Editors’ Introduction
by Sarah Horowitz
The term “spectacle” encompasses an array of meanings across disciplines. As early as the seventeenth century, “spectacle” was associated with the theatrical displays of early English drama. Furthermore, the rise of a new middle class particularly in France during the nineteenth century gave way to new interpretations of the expression.1 “Spectacle” in this historical context became linked to socio-economic ideas of capitalism. More recently, the word has taken on more abstract, conceptual definitions, particularly in scholarly understandings of postmodern society. For instance, cultural and political theorist Guy Debord’s idea of a “society of the spectacle” in the late 1960s offers a useful explanation and critique of capitalist culture, one in which excess imagery mediates human interpersonal relationships.2 “Spectacle” often connotes performativity in our contemporary world as the ubiquity of new media—film, multimedia installation, and other immersive spaces—transforms and sometimes disrupts our perceived realities.
Debord’s notion of “spectacle” is valuable for interpreting art and architecture. While his seminal text The Society of the Spectacle was published in 1967, Debord’s theories about consumerist tendencies can be applied to different situations across artistic media, time periods, and geographic boundaries. As an architectural historian, I want to call attention to how Debord’s philosophies of the spectacle aid in an understanding of postwar American architecture, specifically the example of performative spaces such as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. The building project was a collaborative effort in which American architect Wallace K. Harrison led a team of prominent modern designers in drawing up a plan for the premier performing arts complex in the United States. The centerpiece for the Lincoln Center campus is a large rectangular plaza—modeled after a Renaissance-era piazza—framed by the travertine-clad arcaded facades of the New York State Theater (now David H. Koch Theater), Metropolitan Opera House, and Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) (fig. 1). As a public outdoor space, the plaza contrasts with the exclusive indoor environments of the surrounding performance venues where in order to enter, one must be a paying customer. These tensions of who is privy to these exterior and interior spaces at Lincoln Center evoke Debordian ideas of the spectator and passive consumer. According to Debord, the experience of these outside and inside realms at Lincoln Center would be solely mediated by capitalism and consumer relationships. We, as a result, become enveloped by this spectacle of confrontation with multiple sensory environments—architectural, performative, and visual. However, I would argue that people traversing the plaza or attending a performance at Lincoln Center assume more agency than Debord implies in their engagement with these spaces. By actively moving through and participating in the various landscapes and buildings making up Lincoln Center, people become a fundamental part of the spectacle.
In this issue of SEQUITUR, notions, expressions, and experiences of “spectacle” are thoughtfully considered by the selected contributors. In her feature essay “Paved Paradise: The Concrete and the Stuplime at Parc des Butte-Chaumont,” Madeline Porsella explores tensions between nature and culture in the use of concrete to create the Parc des Butte-Chaumont, a man-made landscaped park that opened in Paris in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Porsella draws a striking comparison between the park’s spectacular display of new materials and technology in the late nineteenth century with the detrimental impacts of concrete on the present-day Anthropocene.
Rowan Murry also discusses spectacle in the context of the built environment and historic preservation. Focusing on the archeological site of Pompeii as an example of what she defines as “tourist folklore,” Murray examines how this ancient ruined city—one of the most visited UNESCO world heritage sites—is remarkable for its associations with magic and a fabled curse where visitors stealing material objects from the site bear the consequences of their actions. The essay presents an intriguing interpretation of Pompeii as a place haunted by this “dark tourism” where historic preservationists must balance their responsibility as custodians of a historic site with the lucrative possibilities of promoting ahistoric and potentially harmful tourist folklore.
The third feature essay in this issue conjures up one of the major debates concerning the spectacle and its definition and representation in art, architecture, and other forms of visual culture: where do the boundaries of the spectacle lie? In “Ruining the Spectacle: Nikita Gale’s END OF SUBJECT,” Darcy Olmstead probes the possible limits of the spectacle embodied in the work of contemporary installation artist Nikita Gale. Referencing the past theories of the spectacle and visuality put forth by Debord and art historian Jonathan Crary, Olmstead argues that Gale’s multimedia work offers a disjointed view of the spectacle where viewers are constantly pulled in competing directions by different visual and auditory elements. The spectacle in this case implodes.
These fluid parameters of what defines—or even obliterates—the spectacle are further questioned in this issue’s research spotlights and exhibition reviews. Levi Sherman investigates how the concept of institutional critique can be applied not only to museums and archives, but also libraries. Sherman asks readers to reconceive the public institution of the library as a space where artists can intervene to reveal power dynamics between these institutions and the patrons they serve. In contrast, ambiguous relationships between performance artists and (paying) spectators at the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Ga Mashie, Accra, explored by Colleen Foran, expose the haziness of the spectacle and its precise definition.
In some instances, the spectacle transforms into the uncanny. Exhibitions such as The Amant Foundation’s SIREN (some poetics), reviewed by Farren Fei Yuan, problematize the viewer’s engagement with and experience of the everyday as it is visually expressed in contemporary art installations inside and outside the gallery spaces. Like Olmstead and many of the other authors included in this issue, Yuan suggests that there is an inevitable dissolution of the spectacle that takes place in the tug of war between perception and so-called reality. Spectacle and its connection to the uncanny are clearly discerned in Katherine Gregory’s critique of Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gregory contends that by representing the breadth of Oppenheim’s work beyond the artist’s most famous surrealist sculptures, the exhibition sheds light on other aspects of Oppenheim’s artistic career, including the spectacular. For example, the artist’s dissolve of gender binaries in her work, Gregory suggests, becomes a means by which Oppenheim engages with spectacle.
While it may be a futile effort to pinpoint the boundaries of the spectacle, the authors in this fall’s issue of SEQUITUR uncover the possibilities of the term for articulating intangible bonds and disjunctures between spectators and the visual and built environment. Systems of control and power may exist in the capitalist society portrayed by Debord, but we have the authority to shape the spectacular into something of our own making.
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Sarah Horowitz is a PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture at Boston University. Her dissertation research focuses on the intertwined art, architectural, and urban histories of postwar American performing arts centers. Prior to pursuing her doctoral studies, she was the curatorial assistant at the Picker Art Gallery and the Longyear Museum of Anthropology at Colgate University. She received her MA in Art History from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and BA in Art History and Museum Studies from Marlboro College.
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Footnotes
1. French cultural theorists Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin as well as British art historian T.J. Clark have previously written about the emergence of capitalism and middle class society in nineteenth-century France.
2. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).