Postures of Postmodernity: Through the Commodity’s Looking Glass

David A. Ensminger (bio)
Lee College
davidae43@hotmail.com

 
I tend to imagine store window displays as late-capitalism voyeur tableaux, microcosms, and dioramas, more than mere passer-by enticement. They become a pitch and pronouncement, a Weltanschauung, a way of making meaning, a fetish-world, and an inner-view. They feel layered and riddled with an unconscious and conscious psychogeography, a keyhole to paused worlds in an urban environment teeming with fuss and speed, indifference and callousness. As an invitation and lure, they act as freeze-frames of stories made anew by each gaze. Through the distancing and filtering functions such window panes perform, viewers observe carefully concocted consumption.
 
Sometimes the spaces act as compendiums replete with multinational goods, folk crafts still warm from kinesis and handling, or pervasive motifs of plasticized Pop. They proffer a distinct cultural specimen of each store as well as strata of economic indicators. In towns riddled with empty storefronts, the goods may seem like artifacts of duress – a few lone mustered antiques, white elephants, dime-store novelties, tchotchkes, and dust-gathering gadgets. In cities like Austin, along certain hipster-riche drags, the goods may seem both ironic and nostalgic, self-consciously retro and manicured, like a personal “museum of me” featuring inventory ready to be displayed on online sites like Etsy.
 
Storefronts often index cultural rituals too, from Christmas and Day of the Dead to re-enacted boyhood fantasia, bygone product eras, and Elvis worship. In doing so, the displays become self-contained simulations, orderly and sequenced, choreographed with purpose and charm, even as viewers are beset by randomness, disorder, flux, and instability in their worlds. The storefront experience is a ritual itself, meant to convey liminality. The storefront is neither the store, really, nor the sidewalk: it is in-between, unbounded. A visit to such space confers special status. Viewers are no longer totally anonymous: they are potential participants.
 
The windows furnish dreams; mannequins – realistic, poetically sculptural, or boldly geometric—become our surrogates. In effect, the windows complicate the participant-observer dyad. They simulate what viewers might want to be, not merely the good and products they desire. The views provide a glimpse of the fetish-object and muster scenes beyond our grasp. In turn, viewers attempt replications of their own, perhaps by hoarding the items found within the scene, splicing the store product genome with their own homes and apartments.
 
Like postmodern insect collectors, viewers seek specimens. As if pushing pins into the undersides of arthropods, they seek, even unconsciously, to own, display, and curate their own commodities and fetish-lined spaces, cupboards of their own curiosities, and to align items according to their own algorithms. The store window environments teem with personas and prompts, some ancillary and accidental, some pertinent to the storytelling and myth making. Some relate to the ideology of the store-as-brand and the sensibilities and gestalt of employees. The displays become a series of enmeshed ideas, not merely tracts of goods.
 
The displays signify group identification as well. Culled from dispersed, sundry items locked within the geometry of stores, the displays become doppelgangers of both viewers and curators and articulate desires that viewers have yet to recognize. Viewers become tacit voyeurs held in limbo by the strict frontality and fixed formula of each storefront, and each viewer attempts to discern the parts of the palette, fondly appraising the habits of Pop.
 
Some might define the style of my photos as aloof and amateurish. Others might deem my approach an anti-aesthetic and liken it to factory floor technical photography. Unfussy and straightforward, the style matches the pieces. The eerie stiffness of each mise-en-scene seems synonymous with leisure society’s dead space, which is inhabited by mannequins, papier-mâché creatures, ceramic architecture, and stuffed animals to create frozen faux landscapes and postures of post-modernity.
 
Still, others might liken my approach to Pop itself: the flatness and centrally composed subjects are the modus operandi. People might assume I seek to subvert Pop and kitsch iconography with the pre-existing and inherited images filtering into the camera eye. Yet I imagine each window as a three-dimensional postcard, or a magic lantern show of consumerist chic, simultaneously awash in high culture aspirations, pop culture conundrums, and low culture realities.
 
An imposed formal rigor sometimes imbues the displays; other times, the displays appear ad-hoc. Some evoke expressionism. Others seem much more accidental, vernacular, blunt, and naive. I tend to be drawn less toward patented products and more toward a campy sense of capitalism, including folk displays and combinatory environments in which recognizable brands and mass-marketed merchandise become subsumed by homespun conceits. I am intrigued when various iconographies become scrambled and enmeshed in hybrid spaces: crisp corporate logos may combine with naive aesthetics, revealing the not-so-hidden hands of workers from factory floor to window sill, navigating a discourse of desire.
 
The displays are essentially a wax mold and a rabbit hole too. Each poised, cold surface and controlled shadowplay begets an interpenetration of meaning, becoming an estuary of gazes while slipping open the door of impending consumption. The curators pay heed to the rites of this initiation: this is where the gaze shall dwell, this is how the goods will be trafficked, and this is how the vacillating impulse of buyers will become cemented. Hence, the cartographers of Pop lure us through the colliding charms found within the matrix of each window, avidly dispatching our needs and desires.
 

 
On the outskirts of the Houston megalopolis, the street hosts a hip microcosm of gallery/coffee bars, second-hand and upcycled goods outlets, self-declared antique malls, and niche interior design stores. The lo-res cell phone shot captures dusk descending on the mise-en-scene, replete with demure vases and winged statuettes alongside a 1920s flapper-style mannequin head (teeny eyebrow lines, aquiline nose, perfectly pinched lips, and short, coal-black hair). The scene is lit like a still from an Otto Preminger film. A slant of light envelops the face, which is untethered from a body, while the hand is detached, like a satellite orbiting an invisible center of gravity.
 
The fractured facade turns body parts into disassembled perches for costume jewelry that recalls pockets of history. Meanwhile, garments become scaled down to isolated bits: slender wrist and truncated neckline alone survive. The vertical and horizontal lines are overly apparent: the body, with its Dionysian impulses—its mirth-making and uncontrolled urges, its unclean tendencies and unbound jazzy flesh—are rendered superfluous and unnecessary. Only the elongated gaze of the face survives as the fingertips graze the carpet edge, suggesting a codex of reductive womanhood frozen in the postures of post-modernity.
 

 
Now shuttered, Mary’s Lounge, with its leather’n’Levi reputation, was the last outpost of gay bar culture to survive on this arterial road in Houston’s former gay ghetto. (The strip has shifted north over the last few decades.) The poster reveals a fault line between hetero and queer communities by exposing the queer epidermis, since many exterior facades of local gay bars still remain anonymous, pedestrian, and featureless. Glistening in the near-dusk ozone sun, the poster evokes an emancipated queer body that has survived the AIDS rupture – with its concomitant tropes of atrophy and emaciation – and reveals a pumped-up, masculine pride. The multiple possible meanings of “Mary’s is Not Responsible” resonate in alert red. “Not Responsible” for what, viewers wonder, besides the risky “baggage,” yet another word loaded with meanings. Perhaps Mary’s is “Not Responsible” for in-the-closet anxiety or for the white heat and vascularity displayed by the hyper-cultivated, Hellenistic body in the age of sullying steroids. Perhaps the phrase refers to the black and white, muscled, testosterone terrain posed right within the doorframe as a lure, bait, and intoxicant. Removed from stage to street corner, the poster acts as dislocated exhibitionism, a trope of militarized fitness routines, and an altar to the young male. All these meanings collide next to a city bus stop and used bookstore.
 

 
We entered town after the floods had barely begun to drawn back. Mosquitoes collided with our necks and arms on every block as the sun started to edge toward the river’s shoreline. A pervasive quietude was quickly dispelled by a burst of hail that spewed across streets and bounced off statues. A blackout soon intervened as well. Seeking the last ounces of light, people took to the sidewalks. This storefront countered that sober sublimation. The mannequin’s fervor and pitched, heroic, unblemished leisure society joy stood in stark contrast to the flood’s aftermath and the nearby laconic waiters and carefully tended gardens. The size seven shoe, the everywoman necklace, the artfully funky glasses (not for busywork but a key perhaps to seeing the curious, must-have objects within the store’s cornucopia), the blue eye shadow, the curvaceous mouth, and the tilted cap, together with the T-shirt knotted at the midsection, oscillate between expressions of playfulness and flirtation, between slightly upscale Southern styles and mock laughter. We gaze into the toothless mouth, succumbing to the rhetoric of her pose and the mass-cultural infatuation she inspires. By the minute, the floodwater recedes even further, like an apparition of nature subjected to erasure by her glee.
 

 
To become fully immersed in the psychogeography of my neighborhood, I try to photograph it every few months, to see what I see. That is, to address the recessed vectors that my eye would normally miss, the dimensions that might remain otherwise unexposed. Fashion is raw power, I once wrote, knowing that ideologies surface fully on our sleeves. The avenue is home to cell phone stores, broken-down book dealers, fish and Indian restaurants, and occasional boutiques, dressmakers, and ateliers. The scene appears as a looking glass. The seemingly two-dimensional photograph reveals both the workaday world of cellophane, calculators, and string, juxtaposed with a kind of luminescent couture. The mannequin feels superimposed, exposing an eerie femininity stripped of body parts. The curve of the window mimics the arc of a theater stage, a slight sparkle shimmers on the purse, a distinct red is dispersed and multiplies throughout the scene, the blue necklace acts as a beacon, and the yellow nuance of the dress, almost enduring a full frontal wash-out, soaks up the plastic light wattage. The dismissed limbs leave only the submissive hull; the body becomes no more than a custodial mount for the imperatives of the workshop.
 

 
The Virgin of Guadalupe resides placidly with her darker doppelganger in the forlorn heart of Montrose, where the roads are pockmarked under the stress of heat and drought. Evanescent, she glows mere blocks from a neon Donald Judd gallery space housed in an old grocery store and funded by the Menil family, millionaire art patrons. The two exhibitions represent the blurry lines between the sacred and secular, iconographic religiosity and iconic minimalism, each surrounded by neighborhoods with bright bodega lights, Mexican cantinas, a gay cowboy bar, barber shop, and Gothic-styled city utility building. The neon studio in which the Virgin resides offers a full roster of nightclub signage, refurbished Flash-O-Matic clocks, and fine art pieces (like brushed aluminum dragonflies) that intermingle just like the neighborhood, which became an interface between the forces of gentrification and change and the stalwarts of affordable mid-century apartments, ma and pa democracy, and community gardens. The Virgin watched the demolition of the community college, the rise of graffiti sprayed on everything from poles to Dumpsters, the displacement of Hispanic families by redevelopment, and the encampment of Miami-style megalith apartments next to freeways prone to massive flooding. She watched and waited for the water to come.
 

 
In the bustling, hipster interzone of this street heading toward the outer freeway are blocks of boutiques, upscale modern eateries, vintage hotels and fire stations, and famous racks of Southwestern boots in the corner store. Amid the fanfare are the specialty shops featuring Third World imports and repurposed goods and spaces celebrating the rituals and folklore of the Texican territory, such as this Day of the Dead altar, with its traditional display of papier-mâché skulls. The simulated Mexican handmade crafts crowd the window, while the rituals surrounding the days are a syncretic amalgam of ancient Mesoamerican practices and Spanish Catholic rituals. Skulls are omnipresent during the festivities, including calaveritas de azucar (sugar skulls) given to children. The store display appears to evoke a multicultural merger between Anglo mercantile aims and persistent, somewhat fossilized Mexican sundries. On another level, the immediacy of the facial paint, with its homespun vernacular vividness, also contrasts with the store’s grid-like displays and money-driven ethos. This is not a bodega or barrio store where immigrants come to maintain cultural practices, nor is it a bridge between cultures, per se. The stores signifies appropriation and incorporation, and each loose-limbed posture and wizened piece of skull tissue in the display might be equated with the stop-motion work of Tim Burton, as in The Nightmare Before Christmas. The uncanny figures, annexed by consumer culture, become tokens of colorful ethnic-inspired entrepreneurship that unintentionally forces rent hikes and redesigned neighborhoods.
 

 
The larger-than-life monkey in the Fez cap emblazoned with the inverted iconography resembling both the Turkish and Tunisian flags immediately signifies circus sideshows, the Shriners, and street peddlers torn from old, Middle Eastern themed films. The monkey is both a paroxysm of Pop and an analogue to the store itself, which offers unstable hybrids. The symbolism of time is unveiled as well: time understood as moon cycle, time measured by quirky plastic wonders, and time as construct. The East, with its Muslim otherness, becomes reduced and frozen for the window shopper’s gaze. The shot also reveals some of the store’s other strata: 3-D puzzles, pirate clocks, and postcards of reprinted pulp fiction, which lead to an interior brimming with Japanese tin toys, street art book compendiums, and campy magnets for the tourist’s Maytag. The entire venue becomes a repository for hollow insouciance. It is located along a stretch of street indicating a city adrift on its own acceleration, well-endowed with a sense of comeuppance and simulation chic, where $1,100 cowboy boots for the Western nouveau merge with $11.00 platters of veggie loaf. The display is an emblem of an asynchronized city, where poverty is heaped into corners while carefully curated, gentrified “museums-of me” like this offer stuffed-animal lynching and kooky, anthropomorphized items that signify the components of camp culture. Such displays revisit the retro-past made in offshore not-so-Edens (Chinese factory towns), imported back into Western master narratives of cute capitalism borne on the backs of commodity laborers.
 

 
A voyeur can become immersed in this mise-en-scene for minutes as the slanted lamps signify a desire to illuminate or to see, which none of the decapitated heads—bearded, literary-minded grotesqueries—can do. The scene also evokes tropes of automatic writing. An example is presented mid-page on the heavy, black, metal Royal typewriter, as if the heads are in a trance and letting the machine convey their monologues, which are given a certain gravitas by the white plaster column, itself emblematic of both civil discourse and ruins. Perhaps the scene suggests a rupture in civil discourse, in the history of logic and rationality. Perhaps it suggests our society suffers endless drivel, signified by closed and blood-rimmed eyes, emitted by talking heads —experts and insiders crowding contemporary discussions. The skullduggery and metal chains, the antique group photos, and pointed sign indicate what happens when people succumb to such “mind-forged manacles” (if I may steal from William Blake): they will become stripped of their humanity, then exist as mere costumery. Note the discrepancies and incongruities: the “typed” paper actually resounds with cursive letters, as if the ghost is truly in the machine. More of the same material is folded on the table, like a pile of dead letters. The Pop merchandiser layers the window setting with Spiritualist and Surrealistic undertones for the entranced shopper and offers iridescent kitsch, priced to go.
 

 
This shot captures the last week of the five-and-dime store, which opened in 1948 in a small shopping district near the shadow of Rice University. Now an intimate street parking mecca for low-rise, downscale box stores like the Gap and Urban Outfitters, and homespun regional retailers like Half Price Books, this window captures the last light of the store’s made-in-China ware. It embodies a central code: the viewer is a potential consumer of tchotchkes in an emporium of manufactured whimsy, which offers an anarchic array, from the John McCain caricature presidential mask (can we muster the courage to don his craggy face and insert our eyes in his empty brain?) and all-American Baseball Tin Bank (where money and sport converge) to the Manhattan Baby package (adopted nomenclature of urbanism?) and the Cute Creatures, which offer the ultimate inversion: become your favorite animal character, the Rooster, and get a choking hazard as well. Roosters still dwell within city limits, as do goats, in outlying neighborhoods next to railroad tracks and tar-paper roofed homes, but only the Village can offer this temporary dark magic and liminality, revealing a youngster’s longing to fuse with the animated world of Foghorn Leghorn (of Looney Tunes fame) and to immerse fully in the unbound dynamics of play and Technicolor in looped demonstrations of slapstick and faux-Southern shtick. The windfall of items seems to embrace a patois of congested Pop and form a transit hub of throwaway goods. In such places, hoarding is made civilized and kaleidoscopic: each piece potentially funneled to children’s parties and adult water cooler office gags. Each is also latently equipped to tell viewers that less is never more. More trinkets mean more low culture wealth and joy in the leisure society tick-tock world.
 

 
This installation speaks to combinatory elements, documenting an art gallery groping with the holiday season by assimilating vestiges of Christmas décor and lore. The bucolic oil painting’s landscape evokes regions far from the East Texas flatland oil and gas topography. It speaks to multiple miniaturizations, from the foliage and flowers basking in the imagined Mediterranean sun to the wooden doll Santa Claus, who holds a penny-sized horse ornament. He seems curiously engaged in the narrative, as if conveying the irony of the season, in which mass-manufactured, wooden folk art becomes a symbol of seasonal authenticity in planned, gated suburbs. Plus, he seems to stare into the juxtaposed landscape, wondering how his cold-weather apparatus will handle the salted, balmy hillocks stirring with red-as-blood poppy petals. In his hand, he holds the toy animal. The workhorse, long removed from such landscapes, is no more than a child’s rocking fantasy, just as Santa Claus too is mere fantasy—a tale metamorphosed into the rites and rituals of consumer society. Yet he cannot escape the conundrum: note the two nails puncturing the window frame, as if barring him from touching the outside. He speaks to entrapment and winter wishes frozen out of time, out of place. Small electric light bulbs, no more than plastic cocoons in the midday sun, signal his retreat into daylight, where all is exposed. His blue eyes, once a safe haven for children’s late-night dreams, are no more than signposts for loss and dislocation. They remain defiantly human even while he endures an aesthetic condemning him to Pop platitudes.