Art Deco: A mode of mobility

Introduction: Art Deco at a Crossroads

Introduction Art Deco at a Crossroads The position an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself. Since these judgments are expressions of the tendencies of a particular era, they do not offer conclusive testimony about its overall constitution. The surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions. The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally. Siegfried Kracauer, 19271 1. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in Thomas Y. Levins [trans., ed., and introduction], The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essay, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 75. ART DECO—A MODE OF MOBILITY 2 Contemporary style we can define only as a living, changing, pulsating, transforming energy. It is changing before our very eyes, assuming forms which seem to elude definition. Yet the spirit of the time—the Zeitgeist—enters into every one of our creations and constructions. Our very gestures, our carriage, our dancing, our pastimes, our ways of preparing food, our methods of transportation, our systems of banking or shopping, our advertisements, our restaurants, our manners—if we could only detach ourselves from their pressing immediacy—would reveal a fundamental pattern of mind which seeks expression in these disparate activities. Paul T. Frankl, 19302 I n the years between the world wars, a modern design idiom emerged and found expression on the surfaces of everyday life. Commonly referred to as “Art Deco” today, the style transcended social, geographical, and medium lines, and while the mode has received some critical assessment, few scholars have considered how it was substantial, how it came to be adopted across the globe and adapted to different public cultures.3 In this book I take up this issue by developing a framework that situates mobility at the heart of the disparate cultural production associated with Art Deco. Mobility is present on the very surfaces of Deco objects and architecture—in iconography and general formal qualities (whether the zigzag rectilinear forms popular in the 1920s or curvilinear streamlining of the 1930s). While mobility has consistently been a significant concern for architects and designers,4 the interest in it during the years between the wars mirrored the near obsession with speed and movement (both physical and social) popularly held at the time. A “user-friendly” mode, Art Deco seemed to suit both the optimism indicative of skyscrapers of the 1920s and a desire for control in the disempowering days of the Depression, as evinced, for example, in the design of new appliances . By focusing on the theme of mobility as a means of tying the seemingly disparate qualities of Art Deco together, I will examine how the surface-level expressions correspond as well to underpinning systems of mobility, thus exposing some of the socio-political consequences of the style. It is precisely because Art Deco appealed to the eye and mind in a legible manner that it penetrated the practices of daily life, fashioning lifestyle. And that it frequently flirted with the fantastic or encouraged escape meant that it had serious socio-political implications and indeed was taken seriously by many at the time. The mode marked the urban landscape in dramatic yet accessible ways, from major monuments, such 2. Paul T. Frankl, Form and Re-Form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1930, p. 21. 3. The most comprehensive, global studies are Dan Klein, Nancy A. McClelland, and Malcolm Haslam, In the Deco Style, London, Thames and Hudson, 1987; Bevis Hillier and Stephen Escritt, Art Deco Style, London, Phaidon Press, 1997; and Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood (eds.), Art Deco 1910–1939, London, Bulfinch Press and AOL Time Warner Book Group, 2003—the catalogue that accompanied the vast Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition. Patricia Bayer offers an international survey of architecture with Art Deco Architecture: Design, Decoration and Detail from the Twenties and Thirties, London, Thames & Hudson, 1992. 4. To indicate the longevity of such interest, we might recall for example the theorization of movement in architecture by Robert Adam and James Adam, The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, [London, Academy Editions, 1773] New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1975 [rev. and enl. version of the 1902 ed. published by...