Learning Community: Chapter 13, To The Arcade: The World of The Shop and The Store

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Chapter 13, To The Arcade: The World of The Shop and The Store

The new show windows

1900: Trimming the marvellous

In 1900 L. Frank Baum — the author of The Wizard of Oz (1900) — published the monumental and influential manual The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows (1900). Techniques of tableaux staging, mannikins and stage magic were combined to create the shop "illusion windows" (see: Colver 1988); eruptions of the marvellous and implicitly erotic into everyday life, overlaid with layers of mirrored reflections (analogous to photomontage) in the newly affordable plate glass. Baum was editor of the journal Show Windows from 1897-1902.
The surrealists were later fascinated by Atget's Paris show window photographs, although these do not convey the effect of being lit at night — in Berlin in the 1910s and 20s, the new show windows were lit up at night, and 'the uncanny mannikins' seen there, perhaps fed the early German cinema's fascination with 'living' automata and robots. Link here.

Paris, 1912, Eugene Atget

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C. 1982, black granite, each wall 246 feet long and 10.5 feet high. Link here for more on PBS ART21.