Art Deco can plausibly be seen as the 'Other' form of Modernism, fatally measured by the same values, but perceived in opposite ways. David Gebhard expressed this thought most succinctly:

"During the decades of the 1940s through the 1960s no aspect of architecture was held more in disdain than that of the Art Deco of the 1920s and 1930s. Art Deco, the popularised modern of those decades, was either ignored by our major architects and writers, or it was dismissed as an unfortunate, obviously misguided effort: the sooner forgotten the better.

Those who exposed (sic) high art modernism during the thirty years from 1940 to 1970 condemned the Art Deco for preserving too many traditional architectural values, for being too concerned with the decorative arts and popular symbolism, and for being too compromising in its acceptance of the imagery of high art modern architecture of the twenties and thirties. All of these accusations against the Art Deco were true - the difference today is that we are inclined to feel that all of these qualities which were looked on so disdainfully were, in fact, assets, not defects."
Gebhard, D., Tulsa Art Deco, Tulsa, 1980, p.17

Probably, Modernism would never have acquired its steely mixture of rationalism and puritanism without Art Deco as its sensuous 'other'. French structuralists and semiologists, like Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, sought to see behind the rationalism of modern architecture and design to find the hidden desires and appetites within. In his 1968 essay The System of Objects, Baudrillard rejected the notion that consumption was driven by need. According to him, an artificial 'system of needs', based on desire rather than want, had been constructed by capitalist production to feed consumption. This 'system of needs' was both constructed and fed by advertising and promotion. Citing Dr. Diehter (whose The Strategy of Desire had been published in 1960), Baudrillard held that advertisers were confronted with 'the problem of making the American man feel moral as he flirts and consumes'. The desires of the American woman, of course, could be addressed more directly. At the risk of abusing Baudrillard's argument only slightly, while Modern design allowed consumers to satisfy desires by pretending to meet practical needs ('fitness for purpose'), Art Deco addressed the desires head on. Art Deco could be defined, therefore, as a system of signs connoting desire and derived from a system of consumption divorced from need. Its homelands are the worlds of fashion, cinema, home decoration, advertising, promotion and propaganda - fields calling for an amplified message addressing unconscious desire.

What characterises Art Deco, therefore, is not its formal stylistic properties but its deformation of existing formal languages (Modernist, Classical, Regionalist) to bring out the underlying current of desire. Art Deco lurks below the surface of all the arts in the 1920s and 1930s, like original sin. It emerged wherever, in poverty or wealth, people decided they wanted to have fun, perhaps needed to have fun.

  < previous   next > Page 2 of 3

Comments