Art Deco: A mode of mobility

Foreword

Foreword T his book represents a major contribution to our understanding of Art Deco, and of the muddled definitions of modernity, modernization, and Modernism. Rather than become submerged by any one theoretical position, Michael Windover deftly employs a series of analytical frames, chiefly those associated with lifestyle mobility. Thereby he both recognizes Deco’s inherent fascination with stylism while disclosing the equally fascinating preoccupation of its purveyors with surface but also substance. For his book is built around four major commissions that demonstrate, in a novel manner, the global reach of Art Deco. These studies of Deco at work begin at the western edge of Dominion Canada, travel to the emergent populist cultural capital of ART DECO—A MODE OF MOBILITY X Los Angeles, the late imperial proto-independent Bombay/Mumbai, and finally to the radical re-staging of life around the radio. Windover literally tunes us into the dynamics of the Art Deco: its colonization of high-end as well as low-cost commodification, clever negotiation of contesting identities both national and individual, its visual normalization of aristocratic and archaeological precedent, plus its brilliantly elegant coating of base commercialization. He displays it as progeny of the Beaux-Arts, but cousin of its eventual nemesis, the Modern Movement. Through his study, Art Deco re-emerges as the visualization of the “democracy” of consumerism, but moulded by privileged aesthetic values and guided by cosmopolitan (as against mass) objectives. The travel of Art Deco around the old world of empire into the new culture of consumption is mapped out in the Introduction. Windover cleverly establishes the sharp outlines of Deco’s transcontinental architecture through the metaphorical and virtual example of The Cross Roads of the World shopping precinct in Los Angeles. Its modern yet historicized articulation reflected the nearby factory of fantasy at Hollywood, where the myriad and exotic relics of disintegrating European hegemony and its imperial mythology congregated: from such historical romps as Gunga Din to the counter-Depression filmic novellas choreographed around Savile Row-tailored, Deco-furnished Fred Astaire. Appropriately The Cross Roads was built around the automobile since some of the most attractive modern machines were Deco-bodied grand touring cars of the 1930s, notably those crafted by Rolls Royce, Delage and Bugatti and their coach-builders. Similarly, Deco managed to combine the desperate postWorld War I clutching onto privilege and tradition with the eager embrace of technocracy, functionalism, and consumption. The Cross Roads also foreshadowed the repositioning of power—economic, military, cultural—out of Northern Europe via the United States into the wider Pacific Rim. Windover’s perceptive scholarship alike holds in balance Deco’s solid design credentials in the academic tradition but also its iconographic appropriations. The spaces of spectacular business enterprise and decorative urbanism reconfigured by Art Deco are first examined in Vancouver, British Columbia, an apt inaugural site because it demonstrates the transoceanic appeal of Deco for professional and public. Deco’s etymological and aesthetic origins may have resided in Paris or East Coast America but its ethos and practice resonated globally. Better yet, Windover’s site is the Marine Building, commissioned just before the fracture of post-1918 paper wealth but completed soon after the low point of the Depression. Those events both marked and enabled Art Deco, much as the Modern Movement really owed its genesis to the rupture of hierarchical convention but strange rapture for technology bequeathed by the First World War. The Marine Building, like its Deco decoration, slides between riches and poverty, conservative values and contemporary attitudes, but also between functional substance and ornamental scenery—literally a modernizing Cathedral of Commerce in the genus of such Yankee skyscrapers as the contemporary FOREWORD XI Chrysler or Empire State buildings. In that sense Art Deco is firmly anchored in modernity, that long gestated dressing of radical new technique in the garb of tradition. The amalgam figured in Windover’s next case study, Bullock’s Wilshire department store in Los Angeles. Its streamlined towers and fluted massing attained distinctive street presence amidst the capital of accessible glamour and virtual reality. Once again he reveals the hydraheaded nature of Art Deco design practice. For Bullock’s was as elegant as efficient, and as influential upon everyday fashion as geared to exclusive taste. He aligns its celebration of glamorous consumption with a 1936 Hollywood cinematic cartoon, Page Miss Glory. The cartoon narrated the make-believe of materialist success that eluded so many people...