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An electronic folk musician's guided tour of furniture aesthetics after
September 11.
By Momus
March 2002
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Photo by Annie Schlechter
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With a free evening in Tokyo, you enter the Ebisu branch of video chain
Tsutaya and browse through the tapes on display. Suddenly you notice a section
labeled "Good Furniture." Under a blown-up still of the space
station from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey you find
Mon Oncle by Jacques Tati, the French mus-ical comedy Anna,
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in Slogan, and multiple copies of
A Clockwork Orange (pictured)--films selected by Tsutaya for
the busy aesthete who cares little for plot but wants immaculate set design.
Why are you filled with a sense that something is horribly wrong here?
Perhaps it's the inclusion of A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick's reading
of Anthony Burgess's Swiftian fable about a delinquent youth cured of both
his violence and his aesthetic capacity by the "Ludovico Technique"
strikes you as too serious a film to be watched "for the good
furniture." In fact, watching it "for the good furniture"
would seem to put you on the same level as Alex and his droogs, pre-Ludovico--indifferent
to ultra-violence but moved by Beethoven. Or, in your case, moved by that
blobby chair in the background of the rape scene. You picture yourself rewinding
the tape and shuttling the scene over the VCR heads like pornography, peeping
through the flailing bodies at the pristine chair beyond: can it really
be a Panton, or is it a copy? Was it made specially for the film, or
was it a production model?
This seems to be the sort of scenario the Japanese video curators have in
mind, and it both attracts and repels you. Its desire to remove messy human
concerns from the forefront of cinema, replacing them with the harmonious
structures of classic Modernist design, is both utopian and dystopian. It's
the logic of the neutron bomb, designed to remove all human drama from cities
but preserve built structures--and presumably all the good furniture.
You wonder why so many films have used immaculate Modernist design
as a symbol of fascism, an enemy of human agency: Welles's The Trial,
Tati's Playtime, Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, Woody Allen's
Sleeper. It's as if--for screenwriters, for literary people, for
humanists--the achievement of a beautiful environment represents the end
of all human struggle, and the termination of both their own utility and
that of language.
But you're rather mistrustful of humanism and words yourself. You feel the
world is overburdened with narratives: political, moral, religious, and
literary. You've just read painter David Batchelor's excellent little monograph
Chromophobia, which suggests that the Western world has discriminated
against color, finding it corrupting, distracting, and effete ever
since Plato described painters as "mere grinders of multicolored drugs."
You turn to artists to justify your growing belief that texture, color,
form, and the delight of the senses have been unfairly neglected in Western
culture. If this is true, all we need to do to reverse the trend is to centralize
the incidentals--pay attention to decor instead of scenario, to good furniture instead
of the ultraviolence that happens around it.
You remember something you once heard Andy Warhol say in a radio interview,
when he told British art critic Edward Lucie- Smith that he liked to watch
movies on TV--a 1960s movie followed by a '70s movie and an '80s movie.
"I watch them for the shoe styles," Andy said. That casual remark,
apparently so fey and glib, came packed with dynamite. Within it was coiled
Warhol's cool and happy alienation from his own culture. "All those
orchestras sawing away, all those actors trying to pluck at my heart strings,
all those directors trying to direct my attention to this and that,"
Warhol seemed to be saying, "are wasting their time. I denature the
movies I watch, I reedit them in my head in real time according to my own
personal fetish for shoe design."
Warhol's indifference strikes you as both monstrous and enviable. Whether
because he was an artist, a homosexual, a Pierrot, or a machine, Warhol
managed to evade completely the normative socialization built into film
and turn it to his own uses. In this he resembles the Japanese, who throughout
their history have always done the same thing with the cultural effluvia
of larger, more powerful states that menace their sense of specialness,
their difference.
Just as gays turn the heterosexual rituals which surround and threaten them
into kitsch, camp, and travesty--removing the sacred connotations of biological
reproduction and gender differentiation and leaving only a ludicrous cabaret
of wigs, wiggles, and orifices--so Japan takes the threat out of Western
cultural products by stripping them of their transcendental values at the
border. You could almost say that gays and Japanese prefer fetish (secretive,
personal, deviant, diffuse, libertarian) to sexual intercourse (dutiful,
social, normative, convergent, hegemonic). Intercourse is, finally,
duty. Fetish is, in the end, glamour. Intercourse continues the human narrative;
fetish gives great head.
You fly back to New York from Tokyo just in time to witness, from the
roof of your apartment in Chinatown, an act of real-life ultraviolence in
the form of the destruction of the World Trade Center. A couple of days
later you fall out with one of your best friends, a Japanese art student,
who insists that the sight of the imploding towers had been, for her, "beautiful."
Your surprise at seeing A Clockwork Orange in the Good Furniture
section of Tsutaya is suddenly replayed in darker shades.
In the face of thousands of pointless deaths, it seems obscene to let aesthetics
occlude ethics. Your Japanese friend, instead of liberating you from some
narrow normative narrative, angers you with her quixotic perversity when
she separates the formal and structural beauty of the buildings' collapse
from the deaths caused. You're not mollified when she justifies
her stance with reference to Kant's aesthetic theory. Kant, she says, put
responses to art into three categories: the aesthetic, the ethical, and
the consolatory. This, according to your friend, makes it justifiable
to respond with separate reactions in each of these categories. Being an
artist, she argues, it's natural that she should respond to the attacks
primarily in the aesthetic register. After this argument you don't speak
to your friend for two months.
During this hiatus, you hear others put your friend's case more persuasively.
One New York painter, for example, says he's been looking at nothing but
"shiny red and yellow plastic furniture from the 1960s and '70s"
since September 11: he is fascinated by its optimism about a bright future
we can no longer take for granted. God knows, you wish you could put the
sordid, stupid narratives of war and politics behind you, especially now.
But the narrative of national emergency is too compelling; you can't switch
off your TV. And so plot ensnares you all over again.
Later, touring the United States with German pop group Stereo Total, you're
told the story of Karlheinz Stockhausen. According to Brezel Göring,
Stereo Total's electronics wizard, Stockhausen was hard at work on a major
opera concerning the devil when the WTC attack exploded into his study.
After 20 years of work on his major opus Licht, in which pieces are
named after the days of the week, Stockhausen was just about to lift the
baton on the first performance of Freitag when in an interview
he ventured the opinion that his lead character Luzifer was clearly still
very much alive in the world and had perhaps, with the destruction of the
twin towers, created his greatest work of art.
There was an immediate scandal throughout the German press. Major sponsors
pulled out, and the performance was summarily canceled. "Which proves,"
Brezel guffawed, "that if you hide your head in art and see everything
that happens purely as a reflection of it, you shouldn't be so surprised
when people look at you with horror and disgust."
I'm told Stockhausen was misquoted--but then so was Lucifer. I wonder what
the furniture's like in hell?
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