Decorative Arts and Design for the InterWebs

Yet because what we propose to study is above all reality, it does not follow that we should give up the idea of improving it. We should esteem our own research not worth the labour of a single hour if its interest were merely speculative. If we distinguish carefully between theoretical and practical problems it is not in order to neglect the latter category. On the contrary, it is in order to put ourselves in a position where we can better resolve them.

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, 1933

By exaggerating the formalist obsessions of their mentors, deconstructionist avant garde architects cautioned against the claustrophobia of a dream realized (a literally International Style, brilliant monotony). Interdisciplinary artworks propose like extremes and literalist interpretations of a society somehow suddenly aware of its own constructedness. In the wake of postmodernisms, many theorists talk of unhinged meanings—floating signifiers are all too banal—and our groping for spatial apprehension in virtual realms only further confirms the constitutive arbitrariness of things.

In these  projects Victorian fears of electric ghosts are echoed in our own loss of meaningful norms, values, and etiquette. And, yet, we’re left still asking how shall we behave? Given that in behaving we are sometimes now only  moving images, one day we may marvel at how unseen are our gestures: at the threshold of new modes of embodiment we pantomime kittens and string in amazement. Performance is intricately tied to behavior when we recognize the informing capacity of our completely artificial surroundings.

This understanding of the relationship between container and contained does not suppose a scene within a scene (mis-en-scène), but mis-en-abîme…“in which the apparatus reproduces the scene it is in.” Lorens Holm continues, “mis-en-abîme threatens the secure relationship between reality and representation upon which most mis-en-scène is predicated because what was meant to be the representation of a scene includes the scene as an integral part of its representation.[i]

These hypothetical experiments, groping demonstrations of surreal and critical contextual development, ask us to imagine places so self-consciously aware of their influence on identity[ii] (but more), Life?  Sure: imagine the danger of the last generation’s fantasy realized, and life into art risks not “falling into the wrong hands” but, hands-free!  The turtles all the way down of infinite regress, and there’s no one to blame, but yourself.  Aaand back to identity.

Yet, some places enforce mass confusion for desiring meaning in only ever halls of mirrors; such downward spirals of self-affirmation leave only  “being at a loss for words” as the last hold-out. This is demonstrated also in activism of late, which is tongue-tied for good reason, reportedly, as preventative measure against quotation, com·mod·i·fied.

Other places remind us as if shouting in secret that with all the social and ecological injustices, our political economy of doubt is now making new, more calculated stabs at determining praxis, something very attractive indeed for times with no future anyway. What Other markets are there? Growth at all cost, we might struggle to reappropriate the rhetoric of ecology, however dangerously.

Let’s call it an expanded decorative arts; it begins at least with agreeing that the city is no impartial site for social engagement, but a layered nothingness of up-for-grabs, usually contradictory contingencies.[iii] Here there can be no images, even while there can be only images.

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