Decoration, Modernism, Cruelty

Decoration always hides a mistake in construction.

—Auguste Perret

I have a problem with decoration. I try to avoid it in my life, my apartment, the way I dress, the walls of my office, even my written work. This essay is symptomatic only in that it includes no illustrations. Although I will discuss some objects, the essay is text-based rather than object-based; my examples will be taken entirely from descriptions of objects.

I discovered this fact about myself several years ago, in the process of moving out of an apartment. When my possessions had been boxed up and moved out, and I had cleaned the floors, countertops, and fixtures for the benefit of the new tenant and in order to recover the security deposit, I felt, almost for the first time, that the apartment had become a space that I wanted to live in, because it looked as though no one lived there. Something about the task of removing every trace of myself from the built environment strongly appealed to me. My purpose in these pages is to outline the history and components of this feeling.

One name for the feeling is forensic: the perfect crime. In Ray Bradbury's 1948 short story "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," the killer becomes obsessed with the possibility that he has left some clue at the crime scene, and forces himself, before making his getaway, to dust and polish every surface that he might have touched, "and he wiped all the utensils and the silver faucets and the mixing bowls, for now he had forgotten what he had touched and what he had not."¹ This task is so involving that it leads him to go over the surfaces of things he could not possibly have touched, the paradigmatic instance of which is his attention to the wax fruit at the bottom of the bowl, which he knows he could not have put his hand on ("I'm sure I didn't touch them" [502]) but picks up and polishes anyway. The tension in the story presumably derives from the killer's capacity for distraction: although the killer can forget his own self-interest, which requires him to flee the crime scene, the story's readers should never be allowed to forget. "Rush, get away, run, never come back, board a train, hail a taxi, get, go, run, walk, saunter, but get the blazes out of here!" (499). The crossing of the readers' motivation (to get the killer out of the house) with the killer's motivation (to clean the house) may be supposed to invest the ordinary act of cleaning with a tension that it would not otherwise have. But the story, in sympathy with the killer whose stream of consciousness it follows, also seems to forget that it's about murder rather than cleaning house: the killer never tells you very much about the victim or why he has been killed, and never develops an awareness of the possible consequences of being caught. Wishing for the killer's escape might be one way of sympathizing with him, but a better way, the story suggests, would be to share in his real excitement, to care about making things clean. The story finally acknowledges the seductiveness of cleaning, and readers who are naturally excited by clean surfaces may be best equipped to appreciate it. It expresses an implicit ideal: to pass over a surface without leaving behind any identifying mark.

Another name for this feeling is modernism. For his 1957 art show "Le vide," a show that exhibited no art objects, Yves Klein cleaned and whitewashed every surface in the Galerie Iris Clert in order to remove any visible or invisible traces of the other artists who had shown there; for opening night, Klein also arranged to have two uniformed guards prevent anyone from entering the building.² What was left, according to Klein, after the remains of the other artists had been eliminated, and in the absence of any spectator, was himself, "the pure 'atmosphere' of the painter." This event is self-promoting, but it proceeds by way...