Shiny Things: Reflective Surfaces and Their Mixed Meanings 9781789383805, 1789383803

Table of contents :
Cover
Shiny Things: Reflective
Surfaces and
Their Mixed
Meanings
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Shiny World
Shiny values
The materiality of shiny work
Mirrors
Embodied Shine
Material processes
Allure
Shiny Representation
Reflexy-const
Virtuosity
Roy Lichtenstein’s mirrors
Computer-generated images
Smudges
Smudges as signifiers
Unrepresented smudges
Purity
Hygiene
Utopias
Efficiency
Weary Willie
Anxious Shine
Nixon’s sweat
Abject performances
Spectacle
The sublime
Ironic Shine
Constructing irony
Shiny irony
Hanging Heart
Kitsch and Camp
Kitsch
Camp
Cloud Gate, again
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

Shiny Things

Shiny Things Leonard Diepeveen Timothy van Laar

Reflective Surfaces and Their Mixed Meanings Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2021 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2021 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copy editor: MPS Technologies Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas Production manager: Tim Mitchell Typesetter: Aleksandra Szumlas Frontispiece: Detail from Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Turkey Pie, 1627, oil on panel, 95 cm x 75cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (see Figure 4.4). Print ISBN 978-1-78938-378-2 ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-379-9 ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-380-5 Printed and bound by Gomer, UK. To find out about all our publications, please visit our website. There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print. www.intellectbooks.com This is a peer-reviewed publication.

Contents Prefacevii Acknowledgmentsxv Introduction: The Shiny World 1 Embodied Shine 27 Shiny Representation 54 Smudges80 Purity100 Anxious Shine 119 Ironic Shine 146 Kitsch and Camp 170 Notes199 Bibliography205 Index213

Preface

In contemporary culture, shininess creates experiences and meanings both banal and profound. These actions and ideas range from trivial fascination to sublime meditation, and can communicate meanings as diverse as optimism and anxiety. Using art, especially contemporary art, as its recurrent point of reference, Shiny Things examines the meanings of shininess in art and in culture more generally, the multivalent application of the term “shiny”: its contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime, and camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and fetishism. Shininess, then, clearly operates as a sign, but in its different multiple contexts it produces diverse meanings. It is also a particular sort of sign, a motivated sign, tightly attached to its physicality and one’s phenomenological experience of it. Shininess as a phenomenon has contradictory functions that have operated throughout history. Because of its contradictory and simultaneous functions, Shiny Things organizes shininess in terms of these functions, such as hygiene, for example. Hygiene, anxiety, and irony are vii

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transhistorical effects of shininess, arising from the physical properties of shine and the perceptual cognitive processes shininess instigates. Thus, this book is a topical and function-driven investigation more than it is a chronology-driven one. (There is a clearer history to the materials that embody shininess, which we take up in our second chapter.) Methodologically, Shiny Things discusses shininess through its affects, an approach that keeps our argument close to the physicality of shiny things, getting at the more metaphorical categories through the attributes of shiny objects; e.g., the frictionlessness of shiny things leads to their being signifiers of efficiency. This, then, is the theory of shininess as it appears in this book: the physical phenomena of shininess are interpreted semiotically, revealing a particular aspect of semiotics: there is always a tight connection between shininess’ physical manifestations and its polemics. Shiny objects, then, argue in a sharply embodied way. Our understanding of shininess has some benefits: we can understand more clearly how shiny polemics function; we provide a critical framework for talking about shiny things and the work they do. This theory offers a critical practice: knowing about cleanliness and efficiency in relationship to shininess’ polemics, say, helps us figure out what cultural objects are doing with their shininess. Because shininess is a remarkably supple phenomenon, at times going in contradictory directions (for example, being a vehicle for both the precious and the cheap), different chapters turn to different cultural theories, such as the sublime, the uncanny, the abject, the utopian, and the ironic. When Shiny Things works with these pervasive cultural theories, it doesn’t develop them so much as it looks at how they are both affected by and contribute to our understanding of shininess. This relationship keeps this viii

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book’s discussion close to physical shininess. There is a bit of a reciprocity between shininess and these dominant theories: in this book’s examination of the shininess of cyborgs, for example, theories of the uncanny help sharpen our understanding of the work shininess does, and the physical phenomenon of shininess reveals unexpected nuances in theories of the uncanny. As we have stated, while it is rooted in physicality, much of shininess’ work is semiotic. Understanding shininess semiotically, Shiny Things turns to those areas where the polemical semiotics of shine are most evident and consciously explored, particularly visual art. The shine in Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate is about the sublime and consumer culture, and more. Artworks are made for the purpose of interpretation; in them, shine tends to have a more intensely interpretable purpose than it has in, say, consumer objects. Thus, while all the shiny things in this book use the same vocabulary, artworks are where shine takes on a more obviously polemical function. Sometimes it is an act of inquiry; at other times it is a highly specific use or function of shine. But in both cases art has a focus that directs one to think about the nature of shininess. Artists as diverse as Anish Kapoor (whose Cloud Gate is a repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico, and Gerard ter Borch center the book in an art discourse that has affinities with body building, Richard Nixon, and Lladró figurines. Shiny objects such as Lladró figurines appear in this book because shininess pervades culture; to neglect its wide range—limiting the inquiry to visual art, say—would impoverish an understanding of the work shininess does. After all, not all of shininess’ work is inquiry; shininess is bigger than visual art. Moreover, contemporary art has immersed itself in mass culture, and questions boundaries of high ix

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and low. As a consequence, the spectacles of Liberace and Olafur Eliasson work with overlapping conceptual frames. Additionally, when contemporary art looks at shininess it often does so through the lens of mass culture and public life, where shininess is massively present. Thus, although the book heavily engages with visual art, it also uses visual culture more generally. The first chapter, “The Shiny World,” examines the cultural values attached to shininess in general, from the superficial to the transcendent, and touches on the possible origins of human fascination with shininess, including, some believe, evolutionary causes. The chapter turns to the uses and effects of shininess found in the inherent excess of its surfaces, work rooted in its physics and its affects—disorientation, dislocation, dematerialization. Turning from the physical and possibly inherent aspects of shininess, and beginning with a history of gilding and electroplating, the second chapter, “Embodied Shine,” moves from shininess’ growing ubiquity to the way its allure has dominated consumer culture and the way it frames our views of objects and even the human body. The chapter argues that shininess has moved from a time when rarity, constructed both through labor and precious materials, gave shiny things a fairly direct meaning of power and transcendence. Power and the sacred as readings of the shiny have modulated to readings of superficiality, irony, and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities of fascination, newness, and cleanliness. This complexity is at times written on the shiny human body, as an unstable mix of desire and anxiety revealed in the shiny bodies of fashion photography, body-building, and cyborgs. Chapters 3 and 4 move to a focused analysis of what it means, in art, to represent shininess. The basic principle that art reveals is that shininess is analyzed when it is x

Preface

represented; in the production of art, shininess is both semiotic and a self-reflexive analysis of its semiotics. The third chapter, “Shiny Representation,” surveys how shininess has been represented in visual art and how that virtual representation and its resulting displays of virtuosity have been used throughout history: from seventeenth-century Dutch reflexy-const, to late twentieth-century photorealism, to digital animation and Hollywood’s use of CGI. The meanings of actual shininess are manifested in its virtual representations, which reveal that representations of shiny things, a hallmark of virtuosity, are highly artificial, a set of technical and semiotic conventions that seem to be as much about artistic power as they are about description. Following this more general discussion of representation, the fourth chapter, “Smudges,” picks up on an odd anomaly—the shiny representation of things rarely, if ever, represents a dirty smudge on a shiny surface. Ultimately, this says something important about the physics of shininess, the cultural position and power of shininess, and how in representations of shininess the shiny operates as a sign. Chapter 5, “Purity,” signals a turn in the book to a more explicit analysis, in the last four chapters, of how shininess is culturally interpreted, its physical attributes used as metaphors and motivated signs for large cultural ideas. As shininess becomes more available, its effects easier to produce, these cultural meanings become more complicated, ending (in our last chapter) in the highly unstable effects of shiny camp. Chapter 5 pursues the significance of shine as a sign for something pure and clean. The relationship of shininess to hygiene and efficiency results in its tendency to reinforce the authoritarian and, surprisingly, to be central in how we understand utopias. The sixth chapter, “Anxious Shine,” begins with a look at abjection, starting with a description of Richard Nixon’s xi

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sweaty debate performance with Jack Kennedy. The chapter develops the shiny abject through a series of progressively more self-conscious performance works by Hermann Nitsch, Carolee Schneemann, and Paul McCarthy. This anxiety of the shiny abject, often interpreted through spectacle, ultimately finds its parallels in the anxiety of the sublime— its dissolving of boundaries and the loss of self. After defining how visual irony works through discrepancy, intent, and knowingness, Chapter 7, “Ironic Shine,” considers the way shininess signals irony through its discrepant citations and its excess. Jeff Koon’s Hanging Heart, for example, is understood as ironic in large part because of its fetishistic shine, an irony perversely heightened by the artist’s strenuous denials of ironic intent. Chapter 8, “Kitsch and Camp,” brings shininess’ inherent superficiality to its paradigmatic contemporary expression. Setting the scene with the shiny spectacle of Liberace, the chapter examines kitsch, its sentimentality and nostalgia, its bad taste, its support of the status quo, and its relationship—via irony—to camp. The chapter investigates shininess as a dominant ingredient of both kitsch and camp. The effects are inherently unstable; in the end, the chapter returns to Cloud Gate as an example of the camp sublime. Shiny things’ perceptual and polemical instability, as well as the disparate and ordinary presence of shininess in our lives, may account for the fleeting and odd presence of shininess as a concept in either scholarship or art exhibitions. When it is referred to, shininess has a particularized presence in scattered references in the work of Hal Foster, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, and others, or in attention to localized details (art criticism on the Dutch Golden age, for example). In these, shininess is understood to have a specific polemical function—as shiny transcendence, xii

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for example, or shiny kitsch. Even the 2017 special issue of e-flux journal, “The Politics of Shine,” has a very particular focus, looking at shine as a manifestation of postmodern flatness. But, as the topic of e-flux journal intimates, the past few decades have seen something of a more systematic approach to shininess, in two substantial exhibitions addressing the concept: Ohio State University’s Wexner Center 2006 Shiny exhibition, and the larger 1998 National Gallery (London) exhibit Mirror Image, accompanied by curator Jonathan Miller’s excellent On Reflection. But reflection, as is clear over the course of this book, is not exactly the same thing as shininess, and our book does not limit itself to art. More closely allied to Shiny Things is the 2013 special issue of the Journal of Design History, and in particular Nicolas P. Maffei and Tom Fisher’s introduction, which, from a perspective of design, points to the relationship between shininess, rarity, and labor, and addresses the changing meaning of shininess as it became more widely available on more things, to people of modest means. While these approaches have tended to turn to either artworks or objects of mass culture, Shiny Things draws on both, and bases its analysis on their common vocabulary and effects. Moreover, the book expands and systematizes the work of these others to include topics such as abjection, utopias, the sublime, kitsch, and representation.

xiii

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the people and institutions that helped bring this project to completion: to Dalhousie University, the College for Creative Studies, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the Sou’Wester Restaurant in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. Along the way, we have been given opportunities to present our work, in numerous department talks and conferences, especially the 2015 Association of Art Historians conference at the University of East Anglia. Vince Carducci, Simone DeSousa, Gary Gregg, Jason Haslam, Barbara Kendrick, Morgan Mies, Lisa Rigstad, Trevor Ross, Ryan Standfest, Graham Stewart, Millee Tibbs, Mitchell Wiebe, and Julia Wright have been part of a supportive and helpfully skeptical audience for our ideas. In particular, we’d like to thank Lisa Rosenthal for her help with seventeenth-century Dutch art, and to Helen Hills. Several people have helped us with specific queries: Lloyd Burchill, Sym Corrigan, Peter Dykhuis, Michele Hudak, Rob Hutten, Robert Hyde, and Clémentine Mathieu. We would also like to thank friends and colleagues for help with images: Macyn Bolt, John Filker, Jason Haslam, Elizabeth Howard, and the heroic Marian Lambers. We are also grateful to the people who showed us how to clean The Bean and put us to work on a cold Chicago morning: Jose Bahena, Neal Speers, and Ed Uhlir. Thanks to xv

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the anonymous readers for Intellect, and especially to Tim Mitchell for his belief in and commitment to this project. And, finally, thanks to Susan Diepeveen and Mary Ellen Geist for their unwavering support, patience, and enthusiasm. They shine.

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Introduction: The Shiny World Lemon Pledge is very pretty Puts the shine down lemon good Lemon Pledge as you’re dusting Brings new luster to the wood. Lemon Pledge cleans so easy Lemon way to make wood glow. Lemon Pledge as you’re dusting Adds protection as you go. —S.C. Johnson ad for Lemon Pledge, 1967

But the lustre of metal, the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by candlelight, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or sun, a smile, the expression of a swiftly passing emotion, ludicrous movements, postures, facial expressions— to grasp this most transitory and fugitive material, and to give it permanence for our contemplation in the fullness of its life, is the hard task of art at this stage. —G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics

In May 2006, Chicago dedicated Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, part of the new Millennium Park on Chicago’s lakefront. Significant amounts of money, public and private, went into the park (whose total cost was 475 million dollars), and into Cloud Gate itself, whose 23-million-dollar cost was borne by private donors. The completed work was enormous, weighing 110 tons and measuring 33 by 66 by 42 feet. Assembled over a tubular steel frame, huge plates of marine-grade high-chromium stainless steel were welded together, using 2400 linear feet of welding. A 24-person crew then labored for nine months polishing the work into a seamless continuous surface, an attention to detail that went beyond the obsessive. The engineering that went into Kapoor’s object was virtuosic, the welding itself receiving 1

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a major award. As is the case for many of his other works, Kapoor crafted Cloud Gate to look impersonal, to give no indication of the artist’s touch, of the process of its construction. It has stepped clear of the historical marks of its making. Cloud Gate is about perception and participation, not self-expression and process. The work communicates through a perfectly smooth and dazzling shine, making it the jewel of Chicago (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1: Millennium Park, Chicago. Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 33 x 66 x 42 ft (10 x 20 x 13 m).

Cloud Gate’s effect was and continues to be that of spectacle, with all the ambitions, pleasures, and unpredictability that kind of experience offers. Kapoor intended Cloud Gate 2

Introduction

to be a transcendent experience, offering a bridge between the physical and the ethereal, earth and sky, even creating an omphalos, the navel of the earth, at the apex of its underside. But shiny things and their pleasures rarely have one single-minded effect. Immediately upon seeing it, journalists and the public gave Cloud Gate its permanent nickname, The Bean, a name both mimetically descriptive and productively banal. Laboring over The Bean didn’t end at its dedication. Its maintenance, and their costs, goes in a surprising direction—to its regular and obsessive cleaning, which historically has always been a corollary to shiny things, to maintaining their physical properties and effects, to promoting their precious aura. Three times a week a crew of three comes to clean the work, using a mild soap solution and mops on long poles. After the washing, the crew buffs the piece with microfiber cloths. These cleanings don’t go everywhere—only part way up, just past the reach of greasy human contact. The cleaning is fussy but not that complicated, as we witnessed on a sunny January day. While his crew systematically addressed the work’s surface, Neal Speers, General Manager of MB Real Estate, the firm that manages the park, reported that the surface is so smooth it almost cleans itself in the rain. The few instances of graffiti have been easily dealt with. (The work is also protected by a high security presence.) But smudges—physical contact with The Bean is expected—need to be removed daily. A worker visits The Bean several times a day with a cloth and spray bottle to wipe off the new marks. Twice a year, in the spring and fall, scaffolding is set up, and The Bean is washed with a mild soap and a pressure washer. At the very top of The Bean, the abject traces of local seagulls are a particular challenge. All of this is expensive. In 2016 the privately funded cost for the cleaning was about 4700 dollars 3

Figure 1.2: Millennium Park staff cleaning The Bean.

Introduction

per month, with the twice-yearly cleaning adding another 9000 or so. But why clean it so obsessively, with a fetish-like attention to detail? Such attention goes way beyond the norm for public outdoor sculpture. Claes Oldenburg’s Bat Column, just down West Madison Street, looks like it hasn’t been cleaned for years. Clearly, maintaining The Bean’s shine, the never-ending process of keeping a patina from forming, is important. It has to be kept looking new because shininess is what this artwork is about, and how people interact with it. People come to The Bean to play with it. Every time we have visited The Bean, we have watched people ritually approach and step back from it, push against it, jump in front of it, do handstands, attempt ill-advised dance moves, and lie on the ground beneath it. Regularly, they walk into it, bumping their heads against it taking selfies. And they touch it, repeatedly, in an attempt to locate the surface. These activities are part of how The Bean produces meaning. Because Millennium Park allows everyone to touch The Bean, it leads to a lack of inhibition and irreverent play. The Bean invariably seduces its audience into a grand and social loss of inhibition, a manic happiness that few works of art elicit so dramatically. All the while, visitors playfully look at or photograph the interaction between their bodies and their distorted reflections. It is not just individual visitors, however, who interact with The Bean: the experience has regularly attracted Hollywood (and Bollywood); in such films as Dhoom 3, Source Code, and Transformers: Age of Extinction, inviting movie goers to appreciate its dizzying effects. Cloud Gate invites a goofy playfulness from its visitors, a nongoal-oriented, distractible activity, a playing with representation. That play is significant. People interact with it to make meaning; through its disorientation, dislocation, 5

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and excess, the work induces the virtual, as-if aspect of art. The Bean is a shiny thing, and that has large implications: shiny things have a shifting, unpredictable play between the insubstantial and the substantial. The Bean’s shininess focuses our curiosity about whether reality is constructed in our heads, or whether it consists of solid stuff in the world. Every day in Millennium Park the solidity of the object bumps against the ephemerality of its gleam.

Shiny values Shininess surfaces everywhere, part of our daily lives, doing its work in unexamined ways. Not only in the shiny natural world of June bugs and obsidian, shininess is omnipresent in culture, in those things that don’t really need to be shiny, but that people, for some reason, have decided to make shiny: cars, supermarket fruit, lips and toenails, credit cards, electric guitars, toilets, cell phones, cellophane, chandeliers, skyscrapers, belt buckles, anime figures, bodybuilders, handcuffs, teacups, the Stanley Cup, diamonds, and, of course, nickels. When shininess is restricted to culturally produced objects, the resulting list points to both ubiquity and an impossible-to-organize heterogeneity. Our ad hoc list seems to wander purposelessly, one of those postmodern celebrations of excess. And yet, shininess’ ubiquity suggests its importance. Individuals continuously negotiate shininess, interact with it. Cultures spend money and time producing and maintaining shiny things. Shininess operates on people all the time, attracting attention, focusing and distracting desires, directing judgments about value, cleanliness, even hopefulness. This range of activities and how it directs attention begin to account for the way shininess appears in our speech, both 6

Introduction

literal and metaphoric. In its metaphoric uses the values of shininess become clearer. The phrase “shiny things,” used on a despairingly large number of websites, has a mixed value—positive, ironic, and sometimes derogatory. To be tagged as the shiny new real estate agent or sociology professor is a mixed blessing. There is a deeply ingrained sense that shininess is not just attractive, but that it is superficial, merely decorative, ingratiating. Much of the sense of the term’s superficial connotations has to do with the fact that physical shininess stimulates, manipulates, and distracts. Shininess’ distractions conceal and redirect one’s attentions—an effect stage magicians rely on. Via their distractions, shiny things seduce their viewers. And, like all seductions, shininess employs pleasure deceptively, and in doing so it short-circuits cognitive reflection. The tension between shiny superficiality and attractiveness shapes its function in contemporary culture. Dismissive applications of the term “shiny” juxtapose an awareness of the term’s superficiality with a suggestion that its seduction is a virtue. Many references to shininess both suspect shininess and revel in it, with a kind of happy defiance. This is the attitude behind the shininess of anime, R.E.M.’s classic “Shiny Happy People,” and the use of gleams in toothpaste commercials. The contradictions in this colloquial use of “shiny” set up its ironic edge. These problems of shininess parallel the problems of pleasure; the contradictions in shininess are those inherent to broad cultural understandings of pleasure (for a more thorough examination of pleasure in aesthetic experience, see our Artworld Prestige, pages 123–60). This relationship is readily apparent; many of the words around shininess suggest different tangents of pleasure: allure, glamour, attraction, seduction, fascination, and preciousness. Pleasure and shininess are structurally homologous; 7

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indeed, shininess is often a device of pleasure. And, both are simultaneously valued and suspect. They differ, of course: shininess is not just a subcategory of pleasure. Pleasure, as the bigger and more abstract category, has more philosophical speculation behind it, theory that can help one understand shininess’ uncertain values. In culture at large, but also in a narrower realm of critics and philosophers, physical pleasures have typically been understood as immediate, seemingly noncognitive, an understanding that makes pleasure’s seductions hard both to analyze and to resist. It’s not so much that critics (and theologians) dislike pleasure as that they distrust it: who knows what pleasure is up to behind the scenes? The experience of pleasure draws these reactions because it is distracting, uncontrollable, its trajectory and endpoint unclear. In The Scandal of Pleasure, Wendy Steiner locates the distrust of pleasure in “a fear of the ungovernability of ambiguity, of the fearsome paths one might travel because of the free-floating signifier or the unanchored dream” that can move audiences in directions unforeseeable and surprising.1 Pleasure, many have argued, can’t do analysis, and can’t be counted on. Shininess enacts these problems of pleasure, doing pleasure’s work; it too distracts and seduces, pulling us in with its immediate and superficial stimulations. Its gratifications lead to passivity, a connection at the heart of the central objections to pleasure in Marxist traditions. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue, pleasure, “if it is to remain pleasure […] must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association.”2 For Adorno, pleasure, a basic tool of the culture industry, is antagonistic to the cause of effecting social change. Much of this uncertain value, for both pleasure and shininess, lies in the problem of mediation. As the above quotations suggest, the lack of mediation in both pleasure 8

Introduction

and shininess creates problems for the value of both. And certainly, it is hard to think of shininess as mediated. Light seems so direct, instantaneous; shininess comes at one as direct perceptual experience. Pleasures similarly seem immediate, arriving unbidden. (As this book goes on to argue, all experiences of both pleasure and shininess are in a sense mediated, and interpreted as they are experienced—for example, the instinctual judgment that a shiny dinner plate must be clean.) With this value system in place, pleasure and shininess become more acceptable when mediation more overtly becomes a part of their experience, such as when irony enters, or when an artwork is seen to be about pleasure, or about one of the functions of shininess. The privileging of mediation has a long pedigree, most fully articulated in aesthetic theory. Richard Shusterman cites the “powerful Kantian tradition [that] insists on a very specific type of aesthetic pleasure, narrowly defined as the intellectual pleasure of pure form arising from the harmonious play of our cognitive faculties.”3 Today’s mediated pleasures don’t have Kant’s kind of disinterest at their heart; they tend to be what R. L. Rutsky and Justin Wyatt call “the pleasures of analysis and critique,” pleasures that can lead to social action, and so solve the problem that Adorno pointed to. As Rutsky and Wyatt argue: “difficult” pleasures are often thought to require a certain (critical) distance, an “alienation” that allows the spectator the space to think about, to consciously examine, what was “too close,” too familiar, too obvious to come to consciousness (usually, conventional bourgeois ideology).4

One consequence of such mediation is that when pleasure and shininess become a sign for something, they become more determinate, controlled, theorizable (think, for 9

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instance, of the critical discourse surrounding Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs). Whether this control is always a good thing is debatable, as critics like Kristeva have pointed out. And mediation is never completely in control. Even in shininess’ presence in campy spectacle, which is highly mediated and self-conscious, shininess still has its instantaneous pull and gratification. In the past, shiny things had less problematic values, for example, in its evocation of the holy. The nineteenth-century Wat Suthat temple in Bangkok creates a sacred space through a golden shininess, with its thirteenth-century Phra Buddha Shakyamuni, a twenty-five-foot tall gleaming gilt bronze Buddha (Figure 1.3). (This Buddha is surpassed by its neighbor in Bangkok, the Golden Buddha at Wat Traimit—a 5.5-ton gold statue, much of it pure gold.) The cloisters encasing Wat Suthat’s central hall are lined with more than 150 other gilded Buddhas. Shininess is more than precious decoration here: shininess, particularly shiny gold, evokes the insubstantial transcendent, pointing out of time and space. Cultures generally have used shininess to evoke transcendence (albeit with differing nuances), as in the baroque churches of Europe with their sacred version of the sublime creating a stunning sensory overload that points a way to God. What also attracts one’s attention in sacred spaces, of course, is not just how their shininess points to transcendence, but the preciousness of their shiny materials, and the association of this preciousness with power. Until the twentieth century, shiny things were typically rare and expensive things. Historically, shiny materials were inherently rare, of course (gold, silver, porcelain, glass), but in their display this rarity was also expressed in other ways. Shiny rarity has sociopolitical ramifications. These materials demanded labor in their extraction, manufacture, and maintenance. 10

Figure 1.3: Phra Buddha Shakyamuni, Wat Suthat, Bangkok. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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Somebody—and it isn’t the Duke of Marlborough—shines the silver at Blenheim, and in doing so reiterates the owner’s power and elicits awe from the visitors. With both the transcendent and the precious, shininess makes things special, suggesting care, importance. In this way, shininess does what art does. In Homo Aestheticus Ellen Dissanayake argues that central to all the activities that have been called art is a basic human pursuit: “making important activities special has been basic and fundamental to human evolution and existence, and […] while making special is not strictly speaking in all cases art, it is true that art is always an instance of making special.”5 In the extreme case, culturally produced shininess and art are made so special as to become fetishized, endowed with a significance pointing to obsession, to significances stretched to the breaking point. But why is shininess not just an arbitrary and perhaps tired cultural convention? Its power suggests larger, perhaps more essential explanations than contingent, cultural, and historical accounts of shininess’ status; the attraction to shiny things extends across cultures and time periods, and studies have shown that even infants prefer shiny things. The standard speculations go to evolutionary or biological accounts, accounts that claim its associations with transcendence and preciousness to be inherent. Dissanayake argues, for example, that making things special is a “biologically endowed need.” For Dissanayake, “the desire or need to make special has been throughout human history, until quite recently, primarily in the service of abiding human concerns—ones that engage our feelings in the most profound ways.”6 One could take Dissanayake’s argument further: making things special is a way to hierarchize, to bring the cacophony of experience under some semblance of control. 12

Introduction

Shininess’ cultural value originates from its optical stimulation, its retinal excitation. Shininess is, after all, an effect of directed and concentrated reflected light, attracting attention. The way that light plays on water may be the most basic experience of shininess, and some argue that our attraction to shiny things is based on an evolutionaryinduced desire for wetness. A 2014 study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, basing its conclusions on studies conducted on both adults and infants, argues that people prefer shiny things because glossiness suggests wetness, and the attraction to wetness and its simulations comes out of the human need for water.7 A weaker version of this argument asserts that some responses to shininess are due to association, some of which are culturally based. Shiny things are often fresh or clean, for example. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, writing on the shiny work of Jeff Koons, and speculating perhaps excessively, argues that shiny things may be attractive because “shiny, sparkling, animated surfaces—in the eyes of another, for example—are a sign of life and health, just as dull surfaces can signal disease and even death.”8 These less clearly biologically hardwired responses to shininess imply that people learn various responses to shininess. As learned behaviors, responses to shininess may account for why different cultures have different standards of appropriate levels of shininess. Human reactions to shininess have a balance between one’s physiological reactions to optical properties and interpretations of what those properties mean in a given context. The interpretation is a response to the excitation. As one might expect of high-tech showrooms, Apple stores have this figured out: the shine of the glass, tabletops, walls, floors and products seduces one’s attention. Apple stores are dynamic, not restful places, where the shine means something, suggesting newness, efficiency, hope, and even, 13

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perhaps, the utopian. People interpret shininess; shininess is always a sign, promising something. It is never merely retinal stimulation. Finally, there are pleasures associated with the mirroring aspects of shininess—in particular, the pleasures of seeing oneself. Critics suggest ways to amplify these pleasures beyond the banal ones of seeing oneself in a department store window. Large claims can be made for this self-absorption, by turning, for example, to the myth of Narcissus, or the mirror stage in Lacan. Writing in the catalog for the large Frankfurt 2012 exhibit of Jeff Koons’ work, Walter Grasskamp argues that the central allure of shiny things is that we see ourselves in them. Gloss’s pleasures are the idiosyncratic ones of self-absorption: “gloss is the only type of surface that rewards viewers for looking at it by presenting them with a portrait of themselves.”9 Shiny things bring out the Narcissus in us (as with many theories of shininess, this one’s plausibility is tarnished a bit by its totalizing claims, which exist even in the face of many shiny things in which seeing oneself is an impossibility). All these theories about shininess’ importance have plausibility, but whether or not there is one cause for shininess’ intense attraction is not as interesting as understanding the multiple results and manifestations of this attraction. Human interest in shininess is too disparate in its interpretive effects and purposes to be reduced to one material/biological cause, or to have a single historical trajectory. There are too many kinds of shininess, put to too many cultural uses: seduction, power, hygiene, irony, spectacle, the sacred, the fetish, and the utopian. Evolutionary and biological causes can’t smoothly and solely account for culture.

14

Introduction

The materiality of shiny work In its heterogeneous values, shininess is unstable. As we have suggested, there are two wavering, opposing poles of shininess’ value: the precious and the superficial. One ties shininess to the highest human values; the other presents it as a technique of charlatans. Some works and objects don’t attempt to resolve those oppositions; in an interview that focuses on his mirror pieces of the early 2000s, Anish Kapoor, perhaps the leading contemporary artist of the shiny, described the impetus of his work being based on an unresolved tension between the significant and the vacuous, of “the almost idiotic phenomenology” of this tension “between the meaningful and the banal.”10 Shininess does simple, basic things that interconnect and metaphorically extend its physical properties, such as creating distraction, fascination, optimism, naiveté, and newness; its complexity lies in how it puts these basic things together. Like Wittgenstein’s games, shininess has multiple characteristics, but not every shiny thing involves them all. Shininess’ work ranges wide across culture. From glitter make-up to chrome cocktail shakers to the fruit display at Whole Foods, shininess stimulates and seduces. As it does in some of these examples, shininess also indicates rarity and the labor of maintenance. Shininess’ twist on rarity, kitsch, has a parasitic relationship with these values. But shininess also indicates frictionlessness, the smoothness of ball bearings and Boeing 787s. It’s a small step to efficiency from here, as it is to hygiene. Porcelain plates, stainless steel sinks, and hospital floors all shine with the sheen of cleanliness. Finally, shininess indicates newness, a lack of history, optimism. Utopian things are always shiny: the top of the Chrysler building, Airstream trailers, and Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum. 15

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Since this book discusses shiny things, the principles of shininess that it examines are always embodied, and as a result the principles attributed to shininess are hard to disentangle from other attributes of the thing on which shininess appears. So, a large shiny modernist building may seem aloof because of its shininess, but it’s also a result of its geometric severity. Consequently, this book embeds its discussion in people’s perceptual interactions with the materiality of shininess; our discussion doesn’t leave the physiological, perceptual aspects of shininess behind in looking at what shininess means when, for example, it turns to utopias or hygiene. Although Shiny Things addresses such topics, it does not first of all look at the nature of utopias, or of hygiene. It instead looks at the physical nature of shininess and how these ideas use it. While the term “shiny” does become a sign for larger cultural issues, the relationship is a motivated, not an arbitrary one (“motivated” is used here in the sense of linguistic category theory, in which while there are reasons for two things or concepts to be related, those reasons make the connection plausible rather than inevitable). So, shininess is not an excuse to talk about something like utopias, as if one could equally use some other phenomenon as a way in to understanding them. Our topic is not utopias, it really is shininess. The physical work of shiny things begins with its reflection of light. Of course, everything visible reflects light, but shiny things reflect light in a particular way. Things that are not shiny (wool socks, pine bark, common brick) reflect light by scattering it, by diffuse reflection. Shiny things, however—such as raindrops on roses and bright copper kettles—reflect light in a regular, organized way. Shininess depends on a directed light source, and the more focused and concentrated the light is, and the more regular and unscattered its reflection, the shinier things will appear. 16

Introduction

Different physical qualities enhance reflection. Smoothness, tautness, hardness, and wetness are likely to produce shininess, in things like polished metal, taut balloons, varnished wood, and wet leaves. Some materials are inherently shiny; in others, these qualities can be achieved or enhanced by polishing, melting, stretching, or crystallizing. These are physical processes, and much shininess has a complex relationship with touch. The obvious interactions are ones of polishing, of caressing a surface to make it shine. But the shiny object attracts its own touching. People desire to touch some shiny things because they want a tactile experience, an experience that is pleasurable, or that can make sense of a confusing visual phenomenon. As virtually every town with public sculpture can attest, history of repeated touching itself can add shine, often in whimsical places. Visitors to the Lincoln tomb in Springfield Illinois have for decades touched the nose of Gutzon Borglum’s bronze head of Lincoln. Having suffered this indignity for generations, Lincoln’s bust now features a nose on which the brown patina has been worn down to a shiny golden finish. On shiny things, touch breaks down the shine; on rough or dull surfaces, repeated touches produce shine. In so doing, touch is an ambiguous record of history. Oddly enough, this emphasis on materiality and process accompanies an insubstantial experience. Shininess raises questions about location and one’s spatial relation to the shiny object, by disguising an object’s form, making the precise location of its edges hard to discern. The object’s boundaries become unclear through perceptual overload, distraction, and conflicting sensory data. Shininess not only disguises and disorients, it begins to dematerialize the object’s surface; we lose our sense of where the surface of the shiny thing is. As a consequence, the shiny object always loses, dissolves or fractures—though not completely—some 17

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of its concrete presence. While a shiny one-ton Dodge Ram pickup still looks like a one-ton pickup, its gleaming surface is unstable: the shine changes and moves when a viewer moves; it adds additional kinds of information (about the curvature or faceting of a surface, smoothness, cleanliness, a surrounding environment, a light source); it confuses and disperses one’s focus, giving false depth to the surface. The disruptive consequences of a shiny object’s reflections are well known in advertising. For example, in publicity and advertising images of cars the reflections on a car’s surface are heavily manipulated because otherwise the reflections would confuse the viewer’s understanding of the form. In Figure 1.4 the shininess is carefully controlled: even though it is meant to look like a high-gloss surface, there is very little mirroring of the surroundings— the pale gray pavement, for example, barely registers on the Lamborghini. The photographer has manipulated the highlights, particularly on the windshield and headlights. Shininess needs to be controlled, to do only some of its work—such as suggesting newness, optimism, preciousness, and directing one’s attention. But the wrong kinds of shininess, the kinds that increase dislocation—resulting in distraction, duplicity, uncertainty—are problems. These problems in a still image can’t be solved the way they are in real life, by making the shine move in relationship to the surface, changing the content and shape of the reflection through the observer’s movement. But the problems can still be managed. Because the ad represents shininess, it can be controlled, and directed to attract, not distract. Controlling shininess is a way of reasserting the object while at the same time suggesting shininess’ aura, preciousness, and attraction. The consequences for shininess’ dislocations aren’t just ones of disorientation—they are also those of fascination. 18

Introduction

Figure 1.4: Lamborghini Murcielago in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Photo: Eric Glenn / Shutterstock.

Because viewers lose the sense of their relative relationship to the shiny thing, the dissolving and fracturing become a source of fascination, encouraging us to play with shininess’ effects. On a small scale, people move diamonds around, to make them sparkle; on a larger scale they bump into Cloud Gate. Shininess encourages motion—it’s a way of establishing location. No surprise, then, that some have associated the movement of shininess with evanescence. Shininess, for philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and others, evokes the transitoriness of life. Writing about Dutch Golden Age painting, Hegel asserts that it deals simultaneously with the “greatest

19

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truth of which art is capable; and, on the other hand, the magic and enchantment of light”: But the lustre of metal, the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by candlelight, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or sun, a smile, the expression of a swiftly passing emotion, ludicrous movements, postures, facial expressions—to grasp this most transitory and fugitive material, and to give it permanence for our contemplation in the fullness of its life, is the hard task of art at this stage.11

Evanescence, whose etymological roots lie in concepts of vanishing, is part of a family of words all related to qualities of light’s ephemerality: opalescence, iridescence, luminescence, incandescence, fluorescence. It’s easy to see how, in some contexts, shine’s impermanence evokes a sense of its triviality. As its evanescence suggests, what we can know about shiny things is distorted, uncertain. Shininess inhibits recognition, but its distortions and reflections have been used to produce art. The eighteenth century saw a craze for the Claude glass: a convex, reflective tinted mirror used by artists (and even some tourists) to alter an image of the landscape through a distorted shine, a shine that changed the color and tonal relationships of what was observed, and apparently mimicked the landscape paintings of the seventeenth-century French artist Claude Lorrain. Such shiny defamiliarization doesn’t always have such grand ambitions. Everyone is intrigued by, and plays with, their reflections on the side of a toaster, while waiting for the day to begin. Things become strange in a reflection: they both are and are not the object they reflect, a disorientation that can introduce anxiety. While admittedly portentous, The Matrix (1999) gets at the anxiety of uncanny reflection 20

Introduction

in the well-known scene in which Neo becomes aware of the alternate universe, and does so through the vehicle of shininess (Figure 1.5). The Matrix uses what we know about shine’s anxiety to make the mirror scene a natural vehicle for entry into an uncanny world. As Neo tentatively reaches out to touch a liquid, shiny mirror, reality gets paralleled and warped. He can’t locate the surface, and touching the shiny surface, instead of establishing his place, unleashes a flurry of further disorienting effects. When Neo contacts the liquid shine, Morpheus notes the disturbing relationship between the reflection and reality. He asks, in his gravelly voice, “How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?” From The Matrix to The Bean, shininess is always a form of excess, and not just a tool for pointing to excess. Shininess provides a perceptual overload. At its extremes, shiny excess disintegrates systems of categorization, and its sensory stimulations overwhelm. This effect moves in two different directions: it can feel both authoritarian (as in Singapore subway stations [Figure 5.3] or many utopian fantasies) and

Figure 1.5: The Matrix, 1999.

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giddily playful (as in Olafur Eliasson’s One-way colour tunnel [Figure 6.9]). In both, shininess’ excess provokes a loss of self. It is no wonder, then, that light and reflected light are at the heart of representing disembodiment—both with Victorian spirit photography and early stage productions of Peter Pan, in which Tinker Bell’s stage presence was created by the reflection of a strong light through a handheld mirror. It has become a standard trope in science fiction, from the specter of Obi-Wan in Star Wars; to multiple episodes of Star Trek; to Starman, the yet-to-become-cult-classic 1984 John Carpenter movie in which an alien (Jeff Bridges) arrives on earth as a shining blue ball of light, to become embodied, through the miracle of cloning a hair, as the dead husband of his earthling love interest. Shininess’ excesses lead to more than just disembodiment. Its overcharge, in certain circumstances, leads to fetishism—for example, the fetishism of the early 1970s glam rock acts like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Gary Glitter, Sweet, Alice Cooper, and, briefly, a confused Mick Jagger. Theatrical, spectacular, this kind of musical performance led to KISS and other bands of the 1970s, which featured making the body strange; adopting a persona; attending obsessively to costume, makeup, and hair styles; and gender bending (Figure 1.6). Such acts were a way of making the body uncanny, turning it into a doubled object, duplicitous. KISS presents the body as fetish. No longer a transparent sign, the body is an object of obsessive and strange attention, and shininess in its allure and defamiliarization overcharges, redirects, and queers the body as sign. In this context, it may seem odd to attribute duplicity to a physical phenomenon. However, the work of the philosopher Paul Grice provides a model for understanding such a conflation. In his theory of communicative cooperation, Grice presents four characteristics of cooperative 22

Introduction

Figure 1.6: KISS, 2013. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

conversation, of which shininess violates two. Grice argues that nonduplicitous communication requires that a speaker not make one’s “contribution more informative than is required.”12 Shiny things can give too much information, making unclear what viewers should focus on. As well, sincere communication requires what Grice terms “relevance.” Extraneous information points to a lack of trustworthiness, and in this, shiny things can be like duplicitous people, the entertaining scam artists of physical phenomena.

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Mirrors If shininess suggests something other than itself, mirrors would appear to be its paradigmatic example. After all, all shininess is reflection, and the shinier something is, the more reflective it is. But shininess is imperfect reflection. A shiny car may reflect some of its surrounding environment, but one is always aware of the medium doing the reflecting (the car), and the image seen in the reflection is distorted. Mirrors problematize shininess because the reflection has reached a point where the materiality of the mirror disappears, and viewers start to look into the shiny surface, to see the image. When a shiny surface reaches a theoretical point of perfect reflection, it is, in a sense, no longer shiny. It’s no longer shiny because the surface has disappeared; it has become entirely dematerialized. When that perfect reflection happens, viewers aren’t aware of the substance of the mirror; it no longer is a shiny thing. Mirrors don’t always pull this off, of course. When, because of glare or some other imperfection, viewers become aware of the substance of the mirror, they aren’t at that moment looking at the reflection. One can look at a mirror or at the reflection in a mirror, but it is impossible to see both at the same time. (This conundrum depends on the ability to be immersed in the mirror, the proportion of the mirror to the overall field of view. A tiny mirror is not going to have this effect, and neither is a distant mirror.) What this wavering shows is that mirrors are both the epitome of shininess and its end. When this purity is reached, a mirror is more like a window than an object. The shiny thing, by contrast, remains surface, emphasizing the object or medium that is doing the reflecting: those are shiny teeth; that’s a shiny shoe.

24

Introduction

Shiny shoes, of course, do not produce light, and this difference goes to the heart of both a terminological and a value distinction. “Shiny” shoes reflect light, but the object that “shines” emits light. This difference between emitting and reflecting has significant consequences. To shine has more weight than to be shiny because shine has its own inherent energy. Shine is not dependent; shine comes from within. The sun shines; it is not shiny. Shininess, on the other hand, is relational and dependent, because reflection is the central feature of shininess. Shininess is not produced internally; it is produced by a surface, a surface dependent on an external source. Shininess is an embodied shine. Its embodiment means that shininess is more contingent than is shine; the relation depends on a surface, and the central place of surface in shininess parallels common cultural understandings that privilege depth over surface. (It is better to go to the heart of the matter than to be skin deep, for example.) It is not surprising that “superficial” etymologically refers to surface. For reasons both of surface and of contingency, “shiny” has less gravitas than “shine.” To say a skyscraper is a shiny building is different than to say it shines, and one of the differences is a difference of value. Shine is less amenable to irony and is a more companionable metaphor for transcendence than is shininess— you can trust God because he/she shines, not because he/ she’s shiny. Shine, including shine in art, is bound to have a different register from shininess. As we have noted, shine is emitted light, but shininess is light reflected from an object, and this difference, oddly, is fundamental to why shine in art takes a back seat to shininess. Artworks are more often about shininess than they are about shine, and they much more often represent shininess than they represent shine. Even in a standard sunset painting, where the sun glows 25

Shiny Things

red near the horizon, shininess dominates, reflecting off the bottoms of clouds, off the surface of water and the wings of birds. The sun is the least interesting part of the image—and not just because shininess is more omnipresent. Shininess operates as a kind of meta-analysis. As reflection, shininess is a mediated, “as-if” phenomenon—and thus more useful for art as a subject of analysis than is shine. The relative position of shine and shininess in art, then, is a difference between directness and mediation, an issue that is integral not just to shininess, but to how shininess more generally functions in art and culture.

26

Embodied Shine 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.

Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing. —Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

—Science News-Letter, 1949

In March of 1393 King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia arrested John of Nepomuk, had him tortured, thrown off Prague’s Charles Bridge, and drowned. The motivations for John’s death were political and religious, a confusing tale in which some versions even posit two different Johns of Nepomuk, some claiming he died because he wouldn’t accede to the King’s appointment of a Bishop, and others that he wouldn’t tell the King the content of the Queen’s confessions. History has treated him more kindly than did Wenceslaus: John of Nepomuk became the much-venerated patron saint of Bohemia. In 1729, he was canonized by the Catholic Church as a martyr, and in 1736, his body was enshrined in an enormous silver tomb of stunning Baroque excess, designed by 27

Shiny Things

Fischer von Erlach the Younger (Figure 2.1). In addition to his patronage of Bohemia and a few other places, John protects against floods, drowning, and slander—which explains the tomb’s inordinate attention lavished on his tongue. As with Cloud Gate, the tomb’s shininess needs to be maintained, and today its sheen is preserved not by an assiduous team whose polishing would gradually over the centuries remove its details, but by a thin protective layer of varnish. The tomb, its curator tells us, only needs dusting.

Figure 2.1: Tomb of St. John of Nepomuk, 1736, St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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The expense and preciousness of his tomb assert that John of Nepomuk, the ideas that he came to stand in for, and the people who built his tomb, are important. The tomb is an assertion of eternal life, of transcendence, and of the sublime. The tomb’s shine has compound functions, oddly juxtaposing power and excess with the immateriality of the shine, an immateriality that also postulates the triumph of the spiritual over history and death. The tomb’s shininess has multiple significations, then, as does the labor that historically was required to maintain its shine. Silver tarnishes, an interaction that increases with rising humidity and temperature, and leaves a layer of dark argentous sulfide. Without some kind of protective coating, silver interacts with hydrogen sulfide in the air, and with other environmental sulfurs, including pollutants. Even the sulfur content of adhesives, paper, or cardboard packaging can be a problem—an egg spoon’s battle with tarnish is doomed from the start. Restoring shine has its own costs: the abrasive in cleaning also removes a thin layer of silver, and the alternative chemical process, that converts the argentous sulfide back to silver, eventually pits the surface. The work that historically was required to produce and maintain shininess evoked the sublime, power, transcendence, and excess. This connection is clear in memorial public statuary found throughout Baroque Europe. In her work on the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples Cathedral, Helen Hills writes of its 32 silver figures of saints that cleaning and polishing, rubbing and coaxing the sharpest gleam from metal was part of the cares of the Treasury Chapel. It was labour that redeemed those surfaces. The shine itself is the surplus of labour, energy made visible, pure profit expended. What goes around comes around in silver.

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Always it hides in its seductive sheen the labour, the sweat, the violence of its origins, its transmission, its social polish.13

Despite the shine’s assertion that it is above history, eternally new and hopeful, most materials constantly retreat from their shine, and their maintenance is time-consuming and costly—something that historically increased rather than decreased their value. (This compulsive process of maintenance is a fraught one: shine is one of the few properties of surface that we fetishize, a fetishization that extends both to physical objects and the human body.)

Material processes The history of shiny cultural objects—the embodiment of shine—is a rebellion against that work, a story of a search for more and more shine, of making it omnipresent, and less expensive to produce and maintain. As part of that search, the early history of shininess is not just a history of rare, valuable materials like gold, silver, or gems. Ceramic glazes were discovered around 5000 to 8000 BCE in Egypt when the excessive heat in kilns resulted in the colored vitrification of clay surfaces. Through accidents and experimentation over thousands of years, inexpensive glossy surfaces became available on ceramic ware, from vessels and tiles to sculpture. By the seventeenth century, middle-class Dutch homes, for example, had walls of shiny Delft tile in their kitchens and living rooms, a mark of status, a lively source of decoration, and an easy-to-clean surface. (But the labor invested in the production and laying of these tiles still made them unable to compete economically with the invention of wallpaper in the early eighteenth century.) In general, glazed ceramic is not a particularly precious material or 30

Embodied Shine

cultural form (unless intensely decorated), which suggests that its commonness and functionality may be what lends its shininess more to hygienic values than to the transcendence and power that are signified by more precious surfaces. Initially, the search for inexpensive shininess that mimicked preciousness tended to go in a single direction: the application of thin layers of a precious material to a cheaper one. The story of gilding and plating materials with a thin shiny surface is a history of technique: of establishing and controlling shine, and of a concern with controlling cost, thinness, adhesion, and durability. But such a history also requires looking at why a culture would value such processes, value them enough to commit extensive resources to their development. The values were, first of all, economic, to lower cost by using less silver and gold. No surprise that it could have some dubious applications. One of the earliest pervasive uses of gilding was by medieval forgers of Roman gold and silver coins who came up with ingenious techniques to match the weight and density of gold and silver, as well as to hide the seams that come with foil gilding. Gilding’s deception was not limited to monetary counterfeiting; all gilding and plating is deceptive. The history of thin shiny surfaces is a history of fraud; gilded and plated surfaces promise solidity but deliver superficiality. Gilding began in the second millennium BCE, appearing with slight technical variations in different cultures. Initially, gilding was an extremely laborious process of affixing gold foil or leaf to another surface (the difference is one of thickness: gold leaf consists of sheets of gold so thin they can’t bear their own weight, and have to be applied with a brush). Adhesives and gesso were often used to apply the leaf, while solder was a technique for attaching thicker foil to metal. The artful concealing of seams was difficult and crucial to gilding’s success—the finished work needed to 31

Shiny Things

look perfect, as if it were pure and solid. Its measure was its successful deception. Invented in China in the fourth century BCE, fire gilding eventually became the most common gilding technique. A gold and mercury mixture (eight parts mercury to one part gold) was put on a clean metal surface, and then heated. The highly toxic mercury would then evaporate into the air, and into the lungs of the unfortunate gilder, whose mental and physical deterioration was quick. Fire gilding was not a way to mass-produce gilded objects. But it did provide church and state with an array of pleasing, uniform, and thin shiny surfaces. The last major discovery in gilding technology occurred in 1743, when a British silversmith, trying to repair a damaged silver knife, blundered and melted the silver, and in so doing accidentally discovered that layers of silver and copper will fuse together at a low melting point, and when hammered out the fused layers will retain the same original and uniform ratio of thicknesses. Sheffield plating brought silver into the homes of people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it, but who now could enjoy the appeal of precious materials in a domestic setting, and also eat their dinners without having the taste put off by steel cutlery. By the mid-nineteenth century, Sheffield plating lost its prominence to electroplating, which was less labor-intensive and more reliable in terms of cost and materials. The purposes of electroplating were various: to heighten smoothness and lubricity; to create, via smoothness, more hygienic surfaces; and to increase corrosion resistance. And, of course, it made things pleasingly shiny. While previously these properties could be attained only through great cost and labor, electroplating offered cost efficiencies in achieving these things at a consistently thin layer of metal—much thinner, in fact, than had been previously possible. Electroplating made shininess available for mass 32

Embodied Shine

production, with the consequence that shininess, suddenly cheap to produce, lost some of its preciousness and allure. The basic process of electroplating hasn’t changed much over time. Objects ready for electroplating are put in a chemical bath of dissolved metal. An electric current is passed through the bath, and the dissolved metal then migrates to and adheres to the object, which functions as the cathode of the reaction. The current and the bath both require precise calibration so that the rate of adhesion can be controlled. At the time of its discovery, electroplating’s source of power was a Voltaic pile, a rudimentary battery with a structure of alternating layers of metals separated by thin spacers that have been soaked in salt. In 1801 Luigi Brugnatelli was the first to electroplate an object—turning a silver coin gold. (Early on, electroplating was overwhelmingly used to cover base metals with noble ones.) But Voltaic piles didn’t allow for large-scale mass plating; eventually, generators were needed to spark its expansion to an industrial scale. Through a series of parallel discoveries in various countries, the process took off in 1839, and advances proceeded quickly. Electroplated objects, buffed and polished, massively expanded shininess into culture; although the biggest commercial advantages were in consumer objects, in 1854 electroplating made possible the electroplated gold domes of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Shiny practical objects became commonplace with the invention of chrome plating, a plated shine that has become synonymous with shininess itself. Not perfected until 1924, chrome was immediately brought to Detroit for development in the auto industry (figure 2.2).14 Chrome plating, usually done over successive layers of separately smoothed and buffed platings of copper, nickel, and finally chrome itself, not only produces an intense, deeply reflective, mirror-quality shine, it makes a surface extremely 33

Shiny Things

Figure 2.2: C. G. Spring and Bumper Company advertisement, 1928.

hard and durable. Chrome’s promise was of a shiny future, impervious to rust and time. The end of the Second World War released chrome from the restrictions of an essential defense material and launched the golden age of the chrome car bumper. At the same time, chrome found its way onto every imaginable kitchen appliance, and the shiny furnishings accents of art deco morphed into an apotheosis of shine with the chrome furniture, lamps, and ornaments of mid-century modern styling.

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Embodied Shine

In recent years, a chrome-like shine has been available for almost any material, particularly plastics, through the technology of vacuum metallization or metal deposition in which a metal, usually aluminum, is evaporated into a vapor cloud within a vacuum chamber. The vapor condenses onto the surfaces of materials it contacts, and bonds to it in a uniform layer that can be given a protective topcoat and made to shine like chrome. This is now the standard process in the manufacture of shiny toys, auto trim, and other reflective surfaces such as metallic party balloons and heat shielding/ retaining Mylar blankets whose reflective surfaces were originally invented for use on NASA spacecraft. In the twentieth century, because of these plating techniques and the aggressive marketing of stainless steel and shiny plastic, shine became ubiquitous. (Nic Maffei’s “Selling Gleam: Making Steel Modern in Post-War America” presents an excellent history of marketing and shine in the American steel industry.) Culture has more shininess than it used to, and not just via the evolution of plated metallic surfaces, but in other advances like the waxing of supermarket fruit and the invention of high-gloss latex house paint, with its extremely small resin particles that created a previously unavailable shine. (Contemporary life also has many more, and more powerful, sources of focused illumination.) Suddenly, things that in the past had never been shiny became shiny, and people who hadn’t had access to shininess suddenly did. Anybody could have chrome in their kitchens. Shininess moved to mass production, and it didn’t require work for its maintenance. Ubiquity, however, has consequences. Shininess lost much of its inherent preciousness. While still connected to its old discourse of prestige, power, and transcendence, the basis for these connections was increasingly unclear as shine became available to larger groups, and to new contexts. 35

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Given both its ubiquity and its literal superficiality, the story of plating is also a story of disappointment. The solid gold Golden Buddha of Wat Traimit is awe-inspiring, but his gilded cousins at other temples, let alone a plated bowling trophy, are a bit of a letdown. Increasingly, in the face of shiny objects, there is a moment of uncertainty. Golden shine can produce an unease of not knowing whether the shiny object is really precious or not, an ambiguity that is often clarified with cultural and contextual knowledge. Such knowledge isn’t solely acquired by reading a Lonely Planet guidebook. In a private home one also reads the context, silently asking such questions as whether one’s host really can afford this apparent level of precious shininess. When it is clear something is plated, more than just one’s knowledge is modified; the affect changes. Not that the shine isn’t real shine—the shine stays the same. But there is a disconnect between the surface and the substance, an added layer to shine’s duplicity, a subverting of expectations. Plate epitomizes the superficial, and it infects the shine. Suspicion of the shine has become our default reaction. It’s not entirely a negative thing: Shiny plating didn’t completely replace the preciousness of shine; shine just became more multivalent, and people became more discriminating about the source and values of the shine they were observing. The reasons for skeptical reactions to shine are related to rarity. Today’s shininess is so ubiquitous that we know the world cannot contain enough gold, silver, and chrome for all of these objects to be solid. As well, its ubiquity and lack of labor required for its maintenance have made shininess commonplace, banal. While contemporary shininess sometimes is precious, more often it’s ordinary, as ordinary as a chrome-plated faucet. The overwhelming presence of ordinary shine has a surprising consequence related to shininess’ evocation of grand values. The default meaning of 36

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shininess changed; its omnipresence has disentangled shininess from preciousness and, consequently, its aura of value and power. When gilt frames became mass-produced out of vacuum-plated plastic, shiny frames started to mean something other than what they had meant. They cite preciousness, status, and class but no longer signify them (and open themselves up to ironic uses). Consequently, it is no surprise that, since the twentieth century’s technological advances, cheap and ubiquitous shiny things have developed a difficult relationship with authenticity. The history of thin shiny surfaces is a history of reducing cost, of making shininess available to a wider group of people, of making more things shiny. Surface plating had a socioeconomic impetus of enabling less advantaged groups to mimic power and status. Shiny plating gave the appearance of preciousness, suggesting transcendence and power, and creating an aesthetically pleasing object, with the consequent increase in status that possession of gilded objects gave. Plating has made the world much more shiny than it used to be, but it also lost some of its effortless authority. Shininess’ availability did not escape the taint of fraud, of people mimicking a status that was not theirs. America’s Gilded Age was glitzy, of course; but it was also deceptive, insubstantial, hollow at its core. It wasn’t America’s Golden Age. When one realizes something isn’t authentic, it can’t create the effects of transcendence or preciousness. (Jeff Koons’ use of popular culture complicates this relationship, using shine to play with both the authentic and the ironic attributes of shine.) This shift is recent. There used to be a tight, almost inherent relationship between shine and preciousness, so tight that cultures considered one to be identical with the other. This apparently ontological connection between shine and its material source has dissolved. 37

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With the ontological connection dubious, and its deceptive properties highlighted, plated shine encounters moral skepticism. While shine deceptively pretends to be something it’s not, moral judgments of it are not simple and clean, merely a matter of modernist truth to materials. As they often are, social moral judgments are rooted in attitudes of class; plated objects can signal striving rather than ease of ownership and wealth. Plated objects want to be something they aren’t, and their abundance encourages some to think of them as cheesy, kitsch, a cheap evocation of preciousness. And there is a further twist: at a certain point plating and shine became so ubiquitous that it’s just the way things are. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, shininess has more often than not become ordinary. Shine’s ready availability can create odd social pressures. When shine is so common, a new rarity is needed. With the sticky fingers of the masses reaching up to grasp newly available shiny things, those for whom money is no object, and who are accustomed to its presence, at times go for an inconspicuous matte Louis Vuitton handbag. Studies show that wealthy consumers make such decisions “in order to differentiate them from the mainstream consumers.”15 Shininess used to be a completely clear marker of social distinction, but distinction is a flexible concept, based on rarity and exclusion. In the 1970s, matte photographs, as opposed to glossy, became popular as a way to distinguish one’s snapshots as artistic. Even Lamborghini makes a matte black version of its cars.

Allure Despite an occasional and perverse elitist twist, shininess overwhelmingly remains culture’s go-to finish. 38

Embodied Shine

Why does culture make things shiny, even at the cost of giving up trust, preciousness, and transcendence—as it has to an accelerated degree in contemporary culture? Notwithstanding its omnipresence, its losses of authenticity, its class markers, and its kitsch, shininess attracts us, it sells. Retinal stimulation still does its work. The Journal of Consumer Psychology cites research showing consumers prefer glossiness in products as diverse as paper stock, paint, and even store shelving.16 Manufacturers have long intuited shine’s attractions, extending beyond precious materials and toward more mundane surfaces. Patent leather, invented in Europe in the late 1700s, claimed to be an improvement over natural leather in durability and waterproofing. But it wasn’t used for work boots and contexts in which waterproofing and strength are essential; patent leather immediately became decorative. Impractical, readily showing imperfections and scuffs, patent leather is really about the attractions of shine. Even in the military it is used for dress boots and uniforms, and for the brims and chinstraps of military caps; and in culture more generally, patent leather’s primary uses are for formal wear, women’s accessories, and fetish wear. Seduction is more than a metaphor in shiny things: just as shiny things are alluring, sexual allure exploits shininess. Indeed, sexual attraction is the paradigmatic process for creating desire, the epitome of allure, and all forms of consumerist desire structurally mimic it. The shiny human body invites pleasure; it entices, catching attention and drawing one in. It is seductive, erotic because shininess promises things and stands as a nonarbitrary sign for both physiological states and physical attributes. The shiny body offers slipperiness, tactility, and visual definition (it is no accident that “lubricious” designates both slipperiness and enticing sexuality). The shiny body signifies arousal through 39

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the sheen of tautness and slipperiness. And it has an excess, sensory overload, a promise of losing oneself. It indicates positive physical attributes: hygiene and grooming, health, youth. What’s not to like? Cultures have general social conventions of attractive bodily shininess that are gendered and subject to change over time. Nail polish and lip gloss (which uses the hydrocarbon polybutene as the key ingredient in its shine) exaggerate the shine of already-shiny parts of the body. Since prehistory, people have been mixing glitter (using mica, for example) with pigments and applying it to their bodies, one manifestation being a gold powder (Gold 001), featured in Prada’s Spring 2016 show. Ubiquitous modern glitter sees its origins in 1934, with the invention of plastic glitter by New Jersey machinist Henry Ruschmann, and since then glitter has found its way into virtually every cosmetic product, including, oddly enough, stool enhancers. Other conventions of bodily shine include jewelry, sequined evening gowns, Nudie suits, and piercings, some of which modulate desire into fetish. (While shininess is often used to elicit desire, as a tool of seduction, the shiny body also has less charged versions of allure, such as playful adornment, or to heighten an occasion. Glitter isn’t always about seducing another person; bodily shininess is not inevitably goal-oriented.) The meaning of bodily shine is inescapably inflected through culture; it always reveals something about the culture in which it appears, particularly social positioning. The shiny body displays the social nuances of wealth. For example, bling, among the other things it does, suggests a particular socioeconomic class, while pearls point in a different direction. Bodily shine always indicates class, an indication that operates differently at different times. Nail polish, with or without glitter, can suggest social status or age. While 40

Embodied Shine

early in the twenty-first century young teenagers would use sparkle nail polish for daily life, for older women of a certain class it was an accent, used for parties and celebrative occasions. The amount of jewelry can be a political statement, as it is in hip-hop; gold or diamond grillz are not an arbitrary fashion statement. Neither is the baffling popularity of sheen-promoting beard oil. Shininess’ social positioning can have more rigorous signs: in the military, shiny shoes are signs of power relations, order, and labor. The significations of different kinds of bodily shine are nuanced and powerful. The various manifestations of the shiny body today are also uniquely tied up with consumerism. Consumer culture pushes its commodities (including bodies) to their limits, to create newness, rarity, distinction. At its extremes the commodified shiny body stands for a heroic romanticism. Aided by new and readily available materials like Titanium G23 labrets or Gel Physique Posing Glaze, the body has become more shiny, more extreme, defamiliarized. Certain kinds of extreme bodies—in some fashion photography, in body building, and in cyborg cinema—rely on exaggerated shininess for their effects. The phrase “extreme body” has different, typically casual, meanings, but for our purposes the phrase “extreme shiny bodies” refers to an exaggeration, a stylization of the body’s features, and using shininess to communicate this exaggeration. With these bodies, the shine is stylized, excessive, or found in unexpected places. Shininess’ signification becomes not just a vehicle, but a subject matter, and the body becomes strange. The shiny body in these instances is an extreme mark of consumer culture: it expands choices and creates forms of distinction, but within highly conventionalized languages and practices. Fashion photography is a paradigmatic example of this practice. Using conventions and techniques of representing shine, primarily conveyed through carefully controlled 41

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and manipulated lighting, fashion ads manipulate the shine and stylize the body. The October 31, 2014 issue of Madame Figaro ran a cosmetics ad featuring model Barbara Palvin, photographed by Nico Bustos (Figure 2.3). The ad’s formal properties are carefully staged, with the vertical symmetry through the middle of the face matched by the single hanging strand of hair. Its lighting, especially the shiny highlights on Palvin’s lips, chin, nose, forehead, and a large one on her upper arm, is central to that staging. Additional wet highlights appear in her hair. These highlights are strange because, except near the tip of the nose, there are almost no corresponding cast shadows, which would confusingly disrupt the surface contours of the face. In particular, there are no shadows from the hanging hair—an impossibility with such a strong light source. This is Photoshop hard at work. This manipulation means something, does something. Rooted in ideas of perfect beauty, of allure, the idealization of the body results in its stylizations, a series of simplifications and exaggerations. And stylizations of shine: in the ad, the highlight on the inside corners of both eyes is unlikely to exist in nature. Shininess helps to construct certain kinds of idealization through its suggestion of newness, freshness, perfection, and, at times, innocence. (This construction of shininess instantiates the work that stylization more generally does. Overly saturating the color of a landscape photograph, for example, does the same kind of idealizing work that shininess does in the Bustos photograph.) The purpose of this manipulated light and shine is to fascinate, to create allure. A bit more and this wetness and shine would defamiliarize the body, make it strange. When it is overly shiny, or excessively adorned with shiny clothing, when highlights and shine become overly stylized, the body moves toward the condition of fetish. (There is an astonishing correlation between “shiny body” 42

Figure 2.3: Nico Bustos, Barbara Palvin in Madame Figaro, October 2014.

Shiny Things

google searches and links to fetish sites.) Liberace, glitter rock, Las Vegas showgirls, and Mardi Gras costumes all revel in this relationship. Over-stylization, through an orchestration of multiple techniques and effects in the creation of shine, defamiliarizes the body, either through its placement on the body or through its excess. The overly shiny body becomes an object of intense focus, disconnected from its context. Excessive shine takes the body out of its world. It disorients; it keeps viewers’ attention on its surface. Viewers don’t read its emotive gestures; they aren’t drawn to thinking about its consciousness. This kind of armored shiny body offers no access to an interior state; unreal, the excessively shiny body strips us of empathy. It engages in these activities in such a focused way that the shiny body becomes fetishistic, taking on one property at the expense of others. Stylized shininess removes qualities, things that would cloud a fetish’s smooth function: imperfection, nuance, history. In doing so, the overly shiny body offers strangeness. One expects shininess to reveal nuances of the body’s surface, and when it doesn’t, the body seems unreal, employing the fetishistic properties of strangeness and idealization. (Not all shiny bodies are idealized: shininess on the abject body reveals flaws, not perfection.) The shine makes the body special, charging and focusing it. The excessively shiny body becomes a sign; as it moves away from realistic representation it becomes less of a Peircean icon and more of a symbol. Stylization and idealization are a process of abstracting, and lead to objectification and commodification. It is no mystery, then, that consumerism is so wild about shine: shine aids in commodification and in the fetishization of the commodity. In the shiny fetish body of fashion photography, shininess does not primarily signify health or hygiene; the signs of health and hygiene serve the conventions of erotic 44

Embodied Shine

expression. Shininess peculiarly lends itself to eros. In a Lacanian sense it dissolves boundaries and suggests penetrability. Enhanced shininess imbues limbs, torsos, or any part of the body with qualities inherent to the body’s naturally shiny (wet or tumescent) and slippery parts, its eyes, lips and mouth, and sexual organs. The excessively shiny body gives itself over to sexual fetishization, which consumer culture conflates with the commodity fetish. (The shiny body of consumer culture, then, merges the commodity and the sexual fetish.) In fetish shininess, the exaggeration of shininess’ inherent attraction leads to dizzying category breakdowns, as exaggeration always does, and category breakdowns move us into the territory of the uncanny. At a certain point— when it is excessive, or in the wrong context, shiny surfaces create anxiety. The shiny fetish and the uncanny share some attributes. Both disconnect object and meaning, sign and referent; strangeness and defamiliarization are a part of both the fetish and the uncanny. But desire functions differently in each. In the fetish, strangeness elicits desire. The fetish (which we discuss more fully in later chapters) is the ultimate sign of desire, an object of obsessive attraction, and hope for gratification. The uncanny, on the other hand, has the anxiety of attraction and repulsion. Except when the uncanny itself is fetishized, the uncanny offers no promise, raises no hopes, of desire gratified. Its affect is a state of tension. The shiny uncanny is an anxious pleasure, like the sublime, and when the shiny body becomes uncanny its eros destabilizes. The experience of the uncanny inherently leaves one unsettled; the uncanny has no teleology. Certain physical effects of shininess have a motivated relationship to the uncanny: the effects of disorientation, excess, mirroring. These effects of defamiliarization accentuate in the uncanny a tense bouncing back and forth 45

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between the familiar and the strange. They also engage in a particular intellectual discourse. While Freud stressed familiarity’s central role in creating the uncanny, a resurfacing of what had been known (the “uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed”17), he also asserted its irresolvability. Freud’s argument that “the uncanny is something which is secretly familiar”18 has uncertainty at its heart, an uncertainty that arises from a mix of the familiar and the strange (the homology with extreme shininess is obvious). Most theorists of the uncanny present an even more destabilized experience, in which the uncanny does not so much reveal what has been repressed (and therefore is familiar), but a slight reversal in which the familiar is made strange. As Andrew Barnaby argues, “we are unnerved by the experience of coming to see subsequently that some other reality—something uncertain or unexpected—is concealed within what is most familiar, personal, and intimate. In other words, the experience of the uncanny is a moment of reversal.”19 The uncanny is, in Terry Castle’s words, an “experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse.”20 In its destabilization of the familiar, the uncanny’s uncertainty produces anxiety, an anxiety that overturns categories that had been thought to be stable or dichotomous, and can even destabilize the sense of self. The uncanny shiny body is most stunningly on display at body building competitions. From local events to the International Federation of Body Builders’ Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe, the rituals are precise. Each show has three rounds of judging, each with its own conventions and rules. Early on, contestants are judged for muscular balance and symmetry. The competition then moves to judging based on stylized poses and flexing. In contests under the auspices of the IFBB, there are eight standardized poses. All of this is done under heavy, glaring light (Figure 2.4). 46

Embodied Shine

Figure 2.4: Troy Alves, Mr. Olympia 2003. Credit: LocalFitness.com.au.

Pre-show preparations are complex. Before a competition, contestants make sure their bodies are completely hairless. On the day before or the day of the competition, they apply posing oils, often with an added pigment to make their skin darker. Dream Tan #2 is a favorite. Some posing oils include menthol to heat the skin, increasing vascular visibility. Zealous competitors even add topical vasodilators and dehydrate themselves before competitions to further enhance this effect, a step that can be dangerous. All these preparations have a common purpose: to increase shine, particularly highlights, and therefore to enhance definition. The hairless body reflects more light, the posing oils add a wet smooth shine, the darkened skin surface creates strong contrasting highlights, and the dilators add definition and create other highlights. Under the glare of the lights, the bodies pop. 47

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The body builder’s extreme exaggeration of the human figure has a destabilizing effect, an effect amplified by the shininess. With its fascinating, uncanny effects, the shiny bodies of the IFBB become strange. While those not in the body building community may experience some repulsion at the extremity of the effects, those in the community fetishize it. The body builder goes after maximal effects; one might wonder if there is any limit at all, a point brought home in the many body building websites that narrate the tragic consequences of body builders whose out-of-control pursuit of muscle mass and definition have led to an early death. The most anxiety-producing effects of the shiny body are the uncanny ones, where the trapezius and other muscles of the shoulder and neck overwhelm the head, or where the skeletal structure entirely disappears, or in the unnaturalness of the shininess and the odd, orange skin tones. When posing, the whole body is clenched, strongly articulated by the light and the shine; the posing smile doubles as grimace. These aren’t natural or ideal bodies; these are muscle machines, extreme bodies. Cinema’s cyborgs offer even more extreme bodies, with more uncanny shiny effects, from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, to the Terminator movies, to Robocop and Mad Max: Fury Road. In Metropolis, the cyborg/android version of Maria first appears as a shiny android, who, when fitted with human skin and features (becoming a cyborg), is sent out to betray and wreak chaos on the underground working class. But it is not so much the social upheaval that she creates that is so disturbing, as it is her uncanniness. In Maria’s fiery death at the hands of the underclass, the sudden revelation of the shiny metal beneath her burning skin tells the workers that she isn’t human, and that moment of transformation and recognition fascinates and horrifies them (Figure 2.5). 48

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Figure 2.5: Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927.

Cyborg shininess has an idiosyncratic semiotic function. All cyborgs and androids have shiny parts whose function is more than mechanical. Shininess is a trope; it represents the unhuman, and in mixing with the fleshy human, it creates uncanny effects. In a cyborg, shiny metal is part of the body, not on it. Shininess defines the cyborg’s identity. It defamiliarizes what appears to be a human body, breaking boundaries, its combination with the organic body suggesting both similarity and dissonance (it is particularly creepy that the cyborgs in Metropolis and The Terminator are shiny under their skin—that’s not where shininess belongs). The effect is one of attraction and horror, and in that tension cyborgs 49

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twist the way shininess usually works. Here, the shininess that we usually find alluring disturbs us. Because shininess is recontextualized, put where it shouldn’t be, it doesn’t do its usual work. It is strange, it is shininess from a different context, and it shocks and horrifies. The image of the dismembered cyborg in 2014’s Robocop repels not just because it is a dismemberment, but because of its juxtaposition of flesh and metal. The Terminator provides even more striking instances of this juxtaposition, of flesh and metal melting and reforming. Not just a property of an object, the uncanny produces a phenomenological affect, found in particularly stylized moments where shine leads to mediated distance. The moment of cyborg recognition, a standard trope in cyborg films, is a moment of radical perceptual unease, and does the work of the uncanny in both characters and the movie audience, although at different moments and to different effects. In Metropolis, the uncanny appears in a classic moment of transformation, of perceptual uncertainty or dissonance (Figure 2.5). One of the horrors of such moments of recognition is that one’s basic emotional and perceptual instincts turn out to be untrue. If truth lies in the instincts (an iffy romanticist understanding of the mind), the moment of the uncanny cyborg is a moment where instincts have been revealed to be false, creating horror, revulsion, or panicked anger. The cyborg’s shininess is a sign for the machine, for the uncanny nonhuman. In this, the cyborg shine doesn’t avail itself of all of shininess’ expressive possibilities; for example, cyborg shine isn’t a sign of fecundity, and it doesn’t work with the narcissistic effects of mirroring that often accompany shininess. As many have pointed out, the fear of the cyborg manifests what Bruce Grenville describes as “a sign of collective anxiety around the ubiquitous presence 50

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of the machine,”21 and, more recently, a fear of the digital. The cyborg creates an anxiety that meshes with the destabilizing perceptual effects of shininess. There is a lot to be scared of: machines are more powerful than humans, they can be more precise and efficient, and they don’t rest. Controlling them is uncertain—it’s never a good idea to irritate cyborgs. And often, it’s not initially clear that they are cyborgs. The Terminator and Cyborg-Maria don’t announce themselves as hybrid, alien; to pass as human they disguise their shininess. In The Terminator and Metropolis shininess signifies additional things as well, producing additional uncanny effects. For one, cyborg shininess disavows history. Although they appear human, cyborgs don’t grow up or age; they can bypass the ravages of time. They can be upgraded; their parts can be replaced; they can be put back together. There are no ultimate consequences for a cyborg. They don’t die; they spawn sequels. In The Terminator, the shininess is internal to the android/cyborg, and can re-form and repair infinitely. The cyborg, to be killed, needs to be dematerialized. Cyborg-Maria and the Terminator are melted and burned. The cyborg body needs to disappear; there can be no surface left on which shininess can reappear. As its passing for human suggests, the fear/revulsion of cyborgs is more than just a fear of machines, then; it is an uncanny fear of a strange version of the human, a fear of the Other. A basic understanding of the Other, common in both horror film and race theory, is that we project our fears and desires onto the Other, the things we cannot acknowledge in ourselves. As Robin Wood argues in his classic essay “The American Nightmare,” the Other “functions not simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what is repressed (though never destroyed) in the self and projected outward in order to be hated and disowned.”22 51

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Othering is exclusionary. With cyborgs, the fear of the Other is an anxiety about our own deaths, our own weaknesses, our own sense of ourselves. There is something transgressive and disturbing about, say, one’s desire for and fear of this alien thing. The impermeableness of the cyborg’s shiny metallic parts keeps it from being known. Cyborg shininess also invokes tropes of efficiency and a consequent emotional distance. It’s not surprising that a central anxiety in The Terminator and Metropolis, and many other cyborg films, concerns emotion. The shininess produces a distancing effect, emotionally remote. In his “Joey: A ‘Mechanical Boy,’” an essay central to cyborg theory, Bruno Bettelheim writes A human body that functions as if it were a machine and a machine that duplicates human functions are equally fascinating and frightening. Perhaps they are so uncanny because they remind us that the human body can operate without a human spirit, that body can exist without soul.23

Awareness of the cyborg not as human but as shiny and mechanical triggers this anxiety. In Metropolis, viewer reactions and the reactions within the film diverge. Audiences see Cyborg-Maria’s sexy dance as the dance of an automaton. Part of the horror at the end of the film is the character Feder’s realization that he has been sexually and emotionally attracted to a cyborg. Such a difficult relationship with emotion goes to odd recesses in culture. Oz’s Tin Man doesn’t have feelings: tears will rust him. He needs a heart. Hearts, of course, are alluring consumer objects, as Jeff Koons has demonstrated with his Hanging Heart (Figure 7.1). But in consumer society there is always a tension between allure and human values. The layer of shine mediates the object or body on which it appears, and 52

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as a result the shine on consumerist bodies moves away from the human, from the photographer’s manipulation of the shine that appears on a model’s body, to the mediated bodies of Mr. Olympia, to uncanny cyborg bodies that are shiny at their core. As Walter Benjamin argues in his Arcades Project, Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service.24

As consumer culture gets more extreme, and shine becomes omnipresent, the shine moves away from the organic. Shine becomes more technological, more mediated, more obviously cultural. Using a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art opening as his hook for a New York Times article on shiny metal in current fashion, Michael Rock writes, “The intergalactic sheen of the inorganic seems omnipresent, tinging everything from eyes, lips and nails to gilded temporary tattoos, cutaneous body adornments, to even the most ubiquitous handheld device, the rose gold iPhone 6s.” Alluring shine pushes in odd directions. The historical drive to invent and create new applications for shininess reveals its hold on us, even to the point of overlaying ordinary objects with a shiny coating. Demanding our attention, intensifying our experience of an object or body, shininess easily moves to fetishization, from memorial tombs to fashion photography to Koons’ Hanging Heart. Grimacing, his glistening pose a rictus frozen in time, Mr. Olympia is a new John of Nepomuk.

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Shiny Representation The listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. —Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

Shininess is so central to our lives that cultures do more than just make things shiny; they spend considerable resources and time representing shininess, creating virtual shine. Takashi Murakami turned representing shininess into an idée fixe, and John Singer Sargent into the trademark of his virtuosity. Thus, while Shiny Things began by looking at the phenomenology of shine, and then turned to shine’s materiality and its making, it now considers the issues in representing the shiny. The three work together, providing a context for understanding the semiotics of shininess. To understand shiny representation, this chapter immerses itself in visual art and representations of shininess, primarily through an examination of painting, but ending with computer-generated representations of shine. Representing shininess has important implications for shininess itself: people have used art and representations of shine more generally to figure out how shininess works, and what it means. From Byzantine and early Renaissance artists, to Dutch genre painters, to photorealists of the 1960s and anime of the 1990s, shininess and representing shininess have been serious goals of visual artists, a means of suggesting transcendence or transience, of examining 54

materiality, of seducing the viewer’s gaze, of demonstrating one’s skill. Shininess and representing shininess are two different things, however, something whose tension is seen in Byzantine icons and early Renaissance religious paintings. These art works, with their gold grounds or shiny halos, exemplify an unusual conflation of actual shininess functioning as a representation of shininess. At discrete locations on their surfaces, these works represent shininess by using a shiny material. But these works’ halo and ground do not demonstrate the difficulties of depicting shininess using a non-shiny material. As for representing shininess, the gold leaf is not conducive to the depiction of complex spatial illusions and creation of form. Something separate from actual shininess needs to happen to represent shiny things. This issue is brought to the fore by photographs of art works in gold leaf, by attempts to represent their actual shininess. Frankly, the Detroit Institute of Arts’ version of the Virgin Annunciate that we have reproduced (Figure 3.1), though a high-quality image, is not that shiny. It has been photographed to reduce its shininess, to reduce the glare because the work’s shininess obliterates details of the surface. The DIA official photograph produces a pure stasis, quite different from one’s actual experience of the actually shiny painting. In a museum, viewers move their bodies to move the glare, and in so doing keep both the work’s shininess and access to the image’s other information. (Some expensive coffee table books try to finesse/recreate this viewing experience by reproducing the physical shine with a metallic ink.) This chapter is not about Fra Angelico’s kind of shininess, about gold leaf. It deals with what the painting only gestures toward: the problem of representing shininess in two-dimensional, nonphotographic media—painting, drawing, animation. The representations can, of course, 55

Figure 3.1: Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), Virgin Annunciate, 1450–1455, gold leaf and tempera on wood panel, 13 x 10 5/8 inches (33.0 x 27.0 cm) Credit: Detroit Institute of Arts, USA. Bequest of Eleanor Clay Ford / Bridgeman Images.

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be actually shiny, as with a painting that has been varnished or a drawing covered with glass. But that shine is usually not central to their work. Viewers look through the shiny varnish on a painting, an activity that can be irritating if uneven, misdirected, or harsh lighting causes the shiny surface to obscure the work of art. Since with represented shininess, viewers look at an image that doesn’t operate like actual shininess, since they look at an illusionistic representation of shiny things, such as the silver tray in Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Turkey Pie (Figure 4.4), the shine becomes a sign for—rather than an experience of—disorientation and other effects of shininess. These illusions are difficult, achieved through a series of visual art conventions that have developed since the 1400s, conventions based on the close observation of reflected light, combined with a system of representing light called chiaroscuro. It involves the artist noticing a host of visual cues, including such things as the smoothness of surfaces, hardness of edges, and reflections of the environment (something the developers of computer-generated images have also had to work through). Actual shininess is hard to observe, and it is transient. If viewers move their heads even a little bit, all the relationships of light change. It’s hard enough to represent three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface, but shininess adds to the difficulties: the surface of the depicted shiny form has a peculiar kind of light effect that dematerializes that form.

Reflexy-const Two hundred years after Fra Angelico, the Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch worked his way through these issues over the course of a career based on virtuosic depictions 57

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of shine. In his representations of shininess, Ter Borch painted with a complex set of instructions that were then current in Netherlandish painting. Representing shininess wasn’t a frivolous technique; it was important to get shininess right. Willem Beurs, writing in 1642, prescribed the following procedure: [T]he mixture that is required to paint white satin closely resembles the mixture used to paint snow, but it has slightly more sheen, so that its white must be found in scallop-white. And it must be painted purely and particularly warm in the sunlight. To render the tenderness of the side [of the satin drapery] that catches the light with the black and white, some ultramarine or smalt is used. The shadow must be glowing and mixed with black and slightly lighter ochre than you would use to paint snow. Make the reflection a bit lighter than the shadow with some white, black, light ochre, and a little bit of vermilion.25

The techniques Ter Borch followed came out of a category of painting that the Dutch Golden Age painter Karel van Mander, in his treatise Schilderboek, termed reflexy-const, a concept that entered the discourse accompanied by technical manuals on how to paint a variety of shiny materials. While it is unclear why Dutch painters valued the virtuosic representation of shininess so much (scholars remain uncertain about what precisely Dutch Golden Age painters valued in the texture of everyday life), they clearly thought representing shininess to be highly important. Not surprisingly, Dutch genre and still-life painters were extremely self-conscious about representing shininess: the procedures that developed came from an extended analysis of how light works, a systematizing of light from observation.

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From within this technical and theoretical context, utilizing a very analytical process, Ter Borch painted Gallant Conversation (also called The Paternal Admonition, Figure 3.2). The dress wasn’t painted from a live model; Ter Borch used a mannequin to make drawings, with the result that the dress could be kept in exactly the same position over time so that the undulating folds wouldn’t change (he also starched the satin, with the result that there were big, simple planes of gradated value). Then he transferred the drawing to the canvas. Getting the drawing right was a laborious process, so laborious that in a display of Dutch thrift Ter Borch used the drawing of the same dress for a near-duplicate now in Berlin. The process of painting was as systematic as the rest of the process. He proceeded via indirect painting, an analytic way of painting whereby each gradation of value is applied systematically and allowed to dry. There was, of course an order of colors: beginning with blocking in a middle value (“a dead color”) over the whole shape of the dress. Ter Borch then systematically applied the darker values for the shadows and the lighter values leading to the highlights. This follows the conventions of chiaroscuro and its analysis of light into highlight, light, shadow, core shadow, reflected light, and cast shadow. These techniques created an interesting and odd painting in which the depiction of something as insubstantial as reflected light is given the most substance in the painting. Ter Borch increased the amount of internal reflected light in the painting, making the dress a metallic satin. The dress is so reflective that it captures color from the environment, particularly the yellows of the floor and the reds of the nearby stool and tablecloth. The imperfections in the surface of the dress—its dimples, tiny wrinkles, and creases—enhance the illusion of the dress’s shininess, since these things are apparent only on shiny surfaces. 59

Figure 3.2: Gerard ter Borch, Gallant Conversation (The Paternal Admonition), ca. 1653-1655, oil on canvas, 71 x 87 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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(It is an odd aspect of shininess’ perfection that it makes flaws so obvious.) One of the ways that the dress has such presence in the painting is that many of the other parts of the painting are grotesquely under-emphasized, and thinly painted. The young woman’s face is not seen, the man’s hand and face are in shadow, the old woman’s face is devoid of detail, and the dog—well, the dog is one of the clunkiest dogs in Western art. Other than the dress, and with a little attention to parts of the male figure (the arm), Ter Borch downplays all other reflectiveness and specificity in the painting. This is a painting about a dress. In Dutch painting, representing shininess was a piece of a bigger project: of representing materiality. For some, this particular and troublesome aspect of materiality— shininess—had what today seems like a disproportionate importance. Shininess had a value that earned it this kind of attention, an attention that was more than a technocrat’s approach: the multiple works on shininess are so extensive they point to a value behind them. Representing shininess was self-conscious, and, understood as reflexy-const, was divided into several subcategories. The art historian Walter Melion, in his discussion of Van Mander’s Schilderboek, notes the following taxonomy of shiny effects: “spiegeling, ‘mirroring’; reflectie, ‘reflection’; glans, ‘polish’; weerglans or weerschijn, ‘re-reflection’; and reverberatie, ‘reverberation’.”26 This intricacy wasn’t just Dutch fussiness. Distinctions, detail, and self-consciousness in a category indicate the category’s importance; reflexy-const had an implied meta-level that gave it value. Van Mander, according to Melion, argued that “the very process of image production originates in nature.” Van Mander, writes Melion, begins by enumerating the reflective properties of surfaces struck by natural light, opening with reflexy, the simple color 61

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changes wrought by the red glow of the sun at daybreak, and closing with spieghelen, the conditions that convert the lustrous surface of the sea and other bodies of water into fully articulated mirrors of their surroundings. Spieghelen, “mirroring,” instanced by the ocean image of sky, allows nature to represent herself by harnessing reflected light.27

Reflexy-const wasn’t just an imitative technique; it was a theory. It was inquiry, looking hard at things and offering explanations for what they do. As theory, reflexy-const also asserted why representation of shininess had value. Celeste Brusati, discussing the work of Clara Peeters, argues that the technical prowess seen in her and her colleagues’ work not only “demonstrated their mastery of reflexy-const in registering these properties of reflected light, they were also implicitly locating the value of their representational artistry in the operations by which nature pictures and imitates itself.”28 And reflexyconst was also a theory not just of representation, but of the value of shininess itself. Intangibility had meaning. Making a point about Willem Kalf’s “shadowy, sparkling images,” Brusati finds that “in these glittering illusions of evanescent treasures, it is Kalf's representational artifice itself that induces beholders to experience these painted surrogates as elusively intangible.” In considering the intangibility of the objects’ shininess, viewers “reflect upon the moral implications of their attachments to them,” an experience that arises “from the sense that the viewer makes not only of the objects Kalf paints but also the way he has painted them.”29 Shininess pervades what is commonly known as Dutch Golden Age painting, particularly the still lifes. Pieter Claesz’ Still Life with Turkey Pie (Figure 4.4), for example, shows the same technique of reflexy-const, and the same value placed on shininess. The Dutch seventeenth-century’s 62

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attention to shininess, though, seems strange, excessive— and not just in the thousands of paintings on similar subjects, but in how they all show an obsession with shininess. The meaning of these paintings isn’t stable—indeed, there is much art-historical argument over what these paintings mean, whether they value their objects or warn us away from them, whether they are used as allegories or are a triumph of mimetic artifice. That interpretive instability, and the incredible attention given to representing shiny objects, has meaning: in Dutch Golden Age painting, shininess, and the objects through which it is represented, tends to operate fetishistically. Ter Borch’s shiny dress shares the inherent instability of the fetish (as does shininess). When an object is fetishized, it is overcharged with meaning. A glass goblet, say, shouldn’t get this kind of attention; it is more important—perfect, detailed, sexy—than it needs to be. In Dutch Golden Age painting in particular, the fetish elevates/overcharges the ordinary; because of the necessity of this imbalance, a tilt in favor of the mundane, a diamond is less obviously a fetish than is a shoe. With this imbalance between importance and banality, the shine of ordinary objects in Dutch Golden Age painting always has something strange about it, a sense of value illegitimately conferred; it has the properties of the uncanny, which leads to an anxious instability. In Gallant Conversation the representation of shininess makes the dress too precious, gives it too much attention, with the result that viewers focus on the dress at the expense of everything else. This imbalance is unsettling, enhanced by the instability of shininess itself, which produces dislocation, a disorientation arising from an uncertain relationship between shininess and materiality. The mirroring aspects of shininess assist with this unsettling uncanniness. Often, unseen light sources produce a shininess that creates 63

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mystery. (Chapter 6 will argue that fetishistic shininess promotes an unruly discourse of anxiety, sex, and the abject.) The shine, then, is an inherent part of creating these objects’ overdetermined value, directing our gaze and elevating the object by which it is produced—not just Ter Borch’s satin dress succumbs to this transformation in Dutch painting, but also goblets, grapes, even eels and mackerel. The purity of the shine makes ordinary things important, precious. Hal Foster writes that “In many ways Dutch still life is perfect— perfectly composed, perfectly finished, with no hint of lack or loss.”30 Yet while the fetish is urgent, it never resolves its anxieties and imbalances. Foster argues that the objects appear caught between worlds—not alive, not dead, not useful, not useless, as if lost between the tangibility of the common thing and the visibility of the distanced commodity. And the pictorial effect is often one of deathly suspension or, as remarked before, of eerie animation, with the objects at once chilled and charged by the speculative gaze fixed upon them.31

As Angela Vanhaelen notes, “Viewed in this way, the visual intensity of shine reveals deep-seated anxieties about an art and a gaze that strives but does not succeed in dominating the world.”32

Virtuosity This visual intensity, this convincing illusionistic representation of shininess—overdone, obsessive, difficult— is not merely a representation of the external world and its duplicities; it is always an expression of virtuosity. Virtuosic technique defines (perhaps overly defines) Gallant Conversation. Virtuosity, in shine and more generally, is 64

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typically understood as a technical effect that takes skill that goes beyond what most people can achieve. But it is not just that the virtuosic work is a record of skill; virtuosity is always understood relationally, measuring itself against some kind of clear standard. In representational art, the standard for one kind of virtuosity is how convincing it is mimetically; how close it gets to the real world. Viewers are dazzled: this moves the virtuosic beyond evaluative effects, to a primary noticing of the virtuosic effect itself. Virtuosity is over-charged technique, its self-consciousness shifting the work’s subject matter or content to skill itself, with the result that things that are usually transparent are here visible. Values are flipped. Excess attracts attention; going beyond the norms of skill pushes skill into the foreground, and virtuosity becomes, in a sense, a distraction—which is why virtuosity comes under suspicion. Excessive, self-conscious virtuosity in depicting shininess is seen spectacularly in photorealism. For general audiences, photorealism is virtuosic because its depictions seem so real. For people more acquainted with the issues of photorealism, its virtuosic effects lie in how well it imitates not the world but a photograph. Photorealism is, after all, the self-conscious (and ironic) imitation of photographs, as in Audrey Flack’s Strawberry Tart Supreme (Figure 3.3). As does Dutch seventeenth-century painting, Flack’s work superbly handles difficult light effects and textures. The surface of the tart is clearly a sticky layer on top of the berries, an effect achieved by slightly offsetting the strong highlights from the surface of the berries—all this suggests a shiny, liquidy glaze. But discrepancies from human vision soon arise, discrepancies that ally the painting not with the eye, but with the camera. Most notably, the shallow depth of field is not how an eye sees things; it’s how a camera records things.

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Figure 3.3: Audrey Flack, Strawberry Tart Supreme, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 60 ¼ inches, (135 x 150 cm) Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan and Fund for Contemporary Art.

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Only the closest strawberries are in focus. This is not simply a painting of strawberries; this is a painting of a photograph. Versions of these issues also arise with Richard Estes’ Crosstown Bus (Figure 4.5), a tour de force of difficult shine and light. But in that work, excessive attention to detail leads to the work’s all-overness, where everything is at the same level, given the same level of attention. These aspects are atypical of traditional painterly observation but common to the way a camera lens captures things. A lens makes no judgments about what is important, and when a painter meticulously copies a photograph as in photorealism, the painter treats every square inch of the surface with equal attention. Estes isn’t making important decisions once the photograph itself is made, he’s replicating the photo in paint. The effect is one of being bewildered by, lost in, the work’s excess. Photorealism twists virtuosity in an interesting way. The effect of a photorealist painting can be virtuosic. But art can have an effect of virtuosity without there being much in the way of virtuosic technique—after all, much of photorealism’s effect is achieved through mechanical means—air brush and image projection. By design, it lacks a sense of the hand, of personal touch—an effect achieved as well through the application of a very thin layer of paint. Mediated rather than directly personal, photorealist paintings have little bravado and risk behind their dazzling effects—these are not the gestures of John Singer Sargent (Figure 3.4). This slippage between means and effect shows how photorealism imitates virtuosity; in it, virtuosity is a sign. This is why photorealists so often turn to shininess and the effects of light. Not just Flack and Estes, but Don Eddy, Ralph Going, Marilyn Minter, and others seem attracted to the production of excessively shiny images. In a time when virtuosity is not a high value, their attachment can seem strange. In a sense, 67

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they are not doing virtuosity. Despite the complications introduced by photorealism, shininess is where painters historically displayed their virtuosity. Shininess is the extreme case of how light operates on things, and it goes to the heart of what all representation and seeing is about; Ter Borch’s dress is both banal and profound. Because virtuosity is hard to achieve, represented shininess provided celebrity, professional, and economic status to the artist, and rarity to the virtuosic works. Virtuosic works demonstrate confidence and panache, asserting perfection—and, inevitably, ego. And virtuosity’s exhibition of skill is pleasurable to observe; striking skill in depicting shine can induce wonder, even a kind of unsettling vertigo, closely allied with the experience of the beautiful sublime. Without these qualities that arise from virtuosity, Ter Borch’s fabrics are mere window dressing. But virtuosity, particularly in the twentieth century, has acquired negative overtones. The distrust starts with technique, the core of virtuosity. Because virtuosity is measured by how well it exceeds the norms of codified techniques, such as the representation of texture, technical skill can also be seen as attention-getting acrobatics. This suspicion started early on: with Dutch genre painting, the initial distrust was that its virtuosity wasn’t in service of anything significant. Later, virtuosity itself was thought to be inherently vacant; its allegiances with self-conscious technique mean that virtuosity was often suspected of being all surface and no depth, a mechanical display of skill. Roland Barthes goes even further, writing of Dutch still lifes that they “render matter's most superficial quality: sheen.” Their shiny virtuosity is superficial: Oysters, lemon pulp, heavy goblets full of dark wine, long clay pipes, gleaming chestnuts, pottery, tarnished metal cups, three 68

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grape seeds—what can be the justification of such an assemblage if not to lubricate man’s gaze amid his domain, to facilitate his daily business among objects whose riddle is dissolved and which are no longer anything but easy surfaces?33

Virtuosity self-consciously heightens surface qualities, and as a result it can weirdly invert hierarchies of attention. Like shininess, virtuosity is distracting, disrupting balance and directing focus away from the signified and toward the signifier, confusing virtuosity with the content of an artwork. The immediate pleasures of virtuosity attract attention, in the same way that shiny things do. With this imbalance, both pleasure and virtuosity are understood to be incapable of critique; to be, instead, about ingratiation. John Singer Sargent’s Madame Paul Poirson—and her stunning satin dress that gives Ter Borch a run for his money—isn’t critique; it’s an over-eager affirmation, on formal and ideological levels, and its virtuosity helps achieve this (Figure 3.4).

Roy Lichtenstein’s mirrors But what if virtuosity is an object of critique? In 1969, Roy Lichtenstein began his Mirrors series with Mirror #1, the first in a body of work that over the next four years would amount to 50 mirror canvasses (Figure 3.5). The oval painting, representing a beveled mirror and its frame, consists of black Benday dots on a white ground overlaid with more gesturally applied black magna. The representation is carefully done, but not virtuosic; it is as well done as it needs to be. Stylized, abstracted, the mirror’s shine reveals two areas of shine: that of the bevel, and that of the wavy imperfections in the glass. The shine references the shape of the surface, but the mirror reflects nothing other than light. 69

Figure 3.4: John Singer Sargent, Madame Paul Poirson, 1885, oil on canvas, 60 x 34 inches, (152.4 x 86.4 cm) Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Manoogian, the Beatrice Rogers Fund, Gibbs-Williams Fund and Ralph Harman Booth Bequest Fund, 73.41.

Figure 3.5: Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror #1, 1969, oil and magna on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein / SOCAN (2020).

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Its effect is deadpan, its ironic coolness a complex blend of, and comment on, late 1960s pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism. Mirror #1 also, of course, references a much longer history of Western art, in which the mirror is a loaded subject taken up by Van Eyck, Velasquez, Manet, and others. In that history, represented mirrors do a lot of work. Historically, the mirror signifies vanity and narcissism, and as an allegorical subject—paintings of Narcissus, Mary Magdalene, and Venus (Figure 4.6). These are some of the more straightforward, iconographic uses of the mirror. Other mirror paintings more complexly inquire into the nature of representation and shine, engaging with the mirror’s confusion and expansion of space, and the questions it raises about spatial representation. The most interesting of these works end up playfully equating the painting with the mirror, or vice versa, a mode of inquiry that often shows up in self-portraits—Las Meninas reaching the apex of this relationship. Mirrors expand the space of the painting; they have the option of reflecting something that “isn’t” in the painting; they have a way of adding another dimension. They are a mode of representation within a representation, and so their inclusion or subject becomes an occasion for meta-representation. As a device of representation in themselves, mirrors encourage self-conscious meditation on representation, on the nature of virtuosity, on human psychology. But as his engagement with late 1960s art culture might suggest, it wasn’t just the possibilities of art historical weight that interested Lichtenstein. He had another source: commercial print advertising of mirrors. Lichtenstein was explicit about this relationship, stating in a 1981 interview, “I was interested in printed brochures of mirrors in all those glass stores on the Bowery.” He collected and filed these images, and made photographs that partially 72

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Figure 3.6: Image from sales brochure, Tyre Brothers Glass. Photo credit: Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Courtesy The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Archives.

replicated their look. These advertised mirrors were empty of reflected images, showing just a stylized glare and tonal value. Decontextualized from their possible surroundings, these images rely solely on the glare to suggest a light source and a shiny surface. Because of that decontextualization Lichtenstein’s paintings become representations of representations of mirrors. Mirrors also refers to the history of printing, particularly the Benday dot and its usual contexts in cheap printing processes. Invented in the nineteenth century and used through much of the twentieth, the Benday 73

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dot was a way to produce a coarse tonality, the opposite of virtuosity. For Lichtenstein the Benday dot is not just a look, though; it’s also a reference to the history of mass culture, as were mirrors themselves. As Sabine Melchior-Bonnet argues in The Mirror: A History, much like shininess itself, mirrors used to be a sign of luxury, but, as a result of changes in production processes, have become a sign of ordinary daily life.34 While reflexy-const gives one pleasure in the clearest possible recognition, Mirror #1 is so stylized that one of its pleasures is figuring out how one knows it represents a mirror. This conundrum of recognition was a motivating impulse for Lichtenstein: What interested me is how unrealistic things taken for realism are, and how far from photographic reality graphics can become, yet people still read them as a literal depiction of the subject matter. This is particularly true when it's done in commercial art which is always thought of as realistic in people's minds. A picture of a stack of towels or sheets on a table, done as a draftsman would draw them, could be anything in the world. It's very unlike the original and yet it’s taken as truth.35

He went on to point out, “My first mirror paintings didn’t really look like mirrors to people. It required a little learning to make them understandable as mirrors.”36 For viewers, the series’ title is a giveaway, but also the least interesting entry into the work’s representational status. More central to understanding the work as a mirror, the shape of the painting is conventional for mirrors, and the suggestion of a frame at the edge of the painting gives this pure reflective surface a shape, a boundary. The shift in the shape of represented light suggests beveling, and, of course, shine. Mirror #1 uses the standard conventions for representing 74

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shine on glass, white highlights suggesting both the beveling and the imperfections in the glass. It uses a stylized shorthand for surface glare, creating a standard gestalt. And, like its origins in advertising, and even contemporary representations of mirrors on internet shopping sites, Mirror #1 is blank. Otherwise Mirror #1 would become a painting of whatever is reflected in the mirror, and therefore look like a painting of a painting. To distinguish this hypothetical work from a painting of a painting, the work would need more surrounding physical context to reveal that it’s a mirror. (Parmigianino in his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror perfects this development of context.) Mirror #1 is open to anything in its blank state, which is one of its attractions. As Lichtenstein said of his commercial sources, “These brochures depicted mirrors with air brushed mirror symbols, reflecting nothing. I thought that was an area I could explore.”37 Because of its stylization and the nature of the mirror as a subject, Lichtenstein’s mirrors are all about the language of representation. With the Benday dots he cites the language of printing processes; indeed, he highly exaggerates their presence to make them visible—which makes the dots a subject matter. The works are about these dots, in much the same way that Ter Borch’s painting is about a dress. Conventional, stylized signs dominate his work: in other works it is a stylized eye, or a tear. In the Mirrors series it is shine. These are works about the tools of representation. With their stylization and dots these works have little reference to the artist’s hand. While Mirrors is not an example of great technical virtuosity, the paintings’ self-conscious rigor, the series’ attention to detail and nuance conveyed via a meticulous reductionism gives them an obsessive quality. There isn’t much about aura here; Lichtenstein’s shine isn’t precious, and because these works are about shininess, they 75

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don’t have fetishistic qualities. These mirrors are the opposite of virtuosity: they are deadpan and pedestrian, which gives them their ironic intelligence. Ultimately, Lichtenstein paints weird, perhaps uncanny mirrors; with the stylization he takes away all the nuances of reflection and leaves just the shine. As with the magazine ads for mirrors that he used, Lichtenstein creates mirrors without content. Fittingly, the glare is indicated by no dots at all. Subverting all notions of virtuoso painting, these shiny highlights have the painting’s least amount of materiality (in Sargent’s work, by contrast, the shine’s highlight is a thick slash of paint). Lichtenstein has moved far from the Byzantine realism of shine, the gold leaf. In Lichtenstein the icon’s actual shine is ground down to nothing, completely dematerialized—but the dematerialization does not suggest transcendence, the way it would have in earlier culture. Lichtenstein’s shine is not eternity/infinity, not sublime; it’s nothing. By the late 1960s painting’s inquiry into mirrors had been exhausted, and Lichtenstein turned to what had been left. He represents the means of representation, but content-less.

Computer-generated images There are other ways for the representation of shininess to end. The suspicion of virtuosity hasn’t stopped people from trying to represent shininess, in particular via computer-generated images (CGI), a modern, digital articulation of reflexy-const. One of the harder tasks of computer graphics has been to create algorithms that result in convincing simulations of real-world shininess. As did Dutch Golden Age painters, contemporary software engineers have worked to mimic the laws of physics regarding light on objects, and, as 76

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with Dutch painting, there is a kind of virtuosity in solving this technical problem. The issues are complex, involving the creation of mathematical formulae for representing a convincing shine on three-dimensional objects. Since few real-world objects are completely smooth and regular, a useful algorithm needs to deal with multiple textures and irregular surfaces. Environmental reflections, functioning differently on concave and convex surfaces, add complexity, as does the problem of real-world light sources—such variables as different intensities, multiple light sources, and color temperature. So far, so good, but a set of more complicating factors lies in depicting moving shine, the shine of moving light sources, and the changing position of a shiny object. As in reflexy-const, computer graphic’s big issues were conceptualized as a series of problems to be solved. The task was to achieve a better, more realistic representation of shine, and to find an efficient, cost-effective way to do it. Solving these problems relied on devising replicable systems, and on increasing computer memory and speed. In retrospect, some of the solutions look awkward and unconvincing, as earlier technology always does. The attempt to digitally render light on surfaces began in the 1970s, with a series of advances in digitally describing the way light operates on surfaces. The basic problems to be solved were addressed through an increasing order of complexity: texture mapping (rendering surfaces), specular mapping (simulating reflected light on a surface), and environment mapping (simulating contextual things reflected in the surface of a shiny object). An early step, Phong reflectance, represented glossy reflection on an ideal diffuse surface by combining separate models of ambient, diffuse, and sharper local moments of reflection. But the world does not consist of very many ideal diffuse surfaces, and by the early 1980s computer 77

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scientists figured out a way to render a reflective world more complex than the simple shapes and surfaces of Phong reflectance. By the mid-1980s, computer-generated shine was sophisticated enough to produce what software developer Lloyd Burchill summarizes as the “heyday of clichéd ‘flying chrome logos’ in advertising.” But logos and still images weren’t where people wanted this technology to rest. The big money was in movies. The 1990s saw the major advancements of computer-generated content into live action cinema, allowing the abject shininess of Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt, for example, to move from a large man in a suit in 1983’s Return of the Jedi to a fully-realized computer-generated image in 1999’s The Phantom Menace. Color of computer-generated inserts became more accurate in the 1990s, as well as increasing sophistication in range of brightness. In the late 1990s software engineers solved the problem of shiny translucence, light reflecting from the surface and from within translucent materials like marble and skin, where light enters as well as reflects off the surface. More recently, other problems have been rapidly solved, such as diffraction and glitter effects. This four-decade history shows that the issues behind representing shininess are incredibly complex. But CGI also raises bigger conceptual issues. CGI is a project of conjuring a convincing simulation, in which the desired effect, as it was for gold coin forgers, is for the technique to disappear, so that the depiction looks effortless, so that CGI shine doesn’t suggest technique. The virtuosity aims to be so complete that the virtuosity itself disappears (except, of course, among software developers). CGI has created a conceptual frisson, an epistemological uncertainty, where the seams between the real and the invented are unlocatable. Within the unreal world of art, the pleasures of CGI are the pleasures of knowing the existence of an additional level of 78

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virtuality, but not knowing where—the pleasures of an unlocatable contrivance. We find ourselves, with CGI, in an odd place, a place where our pleasure in these techniques may be banal, and where it is possible that mimesis as a concept has ended.

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Smudges Every night I shut myself in, all alone, and studied the day's thumbprints with a magnifying glass. —Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

On shiny things, smudges are the banal markers of everyday life: finger marks on a mirror, lipstick on the rim of a glass, shoe scuffs on a gym floor, handprints on a stainless steel refrigerator door. Smudges in our homes provide a record of our greasy and careless bodies as they touch things, and go about their daily routines. The interaction of the shiny and a dull residue of touch, smudges litter our lives, and call attention to themselves by being, apparently, so out of place. Smudges generally don’t take a lot of expertise to get rid of, but—they appear day after day, wearing people down. Smudges are easy to make, and as soon as one stops cleaning something, someone’s going to smudge it again. Smudges are polemical: they show that, for all its bluster about its luster, shininess is fragile. Smudges introduce moments of impurity on the shiny surface; they attack its perfection, its unified surface. A smudge is a violation, a contrasting mark left behind on a surface, a trace of another time, another source. Separate from the surfaces on which they appear, smudges break up a shiny surface, and announce its dirtiness. Curators know this—that is why they wear soft white cotton gloves. Even the keeper of hockey’s Stanley Cup wears these gloves, to momentarily preserve the purity of the Cup’s shine before it is kissed by the greasy lips of victors. 80

Smudges are perceived as a distinct layer, as something on the reflective surface, floating in front of the shine. The smudge and the shine do not form a continuous surface, and it is impossible to see them as such. Smudges confuse our sense of the already-confused light source, and this creates ambiguity about the smudged object’s surface and its form. A smear on a beer glass presents a sudden shift in the texture and the relative light and darkness of a surface. Since all form is understood through the relative values of light, when a second scale—based on a different set of relative values—is introduced, the form and surface become doubly confused, by both the shine and the smudge. The consequences for shininess are significant. Shininess makes it hard to locate a surface, dematerializing it. Smudges, on the other hand, awkwardly rematerialize a sense of surface by being on it, creating a physical presence on top of the shiny surface. A smudge reestablishes a surface, the same way a sticker on a new window prevents people from walking into it. A smudge makes us aware of the relativity of shininess to its surface. Smudge’s disruptions aren’t static, however; they are partly an issue of movement. The smudge remains stable on the surface, relative to the shine, which moves with the changing position of the light source or the changing position of the viewer. Smudges both interrupt and ground shininess’ disorientation. Smudges do this because of their conflicting interactions with shininess. Shine always has some degree of looking in, of looking past a surface, to the reflection in it. (It is a matter of degree, of course: a mirror is all looking in, while matte is all looking at, and in between there is some weighted combination of looking in and looking at.) Because of this play between at and in, smudges aren’t always immediately noticed: it can take a long time to recognize a dirty bathroom mirror because you’ve been looking into it 81

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rather than at it. Or with a window, you’re looking through it rather than at it. But once they are noticed, smudges are looked at. As a consequence, smudges on shiny things are never integrated into the object on which they appear—in the way, for example, the object’s color, texture, or shininess is. The shinier the object is, the more the smudge refuses integration.

Smudges as signifiers Smudges introduce different levels and kinds of signification on the shiny object. Smudges don’t just look different, they mean something different from the shiny objects on which they appear, and they do so because smudges are made by leaving a material trace. It is a trace of a particular kind: a personal trace made by rubbing, or pressing, and leaving indistinct, smeared boundaries. Smudges are made by bodily pressure, by soft skin pressed against a hard surface, the heel of a shoe pivoting on a hardwood floor. These residues of pressure point to three basic attributes of smudges: that smudges are intimate, that they are records of a previous moment, and that they are abjectly bathetic. The smudge’s relationship to the body means that smudges typically are intimately small. They don’t obliterate the whole shine—they interrupt only a small area of the shiny thing. Smudges, then, don’t refer to impersonal acts of nature or machines that obscure the shine of an object. They record a human body and a human scale. They are immediately understood as the product of a unique person, even though one can’t always see the uniqueness, the whorls and loops of fingerprints. Although they are applied thoughtlessly, then, smudges are interpreted, read as an indexical sign of another person. Even the calligraphy of smudges is 82

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unique: a hurried, aggressive smudge differs from a smudge that is the result of a contemplative touch or a caress. One reads a smudge’s history; one notices its duration, reading its implied pressure, speed of application, and direction as meaningful. Even a smudge’s positioning on an object refers to a body. The paintings in the Rothko Chapel in Houston have a line of smudges at hand height, where viewers have surreptitiously but repeatedly caressed the canvases’ seductive surface. The unique personal record implied by a smudge is imprecise, because smudges are usually blurred. Indistinct and muzzy, smudges are neither mechanically applied nor mass-produced: smudges don’t repeat themselves accurately—they are different every time. Because we know the smudge was left by a person, the quality of the mark narrates an implied biography. But we read them as a residue of an earlier bodily presence; smudges have what Walter Benjamin called aura (that is why a smudge on, say, a Virginia Woolf manuscript quickens the pulse of researchers). Smudges are calligraphy, and in them one reads the passage of time: a smudge on a gym floor shows that someone suddenly stopped, or danced, or even tripped. But smudges are also a record of what is now gone: someone used to be here, touched this, and now that person is gone. In their recording a process, they document absence. But smudges, fragile and ephemeral, don’t seem to be a permanent record of absence. Smudges, on a hard and shiny surface, can be removed. Even in its ephemerality, smudge time struggles against shiny time. Smudges are not just fragile in themselves; they underscore the fragility of the shine. Over time, shine also will disappear. On the shiny surface, the smudge’s relation to time stands as a contrast. The smudged shiny object has two conflicting attitudes to time: while smudges are always about the past and loss, shininess claims to be impermeable 83

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to time. Hard and smooth, shiny things stand against time. Shininess asserts its transcendence over physical decay, and, even, the physical. But these are things that time breaks down, and smudges are the haphazard but inevitable signs of time’s encroachments. Absence and ephemerality give the smudge its wistful overtones, arguing against the lie of the shine. Smudges are time’s homely and melancholic residue. Bodily intimacy and time’s entropy inevitably yield a third, basic quality of smudges. In its relationship to shine, the smudge smears the shiny thing with abjection and bathos. While shiny things are often hygienic, the smudge, with its residue of human activity, is dirty. Shiny things are fresh, and the smudge is about decay. Shiny things suggest a lack of friction, and the smudge is about stoppage. Shiny things suggest optimism, and smudges drag us down to failure. How the smudge signifies abjection, however, differs in kind from how it signifies intimacy and time. While the smudge is merely a motivated sign for intimacy and time, abjection colors them in a peculiar way because the smudge really is abject, a quality that encourages the abject to permeate everything, including how the smudge expresses intimacy and time. Because smudges leave an actual residue of the body, they are a particular kind of violation. Smeared onto the surface of the shiny object, smudges disturb the order of the surface, introducing messiness, dirtiness, decay. They make us back off, with feelings ranging from irritation to distaste to disgust. While the smudge’s sense of time could be understood as an argument with the optimism of the shiny, its abject bathos modulates the conflict. The smudge doesn’t argue against shiny hygiene and optimism so much as it gives a performative gesture, sneering at the purity, the transcendence, the hopefulness of shine.

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Unrepresented smudges One would think that in visual art smudges would be useful to represent all the things that real, ubiquitous smudges do: the intimate; time, history, and narrative; the abject and the ordinary presences and failures of life. In particular, given its physicality, one would think the smudge would be an excellent vehicle for representing abjection. And, Western painting has no problem depicting the abject: blood, spilled liquids, stains are fairly standard items. Even excrement has its place; Paulus Potter’s Young Bull, for example, foregrounds a heaping, fresh pile of dung. In their unsettling vacillation between celebration and disgust, Brueghel’s paintings don’t shy away from referencing bodily excretions. Abject things are necessary in art: how would you paint a gory crucifixion without them? Smudges on shiny things seem potentially useful here. And certainly, there are grimy smudges represented on dirty, non-shiny things: smears of dirt on surfaces, faces, or clothes, for example. Reginald Marsh’s Why Not Use the “L”? uses smudges in this way (Figure 4.1). In its mark-making Marsh’s is a smudgy work, and the smudginess, encouraged by the qualities of egg tempera, helps one to read parts of the painting as representations of dirtiness. There is a motivated relationship between the mark-making and what the marks represent. The smudginess of the marks is an indexical sign of sorts, but it is important to realize that the relationship between smudgy marks and depictions of dirt is a convention. The gestalt of dirt is a messy business: it could be that the border of the poster in Why Not Use the “L”? isn’t dirty, but we read it as dirt. But because his mark-making itself is smudgy, we can’t know for certain if Marsh means to represent dirt. The viewer recognizes where dirt would normally appear, and smudges there are read as 85

Figure 4.1: Reginald Marsh, Why Not Use the “L”?, 1930, oil and tempera on canvas mounted on composition board, 36 1/8 x 48 1/8 inches (91.8 x 122.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art/New York, NY/ USA. Purchase. Inv. N.: 31.293. © 2020 Estate of Reginald Marsh / Art Students League, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Credit: Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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dirt—the way, for example, the smudges on the seated woman’s coat aren’t as clearly recognized as such. But smudges on shiny things are a different story. Turn back in history, to consider Frans Hals’ Drinking Boy of 1626 or 1628 (Figure 4.2). It’s not a central Hals; tucked away in the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, it’s relatively unknown. But it seems to show a series of smudges on the back side of the glass that the boy is holding, a series of dark streaks that seem to match the placement of fingers. This is the best example we’ve seen to date of smudges on shiny things depicted in Western art, but even here it is difficult to unequivocally state that these dark lines in fact represent smudges. Hals paints highlights on the near side of the glass with rhythmic brushstrokes, a technique that could just as well suggest the dark lines on the far side are meant only to give definition to the shadowed side of the glass (or the residue of the manufacturing process). He wants to create an ellipse, and these dark lines are a way of defining the curvature of the glass. The lines are a rhythmic shadow, complementing the rhythmic highlights. The fact that Hals is a fairly loose painter, joyously piling on the brush strokes, increases the ambiguity. Besides, the contextual cues are unclear. Wouldn’t it be odd to hold the glass that high, at its widest point? And while those four lines may indicate the presence of the boy’s fingers, where’s the corresponding smudge for the thumb? In fact, our research hasn’t uncovered any clear depictions of smudges on shiny things in Western painting—Hals’ Drinking Boy is the best we could find. That’s odd: no representations of smudges on shiny things in art when they are so ubiquitous in daily life. Why are there no views out of a dirty window? Why don’t those wine goblets in the vanitas paintings of Pieter Claesz or Willem Kalf have fingerprints on them? Why are there no fingerprints on the mirror 87

Figure 4.2: Frans Hals, Drinking Boy, 1626 or 1628, oil on panel, 33.3 x 31 cm, Staatliches Museum Schwerin.

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in George Romney’s Mrs. Russell and Child (Figure 4.3)? Clearly, the boy in the painting would have moved his hand around the mirror, touching it more than once. Why are there no great smudges in Western art? A smudge on a shiny surface would be a powerful metaphor, particularly in nonidealized, realist art traditions. How could Claesz have missed the opportunity to use a smudge in his Still Life with Turkey Pie (Figure 4.4)? People have snacked on nuts and oysters, tucked into the mince tart, peeled a lemon and an orange, left crumbs on a spoon— why wouldn’t they also leave their fingerprints on the knife or the goblet when the whole painting is about the leavings of a party, of appetites slaked? How could they leave all these things and not leave fingerprints? Is this just meant to depict the perfect crime? The smudges would have fit in with Claesz’s likely point that we are here enjoying life, but one day we will be gone. Even if we don’t take Still Life with Turkey Pie as a moralistic allegory, and just understand it to be about the tactility of daily life, a greasy smudge would be, well, perfect. But perhaps Claesz is just the product of an earlier era, one free of the grip of gritty realism. After all, it’s a lot more satisfyingly pleasurable to paint shininess than it is to paint a smudge. So, consider a nearer moment in art, photorealism of the 1970s and later, and Richard Estes’ Crosstown Bus (Figure 4.5), which epitomizes what Fredric Jameson has described as “the extraordinary surfaces of the photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory splendor.”38 (Dieter Roelstraete concurs, noting the presence of shininess throughout photo­ realism).39 Despite the term “photorealism,” Estes’ painting certainly isn’t realistic. Public transportation without smudges on the windows? This is New York public transportation, after all, and New York is never this clean and shiny. 89

Figure 4.3: George Romney, Mrs. Russell and Child, 1786-87, oil on canvas, 144 x 113 cm; 56 ¾ x 40 ½; private collection. Photo credit: Woolley and Wallis Salerooms Ltd.

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Figure 4.4: Pieter Claesz, Still life with Turkey Pie, 1627, oil on panel, 95 x 75cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

(The work should probably look more like the Reginald Marsh [figure 4.1].) One can take this inquiry a step farther, out of the confines of this one painting, to the over-arching project of Estes’ career. His work for decades has clearly been all about the confusion of surfaces. Why wouldn’t he, then, like the confusion that smudges would bring to the location of the various surfaces? Why, in Crosstown Bus, does he limit that confusion to things like the shiny reflection of the bus’s interior that floats through and merges with the lights and activity of a New York sidewalk? In places where you would expect them to be, smudges are absent. Even Idelle Weber’s 1970s photorealist paintings of trash contain no smudges. Why should this be? Why have smudges not become an important conveyor of meaning, the way shininess has? Of course, there are plenty of local reasons why a smudge might be missing from this or that work, but that doesn’t solve the problem of why smudges 91

Figure 4.5: Richard Estes, Crosstown Bus, 2018, oil on board 19 3/4 x 14 ⅛ inches. © Richard Estes, Image Courtesy Menconi + Schoelkopf / Joshua Nefsky.

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are missing from the full history of a medium. Is it that shininess has pulled off the grandest seduction in Western art? Are artists inevitably in its velvet grip? The answer is double, a problem of both producing representations of smudges, and of recognizing such marks as representations of smudges. It’s hard to disentangle the two—smudges are difficult to represent because in painting and other two-dimensional representations they are hard to recognize. Things that are difficult to represent are often celebrated in visual art, of course, as ways of demonstrating skill: satin dresses, glass, foreshortened bodies. But smudges don’t attract the virtuoso the way shininess does. There is no bravura in smudges. It’s not just that the virtuosic is more easily tied to beauty than it is to the abject; virtuosity is also about skill, and drawing attention to skill. Shininess always gets the viewer’s attention, and the difficulty of its skillful representation is admired. Smudges, on the other hand, look clumsy. While in fact the difficulty of being able to convincingly represent a smudge would be the sign of a virtuoso, the represented smudge looks like the opposite of the virtuosic: hard to read, awkward, conflicting with the values around it. The represented smudge can look like a mistake. As will be clear in our argument later, if Abraham van Beyeren painted a smudged silver ewer, it would be hard to know if his smudge was intended to be there, or if his attention and skill had just lapsed. It’s difficult to know the difference between a mistake and the representation of something that can look like a mistake (in the same way that people used to wonder whether musical dissonance was a mistake). Particularly as an apparent overlay of the virtuosic representation of shininess, the smudge would tend to look like someone had been nodding at the easel. But the lack of smudges on shiny things in Western art has deeper and more complicated motivations. As Hals’ 93

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Drinking Boy reveals, in a painting it’s difficult to see the representation of a smudge unambiguously. On the represented shiny surface, it can be difficult to know if something is a represented smudge, a represented reflection, some other distortion of the surface, or, perhaps, merely a stray brushmark catching the light. With a represented smudge in a field of smudgy paint, it can be hard to distinguish the status of the represented smudge. One can’t see both at the same time: one needs to refuse to acknowledge actual smudges in order to see the represented smudge. Consider paintings with representations of mirrors. There is a high level of uncertainty about what is represented in the depiction of a mirror. Ultimately an understanding of a reflected image is a matter of context, but the contextual signs are often impossible to figure out. Smudges make this even more difficult. In Peter Paul Rubens’ Venus Before a Mirror are the ochre marks near the top of the mirror smudges on the surface of the mirror, glare from a light source, or the reflection of something distant and out of view (Figure 4.6)? Or do they suggest abrasions on the surface of the mirror, or the comparatively poor quality of seventeenth-century mirrors? Some mirror reflections in paintings are very abstract, representing fragments of objects and things that are completely unidentifiable. Other mirrors suggest distortions, color shifts, blurs—mirrors are never a perfect reflection. So how would one even recognize a smudge? With the representation of less reflective surfaces, like polished metal, the problems only increase because the visual information is even less precise than with a mirror. As for smudges on transparent glass, what is seen as a smudge can be a reflection, and sometimes the surface of transparent glass can be confused with the material or space behind the glass. This is what occurs in the Estes work, where the tubular rails that seem to be 94

Figure 4.6: Peter Paul Rubens, Venus Before a Mirror, 1614-1615, oil on wood, 124 x 98 cm. Inv. No. GE120. Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna. © Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna/ SCALA, Florence/ Art Resource, NY (2020).

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on the sidewalk are actually in the bus, reflecting on the bus windows. While smudges are hard to see, this does not quite explain why they are so hard to depict. The central issue for depiction is that a smudge on a shiny surface is a disruption on an already disrupted form. Shininess itself is difficult enough to render, primarily because shininess disrupts the simple representation of a form. Shiny objects—particularly very shiny objects—don’t have nice, tidy systems of light. Reflected light flares all over them, alluding to their broader context, which may or may not be visible within the boundaries of the image. The predictable gradations from light to shadow that would be found on a matte object are constantly disrupted. For example, Estes’ reflective shiny surfaces create a confusing space, clearly a subject of his work. But Estes does so using a single logic of representation, the complicated logic of reflected light. Smudges risk making the complications of reflection and light incomprehensible not just by increasing the kinds of perplexities already present in reflection, but by demanding a totally different logic of representation—something less understandable, based on binocularity and motion. The contextual cues for a smudge are of a totally different kind from those of shininess, and often not based on immediate context (consider, for example, the placement of Drinking Boy’s hand). Smudges on a shiny surface risk introducing to localized passages of the artwork an incoherence of a kind where one doesn’t know what is important or what kind of meaning is being conveyed. The difficulty of representing smudges is rooted in how people interact with real-world smudges. One handles real-world smudges differently from represented smudges, moving around real-world smudges, negotiating between looking through and looking at. Smudges require one to 96

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move around in front of shiny things in order to recognize them as smudges, and to establish their location and boundaries. If there seems to be a smudge on your computer screen, you need to move either your head, the computer, or the picture on the screen to see if the smudge is a blemish in the image or is something on the screen. This is because, on a shiny surface, a smudge is understood three-dimensionally. It is seen on the thing being looked into, and if this position isn’t established, then either the smudge isn’t seen (because one looks past it), or it is briefly incomprehensible (because its relationship to the surface hasn’t been established). Once seen, smudges bring us to the surface again, the surface that shininess had dematerialized. When a smudge on a shiny surface is represented, it is locked into a two-dimensional space, which in all two-dimensional images is determined by the monocular quality of a fixed point of view. Indeed, two-dimensional mimetic representation always bumps up against the fixed-eye problem. The representation of smudges is not the only failure in two-dimensional renderings of a three-dimensional world. For example, some of the basic principles of linear perspective don’t hold up as an exact transcription of three-dimensionality. Thus, in linear perspective lines parallel to the plane of vision remain parallel. In real life they warp toward each other. Representing smudges suffers from the problem of a fixed eye, a single point of view, as well. One can’t locate a represented smudge in the way one can locate a smudge on a computer screen, by moving one’s head, or scrolling down. Knowing something is a smudge on a shiny surface requires moving around in front of it, but moving around a represented smudge does nothing. Because a flat representation doesn’t respond to a viewer’s motion, a smudge depicted on a shiny ball could just as readily be understood as a dent as it could be read as a smudge: a nonglossy spot 97

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in the middle of something shiny tends to be seen as a hole. The disruptive presence of a smudge on a ball interferes with the set of conventions engaged to represent three dimensions; it interferes with the roundness of the ball. Smudges reveal that there are some things mimetic representation can’t do. They point to a failure in our system of representation. But if there were great motivation to represent smudges, could there not be conventions to represent them? After all, Western art has solved many problems with representation via conventions; it is able, although inadequately, to represent three dimensions, and less adequately has attempted to solve some qualities of time, motion, sound, and heat. These conventions applied to these problems have a logic to them, but they aren’t really how we see: the conventions of linear perspective, chiaroscuro, and foreshortening—or, more spectacularly, Giacomo Balla’s staggering of edges to represent a dachshund walking. As a subcategory of three-dimensional representation, smudges probably are not on the level of these things, except perhaps in the minds of a few eccentrics, but the problem is that there are no conventions either for representing or for reading smudges. Smudges differ in this way from shininess. The flaws in the conventions of three-dimensional representation, particularly the issue of fixed monocular vision, do not assert themselves as strongly when representing shininess itself. Unlike when recognizing a smudge, one can tell something is shiny without moving. Even in the real world one isn’t moving around a shiny object to establish its shininess, but to establish dimensions, or to play, or to induce disorientation. Reflections follow the form of the represented object, even if they disrupt it a lot. All of which goes to show how obviously and banally flat paintings and photographs are, and how still. 98

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Being difficult to recognize has consequences for smudges: there may be smudges on shiny things in Western painting, but we can’t recognize them. We don’t want to overstate the consequences of this lack. It’s not like the lack of smudges has made art unable to deal with loss, or abjection, or death. This is not one of the great repressions of Western art. It is more that our vocabulary for depicting history and the abject is modestly limited by the inability to depict smudges. We get at the qualities that smudges might embody through other methods. The lack of depicted smudges says more, perhaps, about shininess. In art, without smudges on shiny surfaces, the shiny is really shiny. Estes’ shiny busses are the shiniest busses you’ll ever see. The depicted shiny in art is pure, in a way that it isn’t in real life. Shininess in art draws attention to itself. The consequence is that the shiny in art is not so much actually shiny as it is a sign for shininess, the way exaggerated things often are. Ultimately, shininess in art isn’t realism, but a kind of abstraction of what real-life shininess is. Shininess, in its purity in visual representation, isn’t about subtlety. Shininess in art takes the values of shininess such as optimism, hygiene, luxury, irony—any number of things—and makes them less subtle, more melodramatic, less under attack. This is a bit of a reversal. In art, shininess triumphs; in real life, the entropy of smudges ultimately extends its greasy hands to drag shininess down.

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Purity The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. —William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum”

The triumph of shininess is not just a triumph of technique over smudges; it calls up bigger social issues—for example, of hygiene, efficiency, utopias. Behind these, lurks a larger conceptual frame that ties them together: purity. Of the many artists who have examined these interrelationships, Lynne Cohen has ritually photographed particular kinds of private or semipublic interior spaces, such as laboratories, classrooms, and health spas. Within her large 2002 National Gallery of Canada show No Man’s Land, Cohen included a suite of highly controlled, impersonal yet theatrical images (entitled Notoriété Publique) that examined the complex relationship between space, furnishings, finishes, and the anxieties of emptiness and alienation. Her 1988 photograph Classroom depicts a spotlessly clean and ordered room, without trash, scuffs, or smudges (Figure 5.1). The stools are lined against the wall, and the bulletin board is empty. 100

Figure 5.1: Lynne Cohen, Classroom, 1988, printed 1997. 113 x 138 cm. (44 ½ x 54 ¼ inches). © Andrew Lugg and Estate of Lynne Cohen.

All the traces of what has gone on in this classroom have been erased. And it is very shiny. The shininess underscores the cleanliness, with industrial shiny surfaces that are smooth and slippery. Nothing sticks to these hard surfaces, and they are easily cleaned. In this classroom, efficiency dominates, with all its impersonal, even authoritarian overtones. Classroom reveals a reciprocal relationship between emptiness and shininess; each accentuates the other. There is not much of a sense of history in the scene Classroom depicts; it lacks the messy patina of daily life. All seems disembodied, pure. This purity has its purposes; the shine is both clean and a sign of cleanliness. Cleaning negates, removing dirt, 101

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germs, filth. This removal has a host of practices that aid it (sweeping, mopping, wiping, scrubbing, and polishing), and a closetful of materials that make this cleaning effective (detergents, polishes, abrasives, soaps, and antiseptics). It is no surprise that all these efforts, being about removing germs and imposing one’s will against entropy and anarchy, also give cleanliness symbolic weight and cultural heft. For the beginning novelist, say, an excessively neat room is a swift indicator of a repressed psychological state. The cultural function of cleanliness, however, goes beyond this kind of quick evocation. After all, the purpose of cleanliness is to efficiently keep at bay disorder, abjection, death. Because of this symbolic weight, cleanliness even has a function in ritual. How could you have a decent religion without some sense of cleanliness and its metaphoric application?

Hygiene All cleanliness moves toward shine. When it is necessary to know if something is really clean, the visual proof is its shine. Labs and morgues and kitchens and hospitals are full of shiny things because shininess gives one a quick sense (not completely verifiable) that the thing is clean. The tight relationship between clean and shine is exemplified by one of the most successful ad campaigns of the 1960s, featuring a jingle with the incessantly repeating line “Mr. Clean leaves a sheen where you clean.” The clinching evidence is visual, that viewers can see Mr. Clean’s face and shiny bald head in the countertop. The tight relationship of cleanliness and shininess comes from the nature of the shiny surface: shininess accentuates the hardness and smoothness of a surface. With the exception of the shiny abject (discussed in the next chapter), shiny surfaces aren’t absorbent—neither of light 102

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nor dirt. Things don’t easily stick to the shiny, and shininess makes cleaning things easier. Semigloss paint in kitchens and bathrooms isn’t there only because it might look better, but because it reveals smudges and is more washable. Matte finishes, by contrast, are not useful for maintaining cleanliness. Such finishes, in fact, are often used to hide dirt or defects. The matte finish doesn’t organize the light in a way that reveals imperfections, having a textural structure to its surface, such as patterned graininess, or pebbling, or some other feature that scatters and absorbs light. These irregularities allow matte finishes and textured surfaces to hold light and dirt. The reason they don’t organize the light is the same reason they hold dirt, and are harder to clean than smooth surfaces. Certain appliances try to finesse this: the shiny graininess of some refrigerators both looks clean and hides fingerprints. As opposed to the constant and soul-destroying wiping required of stainless steel, these appliances cause less anxiety. In contrast to the personal quality of smudges, the shiny clean is impersonal; its smoothness is generic, defined by its lack. The shiny clean and hard surface is impenetrable. Smoothness and hardness repel, maintaining the surface in its purity. This repelling is a force of impersonality; since industrialization the really smooth object seems machined, lacking reference to the hand. Shiny smooth things tend to lack idiosyncratic qualities, such as texture and irregularity, that make things unique and personal, that reveal a history. In addition to its hardness and smoothness, the unlocatability of shininess in general encourages us to read the shiny clean as impersonal. The shiny object is aloof, exhibiting the distancing and impersonality of Farshid Moussavi’s Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (Figure 5.2). (As is the case throughout our book, shininess never works just on its own. Because shininess is always attached to an object, it 103

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always functions in conjunction with other attributes. These objects bring their own properties and inflect how shininess works: the impersonality of the Cleveland MoCA is also determined by its shape and scale.) The look of shiny cleanliness has further implications. Each spring, in a laborious process that attracts the obsessive-compulsive, serious yacht owners clean and wax the hulls of their boats. The point of these efforts is not just cosmetic. Waxing shines the yacht, but it also makes it smoother,

Figure 5.2: Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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more slippery, reducing drag. Frictionlessness is important to both efficiency and hygiene; dentists polish people’s teeth not just for cosmetic reasons, but to keep food particles and bacteria from sticking. Efficiency like this typically brings other characteristics in tow; for instance, efficient things often seem impersonal. They don’t allow for flaws, failures, mistakes—the texture of human activity. The shiny clean removes the signs of the human, and of human interaction, and keeps the marks of history at bay. Cohen’s photographs of spas and other clean rooms show some history in the design of the objects and spaces, but there is no accumulated residue of human involvement. Cohen’s photographs, in their depiction of shininess, exploit their subject’s emptiness and stasis to imply sterility. Their shiny cleanliness gives Cohen’s spa photographs this oppressive air. Here, as elsewhere, sterility suggests authoritarianism. Despite its sculptural idiosyncrasy, Eero Saarinen’s shiny and efficient TWA terminal at JFK exudes impersonality and power. Historically, while only the powerful could afford the time and energy to maintain a shine in the face of entropy, and while today it is much easier to create and maintain shine, large-scale shine still conveys authority. Both shininess and cleanliness, especially when taken to a large scale, are signs of power and imposition of a will. The expansive shiny surface transmits an impression of absolute, pure cleanliness. Such shininess rejects any challenge to its purity. The shiny Singapore subway, for example, ties together cleanliness, efficiency, authoritarianism, and transcendence. Uniting the impersonal, power, and the disembodied dislocations of the shiny, Singapore’s subway station has anxious intimations of the sublime (Figure 5.3). The shiny clean’s authoritarianism is based not only on power understood as an active display, as an outward projection of force, as a grasping acquisitiveness. 105

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Figure 5.3: Subway station, Singapore. Photo: 123RF.

Shininess’ power also manifests itself differently, as power understood as repression, a purity based on denial. (Minimalism and constructivism, in their reductionism, exemplify shininess as a message of purity.) The hygienic more generally, in its efficiency and denial of history, is a force of repression, eschewing sex, the body, death—and hygiene’s shininess reinforces those denials. Its repressions have made shiny cleanliness, when understood as hygiene, a problematic topic for art. People involved in culture since Freud have not been very interested in the hygienic; post-Freud, it’s hard to think of hygiene’s denials as a good thing, as a tool useful in social critique. Hygienic denial implies repression or an unwillingness to accept a painful 106

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or inconvenient reality. Shiny hygiene suggests these values of repression, and consequently tends to be used ironically or suspiciously. There’s more interesting work to be done in cultural studies by questioning hygiene than by affirming it. The cultural problems of hygiene go beyond Freud, of course, and beyond the workings of repression (which as a term is always instinctively understood negatively); among other things, hygiene’s entanglements with war, eugenics, and genocide mean that shiny hygiene, in other contexts, will never be an unproblematic concept. In the artworld it is more serious, as inquiry, to go to shiny abjection than to shiny hygiene. But it’s not just hygiene that seems repressed; as this chapter has hinted, shininess itself, for all its exuberant excess, is an exercise in denial. This may seem counterintuitive—what could be more extroverted than a sparkling diamond? Aspects of shininess, of course, invite celebration and play. But many aspects of shininess involve denial: its duplicity, impersonality, impenetrability, uncertain location, lack of friction (removal of tactility), and lack of history. The invitations and seductions of the shiny, even the sexual and religious shiny, are also denials, then: calls to escape history and death. The uses of shiny denial in contemporary art employ these more straightforward ideas of repression. Lynne Cohen’s photographs use shininess in conjunction with other qualities (particularly emptiness and formality) not so much to create exuberance as to portray anxious spaces of psychological repression. Shininess’ consorting with hygiene is inflected with denial. While at times the presentation of this denial in shiny hygiene can be relatively straightforward, as in Lucinda Devlin’s photographs of shiny American execution chambers, the interaction can also suggest more complex relationships. In his 1999 video, Le Baiser/The Kiss, the artist 107

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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle cleans the exterior windows of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, a paradigmatic glass box of the International Style. He gracefully guides the squeegee across the window, each glide enhancing the structure’s reflective shine. In the sixty-plus years since its construction, this house, and Mies’ architecture generally, has become a sign for the repressive reductionism of high modernism. The ironic bite of Manglano-Ovalle’s work is complex. It arises from our suspicion of the act of cleaning this building, an act that expresses conflicting values, a poignant, even affectionate act of maintaining a building that is not just a home, but a sign of high modernism with all its authoritarian baggage. That affection itself is complex. Who initiates this act of cleaning: the owner, or ManglanoOvalle, and is he present as an artist, or as a stand-in for a history of undocumented labor? There is a further strange relationship to history implied in the fact that this shiny piece of utopian modernism, often seen now as a failed experiment, needs its smudges (its history) removed; and the way the shiny clean surface, a glittering transparent shell, distracts us from the issues of class and social hierarchy that it contains and demands.

Utopias It’s a matter of purity, of course, with Mies. Ornament, for modernists, is not just a crime, it’s dirty. Adolf Loos, in his 1908 manifesto “Ornament and Crime,” argued that decoration was a sign of “degeneracy,”40 whose most visceral and abject manifestation in a culture could “be assessed by the extent to which its lavatory walls are smeared.”41 Oddly specific, perhaps, but Loos’ text as a whole instantiates the ways in which shiny purity has a larger, more ambitious 108

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reference than just to hygiene. It reaches; it gestures in modernism to transcendence and efficiency. Loos’ aesthetic stretches far: “We have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament. See, the time is nigh, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then fulfilment will be come.”42 (During his lifetime, Loos’ Zion was limited to his Viennese American Bar, whose surfaces reflect so much that flash photography is forbidden.) The connections Loos makes in his manifesto aren’t arbitrary: hygiene and transcendence (and, as we will discuss later, efficiency) are related through shininess’ purity and its associated denials. The relationships among these concepts—and between these concepts and shininess, as well as between purity and shininess—are motivated relationships, and shiny versions of hygiene, transcendence, and efficiency are their paradigmatic forms. They routinely find cultural expression in ideas of utopia. The utopian aspects of shiny modernism raise questions of how far the shiny clean and its purity and denials extend. If shininess and the shiny clean involve denial, what effect does that have on how we understand utopias (and that ur-utopia, heaven), those incredibly shiny and clean places? (Not all utopias are shiny, of course—there are agrarian versions of the perfect society.) Utopias use shininess to attract, certainly, but that’s only part of how shininess works in them. Utopias, and their religious constructions as heaven, take on the values of shiny hygiene, purity, and denial, but drift to the metaphorical. The Bible’s book of Revelation presents the classic example of a shiny paradise: “Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.”43 The values of shininess are used for their metaphorical signification as much as for their physical signification. It’s no 109

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accident that St. John uses shininess to get at heaven’s transcendence, purity, and hope—it’s a motivated relationship. He didn’t, for example, make heaven hairy. The metaphors become more fraught when we consider further ways in which utopias share in shiny hygiene’s purity. Shiny utopias are places neither of death nor of history. Of heaven, St. John writes “there should be time no longer.”44 Utopias admit neither contradiction nor sin. Removing all these things creates the impersonal spaces of utopias: the shiny hard surfaces intimate that they are impenetrable, untouched by the smudges of death, failure, and history. Utopias present a frictionless world, pure and perfect. But the perfection—and transcendence itself—is based at least partly on exclusion, on denial. The physiological aspects of shininess, a dematerialization based on a confusion of seeing-in versus seeing-on, also contribute to the denials that characterize utopias. Since the shiny object loses its physicality, the problem of living in a shiny land is that it’s not always clear what is physical and what is not. (Shiny purity is ambiguous; it exacts costs of uncertainty and perhaps anxiety.) The dematerialization has a polemic; shininess’ physiological affect not only excludes, it also suggests value. Utopian shininess argues that the dematerialized is better than the material. A necessary consequence of the properties of shininess, this dematerialization and perceptual uncertainty simultaneously blurs and activates the classic Platonic dichotomy. Utopian shininess has several related functions, then, functions which people repeatedly turn to, and which are routinely conventionalized in literary accounts of utopias. William Gibson’s retro description in his 1981 “The Gernsback Continuum” is typical. The narrator finds several books of “Thirties design,” one of which “contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and 110

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Things to Come,” sketches where “Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. […] Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury.”45 This “idealized city” that Gibson refers to is a staple of modernism, like Corbusier’s Radiant City, or one of the most extreme early modernist visions of a utopian community, Bruno Taut’s 1917 book, Alpine Architecture. There, Taut proposes domestic spaces, as well as the obligatory pavilions and monuments, built on alpine summits, constructed entirely of glass and in the form of massive crystals. In a later manifesto Taut exclaims, “Hurray and again hurray for the fluid, the graceful, the angular, the sparkling, the flashing, the light—hurray for everlasting architecture!”46 However, at the time of Taut, his optimistic shiny city was already understood as having a repressive or ironic undertone. The utopian shiny city routinely gets problematized, a consequence of the authoritarian aspects of shininess, as in H.G. Wells's When the Sleeper Awakes or L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, in his valedictory address to the nation, realized the positive social possibilities of shiny utopias. The speech immediately became known as the “Shining City on a Hill” address. In it, Reagan referred to John Winthrop’s 1630 utopian vision for America. Reagan ended his talk by turning to his own vision of America, apparently seen, over the past few weeks, from an upstairs window in the White House: And that's about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe 111

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the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.47

That’s pretty good: a folksy, perhaps slightly schmaltzy invocation of a vision of America that evokes and extends its founding myths of progress, openness, refuge, and liberty. But Winthrop actually wrote something a little different from a “shining city on a hill,” and had a different vision: we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to 112

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speak evil of the ways of god and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whether we are agoing. 48

Winthrop wasn’t experiencing a utopian vision to match that of St. John or Ronald Reagan. His city on a hill was about being watched and a warning against dealing falsely. And his city wasn’t shining. Reagan polishes up Winthrop, to make his vision of America even brighter and purer. Adding the word “shining” to “city upon a hill” was necessary to completely shift Winthrop’s upright and dour warning to a warm, folksy utopia, seen from the vantage point of a La-Z-Boy. Reagan in the White House turns himself into St. John on Patmos, and turns his city into a vision of the shiny Celestial City. Reagan’s city isn’t just a garden-variety utopia: it is a “beacon,” it “glows.” It is indeed, more than shiny—it shines.

Efficiency Utopias are imaginative enactments of human desire and hope, but their shiny purity is not completely separate from the banality of daily life; the pure and hopeful shiny worlds of utopia have their real-world counterparts. As this chapter has already implied, utopias and hygiene are related, but so, too, are utopias and efficiency. All three—utopias, hygiene, and efficiency—promise better lives, lives that resist entropy, that keep the abject smears of existence at bay. All are process ideas, of trying to get to an ideal. And all are connected through ideas of purity, of which shininess is a sign. A pure shine unites the Emerald City, Mr. Clean, and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times eating machine (Figure 5.4). 113

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Figure 5.4: Modern Times, 1936.

In their drive to purity, instances of utopia, hygiene, and efficiency strive to rid themselves of impediments. As it is for hygiene and utopias, efficiency seeks to remove obstructions, making processes frictionless—either physically or metaphorically. (It is no accident that shininess metaphorically stands in for efficiency: shine is defined by organized light, and it’s the recognition of an organized surface that suggests efficiency.) Efficiency saves time, minimizing labor and energy, and the drive for efficiency, at the heart of the technological imperative, is an overriding value, used to excuse and justify ruthless change. Efficiency is typically 114

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a process of relentless elimination, applied to things as diverse as congestion, jobs, and carburetors. Efficiency is insatiable: once it is accepted as a value, it always demands more. It attracts the obsessive-compulsive. Efficiency is utilitarian, its shininess a promise of, and its pleasures based on, how smoothly it works. Occam’s razor isn’t just sharp— it’s shiny. Efficiency removes the stubble of daily life, creating a pure and smooth surface, an unimpeded process. It moves toward purity, and in doing so, it excludes, which is why its definitions often seem negative: purity is seen as freedom from something, as being unmixed, unadulterated. Efficiency’s goal is to arrive at the essence of a process. In efficiency’s quest for a frictionless perfection, even human involvement is removed; Frederick Winslow Taylor, the cultish guru of a visionary managerial efficiency, stated, “In the past the man has been first; in the future the System will be first.”49 This drive for purity has a repressive potential—shiny efficiency can have an authoritarian streak, of strapping a protesting Charlie Chaplin to an eating machine. As the Taylor quotation suggests, much of efficiency’s work is understood through a metaphorical filter. Metaphors are messy, of course, and this chapter’s subsets of purity (efficiency, hygiene, and utopias) wander in and out of each other’s semantic fields. Taylor’s efficiency calls up a utopian vision, a dream of the future without impediments, Buckminster Fuller’s gleaming Dymaxion motor car (Figure 5.5). Utopias and efficiency, then, are devices of hope. They inform each other; frequently, cleanliness is used as a metaphor for efficiency, as in the clean lines of a building. Shiny cleanliness extends far in human activity, to the denigration of a muddy composition or murky ideas. The metaphor’s reach relies on smoothness, on a lack of disruptions and 115

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Figure 5.5: Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion Car, 1934, National Automobile Museum, Reno, NV. Photo: Jeff Dow.

difficulties: a clean bill of health, a clean manuscript, a clean conscience. Shiny things are easy to clean, and this ease is part of its efficiency. Morality lurks in the background: cleanliness and efficiency have moral dimensions (particularly when they imply their opposites). As understood through hygiene, utopias, and efficiency, shininess occupies purity’s moral high ground.

Weary Willie The American circus performer Emmett Kelly, famous for his depiction of Weary Willy (Figure 5.6), the sad-faced hobo, had a trademark routine in which Willy sweeps 116

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the floor to rid it of the circular shine of a spotlight. The act is the little man in the face of the powerful, but its humor is based on a reversal of expectations: the grimy hobo seems more comfortable with dirt than with shine, and removing the shiny spotlight is an act of defiant self-effacement, the last thing you’d expect a performer to want. Initially, things go well: Willie sweeps the shine into a small circle, steps outside of it, and shakes the light off his boot. In one video, the high-pitched laughter of children in the audience recognizes there is something conceptually crazy going on: the absurdity of sweeping up something that has no materiality, and the absurdity of cleaning the shine off a dirty circus ring. It is a marvelous and touching twist: here, the cleaning is an act of erasure, an eradication of shine, a dark twist on the nature of cleaning where all that’s left is a dirty floor. But the shine doesn’t disappear so easily; it reappears the way smudges do. As soon as Willie steps off the tiny spot it begins to chase him, and when he whacks it with his broom it grows back to its original size. Weary Willie has to outsmart the shine, and he hits upon a solution. He again sweeps the shine into a tidy pile, but this time works it toward the edge of the ring. Looking around furtively, he lifts the corner of a rug, and sweeps the shine under it. The crowd explodes, reveling in a humor in which the attributes of the shiny clean are effortlessly understandable, and become perverse when overturned.

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Figure 5.6: Emmett Kelly as Weary Willie. Photo: Ann Meuer/Alamy.

Anxious Shine When anyone has a swelling or a rash or a shiny spot on their skin that may be a defiling skin disease, they must be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons who is a priest. —Leviticus 13:2

In the beginning of his film River of Fundament, Matthew Barney enters a replica of Norman Mailer’s bathroom, reaches into the toilet, picks up a piece of human excrement, covers it with gold leaf, and places the shiny objet d’art back in the toilet. The scene is gorgeously filmed. Repellent, yet strangely alluring, the abject opening of River of Fundament gets at a central concern of much Western art of the last hundred years: the messy relationship between pleasure and anxiety, an untidy business that shininess makes no less complicated. It’s messy partly because peoples’ individual pleasures and anxieties are subjectively determined, and the instability of shininess contributes to and destabilizes the tension between these seemingly opposed affects. Yet the principles that govern the interaction of pleasure and anxiety are mundanely theoretical and abstract: the dual forces of attraction and repulsion. More central to their interaction, however, is that these two categories don’t have hard edges. They overlap with each other, and get most interesting when they become oxymoronic. Shiny things embody this tension in a peculiarly visceral way.

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The pleasures and anxieties of shiny things—the way they dazzle, beguile, confuse—come down to the interplay of two forces inherent to shininess: the repulsions of anxiety come out of the shiny thing’s disorientation, while the attractions of pleasure come out of its fascination. This is neither accidental nor something completely culturally driven; as this book has made clear, there are physical aspects to shiny things that both fascinate and disorient, that both please and disturb: their unclear boundaries, and their uncertain location. Whatever the affects of shininess are, they aren’t ones of rest. Both disorientation and fascination are responses to stimulation, the excessive and discrepant stimulations of the shiny thing. The inherent excesses of shininess, its sensory overload (its excessive, raw, and unprocessed information about context, light sources, and boundaries) fascinate and disorient (sometimes only momentarily), inducing pleasure and anxiety. Excess is inherently destabilizing, and when it reaches a certain point, its uncertainties move from pleasure to anxiety. Shininess in a surprising place can induce gratification, but also unease, and at times the unease of some highly particular affects, such as fascinated disgust—there is probably large cultural agreement that a turd should not be covered in gold leaf, but also that it might be hard to steadfastly look away from it.

Nixon’s sweat In popular history, shiny abjection can decide the fate of nations. On September 26, 1960, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy met at the studios of WBBM TV in Chicago. It was the occasion of the first-ever televised presidential debate, which would be seen by an audience of 66.4 million. 120

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Nixon arrived first at the studio. He appeared tired, and told one newsman that he had a temperature of 102. He had been hospitalized for a leg injury and had lost twenty pounds, with the result that his shirt hung loosely on his frame. His gray suit lacked contrast with the studio background and made his face look dark. He also hadn’t shaved directly before the debate, and sported a five o’clock shadow. Nixon turned down an offer for make-up correction from the network’s professional make-up artist. His people handled the problem by applying some Easy-Shave, a make-up designed to hide stubble. Kennedy arrived rested, having taken a short nap right before. Tanned from his California campaign, he had thoroughly practiced giving his debate statements and responses. His handlers decided the color of his shirt was wrong and sent someone back to his hotel to pick up a shirt that made his skin tones look better for black-and-white television. Right before air time Kennedy had his own people put touch-up make-up on him. Kennedy’s staff insisted that the debate take place with the candidates standing, knowing that this would put stress on Nixon’s injury. There are stories that they also required that the heat in the studio be turned up, realizing that Nixon was prone to heavy sweating. And, to compound his disadvantages, Nixon’s on-camera behaviors weren’t the most adept: during the debate, Kennedy looked directly into the camera, while Nixon kept turning his head to his questioners in the room, making him appear evasive. As the heat built, Nixon’s Easy Shave began to streak, and his face became shiny. Sweat began to trickle down his face, creating shiny highlights visible to viewers. (In the image we have reproduced, that shine is visible near his left eye and the middle of his lip and chin.) He mopped his face and licked the glistening sweat off his lip. Watching in 121

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Figure 6.1: Richard Nixon, 1960, Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate.

the studio, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley said, “My God, they’ve embalmed him before he even died” (Figure 6.1).50 While the New York Times, reporting on the debate, wrote: “On sound points of argument, Nixon probably took most of the honors,”51 that, however, was just a response to the verbal content of the debate. People who watched the debate noticed less of the argument, and more of the stubble and the shiny, sweaty highlights as revealed in his movements before the camera (and difficult to convey in a still photo). Nixon didn’t look good, and viewers gave the debate to Kennedy.

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Political televised discourse in America begins with a story of abjection and shininess, a story that says something powerful about the meaning of abject shininess. The abject, of course, is prominent in late twentieth-century aesthetic discourse, a topic whose contours were defined by Julia Kristeva in her Powers of Horror. The abject is what is cast off from the body, what is eliminated: bodily fluids, hair and nail clippings, and bits of skin. As bodily waste, the abject signifies decay, eliciting visceral reactions, such as disgust, revulsion, and fear of death. And more: the abject doesn’t just signify death, it is death’s actual presence: A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.52

The abject is shocking, but with a particularly odd, destabilizing affect. It fascinates and repels, creating what Kristeva calls “a vortex of summons and repulsion.”53 The abject is a threat because of the nature of its instability. It is about borders and their loss. And it is disturbingly physical, unable to be turned aside as a mere representation of death. (Despite her commitment to abjection’s embodied state, Kristeva then turns to make abjection a more abstract, metaphorical quality—turning to what is cast off from culture more generally. Our project, not surprisingly, eschews that larger meaning, and examines the actual, physical, bodily abject.)

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But abjection also has its pleasures; it is also a summons, and not just for fetishists. People are fascinated with disgusting things. Think of “ruin porn” (Figure 6.7) in the decayed architecture of Detroit—its coffee table books, guided tours, and websites—or how people glance into a Kleenex after they blow their noses. In the face of the disgusting, people linger, involuntarily finding themselves looking. These are mild examples, perhaps, with a mild affect. The point remains, however, that people lose themselves in fascination with disgusting things, and fascination is a kind of pleasure. But the pleasures of the abject are often understood to be bigger than this. (Both abjection and the sublime, when they appear in art, are understood to be ambitious, probably because they have anxiety and death associated with them, because there is struggle.) Kristeva, again, leaning on Freud’s comments on the death instinct and the return of the repressed, presents the most ambitious and most influential exposition of the relationship between a wild pleasure and the abject. Indeed, for Kristeva, there is a causal connection, in which “jouissance alone causes the abject to exist as such.” The abject’s pleasure is primal: One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on enjouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion. And, as in jouissance where the object of desire, known as object a [in Lacan's terminology], bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the Other, there is nothing either objective or objectal to the abject […]. Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and willing ones.54 124

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Kristeva’s abject has such an overcharge of attraction/ repulsion that the affect is destabilized, unable to be conceptualized. Abject pleasures are out of control, the self is erased. While Kristeva is quick to turn the abject into a cultural metaphor, the actual, physical abject resists such extension. Abject pleasures resist being turned into intellectual pleasure. The body takes over, and the brain gets left behind. The abject, in its most visceral and paradigmatic form, is shiny and moist (Kristeva argues the origins of abjection are wet). It’s a particularly tense relationship, in which negative abjection and positive shininess create a fraught but unsurprising affect of disgust and fascination, attracting attention and increasing dissonance. It is easier to ignore dry abject things; in their dullness they don’t attract our visual attention; a shiny, wet, and slimy green pepper rotting at the bottom of one’s refrigerator is more disturbing than the desiccated carrot lying next to it. But the fascination of shininess slides against the disgust of wet abjection, and this relationship between wet shininess and disgust is an odd state of affairs. After all, a lot of attractive shiny things are shiny because they are wet—wetness smooths a surface, directs the light in an organized way, and seems to offer cleanness, freshness, health. But wetness creates a different kind of shininess than the shininess of, say, a diamond—wet shiny things have a transferable materiality that lies on their surface. The abject shine is a soft wet shine. Moreover, abject shininess is a wetness that is part of, from the object, not a wetness that is applied to the object. The wet abject leaves a residue, it can come off, sticking to hands and faces (a point Sartre brings home in detail in his discourse on sliminess in Being and Nothingness55). People fear its residue, its stickiness. Moreover, the wet abject has a sense of 125

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immediacy—the abject moment that produced it is recent, and one is aware of its moment of production. Wetness implies time—things eventually dry out. These qualities reveal the abject shine to be more physical, visceral than other shines. Everybody has a horrible, graphic memory of a shiny abject thing—encountered perhaps on the side of the road, or on a motel bathroom floor. The power of the abject shine arises from its physical basis, having its origins in the body. That physicality transfers to its affect, which is physical, tactile. One’s exploration of the shine turns to an imagined or actual touch, to a more bodily and visceral experience of shine. This is why abjection’s anxious pleasures are never just signs. Their physicality won’t be denied; abjection’s physicality overwhelms. Signs mediate things, making them less dangerous; shiny abject things wouldn’t create so much anxiety if they were merely signs pointing to death. What stays in our minds is Nixon’s actual sweat, glistening on his face, nervously mopped off with a handkerchief.

Abject performances In contemporary art, the experience of abjection is inevitably anxiety-provoking but also complicated—it can traverse the ground of pleasure and of anxiety, but also that of irony, even spectacle. Unlike other experiences of the abject, art abjection always involves an audience; it is both the abject, and always also a representation of the abject, a complication that has encouraged irony and spectacle as central devices. Consider the work of Hermann Nitsch, a Viennese Actionist who has been creating abject performance art for the past fifty years. A priest of the abject, Nitsch has given more than a hundred performances of his ongoing series 126

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Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (The Orgies Mysteries Theater), some of which last for six days (Figure 6.2). These performances’ relationship to the abject is clear. As Nitsch awkwardly states: [T]he associative impulse of classical psychoanalysis is replaced in the o.m. theatre by the sensory sensations evoked by the actions, which, once the censors are overcome, disinhibit and intoxicate, the actions with raw flesh, damp bowels still at body temperature, bloodied faeces, blood warmed from the slaughter, tepid water, etc. provoke regressions towards anal sensuality. the joy at splashing around, spattering, pouring, smearing, soiling escalates into a joy in tearing raw flesh, a joy in trampling on the bowels.56

What kind of art proceeds from this description? It is inevitably an art of Dionysian spectacle, a connection that Winfried Menninghaus in his work on disgust ties, through Nietzsche, to Dionysian ritual.57 Nitsch exploits this association, producing a deadly serious and primal spectacle, confirmed by its solemn ritual, portentous music, and the expressionless faces of its participants. During the Orgien Mysterien Theater, nobody laughs if someone slips on pig bowels. Dozens of participants in white smocks ritually process through courtyards, proceeding to drip blood and fluids on naked crucified bodies. People trample on and muck about in recently spilled entrails, and engage in sex acts. Nitsch himself spatters and pours blood on dozens of white smocks and large canvas sheets. Vegetables are also involved. The Orgien Mysterien Theater is a completely visceral experience. The performers, the props, the actions—all are slippery, wet, soiling, staining. This is the abject at its height—and its properties are registered and magnified by 127

Figure 6.2: Hermann Nitsch, 122nd Action, Orgien Mysterien Theater, November 19, 2005, Viennese Burgtheater. Photo: REUTERS/ Leonhard Foeger.

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its repellent yet alluring shininess. The slipperiness and wetness generate the work’s shininess. We also know that these shiny surfaces soil and stain everything that touches them. (And, the shiny abject comes with powerful odors. Wetness, through evaporation, transmits smells more powerfully than does dryness.) As the performance goes on, and the smock painting ends, the blood dries, the odor dissipates, and when the blood dries and becomes less shiny it becomes less abject, less able to contaminate. Nitsch’s work exploits a specific range of human reactions to the abject, a kind of euphoric altered state. Eschewing humor and irony, Nitsch doesn’t merely cite Dionysian ritual, he attempts to resurrect it. Nitsch’s orgy is very controlled about what the abject is, and how it functions. But the work misses some things. In its attempts at control, the Orgien Mysterien Theater doesn’t use as its central affect the abject’s unpredictability: Nitsch doesn’t acknowledge the possible instability of audience reaction. This is a little odd because the abject, like shininess itself, is unstable, pointing both to the sublime and the trivial, and its affect, like pleasure, is uncontrollable. In its dispersive affect, the abject is coercive, pushing one to undesired emotions: the anxieties of a helpless loss of control, and the deeper anxieties of the abject in general. In his monomaniacal earnestness Nitsch neglects central aspects of shiny abjection’s attraction/repulsion: he misses disgust, unease, and how comedy is frequently used to dispel abjection’s anxiety. Finally, Nitsch’s work gives no evidence of the Dionysian as a socially constructed category—a lack which makes it hard for Nitsch to be theoretical about the abject. There is no critique with Nitsch: his work, a performative act of some kind, evinces no doubts about the relationship of its signifiers to their signified. There is no semiotic

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slippage. Nitsch doesn’t mediate the experience; he doesn’t put his generic citation under scrutiny. Other artists are more nuanced, and more dispersive, in exploring the shiny abject’s instability and range. Consider Carolee Schneemann, who over the course of her career worked with the abject and pleasure. Granted, in some ways her work is not that far from Nitsch. Schneemann described her 1964 Meat Joy as “an erotic rite,” which presents “a vision of the ‘sacred erotic’” (Figure 6.3). But it does so with a much more unstable register than does Nitsch’s work. Where Nitsch is Jungian, Schneemann is more Fluxus than Dada, relying on discourse and the dispersive pleasures of absurd humor. Schneemann wrote of Meat Joy as “an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap.” From that, she argued, the properties of the abject emerge: “Its propulsion is toward the ecstatic—shifting and turning between tenderness, wilderness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent .”58 The work itself was first performed in 1964 in Paris. It begins as a kind of Busby Berkeley send-up, with young women in bikinis lying on the floor, filmed from above. Things soon degenerate into chaos: young men in speedos grind on top of the women with glistening raw chicken in between them, and draped over their faces. (The scale difference of chicken versus pig carcasses, their lesser resemblance to the human body, and the lack of blood and inner organs create an effect quite different from Nitsch). Slippery fish soon make an appearance, and then glossy wet paint is poured over everything. All this is done to a cheerful sound track, composed of the sugary and relentless My Boy Lollipop in contrast to Nitsch’s Wagnerian orchestrations.

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Figure 6.3: Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964. Photo: Al Giese. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann and P·P·O·W, New York. © Estate of Carolee Schneemann / SOCAN (2020).

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Clearly we have entered a different world from that of Nitsch. Schneemann replaces the portentousness of Nitsch with what seems a naïve, innocent kind of play with the shiny abject. The play is more than a little puzzling, it being unclear how closely Meat Joy approaches full-fledged irony. The work also has historical markers and orders of reference that Nitsch’s primal ritual doesn’t: the cheesy My Boy Lollipop, the references to Pollock with the dripping paint, the historically specific swimming suits. Schneemann’s work does not immerse audiences in the abject’s ahistorical, primal time. But the work is problematic, having an historical distance that makes it hard to recreate Meat Joy’s initial affect. Modest bathing suits and body hair used to be about dangerous liberatory sex. From this distance, what the Chordettes used to mean is baffling. The title, Meat Joy, has a clunky concreteness and odd juxtaposition that makes its register unstable—at least, from today’s vantage point. While Meat Joy cites pleasure, the cues for irony aren’t obvious in Schneemann. Not so with Paul McCarthy. Consider his 1995 video Painter, in which he appears wearing a painter’s smock, a bad blond wig, a bulbous nose, fake stubby ears that point straight out, and oversized mitten hands (Figure 6.4). The abject artist sets to work. Using a comically oversized brush in a bucket of black paint, he attacks a stretched canvas. With overly clumsy movements, he mixes his paint, mayonnaise, ketchup, and what looks like gallon cans of low-grade house paint. Shiny, viscous paint gets over everything. He attacks and cuts open a human-sized tube of red paint. Other large tubes of paint are strewn about the set, one of which is labeled “shit.” A tube labeled “flesh” lies on a bed in another room. The artist doesn’t limit his activities to painting. At one point he urinates into a plant; at another he steps into a paint can. After vigorously attacking his hand with 132

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Figure 6.4: Paul McCarthy, Painter, 1995, Performance, installation, video, photographs. Photo by Karen McCarthy/Damon McCarthy © Paul McCarthy, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

a cleaver, he manages to cut off his index finger. He repetitively croons “de Kooning” and other mumbled words. To his dealer, he throws a tantrum about money she apparently owes him, and destroys some of the art in her office. On a talk show where McCarthy appears with some collectors, the interviewer asks the artist no questions, and instead focuses on the collectors’ history. Eventually the collectors show up at the gallery, where McCarthy climbs a desk and 133

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one collector puts his nose up the artist’s buttocks, sniffing deeply and appreciatively. Much of the action and imagery in Painter is violent and sexual. The painter wrestles and sandwiches a slit tube of paint up against a canvas. He dips a prosthetic penis into the paint and paints with it, and at another point uses the penis to penetrate a painting. He repeatedly and violently fists the opening of the tube of shit paint. Throughout it all, as this description begins to indicate, McCarthy references the macho excesses of Abstract Expressionism. Clearly, the wet abject—in all its glorious shininess—is not just something primal; it has a polemical relationship with a specific art historical moment. Painter shares both some of the unstable register of Meat Joy, as well as an odd formal similarity with performances of Orgien Mysterien Theater, a similarity of smearing viscous, glistening liquids on canvas. But McCarthy’s affect differs from both Schneemann’s and Nitsch’s. It is intentionally immature humor, inflected as culturally male. It is meant to be goofy: those Mickey Mouse hands; the bulbous nose; oversized, labeled paint tubes and brushes; compulsively repeated actions; and the barely audible words, repeated over and over. The goofiness isn’t effortless: the humor, as so often with the abject, also arises out of discomfort. The bodily clumsiness and almost catatonic repetitions—standard techniques of humor—are also abject, a repudiation of beauty. Other oddities cause both anxiety and humor, such as the human body with cartoon hands, creating an air of the uncanny. The scale shifts make one anxious. In this context the abjection—the glossy tube of shit, the excreted paint, the amputation of the finger—fits in with this unstable mix of anxiety and humor. Laughter isn’t out of place here; it’s a common reaction to the anxiety that accompanies abjection. 134

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McCarthy’s abject accoutrements don’t just create anxiety. The work evinces a childish but knowing interest in the abject. Compared to the work of the other two artists, Painter exploits highly specific, culturally mediated references that are presented in a parodic form, including the suave midcentury modern jazz that adds an air of Madison Avenue sophistication to the ending credits. Disneyesque rather than Dionysian, Painter only makes sense as a work of art if it is understood ironically. The work is parodic in its irony, parody understood as citation with polemical difference. On that level, McCarthy is theoretical and engages in critique. Thus, while the experience is often whimsical, the theory is deadly serious, and the two exist together. With McCarthy, then, we are into irony, an overlay at odds with Kristeva’s assertion that the abject experience is completely primal. McCarthy’s work inserts the abject contextually, within socially constructed categories and narratives, with an underlying thesis that, while abject art bases itself on the primal, the experience is inevitably broader, filtered through culture.

Spectacle Abjection’s work in contemporary art has a further twist. Abject art is often an art of spectacle, of excess. One can see glimmers of this in Schneemann’s Busby Berkeley references, or more fully exposed in Nitsch’s multiday extravaganzas, or flowing through Barney’s River of Fundament, with its grand, hellish scene at McLouth Steel (Figure 6.5). McCarthy’s 2013 WS explores this connection between the abject and spectacle most thoroughly. It was housed in New York’s 55-thousand square foot Park Avenue Armory, one of the few locations that could take on a project of 135

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Figure 6.5: Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament, 2014, production still. Photo: Hugo Glendinning © Matthew Barney. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

this size. The lit up, glowing, shining set created what Alex Poots, artistic director of the Armory, called “a true Gesamtkunstwerk.”59 The work has a forest of 30-foottall trees; a three-quarter scale, 8,800 square foot replica of McCarthy’s childhood home; and multiple large video screens. Coming from the mind of someone whom Holland Cotter characterizes as a leader in “presenting the human form as a gaseous, leaky container,” WS takes Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and makes it perverse, glittering, abject. McCarthy’s polemical citation of 1950s middle America is fraught. Cotter writes that “while its 136

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rooms are precise in their period décor, they are strewn with refuse, splattered with dark fluids.” The mix of murder, violent sex, and liberal dispension of fluids by grotesque characters with trademark bulbous noses lead Cotter to make the point that “What I suspect is that in Mr. McCarthy we have a Swift for our time, or maybe a Hieronymus Bosch, and in ‘WS’ … a scabrous American ‘Garden of Earthly Delights.’”60 WS has grand ambitions, exploiting large scale, in terms of its stimulation, size, and ambition. It’s Ed Kienholz, but with more money. The abject as spectacle makes sense: among other functions, abjection is used because it creates the standard affects of shock, such as disorientation, anxiety, horror, disgust—and spectacle, issues of scale and excess in the work itself, accentuates abjection’s shock. Spectacle’s own shock works on another level. Spectacle isn’t private; the scale of the piece allows for many people to see it at once, to publicly and mutually participate. This is at odds with the inherently private aspect of the abject. The violation of this in spectacle is shocking, disorienting. This happy coupling of the abject and spectacle produces the pleasures of the sublime. This mix is clearly apparent in Barney’s River of Fundament, with its vast, evocative locations. Here, Barney at times seems to be citing the waste lands of Detroit ruin porn, a mix of the abject and the sublime: a vast sense of decay. It is a common trope in referring to Detroit, the ubiquitous photographs of places like the United Artists Theater. These photographs have been commonly understood to evoke the sublime, but it is more complex than that. These are depictions of sublime abjection, creating an amplified anxiety about disgust, danger, and death (Figure 6.6).

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Figure 6.6: Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit, United Artists Theater, 2005. Photo: Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre.

The sublime and the abject are related, then. Kristeva evocatively notes that the abject is “edged with the sublime,”61 a relationship she vividly describes in the following terms: For the sublime has no object either. When the starry sky, a vista of open seas or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray 138

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in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where “I” am—delight and loss. Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.62

Both the sublime and the abject have an underlying anxiety, an attraction and repulsion, “delight and loss” that “overstrains us,” and in both, shininess encourages and inflects this in particular ways, with its disorientation, dislocation, attraction—as is exploited in the clearly staged image of Detroit’s United Artists Theater.

The sublime As does the abject, the sublime structures itself with a central tension. There is no easy, unproblematic way to interact with WS, or River of Fundament, or Orgien Mysterien Theater. This unease has historical resonance, and is deeply rooted in visceral, physical response; Kristeva works within a long philosophical tradition of the sublime. Edmund Burke, in his 1756 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, argues that the impact and pleasure of the sublime result from having “an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances.” The sublime’s pleasures are those of knowing oneself to be in a virtual, as-if environment. It’s not real danger, but the affect is partial mimicry of real danger. 139

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(By way of contrast, people with a strong fear of heights do not feel the sublime: they don’t feel the pleasure. They experi­ence it as actual danger.) Where does this sublime sense of danger come from? Immanuel Kant, in his 1790 Critique of Judgment posits that “Nature is […] sublime in those of its phenomena, whose intuition brings with it the Idea of their infinity […].”63 Works of art that invoke this idea of the natural sublime, then, create a sense of overwhelming magnitude and loss of boundaries that bump up against our inadequacies for dealing with it, an epistemological crisis that instills a sense of anxiety, of danger, and excites what Burke calls our “passions” for “self-preservation.” At a certain point in the sublime experience there is overload, as one’s ability to process drops away. To create this overload, the sublime trades on different kinds of excess (Kant’s infinity), leading to a feeling of danger. This experience of excess and anxiety shows up in numerous human experiences and art forms, such as religious ecstasy, Romantic understandings of the landscape, and nationalism. More recently, odd permutations of the sublime have appeared, such as the technological and consumerist sublimes. Shininess is central to contemporary art’s sublime. Indeed, speaking of his own work, Kapoor claims that shininess is today’s peculiar version of the sublime, arguing that “the traditional sublime is the matt surface, deep and absorbing, and […] the shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze.”64 The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s work exemplifies the contemporary shiny sublime, building up a substantial body of work over the years that deals with immersive, shiny experiences that evoke the sublime. His most famous work, the 2003 The weather project at the Tate Modern, had over two million visitors during its sixmonth run (Figure 6.7). Filling the cavernous Turbine Hall 140

Figure 6.7: Olafur Eliasson, The weather project, 2003, monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminium, scaffolding 26.7 x 22.3 x 155.44 m. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2003. Photo: Andrew Dunkley & Marcus Leith. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.

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(its dimensions were 26.7 m x 22.3 m x 155.4 m), the work consisted of a giant circular set of monofrequency sodium-yellow lights, whose glow interacted with the projection foil and mirror foil on the ceiling, and a mist machine that diffused the light, creating a dislocated space of uncertain boundaries and reflections. As they do with Cloud Gate, visitors often lay on the ground, in this case trying to catch their reflection on the ceiling some 80 or so feet overhead. Four years later, Eliasson’s One-way colour tunnel (2007) at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art presented an experience that was similarly immersive although somewhat more contained, with the interaction more prescribed. Entering this tunnel 75 feet above the floor below, the experience of walking through this 32-foot long tunnel, composed of stainless steel, black paint, color-effect acrylic, and acrylic mirrors, was an experience of losing oneself in a bath of kaleidoscopic light and shine (Figure 6.8). These two pieces typify Eliasson’s inquiry into light and reflection. Almost all of his works use light as a medium, and the effects of this light are heightened by his use of highly reflective surfaces. Overwhelmingly, Eliasson uses immersive environments: his artworks are spaces, not objects. They are walked through rather than just observed. Like many spectacles his work invites movement and participatory behaviors. (It may in fact have a little too much spectacle to create the meditative aura of work by other Light and Space artists such as James Turrell or Robert Irwin. Eliasson may perhaps be more interested in the pleasures of the sublime than its anxieties.) Eliasson’s work, then, routinely invokes the experience of the sublime, a breaking down of boundaries through scale, reflection, and disorientation that leads to a loss of self, and to marvel. The reflected light fascinates, defamiliarizes, leading one critic, echoing Kristeva, to argue that the central 142

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Figure 6.8: Olafur Eliasson, One-way colour tunnel, 2007, stainless steel, acrylic colour-effect filters, acrylic mirrors, paint (black), wire, 2.56 x 1.8 x 10.5 metre. Installation view: Dallas Museum of Art, 2008 © 2007 Olafur Eliasson.

affect is one of “pre-intellectual wonder.”65 Curator Suzanne Page argues that “The constant oscillation between shadow and light, presence and absence, and affirmation and doubt causes us to question our visual perceptions and, in consequence, our convictions.”66 (Whether indeed this work, or the sublime in general, has this kind of political efficacy is an open question.) Eliasson is aware that his works invoke the sublime: “My exhibition addresses that which lies at the edge of our senses and knowledge, of our imagination and our expectations […]. It is about the horizon that divides, for each of us, the known from the unknown.”67 In a sense, Eliasson is not doing anything unusual with this aspect of his work: historically, light and shininess have regularly been used to indicate or conjure the sublime. After all, 143

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the affects of the sublime and shininess are almost identical; shininess is structurally consonant with the sublime: both use disorientation, dislocation, fascination. This does not mean that all shininess, or all excess, is sublime: there has to be a sense of vastness to create the affect. Shininess’ excesses need to be sensorially overwhelming to the point of a disorientation that leads to anxiety about the self and its boundaries. As it is with shininess, our experience of the sublime does not arise from a determinate, measurable position. All this is to say that the relationship between Eliasson’s shininess and the sublime is really tight: when the sublime uses shininess, it seems to take all of shininess’ properties, unlike the other topics that use shininess that we address in this book (hygiene, the utopian, kitsch, etc.). Shininess, then, is a sign for shine, which itself is a major trope of the sublime. But shininess, as a generator of the sublime, is iffy. As it is in its cultural manifestations, shininess is deceptive, a tricky version of light, and, particularly in its uses in the sublime, subject to gross miscalculation, as it is in the Billy Graham Center’s Heaven Room at Wheaton College, where large mirrors reflecting an imagined sky create an awkward infinity, leading more to disorientation and campy tourist photographs than a sense of heaven’s grandeur (Figure 6.9). In the Heaven Room, shiny does not speak shine. By definition shininess is surface, i.e., superficial; as a producer of sublime effects shininess is often suspect. When the shiny is poorly used to represent shine, the audience senses duplicity, and the audience’s experience of the sublime is in danger—of descending into duplicity’s giddy pleasures. It’s hard to have a transcendent experience when one is aware of things being mirrored, of there not being an actual shine. (This may signal a difference between Eliasson’s The weather project and his One-way colour tunnel.) And here a problem arises: both the sublime’s 144

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transcendence and its anxiety come about because of a loss of one’s boundaries, but with the shiny sublime, one is in danger of experiencing a lesser loss—it is less threatening, it doesn’t trigger a sense of self-preservation, and, when it doesn’t succeed, the experience might ascend no higher than giddiness or irony.

Figure 6.9: Arthur Taussig, Museum Project, Billy Graham Center Museum, 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Over the past three decades, shininess has seduced the artworld, its beguiling excesses insisting on our attention. Hanging Heart, Jeff Koons’ nine-foot, 3,500 pound, high chromium stainless steel sculptural object is an obvious example, but it’s hardly the only instance (Figure 7.1). Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, and once valued at £50m, furthers shininess’ excesses, dazzling on multiple—and often trivial— levels (Figure 7.2). In his Three Best Friends, Mr. (born Masakatsu Iwamoto) uses shininess in a different way, moving from actual shininess to anime’s hyperbolic representations of shininess, playing with how we signify and interpret—both cognitively and culturally—highly reflective surfaces (Figure 7.3). The three are culturally immediately recognizable as arising in the wake of postmodern aesthetics. Indeed, postmodern inquiry both in art and theory has found in shininess some comfortable cultural manifestations of theory—the interests of postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Guy DeBord, and Jean-François Lyotard in non-hierarchical thinking, excess, spectacle, distraction, and irony. Fredric Jameson, for example, argues of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes that in its shiny depthlessness, “perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the Postmodernisms,” the work has “a strange, compensatory, decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the title 146

itself, which is, of course, the glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand that seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at us.”68 All these things are at the heart of postmodern visual culture, and strikingly exemplified in its shiny works. The Koons, Hirst, and Mr. drip with irony, mocking shininess’ historical relationship to transcendence by filtering shininess through consumerist culture and spectacle. All three artists monumentalize bling, out-exaggerating the worst excesses of consumer culture, suggesting (but not exactly warning) that this is where the logic of pop culture leads. Their critique, though, is hardly stable. Combining the techniques of both spectacle and critique can be a form of having things both ways, which is either a mark of ironic ambiguity or insincerity—or, possibly, both. These three artworks embody and refer to pop culture in their iconography, materials—and shininess. Shininess is central not just to these works’ use of pop culture, it’s also crucial to the way they behave ironically. Shininess’ contribution to the excesses of these works makes their irony more apparent and pushes the irony in a direction available only to shininess. Other materials could still create irony, but in these pieces shininess does its own particular work. Imagine Koons’ heart in Cor-ten steel (a dull take on defamiliarization and monumentality—like a giant rusty Oldenburg clothespin). Or imagine it in woven straw (a work about fragility, containment). Instead, the heart is a giant decorative bauble, an in-your-face ornament, a supersized charm from the Walmart jewelry case. As for Mr.’s Three Best Friends, it is hard even to imagine what it would look like without its shine, because it is a representation of shininess. And, without its shininess, what would Hirst’s For the Love of God possibly signify?

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Figure 7.1: Jeff Koons, Hanging Heart (Red/Gold), 1994-2006, high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating and yellow brass 106 x 85 x 40 inches. © Jeff Koons.

Figure 7.2: Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, The Diamond Skull, 2007, 171 x 127 x 190 mm | 6.7 x 5 x 7.5 inches, platinum, diamonds and human teeth. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS / SOCAN (2020).

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Figure 7.3: Mr., Three Best Friends, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 241.2 x 465.0 x 4.6 cm (95 x 183 x 1.8 inches) ©︎2010 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Certainly, the irony in these works is not just produced by and directed at shininess—its source is wider and more complicated. Part of these works’ irony is entangled with pop culture itself: when artists want to refer to pop culture, a typical strategy is to make the art shiny, and in so doing to engage with pop culture’s optimism, consumerism, allure, instant gratifications, and spectacle. Additionally, and necessarily, these works’ shiny irony entangles itself with objects. (In these works, the shine is part of a commodity.) After all, shininess can’t be ironic without a physical surface; it needs to be on something.

Constructing irony Understanding the relationship between shininess and irony necessitates an initial turn to irony in general, and 150

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how it functions via discrepancy, intent, and knowingness. In its shiny and non-shiny instantiations, irony requires discrepancy. Consider Tom Otterness’ public sculpture Life Underground, for example, which, in their multiple figures scattered throughout the subway station, exploits a discrepancy between the scale, whimsy, and odd placement of garden gnomes and what people generally expect of public sculpture in terms of subject matter, scale, and seriousness—the Seven Dwarfs Take Manhattan, in bronze (Figure 7.4). Discrepancy, as here, is not just difference; it is an unstated slippage, “a failure to match” that isn’t then reconciled. Its structure leans to the paratactic rather than the hypotactic. But not just any discrepancy will do—irony’s discrepancy arises from a clash of systems in which specific aspects of two divergent systems are enmeshed within a larger conceptual frame. The discrepancy could involve any number of things. It could involve ways of thinking about the world. Or, the clash could occur between systems of representation, or perceptions, or conventions. It could be between sources—their materials, ideologies, histories, contexts. The discrepancy could be between an object’s usual context and a new context—not just in Otterness’ Life Underground, but also in Koons’ Hanging Heart, which places the iconography of kitsch in a high art setting. And, of course, all these different kinds of clashes can overlap with each other. But the discrepancies have purpose: irony always engages in critique, because ironic works present two systems in conflict. While negotiating the relationship among discrepancies doesn’t inevitably result in arguments about value, with irony it does. Irony’s discrepancies assert value, making it edgy, critical. Irony implies the detachment of an original signified from its signifier, but what results is not a simple 151

Figure 7.4: 14th Street / 8th Avenue Station, New York City. Tom Otterness, Life Underground, 1998, bronze, dimensions variable. Photo: Macyn Bolt.

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replacement with a new signified. Rather, irony layers a new signified over the old, in a kind of semiotic pentimento. The new signifier functions as irony only because the old signifier still awkwardly hangs around. The resultant friction never resolves. In a sense, there are now two signifiers in place, but one—the new one—has a shifty prominence. The prominence of one over the other shows that something is at stake in irony; not just any layering of signifiers will do. The changed signifier enacts a conflict of values, so that the artist, and those who get the irony, use the signified in a way that isn’t/wasn’t commonly understood. Irony requires a situation in which the signifier doesn’t mean what people think/thought it does/did. Not all art discrepancies are ironic, of course—sometimes a contradiction is just a contradiction. Discrepancy needs accompanying qualities in order to put irony into play. For one, it needs an audience that typically forms a supposition of ironic intent, that infers an intended discrepancy in Mr. or Hirst’s shiny work. Of course, the question of intent has troubled twentieth-century theory, in which, partly in order to deal with the difficulty and instability of modernist artworks, theorists from Wimsatt and Beardsley to Greenberg moved the center of interpretation toward formal and autonomous properties of works as determinants of meaning, and away from intent—because intent seemed unknowable or, at best, irrelevant. But a crucial logical slippage occurred: knowing intent is not the same as entertaining a supposition of intent, and just because one can’t know intent doesn’t mean a supposition of intent is pointless. But it isn’t pointless to infer some kinds of intent; indeed, such inferences are essential to experiencing and interpreting art. By the early 1950s, in the heyday of abstract expressionism, if an artist exhibited a gestural painting in Betty Parsons Gallery, it would have been 153

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reasonable to infer that this artist intended to participate in the discourse of process, of the non-hierarchical, of the immediate, of self-expression. In this early 1950s artworld, the contextual cues were relatively conventional, shared, and easy to read. Such contexts suggest a set of appropriate conventions that are meant to be put into play. (There are other aspects of a work that imply intent, such as scale, framing/pedestals, lighting—the list could be infinitely expanded.) Inferring intent is central to interpreting an artwork: to make a work mean, audiences perform intent, bringing to bear on the work’s meanings a supposition of what the work was intended to mean, as suggested by its contextual cues. Such inferences are never stable. But the inevitable incompleteness of inferring intent is not a disappointment, as if the goal of encounters with art should be to unite seamlessly with an artist’s intent. Uncertainty is central to intent’s affect. Not being able to pinpoint precisely the intent of Gerhard Richter’s mid-1960s fighter planes is a large part of what makes those works so interesting and powerful. And irony, of course, doubles the pleasurable uncertainties of intent. Even works that hide intent require, on the part of their viewers, some supposition of intent. Intent still makes things happen. At times, audiences don’t see irony where a later contextual examination sees some; audiences apparently misapprehend ironic intent. For example, Francis Picabia’s turn in the 1940s to pulp magazine porn-lite initially accelerated the downward spiral of his career. Picabia looked lost and befuddled, wandering outside the pale of art history. Now, though, critics increasingly see this later work as ironic appropriation, a reassessment they base on inferring Picabia’s intent. Intent can go askew another way, with unintended irony. Unintended irony brings a different encounter with 154

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intent: irony can happen by accident, when people misspeak themselves, or, for example, when Henry Darger tells us about the Vivian Girls in his The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Few viewers believe in the Vivian Girls, or share in Darger’s burning desire to rescue them. The artworld’s use of Darger’s work comes from the separation between Darger’s obscure intentions, and the terms of artworld interest in the work. It is clear, from contextual cues, that Darger didn’t intend irony, and that irony is created without him. Audiences provide a discrepancy, but it is not a discrepant knowledge that parallels Darger’s own intents. Yet the affect is still tied up with surmising intent—although this time with the consequence of violating, working against, or skewing the original intent. Darger’s work, in many ways a limit case for irony, suggests a way into a common form of irony in contemporary art and shininess. The most complicated operations of irony in contemporary art come from artists’ denials of their own ironic intentions. The British artists Gilbert and George have argued of their own work that: “I’ll tell you where there’s irony in our work: nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. Every time we see that word in an article about us we go to the dictionary and I still don’t understand the bloody meaning of the word. And we hate it.”69 This seems a little odd, given their backlit panels with their large-scale, intensely colorful stained glass religious references mixed with images of feces and genitalia (Figure 7.5). The relationship between their comments and the works themselves creates a destabilized affect in which their claims to be as unironic and naïve as Darger are met with artworld disbelief—and Gilbert and George are seen to be performing sincerity.

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Figure 7.5: Gilbert & George, Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit, 1996, mixed media, 133 1/16 x 167 11/16 inches (338 x 426 cm). © Gilbert & George. Courtesy White Cube.

So, how can one be confident something is ironic? How does one know that there is a discrepancy, a situation in which some people know something and others might not? How does one know there is a joke to be in on? Irony achieves some stability in interpretation because an artwork rarely bases its irony and inherent uncertainty on the basis of one property alone; typically, artworks exploit a network of features that reinforce each other. Even in a work that is as much a one-liner as Hirst’s, the irony arises from a combination of the shiny diamonds, the broader context of memento mori, absurd excess, and the value, hardness, and permanence of diamonds (the work’s problem, 156

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of course, is that there aren’t a lot of different features that contribute to the irony, and so many see the work as lacking in, well, richness). But with irony there are only cues, no iron-clad knowledge. Irony’s uncertainty suggests that, in addition to discrepancy and intent, irony requires a third quality: knowingness. Knowingness is not the same as knowledge, or facts. Knowledge, the kind of thing that can be naively referred to as “fact” and put in scare quotes, can exist outside of a community or coterie. Knowingness is a socially constructed and performed knowledge, and it brings with it complicity and self-consciousness. It is a form of knowledge that not everyone has the competence to put into play. The ironic work winks, but only some catch it. With ironic art, artist and audience know something that isn’t overtly stated, that isn’t solidly there, that exists in some kind of code. Cindy Sherman’s imitations of movie stills, for example, depend for their effect on an audience perceiving an unstated interplay between the look of a movie still, the banality of melodrama, and a questioning of originality and self-expression. Audiences need to know the citation, and to know the discrepancy. Without this knowingness about discrepancy, citation, and the social functions of Sherman’s sources—as well as a supposition of intent—her photographs’ semiotics point in a different, less interesting, direction. Knowingness is not just knowledge, then; it is a social contract, between a maker (or curator, or institutional setting) and audience, in which the ideal audience is in on the discrepancy and the duplicitous intent: enacting a version of Bourdieu’s habitus, a set of behaviors that are both assumed and shared by a subgroup, the audience considers itself part of a group that includes the artist, and potentially excludes others. Ideal audiences participate or are complicit in a subculture of knowingness. Knowingness, then, is a kind of 157

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discursive space/world view/interpretive frame. Audiences make a reasonable supposition of intent because they and the artist occupy the same fertile environment for irony. That is why irony doesn’t work very well across cultures, or even across subcultures. Without sharing a knowingness about high and low art and their historical antagonism, one can’t get the irony of Koons’ work. Irony’s knowingness feeds itself on exclusion; irony is power. No surprise here: irony never explicitly states its discrepancies, an implicitness that makes exclusion necessary. Irony isn’t irony unless somebody might not get it, or at least has a serious risk of being on the outside. Discrepancy, intent, and knowingness are central to all forms of irony and media in which irony appears (such as literature and music), but visual media inflect irony in specific ways—most notably by working explicitly through particular kinds of signs, which, having their own peculiar characteristics, are always amenable to being citations—at times of the visual world, or of earlier artistic practices, or of mark-making, or of selection processes. (Citation is discourse concerning a representation.) This citational quality, dependent on knowingness for its success, inflects the specific kinds of irony that visual art gravitates toward. Visual irony is predominantly citation-based: today, when a shiny object or image is ironic, it cites (mentions) shininess, it doesn’t just use it. The distinction between use and mention is a basic linguistic distinction, and not a new thing to assert about irony’s function. Nor is it a complete account. Some forms of irony, particularly narratively based forms, are not citational (dramatic and cosmic irony do not need citation in order to function, as is perhaps also the case with some kinds of narrative works of visual art). But irony based on motivated signs—Peirce’s iconic and indexical signs, where the relationship between sign and referent is close—always 158

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is citational. This citational quality affects the kind of irony visual signs produce. Whenever a sign is citational, its possibilities for irony are parodic: the polemical irony of citation with discrepancy. (Language, by contrast, depends more on arbitrary signs, and so its citational quality is different— with the partial exception of parody, language’s citationality is based on a history of interpretation.) When they work as citations, Pierce’s visual symbolic signs, because they are unmotivated, employ a different kind of citation from iconic and indexical signs. As Peirce argues, publicly available symbols are citations of their previous uses (otherwise we wouldn’t recognize them as signs), although strictly speaking they aren’t motivated signs. Symbolic signs are citations when the rules for interpreting them are public and historical: blue and the Virgin Mary, for example. Citational symbolic signs always involve an historical knowingness, an historical knowledge that some may have, and others not.

Shiny irony Shiny art has an affinity for these general structures of irony. First, shininess, in contemporary art, is always citational and never arbitrary. It is most obviously citational when it manifests itself as an iconic sign—Richard Estes’ photorealist depictions of New York public transit, for example (Figure 4.5). Shininess has some lesser, indexical relationships as well, as when it is indexical for some of the physical qualities of hygiene, frictionlessness, spectacle. Lynne Cohen’s photographs of laboratories and spas are striking instances of the first two (Figure 5.1); Jeff Wall’s massive lightboxes are examples of the last. It’s not merely a function of iconicity and indexicality, though: these relationships take on symbolic overtones in works of art and 159

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of representation. Because there is an inevitable historical reference to it, in visual art and in marketing, shininess has become most powerful and citational as a symbolic sign. Not merely a citational symbolic sign, shininess has become a discrepant sign, in which a shiny work brings in a discourse that discrepantly plays off of one of the ways shininess signifies and has historically signified: whether the hygienic, kitsch, the modern, the utopian, or the consumerist. The shiny work brings in some of the ways shininess has operated historically, and an audience’s awareness of the conventions that structure this history inevitably inflects the shininess into a sign. As a sign, shininess works polemically today—because of its heavily citational nature and the decline of belief in its unproblematic attachment to hygiene, transcendence, and newness—shininess’ default function is ironic. Today, shininess isn’t just citation in general; it is more focused: it is overwhelmingly ironic citation, even parodic and polemical. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle, with its references to Busby Berkeley musicals and their shiny spectacle, is partly a parodic argument about the ideology of that earlier form. Many of the principles just discussed can, of course, apply not just to shininess but to other forms of visual irony as well. Shininess, though, has its own particular interactions with irony, becoming ironic under conditions that often overlap with, but don’t just repeat the conditions for irony in general. Some things about shininess as a quality—outside of how it might appear in a work of art—invite irony. Shininess is not the artist’s innocent dupe here. Shininess invites irony because it always creates particular kinds of discrepancies: it reflects, dislocates, disorients, distracts, disguises, distorts (those “dis” words suggest that the activities of shininess are linguistically marked, set off as dependent, parasitic). These kinds of discrepancies inflect 160

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the energy of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, for example. As some of these terms indicate, when we think of shininess as duplicitous, there is also at times a moral sense to shininess’ discrepancies, allowing it to function polemically, contributing to and structuring the discrepancy of systems. Second, if a work of art contains some radical shift in scale or contains some other exaggerated property, it initiates a self-consciousness about those properties. Shininess’ inherent excesses—its dazzling quality, its perceptual overload—lead to self-consciousness, which in turn leads to citation. In short, it initiates discourse. Excess makes one inordinately aware of the typical properties of the thing that is exaggerated and its conventions; one considers how the excessive thing usually functions, when it is not amplified. Excess triggers an awareness and citation of discourse, an awareness tipped, often, in a specific direction. Excess, most obviously when it is understood as exaggeration, indicates some kind of discrepancy, which is why it is such a handsome tool for irony. Such discrepancy does not characterize only Tom Otterness’ excessive diminution of our expectations of the scale of public sculpture, it’s also true of Allan McCollum’s ongoing project Plaster Surrogates, his thousands of plaster casts of objects that look like paintings. Excess destabilizes, disrupting expectations, defamiliarizing the thing or property that has been exaggerated. Excess’ discrepancies both cite and interrupt a discourse, creating an initial uncertainty about how and what the excessive work is signifying (which is crucial to the knowingness of irony). Shininess, of course, fits smoothly into this discourse, being inherently excessive, and not just a tool for pointing to excess.

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Hanging Heart Koons’ Hanging Heart engages with and problematizes this discourse of shiny irony. It establishes its irony contextually, with ironic readings of one attribute (say, its shininess) highlighted by the apparent irony of its other attributes. The complexities of Hanging Heart’s irony begin with its citations. Iconographic images are always citations, of course, and a stylized heart is citation at its most schematic: a heart is commonly understood as an unproblematic symbol of love, sincerity, and commitment. Koons quotes this common understanding, but quotes it as sentimentality—and sentimentality, when presented straightforwardly, is hardly a significant value in contemporary art. Koons is clearly aware of this: his heart is a sign of sincerity and commitment, but its exaggerated scale (it lacks any possible relation to the human body) disorients, creates a sense of public spectacle, and makes the work impersonal, suggesting that it is about these things, modulating the heart into some kind of meta-realm. The addition of the large-scale ribbon further underscores the citation of sentimental iconography. The ribbon also accentuates Hanging Heart’s status as an ornament, and gives it a degree of cultural, consumerist specificity (in a way that Jim Dine’s hearts don’t). The ribbon connects it to a specific use and takes Hanging Heart out of the realm of the merely symbolic. The citation of shininess in this work begins with its excess. Its intense shininess reiterates the work’s scale exaggeration. Koons’ over-sized Hanging Heart is too shiny, hyper-shiny, unrelenting—every part of the heart’s surface is equally shiny. Its self-conscious, exaggerated shininess introduces a discrepancy into the discourse of shininess, and makes the work about being shiny. (Curators obsess over Koons’ shiny surfaces—touching them with smudgy 162

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fingers is an art crime.) Koons is ironic partially because in his self-consciousness he is mentioning shininess, not just using shininess—in its purity and excess the shininess of Hanging Heart has become a sign for shininess. To refer to a distinction made earlier, Hanging Heart is a use of shininess, but it is also, and in some ways primarily, mention—and viewers who don’t get this distinction are on the outside; they don’t participate in Hanging Heart’s community of knowingness. The discrepancy of its shine signals a citation, a citation of consumerist cheap excess, of kitsch, of the weird utopian aspirations that kitsch and consumerism invoke. As for the more general discrepancies of irony, Koons employs a classic, but perhaps tired move of modernism. The heart dangles in discrepant contexts: from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to the Palace of Versailles. Even when one of Koons’ hearts moves to a private collection, it becomes part of an art collection. The work’s conventions— of the heart, the ribbon, and shininess—have been put in a place where one doesn’t expect them—kind of. After all, once the same surprising move has been performed thousands of times, the surprise is stylized, conventional. The awkward juxtaposition of a high art environment and low art kitsch has become a well-known structural discrepancy. Is this a meta-move on Koons’ part? Is he playing with our awareness of the tiredness of this convention, in an ironic way? Is it possible that Koons is pointing out how banal that gesture is? And, if he were pointing out the banality of that gesture, would it make Hanging Heart more interesting? Less ironic? And how would we know? One thing is clear: we aren’t on stable ground in front of this work. Koons’ art bauble isn’t discrepant only in this obviously institutional way; it has related discrepancies with their own nuances. For example, it has an odd denial of 163

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touch and personal gesture, which are standard devices for suggesting sincerity. There is also a discrepancy between Hanging Heart’s flashy production values (itself an ironic swipe at virtuosity) and what “ought” to be foregrounded in artworks. And there is irony about its money: this thing is really, really expensive both to make and to show (given its weight). The qualities and resonances of the shininess itself, its pleasurable distractions, and its historical relationships with hope, purity, and stepping outside of history—as well as its historical and contemporary associations with falseness, cheapness, superficiality—complicate and enhance the irony. And, the shininess, in conjunction with the work’s other qualities, suggests a discrepancy between difficulty and simplicity, seriousness and pleasure, and seriousness and banality. Hanging Heart plays off of banality, and banality’s self-satisfied containment. Whatever richness or interpretive activity one might engage in, Hanging Heart insists on its banality, a vacuity that pulls one back. This ironic discrepancy creates a peculiar affect, an affect dependent on knowingness. As it is in all irony, there is an affect involved in the discrepancies of Hanging Heart, in how its knowingness functions: the affect is a combination of recognizing the shininess-induced discrepancy, knowing that the discrepancy isn’t explicitly stated, and recognizing that not everyone gets the discrepancy. Hanging Heart accomplishes its affect only if audiences have a supposition of ironic intent regarding Koons—who has puzzlingly said: “A viewer might at first see irony in my work, but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation.”70 Denying irony by claiming for his work the kind of affect that Fredric Jameson has described as “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense,”71 Koons asserts that 164

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Hanging Heart has just a one-to-one relationship between subject and representation, that there is no discourse operating in Hanging Heart. In interviews, Koons typically denies any polemical citation, that his works are ideological interactions with their sources, and more, he denies ironic discrepancy, that knowingness is an appropriate interpretive frame for this work. Now, it may be that shiny work in general is easier to empty in this way, because it has overtones of superficiality—but without irony, what could Hanging Heart possibly mean? Why would it be interesting? Koons’ denials (as well as those of Gilbert and George) are puzzling; little seems to be gained by denying a prestigious aesthetic property of one’s work. This denial goes beyond correcting a misinterpretation; artists typically don’t strip out any possible interpretations of their work, particularly those that appear to give it weight. With his denials, Koons empties the work, with the result that acts of interpretation (his “critical contemplation”) are stymied. The denial of irony is not replaced with anything else, other than a mute pointing to the work itself, in a weird kind of autonomous gesture. The act of denying irony, oddly, asserts artistic power by excluding that interpretive frame, but in doing so Koons does not democratize the work of art; he complicates irony’s exclusionary process. The blank ineffability of artists like Koons results in a perverse creation of interpretive uncertainty that makes the work more, rather than less, difficult. By denying irony, Koons actually enhances and complicates irony (and makes himself less vulnerable). Koons’ denials are both problematic and a confirmation of his work’s irony. Irony always involves epistemological uncertainty, and in the face of his audience’s inability to look at these things without seeing irony, Koons, with his denial, enhances the irony. His statement functions as an act of ironic performance, in which he is ironic about 165

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irony. It’s not just the irony of Hanging Heart anymore; we now have a meta-irony. The twist is that, at the present moment, apparent “face value” understandings of Koons can be understood as a sign of sophistication. Koons’ antiironic position works as a kind of knowingness, an ironic positioning, an intellectual anti-intellectualism. Even with his denials, Koons exploits irony’s conventions. His denials create bafflement and discrepancy in the face of the shininess and all the other ironic cues in this work. Ironic about irony, Koons’ statement points to irony’s central problem and power: that it always is an unstated discrepancy. One can never be sure. Further, Koons’ denial is an odd invocation of artistic power, in which he presents himself as one step ahead of the artworld’s interpretive frames. This is a recognizable move: since modernism, the way for an artist to get power has been to step outside or ahead of the conventions of contemporary art. Irony, of course, is not the only work that Hanging Heart’s shininess does. In this case, shininess and its excesses don’t just lead to irony, they engage with fetish discourse. In many ways Koons’ heart, like much of his shiny work (and Hirst’s), is a fetish object. It engages fetish discourse through some traditional means that art has always used: the isolated, precious display that focuses attention, removes distractions, and contributes to an overcharge of meaning. Viewers are meant to look at Hanging Heart, and nothing else. It is removed from pragmatic concerns, and enters into the discourse of some kind of transhistorical, stylized psychological desire. But there is also Hanging Heart’s extreme shininess, which accentuates the fetishistic aspects of preciousness and fascination. As we mention in Chapter 2, much fetishistic behavior involves shininess: precious stones and gold, but also latex, chrome, glitter. Extreme shininess is 166

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of a piece with fetishism: its fascination, seduction, disorientation, destabilization, and preciousness charge the object. But there’s a further aspect of shininess’ relationship to fetishism, something more intimate. Much of the shininess of fetishes is the shininess of rubbing, labor, and ritual. There is tactility involved in fetishistic shininess. Looking at Hanging Heart, one is aware of the polish, and thinks about Koons’ mechanistic, perfect negation of touch, and one’s own desire to touch Koons’ works when the guard isn’t looking. The work has an obsessive attention to detail and finish, to slickness, an obsessiveness that, together with the work’s other characteristics, implies ritual. Obsessive attention to something, the activity that excessive shininess suggests, is central to fetishism. Its shininess indicates an excess of attention, making Hanging Heart visually “special,” in Dissanayake’s sense of the defining originating feature of all art. So, what exactly are the fetish discourses Hanging Heart engages with—the commodity, the Freudian, or the anthropological? Or, indeed, are these boundaries hard and fast? Clearly, it is both tempting and appropriate to associate Koons with the commodity fetish. His works are saturated with consumerism, and it is irresistible for critics to bring up the commodity fetish. But to call Hanging Heart simply a commodity fetish is to impoverish it. After all, as a bodily adornment it also has overtones of the Freudian fetish, especially when set next to Koons’ other work. And its uncanniness results in disorientation. But both conceptual forms of the fetish are conceptual/metaphorical extensions of something more basic, and Hanging Heart’s complexity extends further and more fundamentally than this to the anthropological fetish. The work presents an ironic reading of the anthropological fetish and its mediating ability, its ability to mediate between the spiritual and the material. 167

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It hangs in a kind of temple, after all, with a serious amount of space surrounding it, and it overshadows its viewers. Hanging Heart’s shininess is at the center of its mediation, in much the same way that it functions in John of Nepomuk’s tomb (Figure 2.1). Religious fetishes, particularly Western religious fetishes (such as Byzantine icons) use shininess to establish transcendence, and as in religious fetishes the shininess is not just preciousness, here, or spectacle: it creates an overcharge, an unbalanced meaning. Because of its irony Hanging Heart, though, has a different relationship to the fetish than anthropological fetishes do, which are based on transcendence, or than Dutch still lifes, which we did not describe as ironic, but as straightforward and sincere instances of commodity fetishism. It’s not that, as a fetish, Hanging Heart’s irony has no relationship to sincerity; while Koons’ work is not sincere, it invokes and cites sincerity. What is disturbing and complex about the work is that it alludes to something serious, something primal and sincere (in its fetishistic shine), but it isn’t ultimately serious. That’s a good thing, for without its irony, Hanging Heart is a dull and ponderous work. Its irony rescues it, makes it a camp fetish. That relationship between irony and shiny fetishism is not so odd, not just some weird, late capitalist superficiality. There is a deeper relationship. Irony and fetishism are structurally homologous, because they both use shininess to create meaning in the same ways. They are both destabilizing, basing their effects on excess. They both employ uncertainty about meaning that is added-on, manufactured. They consist of a material that is both duplicitous and a motivated sign for various duplicities, for saying one thing and meaning something else. One may well ask, is a fetish inevitably some form of irony, of saying one thing and meaning another? When we tag something as a fetish or 168

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as irony, we change what an object or action means. Both fetishes and irony exploit the work done by shininess’ excess and duplicity. Shiny artworks like Hanging Heart, Hirst’s For the Love of God, and Mr.’s Three Best Friends participate in a discourse of shininess that revels in the duplicity of reflected light, the disorienting, scintillating effects of surface, and that offers not only uncertain physical contexts, but a history of conflicting cultural contexts. Shininess easily, perhaps too easily, becomes the physical embodiment of saying one thing and meaning another.

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Kitsch and Camp Too much of a good thing is … wonderful. —Liberace

As has been made clear over the course of this book, shininess doesn’t always mean what it used to mean. It used to function, fairly unproblematically, as a metonymy for wealth, power, transcendence. A chandelier, a crown, a golden dome—these were devices for conferring distinction upon the possessor. While shininess can still suggest these things, in the late twentieth century its meanings began to pale into detachment, irony, skepticism, superficiality, consumerism. As we have discussed, this change came, in large part, as a consequence of the easy availability of shininess, made possible by the rise of mass-produced shiny finishes. A chrome-plated toaster, a plastic flower pot, hard enamel paint finishes—these do not so much suggest wealth and power so much as they connote the everyday, available to everybody. And, as part of this change to the ubiquity and affordability of the shiny, shininess acquired a new, historically inflected meaning: it became an inextricable ingredient of kitsch and camp. In 1985, at Caesar’s Palace, shiny kitsch and camp reached, perhaps, their apotheosis. In one of his late performances, a few years before he died, Władzio Valentino Liberace arrived on stage in his glittering Rolls-Royce to play one of his favorite pianos: an over-sized instrument completely covered with sparkling rhinestones. During the finale, the piano began to revolve, producing the effect of what David Richards in the Washington Post called 170

“a merry-go-round shooting off splinters of light like a glitter ball on prom night.” This display wasn’t completely unexpected—just the final, spectacular point on a trajectory which began in the 1940s. At that time in his life, Liberace, dissatisfied with the pianos available at his concerts, took the first step in moving his career away from giving concerts, to putting on extravaganzas. His biographer reports that Haunting the piano exchanges in Los Angeles in the winter of 1947, he found the instrument of his dreams in Long Beach. It was a very rare, custom-made double-strung, gold-leafed oversized grand that had been made in Leipzig by Julius Blüthner and brought to the United States before the war. It cost twenty five thousand dollars at a time when a family might have purchased a modest dwelling for a fifth of that amount.72

Liberace’s gold and rhinestone pianos were excessive, their decoration seemingly purposeless: the glitz didn’t help produce a better sound. But it offered spectacle by directing an audience’s attention in multiple directions, creating a shiny wash of sensory stimuli. Liberace’s performances did not encourage an aesthetic contemplation of pure music. The pianos turned preciousness and shininess into an object of attention, a grandiose lounge act that immersed spectators in light and sound. As Liberace said, “I don’t give concerts, I put on shows.”73 Liberace’s performances were peculiarly unstable events, simulating preciousness and glamour, perhaps even ironizing them. Of course, real preciousness was involved: the pianos and his Nudie- and Pabst-designed rhinestone-studded suits were extraordinarily expensive, and this was part of their attraction. But Liberace’s ostentatious excess was a grand enactment of bad taste—indeed, the value of Liberace’s performance as a show would be 171

Figure 8.1: Liberace in concert, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, 1984. Photo: Alamy.

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destroyed if it were not in bad taste. “Taste,” of course, is a problematic term, and we do not mean it as an inherent quality; rather, Liberace was violating some cultural norms about appropriate scale, proportion, and materials—what some would call good taste. To many, his Vegas acts would be understood as vulgar, prominently displaying money—a series of wasteful, gratuitous acts of excess. And, Liberace was alive to nuance: it’s bad taste to simulate the precious with things such as rhinestones. Liberace dispersed his audience’s attention in multiple directions, when one would expect the focus to be on the music, and in doing so he created a carnival of the inappropriate, the impure. While Liberace’s shows didn’t fit the norms for piano concerts, they also transgressed those norms in a particular way, through excess, highlighting non-central features to create a glitzy cornucopia of Las Vegas decadence. This excess and bad taste destabilized the usual markers of sincerity, creating uncertainty whether Liberace was putting them on, an uncertainty that has yet to be put to rest. Liberace had a peculiar defensiveness regarding his shows, scaling down their ambitions and vulnerability to criticism (in this way he is like Koons and Gilbert and George). He declared they were merely fun. Referring to his audience, he claimed, “I try to help them do this for a little while, to help them forget work and problems and enjoy, vicariously, a folderol of fun, good music and fancy dress. I give them a little recess from the humdrum.”74 Even his diction is problematic, unstable—“folderol?” Liberace is an undecideable figure. Were his performances—was he himself—camp, kitsch, or just clueless? Similar to Koons’ disavowal of irony in his work, Liberace typically played the innocent, asserting that his shows, costumes, pianos, and cars were just pretty (although this is a little hard to believe, given his self-awareness). People who disapproved of it 173

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called it kitsch. People who thought it was so bad it was good called it camp. Blue-haired ladies from Jersey called it fun.

Kitsch These conflicts, when dancing along the boundaries of bad taste, are common, and complicated. In a rare moment of faltering in a life of otherwise exquisite taste, Tim van Laar succumbed to buying a pair of ceramic polychrome Dutch boy and girl salt-and-pepper shakers (the boy is pepper, naturally). About two-and-a-half inches high, they are cheap, mass produced, sentimental, stylized, clichéd, and shiny. Van Laar is slightly ashamed of owning them, but also defiant—defiant because he knows it is kitsch, and that kitsch comes accompanied by negative value judgments. For the purposes of this chapter, we intend to put those judgments to the side: while kitsch is rarely understood without aesthetic and/or moral disapproval, an analysis of kitsch needs to begin with the tawdry pleasures of disparagement held in abeyance—for a while, anyway. And, for the moment, we are separating kitsch from camp, which we define as kitsch and other things in bad taste, re-situated ironically. Kitsch has its own shine, of course, and shininess itself is often suspected of being kitsch—because of its excess, duplicity, instant attractiveness, and for dubious classbased reasons, originating in the easy availability of shiny surfaces in the twentieth century. (This raises the dicey ethical problem found in many critiques of kitsch: are they an aesthetic disparagement or nothing more than class snobbery?) Shininess can provide a cheap enhancement of value and effects, taking something of dubious value and making it precious. This effect started early in the twentieth century: for example, the glossies, as a term for certain 174

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kinds of magazines, always had this aura, the term being a description not just of the quality of the paper, but of the cheapness of the magazine’s contents. Such products, like glossies and shiny figurines, offered themselves as pleasurable. Kitsch always offers pleasure, but of a particular kind: the pleasures of gratification. Kitsch is an “easy” pleasure, and easiness is an attribute that is often understood negatively. Kitsch’s pleasures are not surprising; they are the pleasures of comfort. Having no anxiety, there is no sublimity in kitsch. Most of the time the kitsch object is a replication, simulating preciousness; mass produced and inexpensive to obtain, the kitsch object is not unique. But kitsch is not just limited to objects and their availability, it is also the ideas associated with objects that are easily available (critics like Clement Greenberg perhaps too assertively argued, ideas could be kitsch). Kitsch’s concepts aren’t difficult or unusual. As Thomas Kincaid and Norman Rockwell have repeatedly demonstrated in their paintings, hearths are warm and cozy places, and they suggest warmth and acceptance. Comfortable and available, kitsch objects are not revolutionary, striving to upset the social order. The kitsch object or idea does not seriously challenge the beliefs of its possessors. In this way kitsch is optimistic, hopeful, a hope often based on nostalgia: there were once good values out there that people can still access. Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, his famous image of a white family’s Thanksgiving dinner in which all are, implausibly, smiling, is not there to change people’s beliefs, but to confirm them and help viewers feel good about social institutions. The work is built to promote nostalgia, most notably through its lack of color saturation and how it handles light. Surprisingly, the strong light source from the window doesn’t do the chiaroscuro work one might expect; 175

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the main glow seems to come off the table’s shiny objects and onto the faces, imbuing and unifying everything with the same soft light. In its optimism and nostalgia the work upholds the status quo; challenging it would interfere with kitsch’s pleasures and their availability. Things stop being kitsch if they are social critique (recent attempts to advance Rockwell’s reputation—by emphasizing his works that advance progressive agendas—are ways to take his oeuvre outside of kitsch). Even risqué kitsch doesn’t seriously challenge taboos. A bawdy coffee mug with a nude woman handle does not challenge social conventions, it confirms them. Through its intended naughty cuteness and eroticism, placed in a whimsical context, the mug deflects questions of social change. Owners of the mug don’t focus on its objectification of women; they think of it as “fun.” Kitsch objects are never given meanings that involve serious social argument, that interfere with the kinds of pleasures kitsch offers. The reasoning behind these limitations makes some sense: the kitsch object signals that it is not meant to have great ambitions. For one, the wit and humor of the coffee mug deflect the challenge that could lurk in these depictions. (This is not to say that some kitsch doesn’t depict sexist or racist images—it’s just that any depictions are understood by their owners to have been deflected.) Kitsch is meant to be harmless; it doesn’t have big ambitions, and it has a peculiar wit that short-circuits ambition. Whether that makes sexist or racist kitsch more insidious than such work that doesn’t have these deflections is a serious question. But, like all social practices that are defined through a mixture of formal properties and value judgments, kitsch is a fuzzy category, and some of its typical attributes—its mundaneness, its nostalgia, its citation—do not cover every instance. But most kitsch, particularly the kitsch that does 176

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not involve spectacle, is intimately accepting of the mundane world. As Sam Binkley argues, Rather than distancing itself from the everyday in art galleries or high-brow films, kitsch retains its embeddedness. It nestles right into the mundane, savoring its secure patterns and its meter. This is also why kitsch appears so often in the real spaces of the quotidian itself (offices, waiting rooms), in the decorative, the comforting and the trivial trimmings of daily life.75

In this domestic setting, the kitsch object is meant to be displayed—even if it is a utilitarian object, such as an armadillo cheese grater. For domestic kitsch objects, this embeddedness has large implications for other mundane attributes of kitsch, bunking down with the status quo, sentimentality, and nostalgia. Kitsch is frequently, even typically, a souvenir, a memory or citation of something precious, evoking sentimentality. Kitsch’s sentimentality, directing the more poignant emotions, provides pleasures that are sweet rather than bracing. Sentimentality in kitsch usually has a quality of tenuousness about it, of being vulnerable, under threat, and shininess can heighten sentimentality’s fragility. But the sentimentality of kitsch is usually thought of as a negative quality, fitting into a general artworld/intellectual distrust of pleasure: pleasure as limited, inadequate to the real world, untrue. Sweetness hides things: it sugarcoats unpleasantness and doesn’t question the status quo. As an idealization, sentimentality reduces and purifies rather than complicates. And shininess, when it is involved with these qualities, makes them precious and fragile, as all shiny things are. The shine is fragile, easily lost, scuffed.

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Figure 8.2 : Department store display, Lladró porcelain figurines.

For example, consider the delicate figurines produced by Lladró, a company that describes itself as “A Factory of Dreams in Porcelain” (Figure 8.2). The figurines’ effects do not come from self-awareness, irony, or distance. Their refusal of these things, their apparent sincerity, is part of their depiction of vulnerability. They are sentimental, nostalgic, providing easily available, ingratiating pleasures, their glossy porcelain helping to establish their preciousness. Depicting stereotyped behavior, for example, at weddings, they are embedded in the quotidian, in the ways that Binkley describes. Yet, although they depict mundane activities, they are idealized. The figurines—and kitsch more generally—idealize things, by heightening them, an idealization that extends to the physical features of a happy couple, 178

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to the figurines’ implied narratives, and to their shininess as an idealized finish. This idealization pushes Lladró figurines into the category of an expensive cliché (around $500 US). The idea of kitsch and cliché, in fact, arise at the same historical moment (“cliché” as a term meaning “hackneyed and stereotyped” is a late nineteenth-century coinage, with the rise of mass production and mass culture; “kitsch,” as a term for cheap and tasteless art, entered the German language at about the same time). Kitsch has characteristics that complicate its sentimentality and nostalgia. Typically, kitsch involves citation. Sometime kitsch uses direct citation, as with Len Diepeveen’s souvenir corkscrew, strategically attached to a figurine representation of Brussels’ Manneken Pis. More generally, kitsch is a form of citation because it is heavily influenced by the look of something else. This more general use can be seen in the statuary displays at high-end garden centers: the concrete figures pretentiously cite the classical style and grandeur of Greece, in their failed aspiration suggesting Mediterranean luxury. The cedar plaque with a saying on it is a similar instance of kitsch citation: the saying is a particular type of language usage, while the plaque itself cites the aesthetic of an Adirondack lodge. There is almost always an historical precedent for kitsch objects, and this sense of precedence is central to the kitsch object’s function (not surprising, given its connection to nostalgia). Kitsch’s citation can turn to history, but it is not concerned with historical or art discourse. Kitsch’s citation gets at the heart of many value-laden objections to kitsch, because those who classify it as kitsch understand its citations to be clichés, stereotyped, over-used. They evince no individuation. Citation, of course, is never a perfect duplication, and kitsch’s citation is imperfect in a particular sense. It is cheap relative to what it is citing or derived from, often being 179

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a surrogate for the real thing. The finishes on kitsch objects aren’t real gold, they are a “gold” paint. Their sparkle isn’t that of a real diamond; it’s paste. Garden statuary isn’t marble; it’s concrete. It isn’t hand-carved; it’s cast. Kitsch is an imitative diminishment of the precious, of the rare (this is what makes it available for a mass market). Kitsch is a surrogate for the real thing. Having lost aura, kitsch objects are in bad taste. Even when the kitsch object is made from precious materials, like Liberace’s piano, or Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, it is understood to be an inextricable mixture of bad taste and cheapness (Figure 7.2). The luxury is indiscriminate, excessive, done for its own sake. Hirst’s glittery skull is a clichéd combination of luxury and death: the ultimate sign of luxury, plus the ultimate sign of death. Hirst serves up a combo plate of clichés. Further, excess will always destroy rarity—too many diamonds, and they aren’t a girl’s best friend anymore. Over-the-top excess seems cheap. Its peculiar form of citation—as a lessening of its source—may be why people more often think of kitsch as imitation than as citation. In the kinds of borrowings used in cultural activities, the term “citation” is understood to be qualitatively different from “imitation.” While the two are related, in practical use “imitation” is a more value-laden term than is “citation”: kitsch’s imitation is always about a relationship of value to its source. People talk about cheap imitation, but not cheap citation. This is partly because imitation can fail; it can be done badly. Citation is a more purely structural relationship, and has a different relationship to self-consciousness. As well, the term “imitation” offers the possibility of fraudulence. A citation is never passed off as the real thing, but imitations routinely are. (When citation is passed off as the real thing, it is taken as imitation.) With the term “imitation,” there is the possibility of mistaken identity. Not so with citation—one would 180

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never mistake a citation for the real thing. And, imitation, because of its possibilities of fraudulence, raises problems of originality. Despite an attempt here to describe kitsch without disparagement, the fact is that kitsch is typically understood negatively. Kitsch is a value-laden term—otherwise there would be no necessity for it as a concept. The term is applied as a denigration, to things that are considered to be in bad taste. But why the moral opprobrium? After all, a lot of kitsch is just fun—the plaque that says “Bless this Mess,” the donkey who defecates a toothpick when his ears are pulled forward, the Manneken Pis corkscrew. Kitsch’s is not an ambitious humor, used to effect social change, or question the nature of representation, etc. The humor is small scale, about human foibles, bodily functions, petty hypocrisies, small wisdoms. Yet kitsch’s humor points to the fact that at some levels kitsch has a measure of self-awareness. How else could the defecating donkey be funny? It’s not really a donkey, it’s a toothpick dispenser, and that slippage creates irony. Kitsch’s risqué objects have a similar, simple function. The bawdy coffee mug, for example, exploits a knowingness about its recontextualizing—the nude shows up as a mug handle. Not an ambitious recontextualizing, it is moral titillation rather than social critique. This kind of humor, typically understood as “fun,” claims a particular kind of pleasure, localized and small scale, lacking ambition, and putting seriousness, consequences, and moral questions on hold. (Shininess contributes to kitsch’s fun. Shininess, in kitsch, enhances the immediacy and availability of kitsch, and, through its distractions and attractions, it concomitantly encourages a lack of discrimination.) Fun appeals to innocence; it simplifies motives—the causes and effects of actions are simple, and neither dangerous nor transgressive. No wonder 181

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that kitsch’s fun doesn’t conflict with its sentimentality. But while it is often promoted this way, fun is not always this neat—fun can have a disturbing social function, as with nasty comments that get explained away as just being a joke. Fun, given this spin, is a version of critic Martin Jay’s aesthetic alibi—fun, like Kant’s idea of art’s autonomy, is presented as a form of human action or speech that lies outside of normal, pragmatic behaviors, and therefore is not subject to its ethical evaluations.

Camp “Fun” has a central role to play not only in kitsch, but in camp, and in the function of shininess. Kitsch’s fun, however, differs from that of camp. Consider the weird fun of people who don’t recognize an object or activity as kitsch. Liberace wasn’t obviously kitsch to many in his audience— in the sense of recognizing what he was doing as bad taste. The fun of Liberace to his admirers is that his spectacular shows were amusing, pleasing. Their fun was a respite, a distancing from the real world, a mix of fantasy and reverie. But this is not the fun of camp—camp has a different interpretive practice. In the interpretive practices surrounding the object or event that is in bad taste, there are multiple levels of awareness: people who don’t think of it as kitsch (“that’s a pretty figurine”); people who are aware of it as kitsch, and disapprovingly call it kitsch (isn’t it ghastly?); people who are aware it is kitsch, and approve of it (“it’s so bad it is good”). That last pleasure is the pleasure of camp. Taking this kind of ironic pleasure in the kitsch object allows people to role play. The fun of camp, then, is that of recognizing the kitsch as kitsch, and then putting it to ironic uses. Camp’s ironic fun is a distancing device, where 182

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innocence shades to ironic critique, where the original intended innocent affect is stepped away from, where the Disney dwarfs, say, take on a questionable sexual overtone. The relationship between camp and kitsch fun is complicated. In the greasier recesses of YouTube, one can find the videos of voyage.tv.com, an organization that provides puff pieces for hotels and attractions at tourist destinations. Within their playlist lies a five-minute overview of Liberace and the now-defunct Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. Tanya Combs, director of the Liberace museum, is interviewed about the collection, and about what Liberace means. An otherwise banal tourist account, the interview modulates into something more interesting as Combs manipulates the understanding of Liberace with a surprisingly polemical use of the concept of “fun.” It’s unclear whether she knows what she is doing, or whether she is employing an unconscious defense mechanism. Combs lists all Liberace’s costumes in order of increasing gaudiness, beyond the two-hundred -pound rhinestone-encrusted costume to the one with the battery pack that powered its lights. The bizarre excess of this wardrobe is striking, an excessiveness that inevitably (to us, at least) leads one to ask what motivates what seems to be an increasingly visible psychosis. Combs has no such interest; without a pause she says “everything done in fun.” Continuing the tour, she announces “this is another fun costume,” referring to a costume that includes the famous red white and blue hotpants with red sequined boots. Pre-empting our possible embarrassment or search for other motivations, Combs later asserts that Liberace “wasn’t afraid to embarrass himself, to make people laugh, to have a good time.” Her explanations get increasingly circumscribed, and strenuous. Noting that as his career progressed Liberace insisted that his costumes, pianos, and cars matched, Combs states: “he was the ultimate showman; 183

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it was all done in fun.” Buttressing her authority, Combs quotes Liberace as saying “I can put on this show that everyone’s going to have fun.” Describing the spectacle of Liberace’s demented Gesamtkunstwerken, she concludes “what fun the entire show was.” Now, none of these explanations are surprising or unusual on their own, but they get a little odd when “fun” is the only explanation for Liberace’s spectacular costumes, shows, and career. Combs, in fact, uses “fun” to pre-empt potentially alternative explanations: the corrosive irony, the queer übertext, the camp. These explanations are part of what Margaret Thompson Drewal terms a "conspiracy of blindness" around Liberace, which Drewal articulates as a willing and bizarre refusal to see Liberace as gay,76 a conspiracy that we extend to his original audience’s parallel refusal to see his shows as camp. The silence (and “fun”) is meant to circumscribe interpretive options, particularly irony. Combs’ use of “fun,” then, shuts things down, making Liberace out to be nothing more than a domesticated kitsch object. Perhaps that’s all Liberace wanted. But, how can one constrain his meaning to this limited sense of “fun” when his entire career seems to be an over-the-top celebration of camp? It could be both fun and camp, depending on the audience. Camp has its own uses of fun, which have in one sense the constraining sense of the above, but the constraint moves in a more ambitious direction. Kitsch’s fun affirms and contains; camp’s fun subverts and releases. In doing so, camp has a parasitic relationship with kitsch. Camp always argues that its object is, on one level, kitsch; kitsch’s vulnerability, its easy and undistanced pleasures, is central to its use in camp. Camp is the ironic use of something that exists outside of the boundaries of good taste, the irony often being signaled through some kind of excess. (“Good taste” is not an objective category, of course, but rather a social 184

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construct that is always under contention.) Camp asserts the bad taste of something, and likes it for precisely that reason. Its value judgments are not serious. Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra, the music and performances of RuPaul, and audience participation in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is predicated on this enjoyment of things that are simultaneously recognized to be in poor taste. Camp steps back from the kitsch object and uses the whole thing ironically. In camp, a value judgment is being made of kitsch, and of a kitsch aesthetic: Sontag’s famous “it's good because it's awful”77—whereas the kitsch lover merely thinks the donkey toothpick dispenser is funny. Camp’s irony, on the other hand, has a particular edge, a queer aesthetic in which things aren’t what you think they are. But this is done with a particular moral playfulness— moral playfulness as critique. Susan Sontag writes, “Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”78 Camp allows for pleasure in things one otherwise wouldn’t like. Or it allows pleasures in what one already secretly liked. It allows the putting on of a mask, permitting audiences to perform the act of enjoyment. But camp’s moral ambiguity does not extend everywhere. Its play has a purpose. In its transgression, camp has both a general social critique, and a more focused one—an indictment of kitsch’s aesthetic and moral principles. It exposes unacknowledged subtexts in culture. Because of its destabilizing and ambiguous interactions with transgression, the camp aesthetic isn’t for everyone. Camp has rarity, based on a secret, coterie-like knowledge and interpretive practice, which results from the strange positioning that is necessary for something to be camp. It’s a sophisticated position in which pleasure depends on a subversive insider knowledge. An interpretive practice, camp is not an inherent property—people turn things into 185

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camp, putting kitsch to ironic use. Camp, as an interpretive practice, has a wide range of practices and objects it can use for its activities. The only stipulation would seem to be that the object or practice would first need to have acquired some kind of social/aesthetic denigra­tion, such as being in bad taste, for example. This is why, for camp’s purposes, kitsch is a sitting porcelain duck. To become camp, a different form of use and distance is required, one that is also evaluative—or better, one that creates enjoyment by holding evaluative standards in dissonance. While there is criticism involved, the disapproval, the recognition of the work’s failures, becomes a mechanism for pleasure: “it's good because it's awful.” But enjoyment is also a kind of social critique, a thumbing of one’s nose at dominant standards of taste, and an exploration of the transgression (sexual and otherwise) in the kitsch object or activity. The kitsch that stays kitsch is the stuff that is merely awful. But camp does not come into being solely as the result of an interpretive decision. Objects and activities have characteristics that lend themselves to camp interpretations. Camp signals itself. That’s why one can think of Liberace as camp, even though his everyday audience at the time, and apparently Liberace himself, did not think of his performances in this way—it was spectacle, certainly, but not based on acknowledging bad taste. Liberace certainly acknowledged his performances as excessive, but the excess did not point to good awfulness. The excess was destabilizing; it set hierarchies off-kilter, an aesthetic based on overwhelming the senses. It was shiny, but the acknowledgment of discrepancy that is central to camp wasn’t present. While his work could have easily been read as the stereotyped conventions of a drag queen, to acknowledge it as camp (the way a drag queen, for example, acknowledges 186

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discrepancy and masking) would be to have Liberace own up to things he didn’t want to own up to—that it was in bad taste, that it was ironic, that it was queer. Liberace refused to say one thing and mean another—and for many this refusal to acknowledge irony presented a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of his self-presentation. A version of this silence is also present in visual art, from Matthew Barney to Mariko Mori to Jeff Koons. In a high art context, though, something changes; the artworld frames things with a more critical and historical awareness. With someone like Jeff Koons an art audience is conscious of high and low issues in the history of art. In a gallery, the audience inevitably looks at art as a reference to the tradition of high art. Consider Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles: its gleaming porcelain surface is weirdly monumental (lifesize), citing mass production (mold-made), and mimicking preciousness, but obviously undercut by its subject matter (porcelain now is often a kitsch material). It is sentimental and clichéd in its stylization and exaggeration of facial features. And it is very shiny (Figure 8.3). Koons’ art cites kitsch; it uses kitsch discourse, dancing a light fandango along the historical boundaries separating high and low. Yet despite its apparent attempts to erase the distinction, campy works like Michael Jackson and Bubbles are impossible, and possibly valueless, without the historical discourse, and experience, of kitsch and high art. It’s a strange camp, though. As our previous chapter indicates, Koons repeatedly disavows ironic intent. He doesn’t have the troubled allegiance to a higher standard that all camp has. Sontag’s “it’s so bad it’s good” still acknowledges the hierarchy. Koons cites kitsch but doesn’t acknowledge the existence or applicability of hierarchical categories. His unironic flirtation with kitsch makes Koons the Liberace of contemporary art.

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Figure 8.3 : Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles; 1988, porcelain, 42 x 70 1/2 x 32 1/2 inches (106.7 x 179.1 x 82.6 cm) © Jeff Koons.

As is seen in Michael Jackson and Bubbles, an awful lot of camp is shiny. In fact, shininess is a paradigmatic aspect of camp’s duplicity and knowingness. Consider late Elvis and Michael Jackson, for instance—they have, increasingly and unsurprisingly, been put to camp uses. Their presence on stage was impressive. In his 1973 Hawaii concerts, Elvis, his face noticeably puffy and jowly, strutted on stage in a possibly absurd jumpsuit, known as the “Aloha Eagle Suit,” an Italian wool gabardine confection 188

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in red, white, and blue, featuring brass studs, shiny eagles, draped chrome chains, and sapphire and ruby rhinestones (Figure 8.5 ). In his 1996 HIStory tour, Jackson appeared on stage in a dazzling costume that merged Road Warrior with Star Wars (Figure 8.4 ). The shiny effects differed from Elvis’. While Elvis could be understood as an homage of sorts to the rhinestone cowboy tradition, Jackson’s— aided by his dancing—was more urban, deflected, mechanistic, queer. For both Elvis and Jackson the shine was the ultimate, perhaps narcissistic, attention-getting device (particularly useful in a large venue). On a straightforward level, their shows used shininess for glamour, for spectacle, for allure. But things in camp are never straightforward (this is why Koons’ deadpan denials are so troubling). Take spectacle, for instance: its shininess is inherently excessive, obviously and straightforwardly aiding spectacle. But shininess also moves in another direction. With its excessive shininess, spectacle becomes self-conscious, making us aware of the norm that is being exaggerated and perhaps subverted. As we argue in the previous chapter, excess invites discourse. That discourse begins to explain how for these performers shininess’ meanings get more complex, particularly in concert with shininess’ effects of masking. The shine hides the natural body, contributing to self-fashioning but also to a kind of distancing in which performers become surfaces, perhaps even, as in KISS, encased in a kind of armor. The shine keeps people out, shutting off the performer’s interiority, and this has significant consequences. Shine’s hiding, distancing, and masking are central to constructing the duplicities of camp—performers are defamiliarized; they both are and aren’t what they seem. Roles are taken on, and sincerity becomes an understudy.

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Figure 8.4: Michael Jackson, 1996. Photo: Alamy.

Figure 8.5: Elvis Presley, 1973. Photo: Alamy.

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Since camp is an interpretive practice, turning something into camp involves participation in the masking. The shininess encourages certain interpretive behaviors, the most notable being role-playing. “It’s so bad it’s good” is a kind of role-playing, where things are held and experienced in dissonance. Judgments are both acknowledged and temporarily held in abeyance, removed from the world and its ethical judgments. (Camp’s inherent and acknowledged duplicity distinguishes it from other forms of interactions with art.) It’s somewhat like Martin Jay’s aesthetic alibi, in which, because art is a virtual world whatever happens in it has a different status. It is not the real world, but virtual, with the result that pragmatic consequences, ethical implications, even physical laws, are somewhat quarantined. The suspending of disbelief in a virtual world is also directed at one’s aesthetic judgments, a suspension of taste. In its masking, then, shiny camp accentuates profound instabilities of judgment. Camp shows that shininess is polymorphous, unstable, queer. In its destabilizing, camp uses shininess’ duplicity and superficiality, uses them as vehicles of bathos and irony/ critique. Camp and contemporary irony are aware that shininess has become too easy to create, and they use its excess as a vehicle of destabilization—not as a sign of value, but as a citation of value lost. In its shininess, the loss of preciousness appears in camp and contemporary culture, and a part of its expressiveness contributes to the high/low friction that is so central to camp. Camp (and irony), then, introduces a further complexity in shininess’ work. Camp and irony exploit shininess’ inherent disorientation, dislocation, and excess, pushing shininess to an even broader instability where perceptual uncertainty meets a parallel semiotic instability.

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The instability, at its purest, results in a surprisingly complex signification. Consider, for example, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Liberace, performers who have come to represent—as a paradigm or apotheosis—a certain kind of performer and performance. In their iconic function they have become icons of celebrityhood, of consumerist spectacle, of camp. They have become camp icons, an iconicity that goes further back than the semiotic uses of the term, back to Byzantine icons. These camp icons incarnate a tension in representation, between an individual and the brand, mirroring a Byzantine icon’s tension between the physical and the transcendent. Like Byzantine icons, camp icons are defamiliarized, strange, impenetrable, invoking both veneration and distance. A change has come, though, a change from transcendence to irony, a move from transcendence’s “something beyond” to camp’s “something else.”

Cloud Gate, again Contemporary art has found different ways to participate in camp, particularly through its shininess. Few works get more complicated than Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. While it interacts with some camp discourse, it’s not that Cloud Gate is so bad it’s good. It doesn’t have that particular kind of transgression. Cloud Gate has an historical reference that has nothing to do with camp’s celebration of bad taste: it cites modernist plaza sculpture and phenomenologically oriented work. It is James Turrell meets Jeff Koons, introduced by Cecil B. DeMille at a party thrown by Constantin Brancusi. One of its central complexities, though, is the relationship between its phenomenological aspects and the role-playing of camp. The two are related. It’s hard to distinguish the fun house aspect of Cloud Gate from the deeper 193

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cognitive, perceptual questions its disorienting experience creates. According to Kapoor, these questions and experiences are significant. In 2007, Kapoor claimed, “I am interested in sculpture that manipulates the viewer into a specific relationship with both space and time.” At another point, he asserts, “I am concerned with the way in which the language of engineering can be turned into the language of the body.”79 Cloud Gate engages us with spatial ambiguities, leading to speculations like, “Where is this thing in the world? What do I know of this thing?” Speaking of his similar mirror pieces, Kapoor states “the space doesn't recede— it comes out at you […] a new sublime that's forward of the picture plane.”80 This phenomenological aspect of Cloud Gate allows for role-playing. Not knowing where they are in relation to the object, people play with Cloud Gate, they try on roles, goofy behaviors they ordinarily wouldn’t engage in, particularly in public. They approach it ritually: touching, stepping back and forth, creating distortions. People lie on their backs, touching it with their feet. Some stretch their arms up as high as they can, palms flat on the surface, and lean into it. This is not how one is supposed to behave with Art. Cloud Gate, then, holds two things in tension: serious inquiry and giddy play. In doing so, it enacts one of the central productive tensions of contemporary art, a tension between high and low, a tension instantiated by Cloud Gate’s playful, duplicitous engagement with kitsch. Cloud Gate has kitsch qualities in its excessive, absurd, shiny, decorative fun—an enormous mylar balloon, a pretty bauble. In its excess it quotes, perhaps even borders on, bad taste. By paying attention to just these things, it’s hard to see how Cloud Gate could realize serious cultural ambitions (that may be why it is more commonly called The Bean). But it doubly interacts with kitsch. Kitsch objects often have 194

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pretensions of seriousness (somebody thinks they are good, or profound, or moving), such as garden statuary. But to the person who recognizes the kitsch as kitsch those ambitions turn out to be pretension, a seriousness that is misplaced. In contemporary art that cites kitsch, the dissonance between the badly or excessively decorative and the serious is not exactly like kitsch. The dissonance is not, as it is in kitsch, an unintentional failure of the two to line up; there is an intentional and productive dissonance, a dissonance that borders on camp. Cloud Gate’s name, monumentality, ambitious engineering, and its showcase placement on the AT&T Plaza are qualities that deliberately work in tension with its citation of kitsch playfulness. Kapoor is aware of this tension, and characterizes his oeuvre in this way: “I’m interested in the almost idiotic phenomenology of this. On one level you might say it’s not art, it’s a silly game. But I think there’s something in that little edge which is interesting and problematic. There is something going on between the meaningful and the banal.”81 Cloud Gate cites camp in a particular way, and its shininess is central. It, like other works of contemporary art, such as those of James Turrell and Robert Irwin, is immersive. Immersive things lend themselves to spectacle. But Cloud Gate’s shininess turns it in a different direction, toward spectacle and camp, a turn that masks the more serious phenomenological inquiry of the kind that ties Kapoor to Turrell and Irwin. As with their work, Cloud Gate fascinates, dislocates, disorients: you don’t know where you are relative to it. Its shininess makes for a vertiginous experience. But Cloud Gate’s immersive excess, based in its shininess, pushes the experience toward role-playing, where it is not so much that people forget about themselves, but that they self-consciously watch themselves performing different roles.

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Giddiness, dislocation, immersion, spectacle: Cloud Gate invites one to experience the sublime. But how can something that is so mediated in so many ways, and that invites such seemingly frivolous pleasure, invite the primal anxieties of the sublime? Cloud Gate highlights viewers’ perceptual inadequacies, something central to Kant’s idea of the sublime: Hence the feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but is at the same time also a pleasure, aroused by the fact that this very judgement, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is [itself] in harmony with rational ideas, insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us.82

Cloud Gate induces an experience of infinity. When offered on such a scale, and with such distortions, its excesses encourage the sublime, but of a particular sort: the ironic pleasures of the camp sublime. People know their actions in front of Cloud Gate are silly. But they do it anyway. And they do so as they get lost in Cloud Gate’s shine—it induces a playful anxiety, a camp sublime. Cloud Gate raises serious questions about the interrelation between camp, the sublime, and shininess. The sublime is not that far from camp—after all, it is always some kind of overcharge. If camp’s shiny excesses encourage an experience of the sublime, is Kant’s balance of pleasure and displeasure similar to the idea of “it’s so bad it’s good?” Is camp, particularly the camp of spectacle, actually inquiry into the nature of the sublime, an inquiry that gets special focus when it is inflected through shiny theatricality? Both camp and the sublime point to serious issues about shiny things, shiny things’ mixing of fascination, inquiry, and anxiety. 196

Kitsch and Camp

That mixing has consequences; Cloud Gate suggests that although in many contexts shininess does have qualities of superficiality and duplicity, that is not its whole story. As every chapter in this book has suggested, that story is complicated; the work of shininess is messy, in which shininess takes on different kinds of work in the same object. Not surprisingly, the theories that describe shininess’ work have their own complexities and overlaps. In aesthetic theory, the sublime/transcendent, the uncanny, the abject, and defamiliarization are all related. For Kristeva, for example, the abject has overtones of the sublime; Freud’s uncanny is related to defamiliarization. These ideas all mix pleasure and anxiety, an instability that does not resolve. Shininess embodies, instantiates, all of these aesthetic concepts. Shininess, in this way, is not trivial, an accidental property that just happens to be around while, say, sublime or abject things are happening. And shininess has a peculiar weight in contemporary culture. It has become omnipresent, and mediates all kinds of experience, from art museums to plastic dinner forks. Its work extends to knowledge itself, in our phones and computer screens—utopian, and seductive, their shininess promises a future without encumbrances and history. For all their lightness, shiny things carry significant emotional and semiotic weight.

197

Notes

1. Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 75. 2. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 75. 3. Richard Shusterman, “Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 43, no. 3 (2003): 303. 4. R. L. Rutsky and Justin Wyatt, “Serious Pleasures: Cinematic Pleasure and the Notion of Fun,” Cinema Journal 30, no. 1 (1990): 5. 5. Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why (New York and Toronto: Free Press, Maxwell Macmillan Canada, and Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992), 92. 6. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 61. 7. Katrien Meert, Mario Pandelaere, and Vanessa M. Patrick, “Taking a Shine to It: How the Preference for Glossy Stems from an Innate Need for Water,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 24, no. 2 (2014): 195–206. 8. Antonio Damasio, “Designs for Living,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, ed. Scott Rothkopf (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 242. 9. Walter Grasskamp, “An Anatomy of Gloss: The Art of the Surface,” in Jeff Koons: The Sculptor, ed. Vinzenz Brinkmann et al. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 45. 10. Charlotte Higgins, “A Life in Art: Anish Kapoor,” The Guardian, November 8, 2008, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/ nov/08/anish-kapoor-interview.

199

Shiny Things 11. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 599. 12. Paul H. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” Syntax and Semantics 3 (1975): 45. 13. Helen Hills, The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Baroque Architecture and Sanctity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 471. 14. C. G. Spring and Bumper Company Advertisement, 1928. In George Dubpernell, “History of Chromium Plating,” Products Finishing, November 13, 2012, https://www.pfonline.com/articles/history-ofchromium-plating. 15. Meert et al., “Taking a Shine to It," 204. 16. Meert et al., “Taking a Shine to It,” 195. 17. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” trans. Alix Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17 (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1919), 247. 18. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” 245. 19. Andrew Barnaby, “‘After the Event’: Freud’s Uncanny and the Anxiety of Origins,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2015): 985. 20. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Ideologies of Desire) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8. 21. Bruce Grenville, The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2002), 47. 22. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 66. 23. Bruno Bettelheim, “Joey: A ‘Mechanical Boy’,” Scientific American (March 1959): 117. 24. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eilan and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 8.

200

Notes 25. Arie Wallert, “The Miracle of Gerard Ter Borch’s Satin,” in Gerard ter Borch (New York and Washington: American Federation of Arts and National Gallery of Art, 2004), 37. 26. Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander's Schilder-Boeck (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 73. 27. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 70. 28. Celeste Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values in Dutch Still Life,” in Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, ed. Wayne Franits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 151. 29. Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values,” 157. 30. Hal Foster, “The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 262. 31. Foster, “The Art of Fetishism,” 257. 32. Angela Vanhaelen, “Boredom’s Threshold: Dutch Realism,” Art History 35, no. 5 (2012): 1021. 33. Roland Barthes, “The World as Object,” in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 72. 34. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2002), 70–98. 35. Roy Lichtenstein, “Interview with Roy Lichtenstein,” in Roy Lichtenstein: Graphic Work 1970-1980 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art Downtown Branch, 1981), unpaginated. 36. Lichtenstein, “Interview with Roy Lichtenstein.” 37. Lichtenstein, “Interview with Roy Lichtenstein.” 38. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 32–33.

201

Shiny Things 39. Dieter Roelstrete, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Gleam: On the Photorealist Work Ethic,” Afterall 24 (Summer 2010), https://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.24/modernismpostmodernism. and.gleamon.the.photorealist.work.ethic. 40. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1908] 1970), 19. 41. Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 19. 42. Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 20. 43. Revelation 21:11. 44. Revelation 10:6. 45. William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1987), 31. 46. Bruno Taut, “Down with Seriousism!” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 58. 47. Ronald Reagan, “Reagan's Farewell Speech,” PBS American Experience, November 11, 2020, www.pbs.org/wgbh/ americanexperience/features/reagan-farewell/. 48. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Norton Anthology of American Literature: Vol. A: Beginnings to 1820, ed. Robert S. Levine, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), 188. 49. Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913), 7. 50. Peter J. Ling, John F. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2014), 82. 51. Newton N. Minnow and Craig L. LaMay, Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 28. 52. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. 53. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1 54. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.

202

Notes 55. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 604–12. 56. Hermann Nitsch, “Hermann Nitsch: Das Orgien Mysterien Theater,” December 30, 2016, http://www.nitsch.org/index-en.html. 57. Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 386. 58. Carolee Schneemann, “Meat Joy,” Caroleeschneemann.com, January 5, 2017, http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/meatjoy.html. 59. Qtd. in “Paul McCarthy Overtakes Park Avenue Armory’s Immense Drill Hall with His Largest Installation to Date,” Park Avenue Armory Press Release, May 14, 2013. 60. Holland Cotter, “The American Fairy Tale, Fun House Style,” New York Times, June 27, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/ arts/design/paul-mccarthy-ws-turns-a-magic-mirror-on-excess.html. 61. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 11. 62. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12. 63. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2012), 70. 64. Anish Kapoor and Heidi Reitmaier, “Descent into Limbo,” Tate Magazine, 2002, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/ descent-into-limbo-anish-kapoor. 65. Ned Beauman, “Olafur Eliasson on How to Do Good Art,” New York Times Style Magazine, November 13, 2014, https://www.nytimes. com/2014/11/13/t-magazine/olafur-eliasson-interview-fondation-louisvuitton.html. 66. Jeanne-Marie Cilento and Antonio Visconti, “Contact: Otherworldly New Exhibition by Olafur Eliasson in Paris,” Design Art Magazine, January 9, 2015, https://www.designartmagazine.com/2015/01/ contact-otherworldly-new-exhibition-by.html. 67. Olafur Eliasson, “Fondation Louis Vitton Presents Olafur Eliasson: Contact,” 2014, https://eu.louisvuitton.com/eng-e1/articles/fondationlouis-vuitton-presents-olafur-eliasson-contact.

203

Shiny Things 68. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 10. 69. Gilbert and George, The Words of Gilbert & George: With Portraits of the Artists from 1968 to 1997, ed. Robert Violette (London: Violette Editions, 1997), 161. 70. David W. Galenson, “You Cannot Be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster,” Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art, ed. David W. Galenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 85. 71. Jameson, Postmodernism, 9. 72. Darden A. Pyron, Liberace: An American Boy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 114. 73. Pyron, Liberace, 271. 74. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography (New York: Putnam, 1973), 156. 75. Sam Binkley, “Kitsch as a Repetitive System,” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 2 (2000): 144. 76. Margaret T. Drewal, “The Camp Trace in Corporate America: Liberace and the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), 130. 77. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, [1964] 2009), 292. 78. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” 290. 79. Anish Kapoor and Heidi Reitmaier, “Descent into Limbo. Interview with Anish Kapoor,” Tate Magazine (July 2007), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/anish-kapoor-1384/descent-limbo. 80. Higgins, “A Life in Art: Anish Kapoor.” 81. Higgins, “A Life in Art: Anish Kapoor.” 82. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (Courier Publications, 2012), 1790.

204

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211

Index

A abjection 44, 82, 84, 85, 93, 99, 102, 107, 113, 119-39, 197 Abstract Expressionism 134 Adorno, Theodor 8, 9 advertising 18-19, 34, 42-43, 43, 73, 75, 76, 78 Airstream trailers 15 allure 7-8, 14, 15, 38-45, 52-53, 150, 167, 189 Alves, Troy 47 anime 54, 146 anxiety 21, 45, 46, 51, 52, 63, 64, 105, 110, 119-20, 124, 126, 129, 134, 137, 139, 140, 144-45, 175, 196, 197 art deco 34 aura 75, 83, 180 authoritarianism 21, 101, 105-06, 108, 111 see also utopia automobiles 18-19, 19, 34, 35, 115, 116

B Balla, Giacomo 98 Barnaby, Andrew 46 Barney, Matthew 119, 137, 187 Cremaster 160 River of Fundament 119, 135, 136, 137, 139 Barthes, Roland 68-69 bathos 84, 192 Baudrillard, Jean 146 Baum, L. Frank 111 Wizard of Oz, The 52, 111 beard oil 41 Beardsley, Monroe 153 Benday dots 69, 73-74, 75 Benjamin, Walter 53, 83 Berkeley, Busby 130, 135, 160 Bettelheim, Bruno 52 Beurs, Willem 58 Binkley, Sam 177 body building 41, 46-48 Borglum, Gutzon 17 Bosch, Hieronymous 137 Garden of Earthly Delights 137

Illustrations are indicated with italicized page numbers.

213

Shiny Things Bourdieu, Pierre 157 Bowie, David 22 Brancusi, Constantin 193 Bridges, Jeff 22 Brueghel, Pieter the Elder 85 Brugnatelli, Luigi 33 Brusati, Celeste 62 Burchill, Lloyd 78 Burke, Edmund 139, 140 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 139 Bustos, Nico 42, 43 Byzantine art 54, 55, 76, 168, 193 C Calatrava, Santiago 15 Milwaukee Art Museum 15 camp 10, 168, 170, 174, 182-93 Carpenter, John 22 Castle, Terry 46 Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow 33 ceramics 30-31 Chaplin, Charlie 115 Modern Times 113, 114 chiaroscuro 57, 59, 98, 175 Chordettes 132 My Boy Lollipop 130, 132 chrome 15, 33-35 plating 33-35 Chrysler building 15 citation 157-60, 161, 162, 176, 177, 179-81, 192 Claesz, Pieter 57, 62, 87, 89 Still Life with Turkey Pie 57, 6263, 89, 91 Claude glass 20 Clean, Mr. 102, 113 cleanliness 1, 3-5, 6, 9, 16, 80-100,

214

101-07 see also hygiene Cohen, Lynne 100, 105, 107, 159 Classroom 100-02, 101 Combs, Tanya 183-84 computer generated imagery (CGI) 57, 76-79 conceptual art 72 constructivism 106 consumerism 39, 41-42, 44-45, 52-53, 150, 160, 162, 163, 167 Cooper, Alice 22 Corbusier 111 cosmetics 22, 40-41, 42, 53 Cotter, Holland 136-37 critique 9, 69, 106-09, 129, 135, 147, 151, 176, 181, 183, 185, 186, 192 cyborgs 41, 48-53 D Dada 130 Daley, Richard J. 122 Damasio, Antonio 13 Darger, Henry 155 Story of the Vivian Girls 155 De Bord, Guy 146 deception 7, 31-32, 36-38, 144 see also forgery decoration 7, 10, 30, 39, 108-09, 147, 171, 177, 194-95 defamiliarization 20, 22, 41, 42, 44-46, 49-50, 189, 192, 197 De Kooning, Willem 133 dematerialization 17-18, 24, 55, 57, 76, 81, 97, 110 De Mille, Cecil B. 185, 193 Cleopatra 185 destabilization see disorientation

Index Detroit Institute of Arts 55 Devlin, Lucinda 107 Dhoom 3 5 diamonds 19, 41, 63, 107, 146, 149, 156, 180 Diepeveen, Leonard 179 Artworld Prestige 7 Dine, Jim 162 Dionysian ritual 127, 129, 135 discrepancy 65, 120, 151-53, 15557, 158, 160-61, 162-64, 166, 186-87 dislocation 5, 18-20, 21, 63, 142, 144, 192, 195-96 Disney 135, 136, 183 disorientation 5, 20, 44, 57, 63, 78-79, 81, 91, 110, 120, 123, 129, 142, 144, 162, 167, 169, 192 Dissanayake, Ellen 12, 167 distraction 7, 8, 15, 17, 65, 146, 181 Drewal, Margaret Thompson 184 duplicity, 18, 22, 23, 36, 107, 144, 161, 168, 174, 192, 197 Dutch Golden Age painting 19-20, 54, 58, 61-64, 65, 68, 76-77 E Eddy, Don 67 efficiency 13, 15, 52, 100-02, 10506, 109, 113-16 electroplating 32-33 Eliasson, Olafur 140, 142-44 One-way colour tunnel 22, 142, 143, 144 The weather project 140-42, 141 ephemerality 6, 20, 55, 83-84 see also evanescence Estes, Richard 67, 89, 91, 99 Crosstown Bus 67, 92 93, 94-96 evanescence 19-20, 62

see also ephemerality excess 6, 21-22, 29, 40, 41, 44-45, 65, 67, 99, 107, 120, 130, 135, 137, 140, 144, 146-47, 156, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 171, 173, 174, 180, 183, 184, 186, 189, 192, 194, 196 F fascination 15, 18-19, 120, 123, 124-25, 138-39, 144, 166-67 fashion photography 41-42, 44 fetish 12, 14, 22-23, 30, 39, 40, 4445, 48, 52, 53, 63, 64, 76, 166-69 Fischer von Erlach the Younger 28 Tomb of St. John of Nepomuk 27-28, 28, 168 Fisher, Tom xiii Flack, Audrey 65, 67 Strawberry Tart Supreme 6567, 66 Fluxus 130 forgery 31, 78 Foster, Hal 64 Fra Angelico 55, 58 Virgin Annunciate 55, 56 Freud, Sigmund 46, 106, 107, 124, 167, 197 friction 15, 84, 105, 107, 110, 114, 115 Fuller, Buckminster 115 Dymaxion Car 115, 116 fun 173-74, 176, 181-85, 194 see also pleasure G Gibson, William 100 “Gerns­back Continuum, The” 100, 110-11

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Shiny Things Gilbert and George 146, 155-56, 165, 173 Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit 156 gilding 31-32 glare 24, 55, 73, 75, 76, 94 glitter 15, 27, 40-41, 166 Glitter, Gary 22 Going, Ralph 67 gold 10, 31, 32, 33, 36, 40, 55, 56, 111, 147, 166, 171, 180 gold leaf 31, 55, 56, 76, 119, 171 Grasskamp, Walter 14 Greenberg, Clement 153, 175 Grenville, Bruce 50-51 Grice, Paul 22 grillz 41 H habitus 157-58 halos 55 Hals, Frans 87 Drinking Boy 87, 88, 94, 96 hardness 17, 34, 84, 101, 102, 103, 110, 156, 170 see also cyborg heaven 109-10, 113, 144 see also utopia Heaven Room, Billy Graham Center 144-45 Hegel, G.W.F. 1, 19-20 Hills, Helen 29-30 Hirst, Damien 146-47, 153, 166 For the Love of God 146, 149, 156-57, 169 history 15, 30, 34, 51, 80, 82-84, 85, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 164 Horkheimer, Max 8

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hygiene 14, 15-16, 31, 40, 44, 84, 99, 102-08, 113-14, 159, 160 see also cleanliness I impersonality 2, 100, 101, 103-05, 107, 110, 162 see also masking intent 153-55, 157-58, 164, 187, 195 International Federation of Body Builders (IFBB) 46-48 irony 9, 14, 37, 72, 76, 99, 108, 129, 132, 135, 145, 146-69, 184-87, 192, 193 Irwin, Robert 142, 195 J Jackson, Michael 188-89, 190, 193 Jagger, Mick 22 Jameson, Fredric 89, 146-47, 164 Jay, Martin 182, 192 jewelry 40-41, 147, 167 John of Nepomuk 27-29, 53 K Kalf, Willem 62, 87 Kant, Immanuel 9, 140, 182, 196 Critique of Judgment 140 Kapoor, Anish 1-6, 15, 140, 194, 195 Cloud Gate ix, 1-6, 2, 4, 19, 28, 142, 161, 193-97 Kelly, Emmett 116-17, 118 Kennedy, John F. 120-22 Kienholz, Ed 137 Kincaid, Thomas 175 KISS 22, 23, 189 kitsch 15, 38, 39, 151, 160, 163, 17082, 184, 185, 186, 187, 194-95

Index knowingness 157-59, 163, 164, 165, 181 Koons, Jeff 10, 13, 14, 37, 52, 53, 146-47, 158, 162-68, 173, 187, 189, 193 Hanging Heart 52, 53, 146-47, 148, 151, 162-69 Michael Jackson and Bubbles 187-88, 188 Kristeva, Julia 10, 123, 124-25, 135, 138-39, 142, 197 Powers of Horror 123, 124, 138 L Lacan, Jacques 14 Lamborghini 18, 19, 38 Lang, Fritz 48 see also Metropolis Lemon Pledge 1 Leviticus 119 Liberace 44, 170-73, 172, 182-84, 186-87, 193 Liberace Museum 183-84 Lichtenstein, Roy 69, 71-76 Mirror #1 69-75, 71 Lladró 178-79 Loos, Adolf 108-09 American Bar 109 Ornament and Crime 108 Lorrain, Claude 20 Lyotard, Jean-François 146 M Madame Figaro 42 Mad Max: Fury Road 48 Maffei, Nicolas xiii, 35 Mailer, Norman 119 maintenance 3-5, 17, 28, 29-30, 101, 102-03, 105

Manglano-Ovalle, Iñigo 107-08 Le Baiser/The Kiss 107-08 Manet, Édouard 72 Marchand, Yves 138 The Ruins of Detroit, United Artists Theater 138 Marsh, Reginald 85-87 Why Not Use the “L”? 85-87, 86, 91 masking 189, 192 matte 38, 96, 103 Matrix, The 20-22, 21 McCarthy, Paul 132-35 Painter 132-35, 133, WS 135-37, 139 McCollum, Allan 161 Plaster Surrogates 161 mediation 8-10, 26, 130 Meffre, Romain 138 The Ruins of Detroit, United Artists Theater 138 Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine 74 Melion, Walter 61 Menninghaus, Winfried 127 Metropolis 48-53, 49 Miller, Jonathan xiii mimesis 3, 63, 65, 79, 97, 98 minimalism 72, 106 Minter, Marilyn 67 mirrors 15, 20, 21, 22, 24, 69-76, 71, 73, 81, 89, 94, 144 modernism 108, 109, 111, 163, 166 Mori, Mariko 187 Moussavi, Farshid 103 Museum of Contemporary Art Cleve­land 103, 104 movement 18, 19, 55, 57, 81, 9697, 122

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Shiny Things Mr. (Masakatsu Iwamoto) 146-47, 153, 169 Three Best Friends 146-47, 150,169 Murakami, Takashi 54 mylar 35, 194 N naiveté 15, 132, 156 narcissism 14, 50, 72, 189 newness 5, 13, 15, 18, 30, 41, 42, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich 127 Nitsch, Hermann 126-30, 132 Das Orgien Mysterien Theater 127-30, 128, 134, 139 Nixon, Richard 120-22, 122 nostalgia 175-76, 177, 178, 179 Nudie suits 40, 171 O Oldenburg, Claes Bat Column 5 Olympia, Mr. 46, 47, 53 optimism 15, 18, 30, 84, 99, 111, 150, 164, 175, 176 Other, the 51-52 Otterness, Tom 151, 161 Life Underground 151, 152 P Pabst suits 171 Page, Suzanne 143 Palvin, Barbara 42, 43 Parmigianino 75 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 75 patent leather 39 Peeters, Clara 62 Peirce, C.S. 158-59

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Peter Pan 22 Phantom Menace, The 78 Phong reflectance 77-78 photography 65-67, 74, 98 photorealism 54, 65-68, 89 Picabia, Francis 154 plating 31-38 pleasure 7-9, 69, 119-20, 124-25, 129, 130, 150, 164, 175-78, 181, 182, 183, 185-86, 196 see also fun polemics viii, 110, 161, 165 Pollock, Jackson 132 pop art 72 pop culture 147, 150 porcelain 10, 15, 178-79, 178, 187, 188 postmodernism 146, 147 Potter, Paulus 85 Young Bull 85 power 10, 12, 14, 29, 31, 35, 37, 41, 105-06, 108, 158, 166 preciousness 10-12, 15, 18, 31-33, 35-38, 39, 99, 166-67, 168, 171, 178-79, 187 Presley, Elvis 188-89, 191, 193 prestige 35 purity 24, 64, 80, 84, 99, 100-18, 164, 173 Q queerness 22, 184, 185, 187, 189, 192 R rarity 10-12, 15, 30-31, 35-38, 41, 68, 180 see also preciousness Reagan, Ronald 111-13 Shining City on a Hill 111-13

Index reflection 5-6, 13, 16-17, 18, 20-21, 22, 24-26, 33, 35, 47, 57-58, 59, 61-62, 72, 76-78, 81, 94, 96, 98, 142, 144-45 see also mirrors reflexy-const 57-64, 74, 76-77 R.E.M. 7 “Shiny Happy People” 7 Renaissance art 54, 55 representation 5, 22, 72, 123, 126, 165, 193 of shininess 18-19, 25, 41-42, 5479, 146, 147 of smudges 85-99 repression 106-07, 108, 115 Return of the Jedi 78 Revelation of St. John 109-110 Richards, David 170-71 Richter, Gerhard 154 Road Warrior 189 Robocop 48, 50 Rock, Michael 53 Rockwell, Norman 175 Freedom from Want 175-76 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The 185 Roelstraete, Dieter 89 Romney, George 87- 89 Mrs. Russell and Child 89, 90 Rothko Chapel 83 Rubens, Peter Paul 94 Venus Before a Mirror 94, 95 RuPaul 185 Ruschmann, Henry 40 Rutsky, R.L. 9 S Saarinen, Eero 105 TWA Terminal 105 Sargent, John Singer 54, 67, 69, 76

Madame Paul Poirson 69, 70 Sartre, Jean-Paul 125 Being and Nothingness 125 Schneemann, Carolee 130, 132 Meat Joy 130-32, 131 Science News-Letter 27 semiotics viii-xi, 49 sentimentality 162, 177-79, 182 Sheffield plating 32 Sherman, Cindy 157 shininess distinguished from shine 24-26, 113 inherent value of 12-14 material processes of 30-37 optical excitation of 13-14, 15 physical properties of 16-17 ubiquity of 6-8, 35-38, 170, 174, 175, 177, 179, 197 values of 6-14 Shusterman, Richard 9 signs 9-10, 44, 67, 99, 126 iconic 159 indexical 82-83, 85, 158-59 motivated vii, 16, 39-41, 45, 84, 109-10, 158-59 symbolic 159, 160 unmotivated 159 silver 27-29, 31, 32, 33, 57, 111 sincerity 22-23, 147, 155, 162, 164, 168, 173, 178, 192 see also irony Singapore subway 21, 105, 106 smoothness 2, 3, 15, 17, 18, 32, 47, 57, 84, 100, 101, 102, 105, 111, 115, 125 see also friction smudges 80-99, 103, 117 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 136

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Shiny Things Sontag, Susan 185 Source Code 5 spectacle 14, 126, 127, 135-39, 142, 146, 147, 150, 159, 160, 170-74, 189, 193, 195-96, 197 St. John 110, 113 stainless steel 1, 15, 27, 35, 80, 103, 142, 146 Starman 22 Star Trek 22 Star Wars 22, 78, 189 Stein, Gertrude 27 Tender Buttons 27 Steiner, Wendy 8 Stevens, Wallace 54 “Snow Man, The” 54 sublimity 10, 29, 68, 76, 105, 124, 129, 137-45, 175, 196, 197 superficiality 7-8, 15, 25, 31, 36, 68-69, 144, 164-65, 170, 192, 197 see also ephemerality, surface surface 5, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24-25, 29-32, 33, 35-37, 39, 44, 45, 47, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65, 69, 73, 75, 7778, 80-85, 89, 91, 94, 96-97, 101, 102-03, 105, 110, 115, 125, 140, 144, 162, 169, 174, 192 Sweet 22 Swift, Jonathan 137 T Taut, Bruno 111 Alpine Architecture 111 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 115 Ter Borch, Gerard 57-61, 63-64, 68-69 Gallant Conversation 59-62, 60 Terminator 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 Things to Come 100, 111 transcendence 10, 12, 29, 31, 35,

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37, 39, 54, 76, 84, 105, 109, 110, 145, 147, 160, 168, 193, 197 Transformers: Age of Extinction 5 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro 29 Turrell, James 142, 193, 195 Twain, Mark 80 Life on the Mississippi 80 U uncanny 20-21, 45-53, 63-64, 197 United Artists Theater, Detroit 137-39, 138 utopia 14, 108-14, 160, 197 see also heaven V vacuum plating 35, 37 Van Beyeren, Abraham 93 Van der Rohe, Mies 108 Farnsworth House 108 Van Eyck, Jan 72 Vanhaelen, Angela 64 Van Laar, Timothy 174 Artworld Prestige 7 Van Mander, Karel 58 Velasquez, Diego 72 Las Meninas 72 Viennese Actionism 126 virtuality 6, 79, 192 virtuosity 64-69, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 93, 164 Voltaic pile 33 voyage.tv.com 183 Vuitton, Louis 38

Index W Wall, Jeff 159-60 Warhol, Andy 146 Diamond Dust Shoes 146 Wat Suthat, Bangkok 10 Phra Buddha Shakyamuni 10, 11 Wat Traimit, Bangkok 10, 36 Weary Willie 116-17, 118 Weber, Idelle 91 Wells, H.G. 111 When the Sleeper Awakes 111 Wenceslaus IV 27 wetness 13, 17, 42, 45, 47, 125-26, 127-34, 137 Wimsatt, W.K. 153 Winthrop, John 111, 112 “Model of Christian Charity” 111-12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15 Wood, Robin 51 Woolf, Virginia 83 Wyatt, Justin 9

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