I
have just spent three years working on an exhibition
and catalogue called ‘Art Deco’. People
discuss ‘Art Deco’, argue about it, found
Societies to preserve it, plagiarise it, buy and sell
it. It’s a category, a topic, a commodity. But
what is it? Can it be defined as a style? This is a
more difficult puzzle.
Instead of trying to define Art Deco, we might simply
try to observe and understand it (‘it’ being
simply what people call Art Deco). After all, you don’t
on the whole waste much time trying to define what’s
fashionable. Fashion is what the fashionable (beautiful)
people wear. What’s interesting about fashion
is what these people are trying to communicate –
desire, difference, glamour. So, instead of asking ‘How
can we define Art Deco?’ we could ask ‘What
is significant about what Art Deco refers to?’
or even ‘What is Art Deco for?’, ‘What
does it do?’
It is impossible to study the big issues of the 1920s:
economic boom and depression, globalisation of markets,
spread of mass consumption, development of rapid communications
and transport, new materials, the spread of electrification
and industrialisation, mass leisure and sporting activities,
social upheaval, democracy and the challenge of totalitarianism
without dealing in Art Deco images. These great subjects
come clothed in Art Deco, they provide the iconography
of Art Deco, much of its patronage and some of its significance.
Where Modernism refers to the modern world obliquely,
metaphorically, Art Deco refers to it directly and literally:
cars, aeroplanes and zeppelins, skyscrapers and ocean
liners, cogs of machines and piles of coins; these motifs
crop up again and again in Art Deco. At a more abstract
decorative level, lightning flashes which stand for
power generation, or radio transmission, undulating
lines suggesting marine transportation, speed lines
indicating fast trains or automobiles, jagged, jumping
lines hinting at jazz and the Charleston; these are
the decorative stock in trade of Art Deco. And Art Deco
designers were never bashful about commerce. Gold or
silver were the favourite colours of Art Deco designers
and expensive materials their trademark.
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