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Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism #27
Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany
Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.
369 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 12, 2009
I am all of a quiver at the thought of reading this. Three of my favourite things - metropolis, Weimar Germany and cinema.
October 16, 2017
Weimar Germany is, for the art-historian, probably one of the most fruitful periods worth considering. Germany, after its defeat in World War I, sloughed off its classicist/Wilhelmine antecedents (to a certain extent) and artists and architects tried everything from futurism to designs so idiosyncratic that you have to make adjectival derivatives from the artist's name to even begin describing what they were up to; Bruno Taut, for instance, in his book "Alpine Architecture" conceived of a city built of interlocking and freestanding glass pyramids to be nestled among the peaks and valleys of snow-covered mountains. I don't know what to call this style of architecture, except maybe Tautian (sic).
Janet Ward's book does a good job of describing the various ways that artists created a half-Utopian/half-nightmare landscape in post-war Berlin, using neon, stone, and a lot of glass. Special attention is given to advertisements of the era, and in the applied art of shop window dressing/arrangement. The latter might seem unworthy of such attention, but the art of window dressing was serious business in Germany (and Europe in general, at the time) with specialized schools and guilds flourishing in in the metropolises. It is no accident that the man who (for good or ill) defined postmodern art better than anyone else, Andy Warhol, came from this background.
Mx. Ward also deserves credit for mustering the arguments of intellectuals who usually get short shrift when this subject comes up (i.e. Ernst Junger and Friedrich Nietzsche); she also ably questions the premises and conclusions of such well-known and rarely challenged men like Siegfried Kracauer and even Karl Marx (Kracauer, for whatever reason, always seems to have a malicious streak when talking about the female's role in capitalism's growth, portraying everything from mannequins to chorus-line girls as part of some insatiable vagina dentata trying to siphon all the wonderful socialism out of the world). Dr. Ward also does a good job resisting and repudiating the de rigeur temptation to show how every or any German cultural current (here advertising and applied arts) somehow fatalistically lead to the rise of the Nazis. This is something the aforementioned Siegfried Kracauer (in the so-smart-he's-stupid camp Orwell delineated) made into a book-length study. It is hard, though, to accuse admen of doing spadework for the Nazis when the undisputed master of ad propaganda (Edward Bernays) was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and descended from the line of one of the most famous rabbis in European Jewry (Isaac Bernays).
The book falters, though, when Mx. Ward loses confidence in her own theories and conclusions, and allows Lacan, Baudrillard, and other fashionable nonsense peddlers to control center-stage in a discourse where, frankly, I think her own observations outstrip theirs. The grab-bag of "physics envy" tricks used to gussy up the humanities are on full display, the pretentious and hollow "mathemes" and arbitrarily italicization and random use of parentheses, as well as hilarious word salad constructed from coincidental homophones or rhyming (If you think that Marxist probings into the class system and architectural ruminations on glass systems are worth exploring, then man, has Mx Ward got a book for you here).
I don't want to be too mean, but just to let the potential reader know what kind of party they're attending if they accept Janet Ward's invitation, here are some laugh-out-loud excerpts from the text I've highlighted:
"It is clear that this recontouring (sic) shift amounts to a both sweetening kitschification (sic) and an incipient eugenicization (sic) of the female form." I think she's trying to say ads are trying to encourage women to have children, which is curious because androgyny and masculine traits were marketed to women during this period as aggressively or more aggressively than the home-and-hearth sort of advertisements.
Here's one more (last one, I promise): "...rather, we need to reencounter (sic) the process of modernization in the West as one in which rationality and fashion have coincided interstitially (sic) in a condition of symbiotically fertile rapprochement." If you're going to write like this, it had better be under severe pressure, while sleep-deprived and trying to crank out a master's-level academic paper abstract (presumably on a dire subject worthy of acute attention, such as how carving pumpkins for Halloween is a phallocentric means of reinforcing hetero-normative neoliberal assaults on indigenous methods of squash cultivation in order to establish hierarchical Western imperial non-indigenous systems of white supremacy). In other words, you might as well get some elbow macaroni, some glitter, a bottle of glue, and play with pasteboard and rack up $100,000 in student loan debt while doing it.
That said, this book has some features to recommend it, at least as many merits as demerits.
Janet Ward's book does a good job of describing the various ways that artists created a half-Utopian/half-nightmare landscape in post-war Berlin, using neon, stone, and a lot of glass. Special attention is given to advertisements of the era, and in the applied art of shop window dressing/arrangement. The latter might seem unworthy of such attention, but the art of window dressing was serious business in Germany (and Europe in general, at the time) with specialized schools and guilds flourishing in in the metropolises. It is no accident that the man who (for good or ill) defined postmodern art better than anyone else, Andy Warhol, came from this background.
Mx. Ward also deserves credit for mustering the arguments of intellectuals who usually get short shrift when this subject comes up (i.e. Ernst Junger and Friedrich Nietzsche); she also ably questions the premises and conclusions of such well-known and rarely challenged men like Siegfried Kracauer and even Karl Marx (Kracauer, for whatever reason, always seems to have a malicious streak when talking about the female's role in capitalism's growth, portraying everything from mannequins to chorus-line girls as part of some insatiable vagina dentata trying to siphon all the wonderful socialism out of the world). Dr. Ward also does a good job resisting and repudiating the de rigeur temptation to show how every or any German cultural current (here advertising and applied arts) somehow fatalistically lead to the rise of the Nazis. This is something the aforementioned Siegfried Kracauer (in the so-smart-he's-stupid camp Orwell delineated) made into a book-length study. It is hard, though, to accuse admen of doing spadework for the Nazis when the undisputed master of ad propaganda (Edward Bernays) was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and descended from the line of one of the most famous rabbis in European Jewry (Isaac Bernays).
The book falters, though, when Mx. Ward loses confidence in her own theories and conclusions, and allows Lacan, Baudrillard, and other fashionable nonsense peddlers to control center-stage in a discourse where, frankly, I think her own observations outstrip theirs. The grab-bag of "physics envy" tricks used to gussy up the humanities are on full display, the pretentious and hollow "mathemes" and arbitrarily italicization and random use of parentheses, as well as hilarious word salad constructed from coincidental homophones or rhyming (If you think that Marxist probings into the class system and architectural ruminations on glass systems are worth exploring, then man, has Mx Ward got a book for you here).
I don't want to be too mean, but just to let the potential reader know what kind of party they're attending if they accept Janet Ward's invitation, here are some laugh-out-loud excerpts from the text I've highlighted:
"It is clear that this recontouring (sic) shift amounts to a both sweetening kitschification (sic) and an incipient eugenicization (sic) of the female form." I think she's trying to say ads are trying to encourage women to have children, which is curious because androgyny and masculine traits were marketed to women during this period as aggressively or more aggressively than the home-and-hearth sort of advertisements.
Here's one more (last one, I promise): "...rather, we need to reencounter (sic) the process of modernization in the West as one in which rationality and fashion have coincided interstitially (sic) in a condition of symbiotically fertile rapprochement." If you're going to write like this, it had better be under severe pressure, while sleep-deprived and trying to crank out a master's-level academic paper abstract (presumably on a dire subject worthy of acute attention, such as how carving pumpkins for Halloween is a phallocentric means of reinforcing hetero-normative neoliberal assaults on indigenous methods of squash cultivation in order to establish hierarchical Western imperial non-indigenous systems of white supremacy). In other words, you might as well get some elbow macaroni, some glitter, a bottle of glue, and play with pasteboard and rack up $100,000 in student loan debt while doing it.
That said, this book has some features to recommend it, at least as many merits as demerits.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews