BOOKS

Objects of dubious vertu

Bevis Hillier

THE ARTIFICIAL KINGDOM: A TREASURY OF THE KITSCH EXPERIENCE by Celeste Olalquiaga Bloomsbuty, £20, pp. 321 Garden gnomes of the 1890s from Album fiir Teppichgartnerei und Gruppenbepflanzung by Karl GOtze (Messrs Sotheran & Co.) When you find that Dr Olalquiaga's book about kitsch begins with the sentence, 'Meet Rodney, the hermit crab' you realise you are in for some lateral thinking. You also suspect that you are not in the hands of a Kenneth Clark. Rodney is a Victorian objet which Olalquiaga found in a San Francisco 'bed and breakfast'. He is dead and imprisoned in a glass globe. Olalquia- ga's musings about him remind one of P. G. Wodehouse's Madeline Bassett, that wonderfully soppy girl who said goodnight to each flower in the garden and believed that every time a fairy blew its wee nose a baby was born — except that this is a Madeline educated at an American univer- sity, so she writes like this:

Rodney's impassive condition is an open threshold, a portal where life and death meet, each one stepping back to let the other go by, neither concerned about a primacy that can only be momentary in an otherwise intertwined destiny.

She reverts to pure Madeline by adding:

When I stare at Rodney . . . I feel my heart burst into tears, hoping that somehow the warmth of this lachrymal flood will dissolve Rodney's prison.

That sentence is found on page four. I flicked hastily to the end of the book. The horrible realisation dawned that I had over 300 pages of this stuff to endure.

The publisher's jacket-flap note about Olalquiaga tells us that she was born in Santiago de Chile and grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. She has a PhD from Columbia University and has received Rockefeller and Guggenheim Awards. What induced (I nearly wrote 'what possessed') these foun- dations to splash out cash on this goo-goo writer? As the young F. E. Smith replied to the judge who sarcastically asked him why he thought he had been raised to the bench, 'It is not for me, my lord, to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Prov- idence.' Likewise, I know nothing of the deliberations of the Rockefeller and Guggenheim panels; but let us try to pic- ture the committee meeting of an imagi- nary foundation (not one of those two) if it were faced with Olalquiaga's proposal. I think the meeting might have gone rather like this:

CHAIRMAN: Next, we have an application by Dr Celeste Olalquiaga. She wants to write a treatise on kitsch. Elmer, I think you've given her outline the once-over?

ELMER: Sure have, Mr Chairman. Dr Olalquiaga wants to write what she calls 'a cultural history of kitsch, an immensely pop- ular aesthetic phenomenon that has always been disdained as "bad taste" '. Her aim — and I think she puts this very powerfully — is to 'reclaim kitsch from the dustbin of art his- tory'. As I'm sure you all know, the term derives in part from the German kitschen, to collect junk from the street. Dr Olalquiaga suggests, and I quote, that it is 'the product of a larger sensibility of loss' and that it 'enables the momentary recreation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies'.

CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Elmer. Mary-Lou, what do you think?

MARY-LOU: The project sounds real excit- ing. But could I just ask about Dr Olalquia- ga's track record? Has she published anything? CHAIRMAN: Yes, in 1992 her Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities was pub- lished by the University of Minnesota Press.

ELMER: That sounds fine and dandy. But do we know what attracted — if that's the word — Olalquiaga to this off-beat subject?

CHAIRMAN: A crab. ELMER: A crab?

CHAIRMAN: Yup. A dead crab. Pickled in a glass globe — again, in her own words, 'a hard, vitric globe like the hazy, hyalescent vision of a gypsy's magic ball'.

ELMER: Hyal . what?

CHAIRMAN: Hyal Hitler! Just kidding, Elmer; I had to look it up in the dictionary, too. Hyaline means glassy, so I guess hyalescent means glassy-ish.

ELMER: I vote we give her the grant. And let's make it a generous one, as this dame has got to spend months looking at all those hideous things.

Olalquiaga's book is physically quite small. So' the illustrations are small, too; and that is a pity, for if you are postulating that something is kitsch, we need to get a good look at it. Almost all the pictures, and indeed nearly all the objects mentioned in the book, are from the 19th century. Per- haps it is through being South American that Olalquiaga fails to realise how old- fashioned it is to think Victoriana the last word in kitsch. English aesthetes — Osbert Sitwell, Harold Acton, Robert Byron — were already collecting it in the 1920s and giggling. Then came Betjeman, Pevsner and the Victorian Society, all prepared to defend Victorian conservanda, though not its grosser expressions. Olalquiaga even maintains that kitsch begins with Victori- ana. Of course a lot of pre-Victorian hor- rors have disappeared from the face of the earth, lost, destroyed by fire, flood or earthquake, or simply chucked out by later generations for their appallingness. But has Olalquiaga never seen the grotesque 16th- century bronzes of Andrea Riccio? I have a print of a classical bronze owned by the 18th-century antiquary Thomas Hollis; it is as arborescently kitsch as anything from the Crystal Palace. And a School of Fontainebleau painting, once sold at Sothe- by's, depicting a bevy of intertwined ladies, is not something you would hang next to your Vermeer.

The things that fascinate Olalquiaga are the things that fascinated the compilers of The Saturday Book in the 1950s: aquaria, stuffed animals, faked 'mermaids', naughty postcards, French glass paperweights of the kind Colette collected, animal and veg- etable freaks. But these things are not allowed to speak for themselves. Each of them becomes the starting point for some convoluted metaphor or a purple patch of weird, emotional philosophising. Good scholars try to make the complex simpler. Olalquiaga belongs instead to the school which thinks it smart to dress up comparatively uncomplicated ideas in portentous circumlocution. For example, she writes:

Victorian interiors, apparently merely orna- mental, had a practical purpose: to cover the emptiness left behind by the absence of tradi- tion.

I suspect that what this means is, 'The nou- veaux riches wanted to show off their wealth.' At times the prose becomes almost impenetrable:

If the souvenir is the commodification of a remembrance, kitsch is the commodification of the souvenir, Upon freezing the remem- brance as an active material capable of evocation, the souvenir becomes stultified. Having sacrificed the remembrance's mnemonic power (its use value, with variable meanings according to who remembers) for its immediate iconicity (its exchange value, loaded with the fixed meanings of advertise- ment), the souvenir reaches a dead end: it can no longer move backward and, by defini- tion, it can't move forward.

This is five-star gobbledygook; never has gook been so avidly gobbled. But not quite everything Olalquiaga writes is destined to speed straight to Pseuds' Corner without passing Go. I notice that on the rare occa- sions when she restricts herself simply to describing something without wrapping it in some bizarre metaphysical conceit she can be crystalline, as in this sketch of Rod- ney:

He fascinates with the artificiality of his alert eyes, the immobile gesture of his sharp pin- cers, the imrnense frailty of his small, imper- fect body caught in the perfectly round, smooth, relentless surface of the glass globe.

I wonder whether, with her descriptive powers and her on-the-sleeve Latin emo- tion, Olalquiaga might not have the mak- ings of a novelist.

Oh, but that pesky crustacean! He gets a full-page colour plate all to himself, and a special entry in the index:

Rodney, 3-9, 87, 293 bed-and-breakfast home of, 3-4 death and, 4-5, 75, 67-70, 74, 75-78, 85-86, 301-5 as dream image, 85 emotional and psychological effects of, 3-9 eyes of, 3,8, 68, 86 three deaths of, 85-86 time and, 5 various perspectives on, 78

see also hermit crabs If there is one name of which you become even sicker than the sainted Rod- ney's by the end of the book, it is that of Walter Benjamin. Certain writers have a penchant for hero-worship that approaches abjectness, hitching their wagons to lack- lustre stars. A recent example is Neil Leach's Millennium Culture. Leach is a dis- ciple of the perverse French cultural theo- rist Jean Baudrillard and his text is punctuated with 'according to Baudrillard' and Baudrillard says', followed by some insufferably silly or provably untrue apoph- thegm. You begin to think, 'Why not just read Baudrillard? (I mean, who but a thick- ie would read Lamb's Tales from Shake- speare if a collected Shakespeare were lying around?) In Olalquiaga's book, for Bau- drillard read Benjamin. In comparison with her devotion to Benjamin, Mr Collins's attentiveness to Lady Catherine de Bourgh would seem offhand.

To be fair, Walter Benjamin is a more interesting writer than Baudrillard. Between 1927 and 1940 he worked obses- sionally on 'The Arcades Project' — a liter- ary and historical montage about the glass-covered arcades of 19th-century Paris, A snail of two tithes: French gilt bronze c. 1900.

with their many shops selling knick-knacks often classifiable as kitsch. All of that synchs (kitschen synchs?) perfectly with Olalquiaga's interest in 19th-century sou- venirs and bibelots; and we get plenty of 'according to Benjamin's and 'Benjamin says's. Unfortunately for her, the publica- tion of her book coincides with that of an English translation of Benjamin's The Arcades Project by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (24.95, pp. 1,073). So those who thirst for Benjamin can get him at source, not in steady dollops from Olalquiaga. I believe it is a matter of dispute among historians whether King George V's dying words were 'How is the Empire?' or 'Bugger Bognor!' If! had died of boredom while reading Olalquiaga's book, the last hoarse gasp from my lips might well have been 'Bugger Benjamin!'

One of the things I would expect to find in a worthwhile book on kitsch is a histori- ography of the subject. To reach back no further, there is the tremendous debate about 'taste' in the 18th century, as satirised (but also contributed to) by Pope and Hogarth, with such writers as Alexan- der Gerard, William Shenstone, Samuel Foote, Horace Walpole and Richard Payne Knight weighing in, in the 19th century we have Ruskin's tirades and Wilde's countervailing insistence that ethics and aesthetics have no correlation; in the 20th century, pioneer books on kitsch, the set- ting up of a Museum of Bad Taste in Stuttgart by August Pazaurek, and Billy Baldwin's exhibition of Bad Taste in New York, including a Venus de Milo with a clock set in her tummy. (This lady had an afterlife, both as a statue in Andrew Gra- ham's novel The Club and an Osbert Lan- caster illustration of it, and, miniaturised, as the wedding present in the film Father of the Bride which provokes Spencer Tracy to comment to Elizabeth Taylor, 'Give it enough ointment and there's always a fly; give enough presents and there's always a stinker.') The title of John Betjeman's book, Ghastly Good Taste, epitomised what aes- thetes dislike about the tastemakers — their arrogant claim to know what is good for the rest of us and their too frequent lauding of what later judgment finds at best a banal compromise. In our own time we have had Gillo Dorfles's book Kitsch, Stephen Bayley on Taste (before he became notorious by sweeping out of the Dome), Stephen Calloway's Baroque, Baroque, Milan Kundera's comments on kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Roger Scruton's return to the Ruskini- an belief that it is possible to distinguish good from bad in art. Most of these precur- sors get no mention in Olalquiaga's book; those few who do, only peripherally.

Once having established that there have been collectors, museum directors and art historians who interested themselves in what they considered bad, you then have to ask why they took that interest. Was it merely a question of ennui, as with that hero of Disraeli's who asks for some bad wine because he is tired of the good? In the case of the tad taste' rooms set up by Herny Cole at the South Kensington Muse- um (later the Victoria & Albert) and by Pazaurek at Stuttgart, it was the apparently logical view that if you were putting on dis- play fine works to inspire craftsmen, you should also show frightful ones as a horri- ble warning. Then there is the possible revenge motive by persons at odds with society through homosexuality (Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Wilde, Colette) or physical deformity. Byron, with his club foot, wrote a poem 'On Beauty and Deformity'. Karl Kraus, the fin de siècle Austrian writer who made a withering onslaught on overdone ornament, was born with curvature of the spine and had a deformed shoulder. In his 1986 book on him, Edward Timms records that he responded to a caricature which accentuat- ed the deformed shoulder, with 'an impas- sioned declamation' which reached its climax in words borrowed from Shake- speare's Richard III:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. For I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity.

Another thing I want the author of a. book on kitsch to do is to make compar- isons, as odious as you like. One might take, as a modest starting point, the mani- fest technical superiority of some artists to others. For instance, I have a woodcut by Thomas Bewick of a boy chasing a butter- fly. It was very much a theme of the late 18th and early 19th centuries; Wordsworth wrote a poem on it in 1802. I also have a print of Reigate, Surrey, by someone named Lisney. In the foreground is a boy chasing a butterfly. The scene is clearly modelled on Bewick's but it quite lacks his assurance. And recently I bought a minia- ture mug of about 1810 printed with a boy chasing a butterfly, whose inspiration was probably Bewick again, but the butterfly has grown to grotesquely large proportions by the hand of an artist even more inept than Lisney. You cannot dispute that in what each of these artists was attempting, Bewick was far the most successful.

But then we come to more difficult, sub- tler, more contentious comparisons. The façade of Rouen cathedral was painted by the 19th-century English watercolourist Myles Birket Foster. Later, the same frontage was more celebratedly and more atmospherically painted by Monet, in sev- eral versions. Now to many a Victorian art critic the Birket Foster, with its market stalls in the foreground, each apple and orange stippled with minute accuracy, would have seemed much preferable to Monet's dissolving view. Today most of us, myself included, would disagree with the Victorians. Can we say why?

The question that the writer on kitsch is either addressing or burldng is: 'Are there any criteria by which we can judge a work of art?' Some regard the whole notion of branding things as kitsch as a kind of aes- thetic racism. Oddly enough, they are far more willing to accept the idea of badness in literature than in art. Nobody is going to put up a strong case for the poetry of McGonagall or the prose of Amanda M'Kittrick Ros, aside from noting the enjoyment we get laughing at their glorious hamfistedness. But poke a mocking finger at a work of art, and you are a 'reactionary', in peril of excommunication by the arts establishment. So the 'anything goes' culture is allowed to persist — dead horses at the Tate, pickled sharks, madon- nas spattered with elephant dung, Tracey Vermin's filthy bed.

Where the 'anything goes' oriflamme leads a writer on kitsch of the Olalquiaga stamp is to the proposition that kitsch is good; ugly is, if not actually beautiful, at least illuminating. That is what she means by '[reclaiming] kitsch from the dustbin of history'. Though she calls Gillo Dorfles's book Kitsch 'a cult classic' (what cult? I remember it getting woeful reviews when it was translated into English) she reproves Dorfles for sneeringly treating kitsch as bad taste. Part of her defence of kitsch is the suggestion that its preposterous conceits are like those of a dream and thus a con- duit to our subconscious rather than the conscious mind — implying that they are truer than the safer 'good' images. One of the things she illustrates is a 'snowstorm' globe paperweight containing a small female figure in front of a building holding an umbrella. She writes:

Although this motif is sometimes referred to as Little Red Riding Hood, the most interest- ing interpretation suggests it could portray Marie Antoinette in front of the Petit Trianon. True or not, nothing could better represent the French queen's charmed but fateful life . . . than this suspended miniature.

Little Red Riding Hood or Marie Antoinette! 'How happy could I be with The twee and the fey: The Fairy Prince, watercolour by Arthur Barrett. either, were t'other dear charmer away!' Let us suppose that the lady in the snow- storm really is intended to be Marie Antionette. Is Olalquiaga seriously suggest- ing that 'nothing could better represent the French queen's charmed but fateful life' than this mass-produced novelty souvenir? Clearly she has never seen Jacques-Louis David's sketch of Marie Antoniette in the tumbril on her way to the guillotine. That drawing is reproduced in Hugh Honour's book Neo-Classicism. Honour regards the drawing as tender. I cannot agree: surely David, as a leading revolutionary (one of the few great artists to have held great political power), was having a last merciless gloat over the victim of Jacobin justice. But, either way, the masterly sketch of the poor creature, her hair scraped back to bare her neck, is a more memorable emblem of the queen's fate than the stiff little figure under the titchy umbrella in the trumpery 19th-century paperweight. If we have reached the point at which kitsch is admired, not ridiculed — is considered good, not just good for a laugh — it is high time to shove it back into 'the dustbin of history'.

The illustrations here are not from the book under review but from the Bevis Hillier Archive,