered factory, this object was part of Warhol’s alternative production of queer glamor and shine. With the help of Iranian glass cutters, Farmanfarmaian originally produced a large number of these mirror balls, experimenting with different geometric patterns and colors to transform “any solidity of structure into a reverberating field of light” (Cotter 2015: 27). Unfortunately, only a few of these works have survived. One photograph taken in Teheran in 1975 shows Farmanfarmaian with a selection of mirror balls lying on the floor in front of her, another shows the artist juggling them, throwing the mirror balls up into the air. This playful gesture and the suspension of the balls in mid-air subvert the mirror balls’ solidity and weight, further enhancing our impression of them as objects of pure “light.” Similarly weightless are the installations of Japanese artist Mina Shirakura, who works with small, irregular pieces of mirror that are suspended from the ceiling, loosely forming big, see-through spheres. Entitled “Correspondence—Sphere” (2008), the mirrors reflect the lights very much the same way as the mirror ball. However, the movement of light is not achieved by rotation but by the slight stirring of the suspended mirror fragments. Another artist working with spheres that reference the mirror ball is Olafur Eliasson. His “Chandeliers,” made for the Copenhagen Opera House in 2006, consists of an intricate glass prism structure that refracts and reflects the light, appearing to consist only of dematerialized, infinite shiny light reflections. All of these examples share with the mirror ball its reference to the universe and its appearance as a heavenly body, a star that consists of pure energy and sends out its rays of light into the universe. What unites these complex works with the simple mirror ball is shine’s ability to dematerialize the object’s surface and materiality to achieve a limitless sphere of pure light. Sending out scattered light into space, these works reference the effects of the disco ball as described in one of the first disco books published in 1978: “Wheels of colored lights spray color into space, and a thousand facets of swirling mirror spheres break the rays of light and plunge the dancers into entire galaxies of stars” (Hanson 1978: 7, my translation). But not all works allude to the same experience: Eliason’s work references the reflected shine of the disco ball as part of a culture of opulence and distraction, whereas Shirakura reduces light effects to create an atmosphere of diminishment and concentration.

Glitter Globe: Appropriated, Deformed, and Alive Whereas the works in the first category reference the mirror ball’s light effects and emphasize the dematerializing of the ball through shine and light reflection, the works in the second category underscore the materiality of the mirror ball through

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appropriation, enlargement, or deformation. For example, John Armleder’s installation of six large disco balls entitled “Universal Mirror Balls,” first installed in 1996 and later on the occasion of his retrospective at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University in 2006, is a ready-made in the spirit of Duchampian appropriation and decontextualization and has been installed in various ways. By hanging several of them in orderly fashion in two rows close to each other in the atrium of the museum above a small water pool, the disco balls become aesthetic objects in themselves. Equipped with rotating motors, they turn the museum or gallery into a dance club, further eroding the distinction between art object and pop culture commodity, between club and museum (Fyfe 2008: 106). In later installations, such as the one at Frankfurt’s Schirn Gallery in 2019, Armleder hung twenty disco balls in the gallery’s rotunda, covering all surrounding glass with silver foil to create an endless universe of mirrored disco balls. Transferring the mirror ball into the museum is not the only strategy that works, recreates, and plays on the mirror ball’s materiality and functions. Going well beyond appropriation, Geerten Verheus has produced several variations of the mirror ball, using small rubber plates instead of mirrors (Plate 32). Verheus not only reduces the light reflection, he also deflates the ball, producing a crumbled, slightly dull-looking object that has definitely lost its shine and glamor. Looking like a heavily used punching ball, the deformed mirror ball seems to signal the final end of disco. The subtle sheen of the black almost matte rubber squares conjures up other musical genres, like grunge or hard rock, that leave the easy, danceable tunes and glitzy surfaces of disco behind. Titled “Pit, The” (2009), Verhues’s sculpture references the opposites of heavenly bodies or stars. Instead, this mirror ball seems to have risen up from far below, dragging dirt, darkness, and even death up into the air. Two other versions (one entitled “Midnight Sun” from 2005) of Verhues’s mirror ball leave the shape of the ball intact and replace the mirrors with black glass or black rubber. These dark mirror balls resemble the “Death Star” from the Star Wars films, with its black, almost matte impenetrable surface. As such, they appear to be more of a threat than a party device. With the glitter effect taken away and replaced by a soft black sheen, the disco ball has turned into a looming almost oppressive object. Dancing does not seem to be an option here—all kinetic light effects are lost, as is the dancing crowd beneath it. Most other appropriations of the disco ball have played with its shape, but not its surface. For example, by attaching mirror squares to the mixing drum of a huge cement mixer truck, Benedetto Buffelino creates a movable and rotating “disco ball” that can be set up in the street, transforming whole town squares into dance spots. Instead of enlarging the disco ball and transferring it into the public realm, the Dutch design collective Rotganzen has produced melting disco balls that seem to have lost their shape “dripping” over cabinets or appear to dissolve on the floor. The works of both Verheus and Rotganzen play with the mirror balls seemingly perfect, gridlike, orderly and shiny shape and surface, implying that the durability, stability, and the apparent shiny surface structure of the disco ball is not what it seems. Hence, change, alteration, transformation, and even decay can equally apply to this symbol of seemingly everlasting party culture as in Hans-Jörg Mayer’s portrait series of disco balls dating from around 2017 to 2019 that show individual mirror balls in paint or water colors (Plate 33). Named after Munich discotheques of the 1980s, such as

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“Lipstick” or “Parkcafé,” and sketchily executed, these disco balls dissolve and drip paint, betraying the medium of their execution. Their grid structures, as well as their hard, mirrored surface, seem to soften and liquefy. In turn, their ability to sparkle is muted, so that they appear more like living organisms, sweating or melting away, rather than technological devices. As a series wherein each is named uniquely, Mayer’s disco balls have the air of portraits that show an individual disco ball and its surroundings, though no clear image can be made out in the reflection of their surfaces. Hence, Mayer shows the disco ball’s sparkle to be fully involved and coming to life (or disappearing) in the space that surrounds it. In this sense, the disco ball is a living organism, breathing and sweating like the dancers themselves, and not just the vehicle for bringing “life” to the swinging crowd.

Under the Disco Ball: Symbol of Changing Club Life The third category of works references the disco ball as a cipher for club life: David Allen’s installation “The crowd waits outside” (Figure 14.3) features the disco ball as a symbol for the inclusion or exclusion in club life. Who gets in and who does not? Who is part of the crowd dancing underneath the disco ball? It was installed in a small shop window in Berlin in 2012 and comprises two mirror balls and strobe spots mounted onto microphone stands. The mirror ball structure works [sic] as a mute rendering of a distorted disco beat. One mirror ball is set to rotate “the wrong way” and hence “mirror” the other in more than one manner. The strobe lights are marginally out of sync with one another, flashing at slightly different rates. The number of beats per minute reference electronic dance music genres such as Dubstep and Grime. (Dave Allen, The Crowd Waits Outside 2012)

Lines of text reading “The crowd waits outside / shuffling their feet / until suddenly the club / opens majestically / The doorway becomes the image” are applied on the rear wall with spray paint. Metaphorically speaking, the balls “dance” with each other. As the only club goers that glitter in this make shift environment, there is no possibility of a dancing crowd beneath. The disco balls replace them. The lines of text are a reference to the selection process of club entry policy, casting a sober light on the reality of clubbing and calling into question the possibility of a communal experience through dancing. The dancing crowd is equally invisible in Wolfgang Tillmans’s single channel video installation “Lights (Body)” from 2000 to 2002 (Plates 34 and 35). The camera concentrates solely on the light show within the club, and we hear faint rhythmic music in the background. The disco ball briefly emerges from the depths of the club and is shown to be part of the lighting system on which Tillmans’s video focuses. Rather than a dancing crowd, Tillmans shows us dancing lights that move to the techno-track rhythm. More prominent than the disco ball are the actual automated moving lights that seem to have a life and body of their own. The disco ball, on the other hand, comes into view only as an apparition in the distance. Its surface appears to be matte rather than crystalline

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Figure 14.3  Dave Allen, The Crowd Waits Outside, 2012, mirrorballs, electrical motors, mic stands, strobe lights and spray paint. © Dave Allen

and therefore does not reflect the lights, but shimmers only slightly. Here, the disco ball has clearly given way to a more dynamic and complex light show. In Tillmans’s vision, the “days of disco” while not completely gone, have clearly been superseded by novel lighting systems and, hence, new forms of club culture. If in Tillmans’s work, the disco ball is the symbol for a nostalgic, slightly faded past, Bernhard Martin’s installation “Single Disco (Whisperclub)” from 1999 (Figure 14.4) gives us the opportunity to immerse ourselves

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Figure 14.4  Bernhard Martin, Single Disco (Whisperclub), 1999, mixed media

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directly in that disco of the past. By converting a simple white wardrobe with black walls, a music system, speakers, a disco ball, and a spotlight, as well as colored lights as a floor, he creates a discotheque for one person only and therefore negates the function of the disco ball to unite a dancing crowd by throwing its shimmering reflections all over them. The rotating disco ball hangs in one corner of Martin’s “Single disco” to complete the party universe for the solitary disco goer. In this claustrophobic cupboard, however, the mirror ball’s moving light reflections can only hint at endless space and consequently become a meager imitation of what is normally experienced as expansive and all-encompassing. Created in 1999, Martin’s “Single Disco (Whisperclub)” takes up the aesthetics of Saturday Night Fever with its decorative circles applied to the wall and their strong colors of yellow, blue, and red repeated in the floor lights. These floor lights resemble the ones John Travolta danced on, making the unequivocal reference to 1970s dance culture as it was mainstreamed and commercialized by Saturday Night Fever. The emphasis here is not on disco as a communal experience but of disco as a form of individual performance, even isolation. All three of these artists reference the disco ball, albeit with different emphasis, as an object that stands for ongoing club culture, its history and social formation, as well as its rules. The disco ball’s scattered flecks of shine are either muted, as in Tillmans’s work, rotating the “wrong way,” as in Allen’s installation, or glinting for just one lonely dancer, as in Martin’s cupboard disco. All three works show that the mirror ball’s moving, shiny beams do not necessarily keep the promise of communal dance experiences through an ever-lasting and all-encompassing phenomenon of commercialized mass entertainment but are subject to changing social and historical conditions.

Universal Glitter The mirror ball’s roots in mass entertainment of the 1920s, its simple technique and recognizable effect, as well as its connection to the 1970s disco wave make it a nostalgic, yet ever renewable modern and postmodern shine machine that signals stability as much as it promises transformation, community, and moments of the extraordinary. Mirror balls have radiated above dancers’ heads who were “enjoying a glittering material world” (Maffei and Fisher 2013: 235) since the 1920s. As Reyner Banham put it so provocatively in 1966, “This love of glitter is not just a vulgar dream of the silly and the underprivileged” (Banham 1974: 156) but, as he goes on to argue, the love of shine is rooted in the modernist designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Breuer, satisfying “such desires of man as universal glitter” (Banham 1974). Following this line of argument, the mirror ball is part of a democratization of shine that coincides with the advent of modern design, satisfying the general demand for “more light” (Banham 1974) and consumption for all. By working with the mirror balls ability to conjure up a feeling of infinity and distraction, by appropriating it and deforming its surface to call into question its promise of never-ending club nights, or by examining the social and historical changes it has undergone, the works discussed here underscore the disco ball’s ability to satisfy that universal need for glitter while, at

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the same time, showing its historical contingency and (unkept) promises of communal and ecstatic experience.

Notes 1 Notwithstanding, there are indications that mirror balls were in use well before this patent. For example, there exists a postcard available through the Milwaukee Historical Society featuring a mirror ball on a hospital veranda or “sun parlor” in Milwaukee in 1912. Here, the mirror ball is suspended from the wooden ceiling hovering above sets of easy chairs. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM401 2 For instance, it has not been established which firm produced mirror balls for the European market in the 1920s. 3 The term “disco ball” is in use for the mirror ball since circa the late 1970s. I will use both synonymously. 4 The mirror ball seems not to have been of interest to the artist of the avant-garde working with light in the 1920s and 1930s such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others. See Hoorman (2003) and Gärtner, Hemken, and Schierz (2009). 5 There are probably as many artworks featuring disco balls as there are mirrors on it. I have thus limited my discussion here to a small selection.

References Banham, R. (1974), “All That Glitters Is Not Stainless,” in R. Banham (ed.), The Aspen Papers. Twenty Years of Design Theory from the International Conference in Aspen, London: Pall Mall Press, 155–60. Bell, P. (2015), “Dionysisch? Clubkultur. Rezeption und Historismen in der Disco,” Marbuger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaften, Vol. 45: 291–302. Berlin, E. (2015), “The Myriad Reflector. The Early, Forgotten Disco-Ball,” Mental Floss, May 21. Available online: http://mentalfloss.com/article/64276/myriad-reflector-earlyforgotten-disco-ball (accessed September 25, 2019). Cotter, S. (2015), “Begin, Begin Again. Progression of an Artist,” in S. Cotter (ed.), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. Infinite Possibility: Mirror Works and Drawings 1974– 2014, Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 17–30. “Dave Allen: The Crowd Waits Outside” (2012), dieraum. Available online: http://www. dieraum.net/index.php?/exhibitions/2012-0008-dave-allen/ (accessed September 25, 2019). Echols, A. (2010), Hot Stuff. Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, New York: W. W. Norton. Faulstich, W. (1986), Zwischen Glitter und Punk Teil III 1972–1982, ser, Tübinger Vorlesungen zur Rockgeschichte, Rottenburg-Oberndorf: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Fyfe, J. (2008), “John Armleder: Slightly Transformed or Used Verbatim,” Art in America, February: 106–10. Gärtner, U., K. Hemken and K. Schierz, eds. (2009), Kunst Licht Spiele. Lichtästhetik der klassischen Avantgarde, Bielefeld: Kerber. Hanson, K. (1978), Disco Fieber. Alles über die Disco-Welle, München: Heyne.

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Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine

Holert, T. (2004), “Silver Cube,” in T. Holert and H. Munder (eds.), The Future Has a Silver Lining. Genealogies of Glamour, Zürich: Migros Museum, 65–81. Holert, T. and H. Munder (2004), “Glamour-Genealogies. An Introduction,” in T. Holert and H. Munder (eds.), The Future Has a Silver Lining. Genealogies of Glamour, Zürich: Migros Museum, 17–35. Hoormann, A. (2003), Lichtspiele. Zur Medienreflexion der Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Knud, W. (1992), Tanzdielen und Vergnügungspaläste. Berliner Nachtleben in den dreissiger und vierziger Jahren von der Friedrichstrasse bis Berlin W. vom Moka Efti bis zum Delphi, Berlin: Edition Hentrich. Lawrence, T. (2004), Loves Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979, Durham: Duke University Press. Lawrence, T. (2018), “Dance Floor Transformation: Gegenkultur, Postindustrialismus und neue Raumlandschaften im New York der 1970er und frühen 1980er Jahre,” in M. Kries, C. Rossi and J. Eisenbrand (eds.), Night Fever: Architektur und Design in der Clubkultur von 1960 bis heute, Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 88–96. Maffei, N. and T. Fisher (2013), “Historicizing Shininess in Design: Finding Meaning in an unstable Phenomenon,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 26, No. 1: 231–40. Moreck, C. ([1931] 1987), Führer durch das lasterhafte Berlin, facsimile of the first edition, Dresden: Edition Divan. Naumann, M. and B. Penth (1978), “Heute Nacht ist meine Zukunft,” Links, Vol. 100: 22–3. Poschardt, U. (1995), DJ Culture, Hamburg: Rogner und Bernhardt. “Produce Novel Lighting Effect in Hall” (1921), Illustrated News, Vol. 35: 693. Smucker, T. ([1976] 1980), “Disco,” in J. Miller (ed.), The Rolling Stone. Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, New York: Random House, 425–34. Ward, J. (2001), Weimar Surfaces. Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Index abstract expressionism 176, 188, 192–3, 197, 207, 209, 215 Adorno, Theodor W. 115, 210 Form of the Phonograph Record, The 115 Ali, Muhammad 63, 64 Allen, Dave 248, 250 Crowd Waits Outside, The 247, 248 Allen, David 247 Altenloh, Emilie 49 aluminum 13–15, 25, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 129, 169, 170, 172, 208, 214, 215, 221, 245 foil 15, 169, 170, 172 Anderson, Christy 106 Andrews, Oliver 223, 224, 227 Living Materials 227 Angell, Callie 178 Screen Tests 178–9 Anger, Kenneth 229, 230 Kustom Kar Kommandos 229 anthropomorphism 187, 188, 200, 203 n.5 Arden, Elizabeth 60, 146 Armleder, John 246 Art Deco interiors 124, 127, 133, 135, 136, 174, 176 asphalt 42, 46, 48 Atlas, Charles (Because We Must) 14, 155–8, 166–7 aurora borealis 141, 142, 151, 152 n.3 Austin, Everett 141 Babuscio, Jack 133 Badham, John (Saturday Night Fever) 16, 241, 250 Baker, Josephine 23, 59 Baldessari, John 223 Ballard, J. G. 200, 203 n.8 Banham, Reyner 91, 226 Barbier, George (Venise) 83 baroque 14, 155, 156–60, 165, 166, 226

Barr, Alfred H. Jr. 136, 141 Barris, George 226 Barthes, Roland 6, 7 Battcock, Gregory 198, 204 n.17 Baum, Frank L. (Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The) 139 Baxter, Warner 60 Beasley, Theotis 64, 66 n.9 Beaton, Cecil 132–4, 141, 145, 166 Bright Young Things, The 131–2, 133 Stephen Tennant 134 Symphony of Silver 132 Beery, Pauline G. (Stuff) 6 Bell, Marie 112 Bengston, Billy Al 221–3, 226, 227 Mesquite Western Series 221, 222 Benjamin, Walter 39, 133, 176, 210 Bennett, Joan 3, 60 Berg, Gretchen 169, 176 Berlewi, Henryk 225 Berliner, Emile 13, 109 gramophone record 109, 112–16, 118 n.18 Bitzer, G. W. (Interior New York Subway) 37–9 black matte 12, 55–9, 64, 65, 65 n.3 blackness 56–9, 64, 65 Blackwell, Tom 222 blurred 41, 43, 79, 106–7, 136, 171, 178, 217 Bohr, Niels 152 n.4 Bonney, Thérèse 128–30 Aluminum Screen. Rectangular Vase. Marple Table with a Deep- Sea-Blue Green Glass Top 130 Bar on Studio Balcony of the Apartment of the Artist Tamara de Lempicka, Rue Méchain 129 Smoking Corner of Apartment of Tamara de Lempicka, Artist, 7, Rue Méchain 128

254

Index

Bourke-White, Margaret Pierce Arrow 25, 26, 33–4 Story of Steel 25 Bousquet, Jacques 201, 204 n.20 Bowery, Leigh 14, 15, 155–67, 167 n.1. see also Atlas, Charles (Because We Must) Bowery, Nicola (Bateman) 159, 161, 166, 167 Boy-Ed, Ida 5 Glanz 5, 17 n.2 Brancusi, Constantin 227, 229, 230 brightness 1, 13, 38, 42, 93, 95–6 brilliance 7, 12, 24, 73, 75, 76, 98, 111, 115, 124, 219, 220, 226, 229 Brown, Elspeth H. 146 Brown, Judith (Glamour in Six Dimensions) 146 Brown, Lew (Shine) 63 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 156–7, 166 Bufalino, Benedetto 246 Burnham, Jack 191 capitalism 14, 15, 115, 135, 136, 187, 198 Cave, Nick 10 cellophane 15, 145, 146, 151, 217 celluloid 39–40, 45, 109, 145 Cennini, Cennino d’Andrea 108, 117 n.5 Libro dell’ Arte 108 Chamberlain, John 223 Charbonnier, Pierre 141 Cheng, Anne Anlin 9, 59 Chevreul, Michel-Eugène 71 Chicago, Judy 16, 219–20 Car Hood 219, 221–3, 231 Dinner Party 231, 232 hypermasculine gloss 220–3 Iridescent Domes #2 224, 226 Through the Flower. My Struggle as a Woman Artist 221 Clark, Michael 14, 155, 160–3, 167 n.2 New Puritans 160 Clifford, James 75 Cockettes, The 9–10 Colette 76–7, 79 Connor, Steven 131 Coplans, John 209, 220, 227 cosmic communities 147–50

light 140–3 skin 143–7 Crumb, Robert (Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, The) 118 n.19 crystal 4, 14, 15, 129, 141–2, 151, 152 n.10, 159, 185–6, 188, 195–7, 200, 202, 238, 241 Cubitt, Sean 106 Cummings, Irving 60 Vogues of 1938 60–2, 66 n.6 Cunningham, Merce (Blue Studio (1976)) 163 Dabney, Ford (Shine) 63 Daston, Lorraine 106 Davis, Miles (In A Silent Way) 63–4 Delaunay, Sonia 77 Delluc, Louis 38 de Marly, Diana 159 de Meyer, Baron 146 democratization 6–7, 11, 59, 136, 250 de Régnier, Marie 82 d’Houville, Gérard 82 Diaghilev, Sergei 141 diamond 3, 4, 7, 46, 48, 95, 148, 237 Dibbet, Jan 223 Dichter, Ernest 228, 229 Handbook of Consumer Motivations 228 Dietrich, Marlene 9, 30–1, 239 disco ball 16, 174, 180 n.5, 237, 239–3, 245, 246–50, 251 n.3 distraction and consumerism 45–9 micro-politics of 49–50 Döblin, Alfred (Berlin Alexanderplatz) 30 Dove, Heinrich Wilhelm 2 Dubost, Michel (L’Oiseau dans la lumière) 77–9 Dufy, Raoul 77, 84 Chevaux marinset Coquillages 84 lumière-couleur 77 Dunand, Jean 80 Dunlop, Anne 106 Dupont, Ewald André (Varieté) 42–7 Dyer, Richard (White) 63 Eaton, Natasha 4 Echols, Alice 240

Index Eddy, Don 222 Edis, Robert William 124, 125 Eisner, Lotte H. 44 Haunted Screen, The 44 Eliasson, Olafur 245 Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics 60, 147 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 230–1 Kursbuch 230 Erdal shoe polish 23 Erskine-Pullen, Mark 158 Factor, Max 60 Fanon, Frantz 56, 62 Farmanfarmaian, Monir Shahroudy (Mirror Ball) 243–5 Fauche, Hippolyte 107 Fejos, Paul (Lonesome) 40 Felix, Seymour 62 fetishistic scopophilia 45, 46, 50 n.6 Fisher, Tom 5 Fleming, Victor (Wizard of Oz, The) 139 flickering 1, 3, 10, 37, 40–2, 44, 83, 159, 243 Ford, Charles Henri 140–1, 143, 147, 148 Young and Evil, The 151 n.2 Fortuny, Mariano 12, 82 Frank, Jean-Michel 132 Franklin, Caryn 161–2 Franzen, Ulrich 7 Freud, Lucian 166, 167 Evening in the Studio 166 Freud, Sigmund 3 Freund, Karl 44 Fried, Michael 208, 217 n.2 Fröhlich, Gustav 46 Fuller, Loïe 77 Fusi, Lorenzo 165 Galliano, John 160 Garland, Judy 59 Gautier, Théophile 83 Gerowitz, Judy 219, 223 glamor 2, 6 artificial silk 29–34, 45 of community 242 and distraction 49 modern 126–35 photographic 135, 145 of reality 135

255

social 27 subjectivities of 8–10 types of 135–7 glare 1, 2, 5, 76, 179 glaring 1, 27, 40 glass 16, 23, 27, 41, 127, 132, 146, 148, 151, 158, 166, 191, 211, 224, 226, 241, 243, 245, 246 gleam 4, 9, 11, 13, 15, 23–5, 31, 89–93, 99–100 stainless steel 96–9 Steelmark and 95–8 glimmer 1–2, 12, 17 n.3, 126, 128, 132, 185, 202, 224 glinting 158–9 glittering 1, 5, 7, 9–10, 14, 15, 17 n.1, 23, 29, 38, 41, 42, 75, 76, 82–4, 86, 125, 126, 132, 139, 142, 146, 148, 151, 169, 171, 172, 174–7, 179, 185, 186, 192, 197, 202, 220, 230, 237, 239–3, 245–7, 250–1 glitz 56, 58, 172, 174–6, 237, 246 gloss 5–7, 11, 12, 23–5, 27, 29, 31–4, 58–9, 111, 129, 172, 174, 195, 209, 212 aesthetics 24–5 of artificial silk 29–34 automobiles 25–9 hypermasculine 220–3 working up a shine 23–4 glossiness 15–16, 60 glow 27, 40, 41, 46, 77, 79, 112, 116, 131, 145, 151 Goings, Ralph (Airstream) 216 gold 1, 3–5, 14, 23, 24, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 108, 125, 132–3 Goldsmith, K. 117 n.9 Golub, L. 202 n.1 Goode, Joe 221 Goodwin, Charles 58 Gordon, Kim 12, 53–6, 64 Murdered Out 12, 53–6 Gorska, Adrienne 127 Granata, Francesca 167 Greenberg, Clement 140, 208–11, 213 American Type Painting 208 Avantgarde and Kitsch 208 Gronberg, Tag 127 Grune, Karl (Die Straße) 41 Gundle, Stephen 135

256

Index

Gunning, Tom 165 Guy, Edmonde 24 Halberstam, Jack 151 Hamilton, Walter 125 Harney, Stefano (Undercommons, The: Fugitive Planning & Black Study) 151 Hatt, Michael 124 Hawkins, Matthew 158, 166 Heidegger, Martin 200 homosexuality 124, 176, 197, 200, 202 n.4 Hoormann, Anne 40 Hujar, Peter 165 Hurston, Zora Neale 63 illumination 11, 37, 39–41, 48, 76, 132, 159 Ingold, Tim 105, 106, 116 interior, modern. see modern interior iridescence 2, 3, 14, 79, 139, 146, 150–2 James, Edward 141, 150 Jameson, Fredric 220 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 116 Jannings, Emil 43 Jarman, Derek 106 Jay, Martin 155–6 jet-black 58–9 Jewell, Dick 165 jewelry 4, 5, 45, 46, 58, 109, 148, 150, 151 jewel 1, 3–4, 148, 150, 159 Johnson, Philip 136, 172 Jones, Caroline A. 170, 202 n.3, 203 n.15 Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist 170 Jones, Inigo 159 Judd, Donald 185, 192, 197, 203 n.9, 203 n.11, 209, 227, 229 Kállai, Ernst 32 Kapoor, Anish 64 Karantonis, Pamela 161 Kauffman, Craig 224 Kershner, Irvin (Empire Strikes Back, The (1980)) 163 Kettelhut, Erich 46 Keun, Irmgard 6, 8, 29, 45 Artificial Silk Girl, The 6, 8, 29–34, 45

Kirstein, Lincoln 141, 143, 150 Klein, Yves 64 Knaggs, Nelson S. 107, 110 Cleansing Stick Lack 110–11 Knelman, S. 118 n.21 Kochno, Boris 141 Kollar, François 112–15 Etudes Publicitaires pour “Magic Phono” 112, 114 Kooning, Willem de 188, 189, 208 Woman 188, 189 Kracauer, Siegfried 8–9, 11, 39–41, 43, 46, 48, 49 Analysis of a City Map 40 Cult of Distraction 50 Salaried Masses, The 9 Kubler, George (Shape of Time, The: Remarks on the History of Things) 200 Kusama, Yayoi 243 lac and shellac 105, 117 n.11 brilliance 115 cultural history and 107–9 gramophone records 112–16 maintenance and performativity 109–12 materiality and mobility 106–7 reflectivity 112, 115 Lacan, Jacques 3, 17 n.1, 148 lacquer 24, 25, 29, 39, 55, 80, 108, 117 n.7, 219, 220, 222–7 lamé 12, 71–7, 79–84, 86 displacement 75–86 genealogy and materiality 72–5 glittering 86 Lang, Fritz 45 Lawrence, Tim 240 Le, Corbusier 135–7, 250 Lefebvre, Henri 37 Lempicka, Tamara de 11, 14, 27–8, 124, 127, 131–2, 137 Self-Portrait in Green Bugatti 11, 27–8 Leonardo Da Vinci (Vitruvian Man) 143 Leslie, Esther 4, 116 Liquid Crystals 116 Lichtenstein, Roy 15, 211–14 Ice Cream Soda 214 Look Mickey! 213

Index light and color 1 electric light bulb 39, 42 refractions and reflections 38 sheer reflection of 3 technical reproduction 39–42 Linich, Billy 14–15, 170–2, 174–80, 180 n.1, 180 n.4, 180 n.9 Löbel, Sali 131, 135 Glamour and How to Achieve It 135 Lomonosov, Mikhail (Evening Reflection upon God’s Grandeur Prompted by the Great Northern Lights, An) 141 Louis, Morris (Silver Discs) 208 luminosity 12, 14, 71, 82, 95 luminous advertising 39, 41, 48 luster 6, 13, 17, 23–4, 58, 71, 73 Macaulary, Alastair 162 McCracken, John 16, 209, 227, 229 Mack, Cecil (Shine) 63 McLuhan, Marshall 191 Māgha (Tétrade) 107 Mallet-Stevens, Robert 127 Mancuso, David 240 Manet, Edouard (Bar at the Folies-Bergère, A) 176 Marcuse, Herbert 187, 197–8, 200, 204 n.17 Martin, Bernhard (Single Disco (Whisperclub)) 248–50 Marty, André E. 27 Mäschke, Friedrich 43 Masheck, Joseph 229 matte 12, 15, 16, 25, 53–60, 64–5, 65 n.2, 65 n.3, 83, 207–10, 215, 219, 225, 246, 247 Maugham, Syrie 132 Mayer, Hans-Jörg 246–7 May, Joe (Asphalt) 11, 45–9 Meikle, Jeffrey L. 93 Meraud, Tavi 2, 150, 151 metropolis 8, 11, 42, 76, 142, 176, 210 minimal art 188, 191, 203 n.5, 219, 227 mirror 3, 16, 33, 48, 50, 60, 92, 112, 112, 115, 132–3, 146, 157, 158, 165, 166, 170, 174, 176, 209, 215, 224, 237–47, 250 mirror ball 16, 178, 237–9

257

appropriation, enlargement, or deformation 245–7 art object 242–3 in club life 247–50 entertainment prop 239–42 infinity and distraction 243–5 universal glitter 250–1 Mizer, Bob 203 n.12 modern interior 123–4 glamor and 135–7 identities 126–35 precedents 124–6 modernism 13–17, 72, 124, 127, 135, 136, 146, 185, 189. see also queer modernism Moholy-Nagy, Laszló (Painting Photography Film) 115–16 Morris, Robert 203 n.9 Morrisroe, Mark 165 Moten, Fred 56, 65, 151 Mulas, Ugo 173 Mulvey, Laura 50 n.6 Munder, Heike 9, 242 Muñoz, J. E. 152 n.6 Naar, John 245 neon 10, 11, 23, 27, 39–42, 44, 46, 48, 141, 142, 188, 193, 241 Nerlinger, Oskar 225 Newman, Barnett 208 nitrocellulose (cellulose nitrate) 25, 39, 223 Nkanga, Otobong Crumbling through Powdery Air 7 In Pursuit of Bling 7 Noguchi, Isamu 227 Nordau, Max (Degeneration) 125 Orrinsmith, Lucy 125 Ozbek, Rifat 161, 167 n.1 Packard, V. 100 n.3 Parks, Gordon 63 Pater, Walter (Greek Studies) 126 pearl 4, 6, 133, 139, 150 Peck, Samuel 108 Pesel, Louisa 161 photogenic architecture 124, 127, 136

258

Index

photography 4, 6, 8–11, 14–16, 25, 31–4, 54, 56, 60, 61, 63, 86, 105, 108, 109, 112, 115, 116, 118 n.21, 124, 126, 127, 129, 131–3, 135–7, 143, 145–8, 158, 171, 194, 200, 203 n.12, 216, 217, 219, 223, 239, 240, 245 Picasso, Pablo 208–10, 229 Piene, Otto 243 Pincus-Witten, Robert 169 Pinney, Christopher 158 plastic 7, 13, 14, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 105–9, 116, 158, 161, 170, 178, 185, 191, 195, 220, 224, 226 plexiglas 65 n.2, 185, 191, 202, 220 Pointon, Marcia 4 Poiret, Paul 12, 73–7, 80, 81, 84, 85 Ensemble 80, 81 Evening Gown “Irudrée” 73–5 Model of an Evening Dress 85 polish 2, 3, 10, 16, 23, 25, 27, 33, 39, 46, 56–8, 63, 112, 116, 117 n.10, 128, 129, 131, 139, 209, 215, 216, 219, 220, 226–31, 237, 243 Politz, Alfred 93, 94 Pollock, Jackson 172, 188, 190, 208, 219 Blue Unconscious, The 190 Porter, Edwin S. (Coney Island at Night) 39 Proust, Marcel 82–4 La Prisonnière, À la recherche du temps perdu 82–3 Putti, Lya de 45 Qadiri, Monira Al (Diver) 3–4 queer modernism 13–15, 124, 136, 139–40 cosmic communities 147–50 cosmic light 140–3 cosmic skin 143–7 iridescent shine 150–2 Radlauer, Ed 228 Custom Cars 226, 228 Rauschenberg, Robert 211 reflection 1, 2, 14, 38, 40 reflectivity 71, 112, 115, 174 refraction 1, 2, 15, 38, 40 Regina Hartglanzwachs 23–4 Reinhardt, Ad 207–8 Rémon, Georges (Mobilier et Decoration) 127

Repin, Ilya 208–10 Resi-Konfetti-Lichtkugel 240 Rhinestones 150, 152 n.10 Rittaus, Günther 46 Rogin, Michael 58 Rosenquist, James (F-111) 214, 215 Rothko, Mark 208 Rubinstein, Helena 145–8 Runge, Phillip Otto (Der Tag (Day)) 195 Ruttmann, Walter 40, 239 Berlin. Symphony of the Big City 40 satin 31, 160, 223, 231 Saulters, Dottie 61, 62 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 76 Schlüpmann, Heide 43 Scholz, Georg (Flesh and Iron) 31 Schonzeit, Ben (Cauliflower) 217 Schuitema, Paul (Playing Gramophone) 118 n.20 Segalen, Victor 75 Semper, Gottfried (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts) 219 sequins 14, 15, 141, 143, 143–8, 150–2, 152 n.5, 155, 158–62, 164–7, 167 n.1 Serner, Walter 37–8 Serres, Michel (Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, The) 117 n.16 Severini, Gino 145 Sévigne, Marquise de 73 sexuality 15, 124, 137, 164, 165, 177, 180 n.8, 187, 188, 194, 197, 198, 200, 202 shellac 9, 13, 105, 107–12, 115, 116, 117 n.7, 117 n.9, 117 n.11, 117 n.17, 118 n.19. see also lac and shellac shimmering 1, 7, 8, 14, 24, 25, 29, 34, 46, 48, 60, 75, 77, 79, 84, 126, 128, 132, 145, 151, 155, 186, 220, 224, 228, 231, 250 shine 1–2 abjection of 59–2 art 4–6, 15–17 democratization of 6–7 depicted 209–15 dissemination of 10–12 and glamor 8–10 material cultures 12–13

Index obscene 215–17 perceiving 2–4 phenomenon 1–3, 5, 6, 10–12, 15, 17 promiscuous 159, 167 queer modernism 13–15 reappropriation of 63–4 suppressed 207–9 working on the 227–31 shininess 13, 15–16, 42 Shirakura, Mina 245 Sichel, Jennifer 177 silk art 6–7 artificial 29–34, 38, 45, 46, 48 Bemberg 29, 46 posh 30 pure 29 stocking 11, 45, 46 silver 4, 7, 14, 15, 24, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84, 95–8, 108, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 133, 136, 145, 159, 169–72, 174, 175, 178, 179, 185, 208, 209, 219, 241, 243, 246 Silverman, Deborah 175, 176 Simmel, Georg 4, 5, 146 Sociology 4 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 225 Sitwell, Edith 141, 146, 148, 150 Smith, Jack 165 Smith, Pamela H. 106 Smithson, Robert 15, 185–9, 191–202, 202 n.1, 202 n.2, 202 n.4, 203 n.5, 203 n.8–203 n.12, 204 n.18, 204 n.19, 209, 220 Abstract Mannerism 201 Anatomy of Expressionism, The 188 Entropy and the New Monuments 200 Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space 188, 198–200 Quick Millions 185, 186 Untitled (Man in Colonial American Dress and Indian) 192, 194 Untitled (Pink Linoleum Center) 192, 194 Untitled (Venus with Lightning Bolts) 192, 195 Sontag, Susan 133 Sparke, Penny 136

259

sparkling 1, 3, 11, 15, 42, 79, 145, 146, 148, 185, 187, 237, 239, 243 splendor 4–5, 7, 9, 17, 23, 25 steel industry 89, 92, 93, 96–100 stainless 7, 12, 13, 25, 89–2, 95–100, 219 tubular 136 U.S. 89, 92–8, 100 Steelmark 13, 89, 93–8, 100 Stein, Gertrude 141 Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) 145 Stella, Frank 172, 185, 208 Sternberg, Joseph von 9, 30, 50 n.6 Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) 30, 239 Stettheimer, Florine 145 Suárez, Juan A. 171, 177–8, 180 n.8 Superstar, Ingrid 170, 171 Swan, Joseph Wilson 6 Swarovski, Daniel 151 synthetic materials 6, 10, 11, 14, 39, 145–7, 151, 167, 191 Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro (In Praise of Shadow) 80 Taylor, Elizabeth 59 Tchelitchew, Pavel 14, 15, 139–51, 151 n.1, 151 n.2, 152 n.5, 152 n.7 Hide and Seek 141, 150 Personage 144 Phenomena 140 Portrait of Charles Henri Ford 14 Tennant, Stephen 14, 124, 132–3, 137, 147 Theophilus 108, 117 n.6 Thompson, D. V. 108 Thompson, Krista 9 Thompson, Virgil (Four Saints in Three Acts (1934)) 145 Thrift, Nigel 9 Tibaldi, Pelegrino (circle of) (Venus and Minerva) 201, 204 n.20 Tillmans, Wolfgang 247, 248, 250 Travolta, John 241, 250 Tsai, E. 202 n.2 Tsang, Wu 14, 15, 139, 151 Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Curtain 139, 151 twinkling 1, 42, 96

260

Index

Tyler, Parker 141, 146 Young and Evil, The 151 n.2 Umbo 32, 33 van der Weyden, Rogier 117 n.3 van Linschoten, Jan Huyghen 108, 111 Veckly, John 94 Verheus, Geerten 246 Vidor, King (Crowd, The) 40 Villiers, Nicholas de 169 Virilio, Paul 39 Vollmoeller, Karl 27 Ward, Janet 39, 46, 239 Warhol, Andy 9, 14–15, 169–72, 174–80, 180 n.4, 180 n.8, 180 n.11, 209, 211, 212, 215, 240, 242, 243, 245 Exploding Plastic Inevitable 170–1 interiority 175–80 Silver Clouds 209 Storm Door 1 211, 212 surface effects 172–5 Waugh, Evelyn 133 Waugh, T. 202 n.4 Weimar Cinema distraction and consumerism 45–9

light, technical reproduction 39–42 micro-politics of distraction 49–50 vertigo and kaleidoscopic vision 42–5 visual pleasure 37–9 Wheathers, Chelsea 177 Wiener, Norbert 187, 191, 200 Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine 191 Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society, The 191 Wiene, Robert 44 Wiertz, Jupp 31, 32 Williams, William Carlos 151 n.1, 152 n.9 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 220 Woeste, Louis Bernard (Myriad Reflector) 237, 238 Wolfe, Tom 226, 230 Wolman, Baron 63 Woolf, Virginia (Waves, The) 1 Worringer, Wilhelm 200 Youngblood, Gene 191 Zola, Émile (Au Bonheur de Dames) 5

261

262

263

264

265

266

Plate 1 and 2  Monira Al Qadiri, Diver, 2018, video installation, 4:00 min. loop. Courtesy of the artist

Plate 3  Otobong Nkanga, In Pursuit of Bling – The Discovery, 2014, installation view. 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, May 29– August 3, 2014. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Plate 4  Otobong Nkanga, Solid Maneuvers, 2015, different metals, forex, acryl, asphalt, salt, make-up, vermiculit, dimensionen variabel. Installation shot Crumbling Through Powdery Air, Portikus, 2015. Photo: Helena Schlichting. Courtesy of Portikus, Frankfurt/Main

Plate 5  Promotion-Postcard for the AEG Vacuum Cleaner Vampyr, c. 1929. © Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

Plate 6  Jupp Wiertz, Poster for Bemberg Silk Cloth and Lingerie, c. 1928, 84 × 33.5 cm. Collection of Ernst Cremer und Lilli Philippen “Die Femme fatal im Tempo der Großstadt,” Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen 2003, 77. © Ernst Cremer and Lilli Philippen Collection, Aachen

Plate 7  Max Factor Hollywood “Pan-Cake Make-Up” advertisement at the occasion of the release of the 1944 Technicolor musical movie Cover Girl starring Rita Hayworth. © Max Factor

Plate 8 Baron Wolman, Miles Davis Leans on His Ferrari 275 GTB in New York City, October 1969. © Baron Wolman

Plate 9  Raoul Dufy, Women’s Shawl, manufactured by Bianchini-Férier, France c. 1925, silk and metallic threads, printed. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Jane Peck Messler Bequest (M. 2004. 25). Photo © Museum Associate/ LACMA

Plate 10  Raoul Dufy, Women’s Shawl, detail, manufactured by Bianchini-Férier, France c. 1925, silk and metallic threads, printed. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Jane Peck Messler Bequest (M. 2004. 25). Photo © Museum Associate/LACMA

Plate 11 Thayaht (Ernesto Michaelles, Italian, 1893–1959), “Unerobe de Madeleine Vionnet,” Fashion Illustration, Gazette du bon ton, no. 8, 1922, plate 62

Plate 12 MaisonWorth, Women’s Cape, France 1925, silk and metallic threads, silk design by Jean Dunand, manufactured by Bianchini-Férier. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of the Pasadena Playhouse (63.40). Photo © Museum Associate/LACMA

Steel

Plate 13  “Steelmark” logo designed by Lippincott and Margulies, 1958, for the American Iron and Steel Institute. Hagley Museum and Library Acc. 1631, American Iron and Steel Institute Records. Reproduced with permission from Hagley Museum and Library

Plate 14  Gateway Arch for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, completed 1964. Designed by Eero Saarinen. Photo: Bev Sykes, 2005, CC-BY-2.0

Plate 15  Thérèse Bonney, Smoking Corner of Apartment of Tamara de Lempicka, Artist, 7, Rue Méchain, 1925. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Plate 16  Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant. c. 1927. © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sothbey’s.

Plate 17  Pavel Tchelitchew, Personage, 1927, oil and coffee grounds on canvas, 129.5 × 86.7 cm. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Plate 18  Pavel Tchelitchew, Portrait of Charles Henri Ford, 1934, gouache, ink and sequins on board, 55.2 × 43.6 cm. © Christie’s Images Limited

Plate 19  Wu Tsang, Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, 2015, mixed media. Photo: Antoine Kralik, commissioned by Swarovski as part of the Swarovski Series at FIAC Paris 2015. Photo credit: Swarovski Series—Wu Tsang, Antoine Kralik. © Swarovski

Plate 20  Female ensemble for Because We Must, 1987, Leigh Bowery (designer) Mr. Pearl (maker), Museum no. S.102:1 to 3–2010. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Plate 21 and 22  Charles Atlas, Because We Must, 1989, 52:30 min, color, sound, “Venus in Furs” sequence. © Charles Atlas; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Plate 23  Lucian Freud, Evening in the Studio, 1993, oil on canvas, 200 × 169 cm. © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images

Plate 24  Billy Name, Slide (Jill Johnston in The Silver Factory), 1964. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. T3431. © Bildrecht Wien, 2019

Plate 25  Billy Name, Slide (Jill Johnston in The Silver Factory), 1964. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. T3422. © Bildrecht Wien, 2019

Plate 26 Robert Smithson, Untitled (Pink Linoleum Center), 1964, collage and color pencil on paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Plate 27  Robert Smithson, Untitled (Venus with Lightning Bolts), 1964, pencil and crayon with collage on paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery. © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Plate 28  Roy Lichtenstein, Mustard on White, 1963, manga on plexiglass, 62 × 77 cm. Private Collection. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Plate 29 Ben Schonzeit, Cauliflower, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 190 × 190 cm. Private Collection, Ben Schonzeit

Plate 30  Judy Chicago, Car Hood, 1964, sprayed acrylic lacquer on Chevrolet Corvaircar hood, 109 × 125 × 11 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © 2019 Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © Photo: Alissa Walker

Plate 31 Kenneth Anger, Kustom Kar Kommandos, 1965, Puck Film Productions, 3:15 min., PAL, color, sound, Screenshots. © Kenneth Anger

Plate 32  Geerten Verheus, Pit, The, 2009, rubber and steel, 140 cm × 50 cm. © Geerten Verheus

Plate 33  Hans-Jörg Mayer, LIPSTICK, 2017, acryl on canvas, 230 × 155 cm. Courtesy Galerie Nagel Draxler. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Plates 34 and 35  Wolfgang Tillmans, Lights (Body), 2000–2002, single channel video, 5:00 min. Music: Don’t Be Light, by Air, Hacker Remix, Helsinki/London. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne