A FEW years back advertising commercials director Tony Kaye and two agency creatives tried to get their venus in Furs spot for Goodyear (or was it Pirelli?) into the Tate Gallery’s collection. The film, they claimed, transcended its commercial function and justified inclusion as a work of art. The Tate demurred, Kaye picketed the gallery and lively press coverage was enjoyed by all.

This spat created tension in adland. Traditionalists were embarrassed by the pretension; others energised by the issues. As ever, perspicacity could be found in the grey area between the two camps. In reality, art and advertising remained separate and fixed in their constellation, what had changed was the self-confidence of the latter. Some ad people became so high on the industry’s growing social and cultural influence, and its obsession with its own ‘creativity’, that they had mentally dropped the word commercial from the term ‘commercial artist’.

The rapid increase in, and demand for, creative specialists hastened the death of this term. Where once was a commercial artist, suddenly there were art directors, copywriters, creative directors, typographers, graphic designers, planners, brand consultants, Web designers, engagement managers, imagineers and creative business holisticians.

The burgeoning design industry needed more precise job titles, but in playing fast and loose with conventional terms many designers lost sight of the differences between themselves and other trades and professions. While some claimed the most interesting fringes of contemporary graphic design and art were merging, others urged design consultancies to offer management consultancy services.

Advertising seems less interested in art these days, maybe due to so much contemporary art being hypnotised by the seductive and (worryingly) omnipresent language of commercial creativity. Many in the design world still hark after elevation to the gallery, however. It is a common fantasy that a creatively remarkable design work can transcend its origins and become art. I have two problems with this. One, it can’t. Two, believing creative excellence makes a work worthy of promotion to another realm misses the purpose of and devalues design.

Whether design can be art is a more complex question than whether advertising can. Neither design nor art are, by definition, promotional; advertising is. It’s tempting to say the difference between design and art is that the former is created on behalf of a client and the latter on behalf of the artist, but it doesn’t quite separate the two. What if a designer self-funds a poster to address a social issue?

For me, the difference between contemporary art and design lies in the relationship between form, function and audience. In art, form (expression) is free to take priority over function (effectiveness), and the artist is prioritised over the audience. In design, function has priority over form, and the audience is more important than the designer. This remains true even with a design work considered aesthetically or sensually beautiful - its beauty is redundant if it doesn’t achieve its functional objective.

Take the example of the self-funded designer - they are not constrained by the client, but they are by the need to communicate rather than simply express. A work of art has none of these constraints - it is what it is, regardless of how it is received. These contrasting positions with regard to effectiveness are why the world generally pays artists respect and designers money.

I take these tentative steps into the dangerous, labyrinthine design-art debate as a preface to a simple desire. I’d like to see the next generation of designers recognise the difference between design and art, banish the notion that design should aspire to be art, and celebrate the huge value of excellent design. Those driven by a desire to create art are free to do so, whenever they’re not designing.

Drawing a line between design and art is healthy for a design community to do. It lets us measure what we do against something other than the spurious, vague notion of ‘creativity’ that exists in most groups. Form, style and expression are vital, but can only be judged in relation to function. We’re here to inspire people to act in a certain way, and we should measure our success according to that, not just the pleasure evoked by the combination of design elements we employ. So design is a means to an end, art is an end in itself. The greatest question facing a designer is to what ends do you want to go?

KEEP-FIT culture has come a long way since Jane Fonda and the Green Goddess. From pumping iron to practising Pilates, there are now numerous ways to keep in shape. How you exercise is as much about fashion, it seems, as fighting the flab.

Spending on health and fitness reflects its growing status as a lifestyle option. Consumers sweated out almost pounds 1.7bn in health and fitness clubs last year (source: Mintel). This figure has grown 145 per cent since 1996 and the market is expected to double over the next five years.

Membership and admission charges represent around 70 per cent of this expenditure, with a further 10 per cent going on one-off joining fees. This still leaves a significant sum for health and beauty treatments, bars and cafes, which suggests consumers are looking for much more from the experience than a couple of gym circuits.

Traditionally, health and fitness club design has been more readily associated with a Lonsdale than a Gucci belt. But this is changing fast. The multi-million pound KX Gym, which opened this week in west London with interiors and architecture by Thorp Design, is the latest luxury offering. It follows Third Space and Naked, which opened in Soho and Earl’s Court respectively last year. Edinburgh now boasts Escape, owned by the Scotsman Hotel group, and Cambridge has The Glassworks, designed by Conran & Partners.

The fit-out of the pounds 2000-a-year KX Gym (pronounced ‘kicks’ and derived from ‘kickboxing’) is far from run-of-the-mill. Thorp Design managing director James Thorp says it displays a ‘residential mindset in a commercial space’. And he doesn’t mean two up, two down. Thorp’s track record is mainly in designing expensive houses, yachts and planes.

‘We understand what quality is,’ he says. ‘The style of KX evolved from these private commissions. It’s maxi-minimalist, or minimalism taken to a more opulent level.’ Design accounts for more than half a budget in the region of pounds 8m to pounds 10m. There are ebony panels and textured plaster walls. The flooring is either natural hammered stone or teak, Thorp adds. ‘It’s used for yacht decking.’

The positioning, like the look and feel, resembles that of a boutique hotel and is intended to appeal to a similar clientele. So important is location to the target market, Thorp confides, that plans for a site in South Kensington that were ’shut down a week away from work starting’ when the old Harrods depository in Brompton Cross came up. ‘It’s nothing like a Harbour Club, Cannons or Holmes Place,’ he says.

Ian Sherman, Corporate Edge chairman of interiors and architecture, warns against seeing all health and fitness clubs ‘in the light of KX’. He says, ‘it’s at the extreme end of the market, both in terms of costs and what it is offering.’ Corporate Edge has designed 70 gyms over the past 15 years, including the Harbour Club (first and second time around), Champneys City-Point and most recently the ‘affordable luxury’ brand Amida, which opened in Becken ham, Kent, last November.

Sherman says, ‘The market has changed massively. Early on, design was not seen as a key element in the mix, but now it’s increasingly important. The market is also broadening and stretching, so it’s inevitable that there is greater segmentation and more differentiation.’

He likens the position of the larger groups, ‘Fitness First, LA Fitness and Cannons’, to that of retailers such as ‘Burton and Top Shop’ in the 1980s. ‘They’re developing and evolving standards,’ he says — but suggests this has led to a generic style.

Bespoke clubs like KX Gym, Third Space and Naked certainly break the mould. But the challenge, Thorp suggests, is integrating the ‘hotel aspects of the operation, like laundry and day-to-day running’ with calm, spacious design. How feasible it is with more typical budgets, though, is another matter.

The wiring at KX Gym is hidden away ‘under the floor, like a dealing room’, says Thorp. Using a PIN, personal fitness programmes can be downloaded to all the exercise machines. Such individualisation also depends on consumers becoming more sophisticated about fitness techniques. KX is ‘very studio and martial arts-based,’ says Sherman. ‘People have to understand training.’

However, what is common to both the high-end and the mainstream market is a broader definition of what gyms are about. Mintel leisure analyst Richard Bowyer says, ‘In general, a more holistic approach is being taken towards health and fitness. Consumers are interested in a wider range of exercise activities, which explains the popularity of Tal Chi and Pilates and alternative therapies such as reflexology and aromatherapy.’

Sherman points to ‘the growth of relaxation’ as opposed to fitness. He describes cardio-vascular gyms as the ‘pump primers of the industry’, but says the Amida concept is ‘not quite 50/50 but 60/40′ in its ratio of fitness to relaxation. Design, necessarily, has to be more ‘warmer, softer, lower-lit, more contemplative’, he suggests. Having more varied spaces will make greater demands on designers.

With its self-conscious exclusivity, KX Gym’s aesthetic will remain aspirational for most. ‘It’s the Ferrari ticket,’ says Thorp. He thinks the technological rather than the design elements will ‘filter down’. But the boutique hotel comparison might suggest otherwise. First there was Schrager, now there’s Malmaison.

At the height of Goya’s career, when he was deluged by demand for his brutal and profoundly cynical visions of humanity, the patron saint of young, angstful intellectuals and political revolutionaries painted a quiet and humorous work that has escaped much scrutiny. It is a self-portrait. Goya is working in darkness in front of his easel. He is wearing a large black felt hat, and on the brim blazes a halo of several dripping candles. He is looking out at us (at himself in the mirror, really), his expression one of wry and relaxed amusement, laughing no doubt at the paradoxes of his rapid climb to court painter and burning the midnight oil for the consumption of his less than flattering dark and apocryphal canvases. The painter encircles his head with the flickering flames of industry.
In prehistory, light, heat, and cooking were one and the same. You had your fire, you cooked up your meat, and you sat around in your cave (or wherever) to stay warm–the light from the fire drove back the hoards of hungry night predators. While cooking and heating stayed married for a great deal longer, light became its own entity early on. The discovery that any kind of oil (vegetable, animal, or mineral) with fiber in it could be lit and burn brightly led to the use of lamps, which were easily transportable.
The candle has most often been considered inferior to the lamp, due to its inconvenience and mess prior to the progressive changes made in its manufacture during the nineteenth century. Early candles were made of tallow, which could be any animal fat, though most often it was derived from mutton or beef. The fat was rendered before putrefaction had set in; nevertheless, it was difficult to thoroughly purify the tallow before it was made into dipped or molded candles, and the result was a smoky light, foul odor, and a candle that sort of collapsed into a puddle of hot grease rather than burned itself efficiently. Wax, either on its own or in combination with tallow, provided a cleaner light, but it suffered similar problems.
Candles made of either substance needed to be rigorously tended by the householder or servant, its wick needing to be trimmed (using a scissorlike device called a snuffer) several times an hour or else the candle would start to gutter, causing the wax or tallow to melt and drip instead of being consumed by the flame. The candle’s light would flicker annoyingly. Great occasions of state and church were always lit by candles (often several hundred or more), and it was common for these events to become overwhelmingly hot and smoky, with a constant rain of molten wax falling onto the spectators from chandeliers filled with guttering tapers. The invention of the self-snuffing, plaited wick in 1820 drastically revolutionized candles, eliminating the hazard, waste, and mess of the untended flame and pretty much bringing the candle into its present incarnation.
The ingenious but perversely gruesome use of “found candles,” if you will, abounds. Candlefish (a relative of the salmon) were used as bizarrely decorative lamps by Native Americans of Vancouver who caught the fish, dried them, propped them up on Y-shaped sticks, and lit one end at nightfall. On the Shetland Islands, the population caught a little bird called the storm petrel by the thousands, and after drying the bird threaded it with a wick, stuck its feet in a lump of clay, and lit its beak. In the West Indies, fireflies were caught and placed in small wooden boxes, and were adhered to the big toe with a gumlike substance to illuminate the path at night and spot any deadly snakes that may be lurking in the shadows.
The eternal struggle and expense to keep a light going before the modernization of illumination with gas and electricity cannot be exaggerated. Getting and keeping a light was almost as critical to survival as was food and shelter. Indeed, the choice between food and light was a constant for the poor–many lamp oils also being edible. This fact was duly noted by an increase in shipwrecks along the coasts of England in the nineteenth century, when lighthouse keepers used their surpluses of tallow candles for food instead of as warning signs for dangerous waters ahead. Being able to burn a candle anytime you wanted meant that you were rich, and probably literate. It signified freedom, order, and privilege. It also provided protection from the unseen chaos and the debauchery of the night.
Up until the latter half of the twentieth century, the candle was a necessary and sensible object, used thriftily and with reverence, for the most part because of its ability to turn night into a somewhat navigable situation. Its shape and color changed little over thousands of years, varying marginally from the cone to the taper, each dictated by the wick to candle-diameter ratio, and its color a result of the raw materials at hand. The candle gained symbolic significance within the spiritual realm as well, where its use in religious ritual has been prolific and widespread. The early Christian church discouraged the superstitious and pagan use of candles in services or in the common practice of guiding the dead to their final resting place. By the late third century, the church gave up this losing battle and embraced the candle. It then became a trinity of meaning: beeswax, the pure body of Mary; wick, the soul of Jesus Christ; and flame, Divinity.
Of course, candles served a sinister and lucrative role as a votive for fearful and guilty petitioners who wished to whisk their loved ones away from the jaws of purgatory and through the pearly gates. But more fanciful, empowering, and interesting uses of the candle as a sympathetic object can be found in fourteenth-century France, where a town, during pestilence or war, would make a taper the length of the town’s perimeter (which might be several miles), dip it in wax, and wrap it around a wooden barrel; the protective votive might burn for a couple of months or more. Similarly, a taper would be stretched around a sick animal and brought to the church to burn for the beast’s recovery. In both instances, the candle is thought to attain metaphysical power through the believer’s will and imagination. Magical practices have always employed candles, as literal and figurative constructions of reality through which the mind operates on an unseen level. Blowing out the candles on a birthday cake while making a wish originates in this transmutation of reality via a little bit of wax and flame.
In the mid eighteen hundreds, gas was beginning to replace the lamp and the candle in factories and homes. It was centrally supplied, required almost no maintenance by the householder, and provided bright and constant light that certainly revolutionized the dark and dangerous workplace. But there was a mysterious resistance to the use of gas light in the drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie. People clung to their candles and lamps. For decades, they refused to allow family meeting rooms to be converted to gas, though hallways and kitchens had gas installed almost immediately. Gas was accused of being poisonous and eating up too much oxygen! But the real reason was that gas did not have a mellow, warm flame that emulated the gentle, poetic, and hypnotic character of the hearth. The gas flame was harsh, and too bright. It did not do for the psyche what the flame of the candle or of the lamp could do: It provided no reprieve.
Nowadays, candles reside as blurred relics to their forgotten spiritual and domestic functions. They have lost their critical necessity, and in so doing have been given the time and luxury to expand from their tried-and-true modest singular form into the most fantastical, horrific, hilarious, and kitschy forms imaginable. Springing up and spreading like wildfire in the nineteen fifties through the seventies, the populist arts and crafts movement derived its momentum from a revolution in domestic life, whereby labor-saving devices and the sudden availability of inexpensive, factory-made goods altered the role of women in the home. As an adverse reaction to the modernization of housework into bland consumerism, the craft boom was in no small part a nostalgic re-creation of childhood memory, as well as a collective and unquenchable desire for individual creative activities that required skill, attention, and care. As a consequence, candle-making, along with macramé, ceramics, braiding, crocheting, quilting, rug latch-hooking, and decoupage, became hugely popular handicrafts in the postwar era, spawning specialty stores, books, magazines, television shows, classes, societies, and fairs.
Novelty candles flooded the marketplace, appealing to all tastes and embracing the bohemian counterculture’s aspiration for a chilled out, homespun, eastern-flavored, artsy, incense-burning exoticism that has seeped into every nook and cranny of the culture. Who does not remember making the hippie (or sand) candle at school or as a stay-at-home project? Or how about the multicolored drip candle, which, when placed in an empty wine bottle, would develop the counterfeit patina of a rich kaleidoscopic past of love-ins, happenings, and consciousness-raising sessions? The Hari Krishnas adopted the psychedelically patterned candle as their trademark and money-generator. And there are the gigantic trophy candles bought by upwardly-mobile suburbanites, those elaborately poured, dolloped, dripped, and sculpted forms–always a god-awful wood-brown color whose wick never tastes the bite of the match: a final footnote on the candle’s road from service to ornamental home décor.
Less swingin’ your-pad-or-mine candlealia is perhaps even more glorious and unbound: note the Santa Claus Winter Wonderland candle, the pressed-flower candle, the ice-cube candle, the head-shop skull candle, the layered candle, the fake-rock candle, the fake-woodgrain or brick candle, the pop-confection ice-cream-sundae candle, the little boy and girl candle (you light their heads), the many assorted animal candles . . .
Perhaps only artists have clearly understood our complicated relationship to the candle, or the vast possibilities of narrative, allegory, and pictorial promise of a candlelit space. Yet, surprisingly, representations of the candle in art are slight in number. In making Barry Lyndon, a 1975 film set in the eighteenth century and shot entirely in period lighting, director Stanley Kubrick was obsessed with using only candles and natural light in order to visually recreate the tone of Romantic-era paintings. When told that filming would be impossible without fill lighting, he adamantly made his own camera lenses and specially developed all the film. The technical difficulties facing painters have been similar; the challenge even more onerous. Candlelight is not stable: The flame changes continuously, shuddering palpably under the slightest air current, while expanding and contracting at will–moving like water over all it touches. Many artists just haven’t bothered, painting during the daylight, then adding a few candles here or there, hoping that their addition would be enough of a clue that the depicted scene occurred at night.
Postmodern resurrection of seventeenth-century French painter Georges de La Tour is a notable exception. His late portraits of Magdalenes–born through a demand for trifling voyeuristic portraits of morally repentant and anonymous women of clandestine reputation–are exquisitely reverie-inducing and brilliant studies of lighting. The object lesson of the fallen is overridden by the sheer transformative wonder of de La Tour’s technical virtuosity. Likewise, Gerhard Richter’s photobased paintings of skulls and candles critique Romanticism, while delivering a healthy hit of sensuous swoon. They recontextualize the dichotomous versions of the candle as both soulful reflection of the vanities and as parabola of sensorial seduction. Furthermore, the spiritually and sympathetically symbolic effects of Robert Gober’s candle pieces–a stubby, white candle with pubiclike human hair growing out of its base, or a truncated and formally clothed human form with candles sprouting from its limbs–mine the well-submerged but unconsciously recognized powers of the candle as a vehicle of wish fulfillment on the physical plane. Nam June Paik’s technological translation of a single candle into a multitude of variously scaled and colored video projections in One Candle of 1988 meditates upon the transition of our attention from the flame of the candle to the glow of the monitor. And picking up the thread of the nineteen-seventies aesthetic candle explosion is Jorge Pardo’s extravagant avocado, yellow, and orange drippy chandelier.
Just about the time that art was taking a major nosedive in significance as the main game in visual communication, the candle was being replaced by gas and electric light, and its significance in religious life was being devalued and forgotten. (Today, the Catholic Church in Rome has converted to electric votives; you pay and then hit the switch). With similar persistence–in the face of humiliation, debasement, and criticism leveled at its frivolity, self-indulgence, and lack of substantial meaning–the visual arts and the candle soldier on. As a consequence, they have become more ridiculous, exaggerated, inventive, and grand as time goes on. Indeed, the existence of the visual arts today is a testimony to a kind of faith, endurance, and desire for an illusionistic experience of life. The line between fact and fiction is wherever you want to draw it; undeniably, for the imaginatively evolved, the distinction is moot. Still, like the individual efforts of the artist, a dim candle burning in a darkened room continues to assert its right to blur, dream, trip, disguise, and pull the rug out from under everything else.

Serious fireworks turn something into nothing, very suddenly, and do it repeatedly until (only) nothing is left. Life should thereupon feel scrubbed and new. Socially, fireworks are a generously wasteful gesture–a potlatch–like publicly burning one’s money in a sincere way. Audiences must feel that the event honors their presence. Of course, they are stunned, overmastered, blitzed, sent. Such is the fireworker’s humble ministry. I love setting off fireworks, which I do for less than twenty minutes once a year, after thinking about it a great deal.
I seldom enjoy professional displays, which are academic. They expect to be admired. You know: ooh, ahh. Forget that. Think sob, scream. When doing fireworks, never consider beauty, which will take care of itself. Contrive only intensity. Fireworks should not be something that people watch, but something that happens to them.
My wife Brooke Alderson’s and my annual Fourth of July party began about fifteen years ago at our country place (a third-hand trailer at the time) with a few friends and some bottle rockets that I’d scored in Chinatown. It grew, last year drawing over 200 friends and neighbors. For a while, I bought in bulk from a Midwestern outfit that ships to interstate-trucking depots. Today, I patronize a savvy, passionate dealer named Joe. My partners Eric and Kate and I make a road trip to Joe’s cinder-block bunker in a bucolic field each spring. Joe has taught us different uses of “black match” (gunpowder-impregnated cotton fuse wrapped in waxed paper) and electrical “squibs” (which, with wiring, enable battery-powered instantaneous mass firings at a distance). There is so much more to learn, but we’re taking it gradually.
I haven’t tried to get professional-grade ordnance. We use the “C”-class that is legal in some states. Except for forget-about-it “A”-class complexity, the main difference is size, which can be compensated for by grouping units, exploiting features of the terrain, and, above all, keeping the show close to the audience–which contributes a bonus frisson of fear.
The main types of display fireworks are rockets, fountains, and tubes (mortars). “C”-class rockets, which we launch from PVC pipes stuck in the ground, are generally unsatisfying. Most sacrifice bang for color; some do the opposite. (All share that lovely takeoff, whoooshh.) We use them for filler. Best are “cakes”: bulky bundles of tubes that shoot “flaming balls,” as it says on their labels. At different altitudes, the effects include many-colored banging, whizzing, darting, showering, corkscrewing, shimmering, and whatnot. We like to pack the air with cake phenomena–sort of all-over sky painting–for a long spell. Some of the cakes we use are named Oriental Thunder, Blinking Dragon’s Breath, 37 Shots Shining Star, Millennium, Wild Boar, Insanity, Magic Whirly, Vendicator [sic], Star Gate, Drinker of the Wind, Black Cat Warp Speed, Super Stallion, Gold Strike, Dagger Falls, and–most mysteriously–Dayton Night.
Our nine-year-old house tops a slope that descends, from the porch, through a distance of one hundred feet in tiers and across a lawn to a stream which, for the past few years, has been swollen into a virtual lake by beavers. (The beavers surely loathe the Fourth; living on our land rent-free, they can jolly well put up with it.) From the stream, a meadow extends one hundred and twenty feet to the base of a wooded mountain. We do most of our show on the lawn–with, this year, six front-line all-purpose crew members, a rocket man (hi Seamus!), three reloadable-tubes people, and Eric supervising. Last year, we involved a nearby big willow (more about it later) and the stream itself (a homemade barge loaded with fountains for a curtain effect); this year, we expanded further to small cherry trees and the entire meadow. Next year, the mountain. The offered loan of a gut-quaking gunpowder cannon has been accepted. You can’t beat a narrow mountain valley for acoustic enhancement, by the way.
Reloadable tubes include the exuberantly flashy Critical Acclaim and the indispensable Violence Ammunition, which produces very loud, hard bangs. Applying lessons from Joe, we have learned to remove the propellant from VA projectiles and to fuse the warheads for use on the ground.
The largest “C” tubes are preloaded, one-shot mortars, pretty expensive, that launch with heavy thumps, “break” (explode) impressively, and yield the high, colored blossoms and cascades that most people think of when they think of fireworks. Joe despises them as uneconomical, but if you don’t give folks some of what they expect, what kind of host are you? We used to finish with large tubes. Now I like them as a false finale, relaxing the audience into the ooh/ahh mode, and thus setting up the knockout that I’ve lain awake for months scheming.
Saturns. Everybody who knows any small fireworks knows the bricklike launchers of twenty-five or one hundred little plastic rockets that scream upwards erratically and go bang. Rule of life: You cannot have enough Saturns firing simultaneously. It feels crazy every year at Joe’s, loading up on so many of one item. But I’m girding to really go for it next year: a colossal, shrieking wall of ripping fire that gives an intimation of satiety–too many Saturns. My friend Mark’s auteurial dream of a show is just, say, fifty thousand Saturns and good night. That would be quite cool. We might need to call two hundred ambulances from the nervous hospital. But I bet Mark that we can get a heartwarming, though brief equivalent with a mere three thousand. We’ll see.
Now and then, I sense our use of fireworks crossing a line into art. I try to suppress the thought, which threatens crippling self-consciousness. I keep reminding myself of my earliest and still perhaps only insight into the pyrotechnical sublime: “Shoot off everything you have as fast as you can.” A no-bidding corollary: “Absolutely no dead time.” A half-second pause between fireworks is an abyss in which is glimpsed death by boredom. If art can handle the pace, bully for art.
The arts that fireworks are closest to are music and painting–the pure structuring of time and the optical field–both of which operate automatically on any perception we have that is susceptible to them. I made an instructive, arty mistake this year, expending many person-hours of wiring and splicing to prepare a ten-second effect in the meadow: ranks of Critical Acclaim and Violence Ammunition warheads detonating in the grass from the mountain to the stream. Mark and I crouched in the dark as, keeping the beat, he handed me wire leads and I touched them to a battery. I had envisioned a barrage rolling toward the audience. The percussive aspect was gratifying–and would have been more so if I hadn’t missed connecting one of the ranks. But people didn’t much get the visual idea, surely because their gazes composed the explosions frontally, in pictorial space. Middle ground (between near and far, and properly the domain of sculpture) is a headache in fireworks as in landscape painting. Only Van Gogh ever did major things with it, by accounting for its every dip and veer with cobbled strokes. Give me a ton of money, several miles of wire, and a huge crew, and I’ll do you a Van Gogh.
The finest fireworks tour de force I ever saw (only on TV, alas) was the Eiffel Tower on Millennium Eve. There had to be hundreds of thousands of charges set off in geometric patterns and syncopated rhythms: classicist. (As a northern type, I’m a romantic, but teachable.) I mentioned that masterpiece to Joe. He tensed up. “Fuckin’ French,” he said bitterly. “The best. We just think we do it.” The example gave me the idea of loading our big willow tree with cakes (Niagara Falls–white balls and spark showers) fused in overlapping sequence and aimed to bounce around in the branches. The tree appeared to disintegrate in concatenating fire. This is the one stunt we do that I am perfectly happy with. This year, we duct-taped Snow Storm fountains into two hawthornes near the mountain, to enchanting effect. Look for more of those next year.
I recently heard an eyewitness account of New Year’s fireworks in Naples: how the city blazes with amateur stuff for hours, then the official show erupts all over the magnificent bay. I am proud that this fits my own instinctive pattern. At Brooke’s and my party, inexhaustible heaps are set out of small and medium rockets, firecrackers, minor tubes, Roman candles, flying spinners, sparklers (the multistage, spitting kind), and novelty items (such as little boats which, afloat on our pond, putt forward, shoot cannons, and launch helicopters). People may help themselves all day. Age restriction: ability to use a Bic lighter. Small kids radiate bliss that disarms leery parents. O.K., ten-year-old boys can be a pain (vide Lord of the Flies). This year, I passed one who was twisting rocket fuses together for a multiple launch and heard him growl, “They will feel my power.”
How much does all of this cost? I was tickled last year when some people formed a pool to guess, and their low figure for the show alone was $5,000. Three of us, splitting the bill, had spent a total of $1,300. Never underestimate Chinese productivity. Of course, we must escalate each year. Maybe someday I’ll hit the reset button and begin again with bottle rockets on the porch.
Isn’t it dangerous? (I hear you, reader.) I eschew cherry bombs, M-Sos, and anything else paramilitary. Fireworks should destroy only themselves. Slight burns are the worst peril with what we use–barring extraordinary misfortune which, in fifteen years, has yet to occur. Well, during the show this year an outsized Roman candle, brand-named Brilliant Envoy, fell over and fired into the crowd. That was sobering. Observing with horror from across the stream, I marveled at the alacrity with which human beings can remove themselves from the flight paths of flaming balls. Whew. And once, years ago, my sister Mary was soldiering in the front line as usual, when her hair caught fire. Someone whopped her about the head until the flames went out, and she returned to duty almost without missing a beat.
It’s incredible in the front line: infernal fire, smoke, noise, and scampering bodies. Fireworks condense the fun parts of war, without the bad. Occasionally, a rookie freezes up or skedaddles. Few of us, including me, have ever seen our show. I’ve viewed a couple of volunteer videos and some photographs. I was interested, but for anyone to step back and record the event seems to me misguided. Fireworks are a participatory experience, like sex. Be there or be square.
People who think they’re being funny call me a pyromaniac. I resent that. Refer to me and my kind as pyrophiles, if you please. Or else, Pyro-Americans.
The political content of the Fourth should be kept freshly in mind: kicking English ass. Every rocket is targeted spiritually at old George Three. Last year, atop the bonfire that instantly follows our show, we flew a vast Union Jack painted on muslin by Hannah Harvey. Seamus dug that. English guests at the party took it a mite queasily. I assured them of our benevolence. I quoted Winston Churchill: “In victory, magnanimity.” And Ulysses S. Grant: “If we have to fight, let us do it all at once and then make friends.” (Notice: all words of one syllable. Amazing writer.)
I suppose that, psychologically, a defiant devotion to something illegal, morally woozy, or just foolish–fireworks no less than drugs or art–is neurotic in a particular vein. It may express stubborn loyalty to the person or persons who, when we were children, conveyed to us that we were, or even perhaps ought to be, bad. I have ideas about myself in this regard.

Fairyland is every man’s dream of perfection, and changes, dreamlike, with the mood of the dreamer. For one, it is a scene of virgin, summery Nature undefiled by even the necessary works of man. For another, it is a place where there exist no codes, conventions, or moral laws, and where people love or hate at sight, having their virtues and vices writ large upon them. For another, it is a champaign dotted with fine castles, in which live sweet ladies clad in silk, spinning, and singing as they spin, and noble knights who do courteous battle with each other in forest glades; or a region of uncanny magic, haunting music, elves, and charmed airs and waters. For still another, it may be an anarchy of the beautiful touched with terror, tenanted by spirits who must be propitiated with cakes left on the window sill and soft words spoken up the chimney at night. No two minds see fairlyland alike or demand like gifts from it, and to the same fancy it alters from day to day, as the winds change which blow about a house, and with as little apparent reason. Nevertheless, it gives by contraries so accurate a reflection of life that the spirit of an age is more essentially mirrored in its fairytales than in the most painstaking chronicle of a contemporary diarist.
The visions of what is called idealism are only reflections of fairland and its experiences; they share with the scenes of that wonderful domain the merit of telling the truth about those who see them, and of telling it the more clearly because unconsciously. Yet, there have arisen in the last half-century, more or less, certain long-faced, earnest, intent, and seemingly very daring people, who inform us sadly that we must look dull facts in the face if we would see truth, that we must not delude ourselves with rosy dreams or golden castles in Spain. By way of showing us how to proceed, they rake over the rubbish heaps of humanity in its close alleys and noisome slums to find fragments of broken moral crockery, to nose out the vices of unfortunate people, to set upon them the worst possible interpretation for the social system, and, by the simple process of multiplication, to construct from them what they consider typical human beings.
Determining to hide nothing, and to show every side of life impartially, they forget that the things which necessarily strike them most in their impartial survey and appear most emphatic in their work are mere offal of the senses–as a man with a delicate sense of smell would find unpleasant odors the chief feature of life in a hovel of disease. Boldly declaring that they will cast aside all factitious optimism, they automatically choose the dark aspect of all things in order to be on the safe side; as a result, unpleasantness becomes associated in their minds with truth, and if they wish to produce a faultlessly exact portrait of a man, all they need do is to paint his weaknesses and then, for the sake of propitiating the instinct of kindness left by some oversight in their hearts, to explain that his shortcomings are the inevitable consequences of a mistaken scheme of life. There remains only to set down the man thus portrayed in a milieu, the dullness, sordidness, and stuffiness of which is “reproduced” with a monotonous and facile elaboration hitherto unknown in art, and a masterpiece of realism is obtained. It is hardly surprising that when such stuff is given to tired and overworked men and women with unsteady nerves as a study for their leisure hours, it is apt to cause a certain flavor of despondency and pessimism to become characteristic of the time, with the social result that if any difficult problem of life clamors to be solved, those best equipped for solving it have utterly lost all youthful hope and cheer and have no energy for the labor. They pass on with sighs, leaving the task to bureaucrats and party politicians.
It is an old sneer, no doubt, that realism is a picker-up of life’s refuse, and it may be just that any point of view which belongs to a large class of people should find representation in art. But it has never been proved to the satisfaction of the most reasonable and easily convinced visionary that the realistic is a definite point of view. For, in truth, it is only the mood of every man’s dull and depressed hours. We are all realists at times, just as we are all sensualists at times, all liars at times, and all cowards at times. And if it be urged that for this very reason, because it is human, realism is essential to art, the obvious answer comes that this claim entitles it, at most, to a niche in the temple, not, as at present, to a domination of the whole ritual. Truth in art, as in other things, should not be sought by that process of exhaustion encouraged so fatally in our age by the pedants of science, and by their fallacy that it may be discovered by considering all the possibilities: a method which surrenders intuition and all the soul’s fine instincts to receive in exchange a handful of theories, which, compared with the infinite forms of immortal truth known to the gods, are as a handful of pebbles to a thousand miles of shingly beach.
Faulty as its philosophy is, however, the realistic creed that dominates our literature is not due so much to bad theories as to bad art. To be an idealist, one must have a vision and an ideal; to be a realist, only a plodding, mechanical eye. Of all forms of art, realism is the easiest to practice, because of all forms of mind the dull mind is commonest. The most unimaginative or uneducated person in the world can describe a dull scene dully, as the worst builder can produce an ugly house. To those who say that there are artists, called realists, who produce work which is neither ugly nor dull nor painful, any man who has walked down a commonplace city street at twilight, just as the lamps are lit, can reply that such artists are not realists, but the most courageous of idealists, for they exalt the sordid to a vision of magic, and create pure beauty out of plaster and vile dust.

Coming of age in the heyday of punk, during the late nineteen seventies, I believed that we were living at the end of something–of the American dream, Modernism, the industrial economy, or a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us, in the cities, which were literally in ruins: the South Bronx, Detroit, downtown Oakland, South Central Los Angeles. Modernist housing projects across the country were in a state of collapse, and the shipping piers that had once been key to New York’s economy had been abandoned, as had the once-great Southern Pacific railyard, Mission Bay, in San Francisco, along with the city’s two most visible breweries. Vacant lots, like missing teeth, gave a lopsided grin to the streets we haunted; ruin was everywhere. Indeed, the ruins of America’s great cities were the emblematic places of this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic. Like most aesthetics, punk too contained an ethic, a worldview, with a mandate on how to act and how to live.
What is a ruin, after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of its values lies in its similarity to the wilderness: a place mysterious, slightly dangerous, full of the promise of the unknown, with all its epiphanies. Cities are built by men (and, to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, and the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick. Nature takes over when, for economic or political reasons, maintenance is withdrawn. Sometimes, ruins are created by active attack, by the vandalism, arson, and war in which humans run wild–or by terrorism, a devastating fact of which we recently have been reminded.
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, regulate, and earn. As such, ruins are the unconscious of a city, its memory, darkness, and lost land. In this, ruins truly bring the city to life. The act of eradicating ruins from the city often functions as an urban lobotomy, erasing its ability to dream. This kind of rationalist amnesia is a current mental illness for American cities, as the Disneyfication of Times Square or the generic developments of Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco or Horton Plaza in San Diego bear out. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and, as such, it is an ideal home for art, which also is an activity that falls outside ordinary production and consumption. Art, though it may enter the marketplace, needs to be born outside of it–someplace more weedy, wild, unregulated, and erotic–or at least so needs the romantic art that I, who came of age in the ruins, identify with most.
For example, the performance trio Survival Research Labs staged at least one of their mechanical extravaganzas of violence and entropy in the ruins of the brewery in San Francisco’s South of Market, when that neighborhood was still made up mostly of small industrial sites and leather bars. The abandoned beer vats–I think it had been a Hamms brewery–stood like ominous giants amid chunks of cement ringed by a cyclone fence. We stood around and watched, as ingenious machines destroyed each other and menaced the audience in a baleful setting. At the time, we thought SRL’s performances were about the future, just as we thought the apocalyptic film Road Warrior was about the future. But, in reality, they exemplified the concept behind the 1985 Oakland Museum exhibition “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”–depicting only how the future looks from a now-historic point in time. It was the era of Reagan’s nuclear brinkmanship, and postnuclear ruins figured in every anxious imagination. “The living will envy the dead” was the phrase Nuclear Freeze activists recited like a mantra.
SRL was describing what was breaking down, but their industrial aesthetics were already nostalgic, for the great industrial cities were becoming something else entirely: San Francisco and New York were losing their ports to suburban locales, and the small industries of the inner cities were being replaced by artists, along with the smooth affluence that sometimes follows upon the heels of artists. New silicon-based life forms were sneaking into every interstice, without setting off alarms that all would be utterly changed. Nuclear apocalypse was more readily imaginable than was the coming digital revolution. Things may have looked bleak, and we were dressed for it, in sensuously tactile leather, boots, spikes–and lots of black. “London is burning,” called out The Clash, “But I, I, I, live by the river,” as Jacques Reda published in Les ruines de Paris. We young preferred to imagine ourselves dying rather than becoming middle-aged, and apocalypse was the planetary equivalent we anticipated.
Punk’s godfather Iggy Pop–who once sang about “walking down the street with a heart full of napalm”–is today a no-longer-beautiful, golf-playing Republican. A big-box Costco stands where SRL once performed, as generic, efficient, and quotidian a place as could be imagined, a place that shoves urbanism into suburbia. In many ways, suburbia has become urbanism’s middle-age, a blander, safer, more sequestered version of hectic city life. It was only in the intermission between the original Modernist city era of production and today’s era of consumption that the playful anarchy of punk culture could emerge from the ruins.
This all came back to me last year, when I walked into a Chelsea gallery full of the photographs of Peter Hujar, who died in 1986, during the heyday of this lost sensibility. I had been looking at a variety of contemporary art in the several galleries that preceded my momentous visit, art that was sleek, shiny, designed, fashionable, and disaffected. This art, which implicitly referred to the smooth surface of the new city, had replaced the bleak cityscapes that so moved me in Hujar’s work. The very texture of his work was different. In Hujar’s saturated, black and white prints, the world was rough in every sense; its surfaces were porous, decrepit, sensuous, full of age and an ability to absorb–whether light, meaning, or emotion. The city of Hujar’s art had a mystery and danger of the sort urban renewal pledges to remove. Indeed, not far from the galleries is Chelsea Piers, and the history I am explicating is encapsulated there as neatly as anywhere. Chelsea Piers is now a “family place,” a high-end sports and exercise complex, pricey, regulated, safe, and predictable. Full of healthy people simulating activities like golf and climbing, it is in a profound way synthetic–a synthesis of purposes and a simulation of places, though it may yet yield to ruin again. (In the wake of the World Trade Center attack, I was told that it was to be used as a triage center, except that there was no triage: only the ambulatory and the dead.)
Chelsea Piers lies where the Hudson starts to become an ocean (and, by extension, where the American insularity of the Hudson River School became international Modernism). The piers officially opened in 1910, the year about which Virginia Woolf famously remarked, “On or about December, 1910, human character changed.” One can imagine it as Modernism’s own port: immigrants, like those in Stieglitz’s famous 1907 photograph Steerage, landed there, as did luxury liners. The Titanic was headed for those piers when the iceberg intervened, and the survivors docked there a little later on the Carpathia. From those piers, the Lusitania embarked, and its bombing by Germany brought the United States into the First World War. One imagines the Modernists embarking for Europe there, and some of them, fleeing the Second World War, disembarking there, too. So, high culture was in transition at the piers, and continued to be so as late as the nineteen sixties.
Today, the Chelsea Piers’ website steers clear of its history between 1976 and 1992, when its current phase began. “The Chelsea Piers just sat there, rusting in the harbor air, until destiny called them back,” is all it claims. But they didn’t just sit there, of course. During those years, every kind of sexual outlaw and riff-raff made itself at home in this temporary, autonomous zone. On or about 1977, as attested to on the piers, human character changed again with the birth of punk, as thousands bore witness throughout the country, the voices of what now, in the shrinking vision of hindsight, look to be a generation.
While Peter Hujar photographed the Chelsea Piers, his protégé David Wojnarowicz cruised them: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture; three-legged desks, a Naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down, and small rectangles of light and wind and river over the far wall. I lean towards him, pushing him against the wall, lifting my pale hands up beneath his sweater…. In the warehouse just before dark, passed along the hallways and photographed the various graffiti on the walls, some of hermaphrodites and others of sharp-faced thugs smoking cigarettes….” The emotional, erotic, aesthetic, and ethical intensity of Wojnarowicz’s words seems inseparable from this kind of place. If he–queer, punk, desperado, activist–was an artist of his time, it was because the time in which he lived was exemplified in places that are ruinous and bleak, but somehow still imbued with a romantic outlaw sense of possibility and freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic–in the bitter vein of the Sex Pistols’ “No Future,” perhaps, but idealistic all the same.
To read Wojnarowicz on his travels through the city’s ruins is to read a description of the city as a forest in which its inhabitants, like wild animals, meet, rut, fight, and vanish again into a thicket of pillars and rubble, strange creatures that seem to walk in leather pants with racks of antlers casting streetlight shadows on old brick walls. Walter Benjamin, writing of Paris a century earlier, mused, “But to lose oneself in a city–as one loses oneself in a forest–that calls for quite a different schooling. Signboards and street names, passersby, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a crackling twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center.”
Ruins are the city gone feral. The photographer Francesca Woodman knew this when she explored her body and sexuality in a series of self-portraits in ruinous interiors, from about 1977 to 1981. In some ways, the ruins served formal purposes for her artworks. Their roughness and patina of age contrast with her young flesh. But they do more. The stains and scrapes and wear are signs of a history, of the passage of time. They speak of sadness, experience, and the eternal imbalance between the tangible length of past and the utterly intangible, unimaginable future before it arrives (as it never did for Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981, at the age of 22). They whet the appetite for the present, for the moment of consummation and destruction, risk and decision. In these old ruins, Woodman lost herself in erotic reverie, self-invention, and the spaciousness of a half-abandoned world.
That kind of age was not only sensuous, but explicitly sexual. Perhaps, in spanning vast amounts of time, it put quick acts of passion into perspective; perhaps it offered the melancholy that is so close to eros. In recent years, the painter Delmas Howe returned to the subject of the Chelsea Piers in its outlaw heyday, painting them as homoerotic Stations of the Cross, in which leathermen and other naked guys cruise, suffer, embrace, and generally stand around the industrial setting. His Chelsea Piers (reconstructed from slides taken by a friend dead of AIDS) have the spaciousness and majesty of classical architecture and magnify the dignity and drama of the buff figures in Howe’s paintings. But this neo-Acropolis burns and crumbles, as though the place itself and that heroic, pre-AIDS era of sexuality were what really were crucified, never to be resurrected.
Cities were reborn in the nineteen eighties and nineties, and most of their ruins have been redeveloped. Our new cities have no room for unproductive places; everything abandoned has been reclaimed as income-producing real estate. The ruinous trainyards of Mission Bay soon will be biotech facilities. I think of an old boxcar I saw out there, on which someone graffitied the word “dream.” This apparition gives weight to the photographer Susan Schwartzenberg’s assessment of the loss of ruins and vacant lots, what she calls “dreamspaces,” or the urban unconscious excised. I remember well the furious punk concerts in the vacant lot facing the 1984 Democratic Convention at Moscone Center, a lot that had been created by tearing down working-class residential hotels. That lot is now the shiny Yerba Buena Gardens, which always makes me feel as if I’m in an airport. Where Survival Research Labs once gleefully destroyed the machinery of Modernism, Costco sells in bulk to its members and can only be entered through the parking garage. This, too, is part of a suburbanization of the city that characterizes not only class and cleanliness (thought as well as deed), but an erased, homogenized sense of place and a shift from production to consumption. If the beer vats were the face of the local, these big boxes are the face of the global–or rather, its facelessness.
The ruins are disappearing, not only literally in the cities, but conceptually, in the aesthetics of our time. Disappearing with them is a romantic sensibility that may have looked like desperation in the nineteen seventies, but looks swooningly luxurious now. The task of the young today is radically different: to face the future, to come to terms with or subvert this brave new world of the generic. It shows not only in the subjects of their art, but in its very texture. Decay itself has been stopped and replaced by growth. As my era was defined by its relationship to the past, this one is defined by its relationship to the future. New technologies signal the beginning of a new sense of time and place, and this alone marks those coming of age now as faced with profoundly different questions than those of us who thought we were living at the end of the world, a quarter of a century ago. To be sure, the nineteen seventies have been aggressively, but selectively revived in the past few years: We got the glitter rock and disco, the polyester and platforms, all part of an official nineteen seventies. You have to look harder at underground music and grungier kids fighting globalization and sweatshops–the industrial jobs that went over the horizon in the remaking of American city life–to find any reference to that other nineteen seventies, the one that asked, as the Avengers put it, not what you can do for your country, but what your country’s been doing to you.
American ruins are something comparatively new, at least in the cities. Although the ruins of the rural South and the Dust Bowl had been documented by Walker Evans and the WPA photographers in the nineteen thirties, the American city for the most part has been the site of a Modernism that is utopian, industrial, and urban. Until the late nineteen seventies, they mostly signified a Marxist fantasy that avant-garde and proletarian aesthetics would unite in some unimaginable redemption. Of course, there was no redemption, only decay, and this decay, more than all the books of postmodern theory, was postmodernism itself, the other face of suburbia, with its white flight, vanishing industrial workers, and endless consumption. Ruins spoke of nonintervention, of places that were neither maintained in their original uses nor redeveloped. They remain a kind of free space, liminal, between roles: an ideal site from which art may emerge. For a brief moment, in one intermediate era, the city’s ruins constituted a dark playground for those of us who felt ourselves to be something like ruins–out of place, not of use, belonging nowhere, open to definition, engaging in noneconomic, nonproductive activity, imaginative, and erotic.
In clinging to the ruins as icon and actual space, the artists and writers of my generation were clinging to what was left of Modernism’s sense of a heroic mission. For the late nineteen seventies and early eighties were heroic, perhaps foolishly and vainly so, but we possessed a belief that art could change the world, that its subjects were justice, truth, and history. Since then, the culture we created has died so quietly that nobody has bothered to write an obituary for it, though we may consider every Starbucks in America–and Beijing, and Glasgow (where the coffeehouse has replaced the Romantic poet Robert Burns’s bookstore)–its tombstone. We are now at the beginning of an era whose constructions are far scarier than ruins. “Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,” sang the Sex Pistols. Now, we know where to buy the tray, and what the heart tastes like.

At the end of the war–WWII–a lot of American men came home with a new vision of just how bad life could get. While most of the population fled to the suburbs and Organization Man anonymity (those that landed jobs, anyway), a segment decided to take the spiraling, anarchic experiences of Prohibition, the Depression, and the campaigns through Europe and the South Pacific (and, as the news sank in, the liberation of the camps) to the next level. Thinking globally and acting locally, taking the brutal coercion of war as the constantly visible endpoint of any social negotiation, they continued to behave by the pared-down, existentialist rules of trench warfare: They had seen a lot worse than anything the Great Satan’s domestic wing could dish out. Many of them had lived, some for years, in a kill-or-be-killed culture, scavenging for food and shelter, surviving–no thanks to the brass–by their wits and the skin of their teeth. Now, they were expected to step into the antiseptic, paranoid sit-com of postwar Americana, a grotesque, emasculated, management-heavy, frozen-pea confabulation being dished up as that for which they had so bravely fought? Sorry, Charley. Instead, men congregated in nervous, anarchic packs. Some of them found, in the surplus of war-issue Harley-Davidson motorcycles, a perfect vehicle for their deep restlessness.
Cheap and unregulated, the Harley of the late nineteen forties was at a peak of utilitarian engineering. The company had garnered official government praise for the quality of their wartime production, and its side-valve WLA was a rugged, easily repaired, mechanical warhorse–planned obsolescence and strict manufacturing codes for street legality being things of the future. Easily repaired meant easily modified, as well, but that’s getting ahead of the story. Demobilized in California, and not particularly eager either to return to their parents’ Midwestern farms or to study painting on the GI Bill, the ex-soldiers ranged across the state on their bikes, regrouped and unprecedentedly mobile, looking for ways to keep the adrenaline rushing.
This dispersed energy came to a head in 1947, in Hollister, a small California community known as the garlic basket of the nation. Locals were puzzled and frightened when their annual Fourth of July motorbike scramble drew a staggering 4,000 participants from across the state. The bikers basically took over the town: sleeping in the park, guzzling beer at Johnnie’s bar (and everywhere else), fighting, pissing in the gutters, pitching woo with the Miss Garlic Queen contestants, and racing up and down Main Street at breakneck speed. Fifty men were arrested for drunkenness or brawling or indecent exposure, and the rest moved on. A journalist-come-lately from the San Francisco Chronicle smelled a story and concocted a more outrageous version of the weekend’s events, posing a woozy straggler–a member of the Oakland area motorcycle club called “The Booze Fighters”–on his Harley Knucklehead in front of the litter-strewn Johnnie’s. The wire services gleefully picked up the story; the posed snapshot made the cover of LIFE, and a new American mythology was born.
Still, it took seven years for the seed of the “motorcycle outlaw” that had been planted in the American collective unconscious to erupt in pop culture as The Wild One. Though the Actor’s Studio would deny it, Marlon Brando’s performance in the movie as bike-gang leader Johnny seared his screen presence into the contemporary pop canon far more than did his institutionally celebrated role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. The archetype of the black-leather-clad, misunderstood, faintly androgynous, anti-authoritarian, deep-but-inarticulate, postadolescent male on a motorcycle is among the most important icons of American lore, and it cemented Brando’s near-mythical status for the rest of his checkered career. Indeed, not only Brando, but a core group of pop-culture luminaries–James Dean, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed, as well countless lesser talents–owe most of their ongoing iconic significance to their association with biker aesthetics. While the shiny leather and insolent posture count for much, the potency of this icon derives from its reference to that throbbing, snarling robot monster between the protagonists’ legs, and the machine’s ability to transport its master, plus one passenger, to the Shining Land.
This icon eventually found a perfect organization to promote it in The Hell’s Angels, a loose-knit, on-again, off-again string of motorcycle clubs that originated in the early nineteen fifties in San Bernardino or Fontana, just east of Los Angeles. It was made up of a slightly younger generation of misfits who had come of age at home, younger brothers (and even sons) of the original cultural misfits who had tasted social ataxia firsthand. This subsequent generation had to orchestrate its own theater of chaos, inevitably over-compensating in the arenas of public spectacle and vehicular extravagance.
The outlaw bikers’ allegiance to Harleys was originally motivated by availability, Harley being the only major American motorcycle manufacturer to survive into the nineteen fifties (and the explosion of Japanese imports still a mere glimmer in Soichiro Honda’s eye), but it was cemented in the war-production honed mechanical flexibility of the machine itself. William Harley and the Brothers Davidson arguably had invented the motorcycle as a distinct entity from the motorized bicycle in 1903 and regularly pioneered subsequent technological innovations for it, including the sprung fork, magneto ignition, mechanical inlet valves, and the chain drive. But it was the distinctive bifurcated v-twin engine that minted the Harley’s visual identity, and determined its characteristic low-riding profile.
The gorgeous 6IEL Knucklehead of 1936 is an early masterpiece of American industrial design, wedding form, function, and streamlined art-deco elegance in a package that undoubtedly haunted Walter Gropius’s Harvard dormitory wet dreams for years to come. The vernacular variations on this stock cycle were to become synonymous with the frontiers of idiosyncratic extravagance afforded by American design, as well as a particularly American form of psychedelic libertarianism whose influence continues in a number of youth subcultures, from Deadheads to posse militias. The “chopped” hog–a stripped down Big-Twin Harley with modifications made to its forks, handlebars, rear suspension, gas tank, and sundry details–is an extremely successful example of a collectively designed public art form redefining a collective cultural ideal. Unfortunately for the Hell’s Angels, such anonymous and poorly documented intellectual property isn’t defended with the same vigor as, say, the songwriting of boy bands, and the outlaws found each of their design innovations regularly appearing in the next generation of factory output. The choppified Harley was chosen as the epitome of American design for a recent exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but Oakland Hell’s Angels’ President Sonny Barger wasn’t invited to the vernissage. The company itself, however, has gone so far as to file for trademark protection of the distinctive v-twin rumble.
The Hell’s Angels rode a turbulent drug-fueled cultural wave through the nineteen sixties that took them from has-been greasers in the Epoch of Fabian to psychedelic, postapocalyptic, Viking revolutionary warrior daddy-o’s who fucked with anyone who got in their way. From the renewed tabloid interest in their early-sixties’ revels, through their uncharacteristic canonization by the acid underground as models of liberated action, and up until their embarrassingly bourgeois scapegoating in the wake of the violence and murder at Altamont in 1969, the Hell’s Angels received an unprecedented amount of mass-media attention for what was essentially a bunch of rowdy blue-collar hobbyists. The Angels were lumped together with Charles Manson and the Weathermen as just having gone too far. Reeking of urine and motor oil, it was often believed, they roamed the countryside, raping and pillaging. The Harley-Davidson Company, whose market share had been shrinking continually during the nineteen sixties, watched horrified as their increasingly leaky and temperamental machines became linked with these violent avatars of the American id.
Later, William Burroughs took the aesthetic to its logical conclusion in his novel Place of Dead Roads, whose cowboy-gang Wild Fruits rolled in rotting livestock so they could intimidate the Shits with their Stink of Death. But it was Burroughs’s friend Terry Southern, in his role as screen-writer for Easy Rider, who first drove the wedge between the Angels and their machines. Easy Rider’s Captain America, played by Peter Fonda, was the template of the clean-cut college dropout taking the summer off for a road trip/identity crisis on his parents’ dime. The aura of danger that had accumulated around the Angels’ decades of alleged lawlessness now came as a stock accessory with the bike, and the machine became the symbol of freedom itself.
It took the Harley-Davidson Company awhile to recognize this shift, but when they finally did, it resulted in one of the most spectacular corporate recoveries ever, a textbook case of late twentieth-century brand-name marketing. After a series of mergers and structural reconfigurations, Harley-Davidson finally found a friend in Ronald Reagan, who imposed a major tariff on Japanese imports, which resulted in the company regaining its feet. It bought them enough time to reconsider their approach. Harley-Davidson limited its production, emphasized quality control, and began to nurture and listen to its customers. The most visible result was its Softail series of bikes, designed to trigger nineteen-fifties biker nostalgia, while referring visually to the outlaw choppers with their gang-rape connotations intact, but now tamed. This was a neat bit of semiotic sleight-of-hand, but nothing compared to the grand scale of redirection that was to follow.
Beginning at the same time, Harley-Davidson began a massive licensing campaign to secure their already considerable branding of the public imagination. Focusing at first on establishing the Harley’s identification with the titillating outlaw innuendo, the company authorized HD cigarettes, beer, and leather jackets. The public response was surprisingly powerful, and the company began to aggressively pursue merchandising deals and product placement in movies like Terminator 2 or the Superbowl halftime program, all the while reducing their actual advertising budget considerably. As a result, you can now purchase Harley-Davidson playing cards, watches, coffee beans, stickers, train sets, Christmas-tree ornaments, eau de cologne, welcome mats, piggy banks, pool tables, beanie babies, and figurines in pewter or porcelain. There have been three limited-edition leather-clad Harley-Davidson Barbie and Ken dolls, as well as a whole line of Harley-themed fine art, much of which is indistinguishable from the landscape art of Thomas Kincaide, except for the chopped hog in the foreground.
Harley-Davidson Scratch & Win is the most successful lottery promotion ever, selling over 100,000,000 tickets in the United States and Canada since 1998. Harley-Davidson Cafes have opened in Manhattan and Las Vegas. Harley dealerships have been transformed from greasy outlaw hangouts to cluttered boutiques, and the company’s official line of motorclothes has expanded to a $200,000,000 line of couture, including faux-Victorian lingerie for the ladies and pink and blue terrycloth bath sets for the l’il bikers.
The company has posted record profits every year since 1987, and there is an up-to-two-year waiting period to purchase a bike. Harleys increase in resale value the minute they leave the showroom. The Harley-Davidson name was recently repositioned as one of the top five most recognizable brands in the world, after Coke, McDonalds and Nike, all in spite of the company’s limited advertising and its having only last year surpassed the 200,000 mark in production. Another of the company’s marketing innovations is the Harley Owners Group, or HOG, a string of dealership-centered clubs that go on weekend rides and do high-profile charity work with celebrity bikers like Jay Leno and Billy Joel. Twenty-eight people appeared for the first HOG event in the mid nineteen eighties; today, the group claims close to 500,000 members. In April 2001, Harley-Davidson was elected to the prestigious Marketing Hall of Fame by the New York American Marketing Association, who noted that “Harley-Davidson means an ‘attitude’ toward living that is both uncompromising and rooted in freedom, individualism, and adventure.”
Throughout, Harley-Davidson has managed to detach the dark mythological significance of the outlaw bikers from the scruffy anarchism of its originators and the full-bore freak show of their sixties counterparts. It has successfully transferred this mystique onto patently bourgeois tchotchkes and ludicrously Rotarian good works. The company has been instrumental in transforming rebellion into one of today’s chief cosmetic lifestyle choices, with a predetermined set of incremental steps of understanding and levels of acceptance, all measurable by your commitment to consumption of the brand. And while this is nothing new in the art of advertising, the amorphous values usually ascribed to a product perhaps have never before been rooted in such a negatively perceived or clearly defined subculture.
In Harley-Davidson’s hands, the symbol of freedom finally refers only to its own publicly ratified designation, and not much else. Indeed, the only freedom most Americans want is the freedom to describe themselves as “free.” The only rebellion they want to participate in is the rebellion against hypothetical strictures against declaring yourself to be a rebel. While there are pragmatic reasons for the Harley’s latter-day success, and doubtless ethological explanations for the appeal of shiny black leather, chrome, open-air speeding, and club emblems, the real reason for the deep marketplace penetration of Harley-Davidson is a masterful trompe-l’oeil aesthetic effect: making a powder-blue bib refer to a very particular, narcissistic, postwar angst–or providing a donation to the Jerry Lewis Telethon with a frisson of rape.

Drive north on Highway 281 out of Austin, Texas, and the hills collapse, the land goes flat, the creeks and heights give way to wide ranches, farms, and small towns, which get smaller and farther between as you approach the edge of the Plains. Oklahoma is due north; the Panhandle, a little bit west; you pass through Lampasas, Hico, Stephenville, Mineral Wells. After about three hours you hit Jacksboro; a few miles north you turn east onto 114; at Olney you turn north again onto 79, and fifteen or twenty miles later you’re in Archer City–which is nowhere, really: one traffic light, a few streets, population somewhere around 1,700, just another little Texas town where they take football too seriously and you can’t get a drink on a Sunday night.
Or anyway, it would be nowhere, except that Larry McMurtry grew up there, and rendered the place in a couple of books–The Last Picture Show and then Texasville–which were made into a couple of movies, which in turn made Archer City something else, the model for mythical Thalia, and hence, if not exactly somewhere, then at least Nowhere: the remains of the great American West after the frontier had been fully settled, the cowboys were extinct, and the oil booms had come and gone. Thalia was–and Archer City is–an archetype by virtue of its obsolescence. Still, it’s a good enough place to live if you have family in the area or a local business to run. McMurtry has both. His sister lives nearby, his brother’s down the road, and in the center of this tiny little town he’s installed one of the largest and one of the best used bookstores in America, perhaps in the world: hundreds of thousands of volumes, representing the entirety of literary production–biography, poetry, history, essays on travel, natural science, the movies–all of it carefully priced and shelved in four enormous storefronts gathered around the town square. McMurtry has turned his hometown into a book town, along the lines of Hay-on-Wye, the little Welsh village that’s become a British center for booksellers, reading festivals, and the like.
Well, Archer City is a strange place. Or rather, it’s a perfectly unexceptional place to which strange things have been done. The bookstore–McMurtry’s named it Booked Up–is a sort of grand folly on the Plains, but in the context of the town’s history it’s just another odd wrinkle. Consider: On the wall of the Archer City Dairy Queen there’s a framed reproduction of a newspaper photograph showing Peter Bogdanovich directing a scene from Texasville, using that very same Dairy Queen as a set. That is, local families sit down to their burgers beneath a reproduction of a reproduction of a photograph, of a man in the act of photographing, yet one more time, a staged scene based on a book, which purports to represent, if not a moment of life in Archer City, as such–for fiction and film both have their prerogatives when it comes to truth (though McMurtry exercises them less, perhaps, than most other novelists, and in fact it was he who first suggested to Bogdanovich that realism would best be served if they filmed in the town that inspired his novels)–then at least a fair approximation thereof. And there it is, that image so many times removed, displayed on the wall of what, for lack of a better term, we might call the original. (If I’d had my wits about me, I would have snapped a picture of the thing for reproduction here, compounding the ontological layering to yet another level of degeneracy.)
Well, big deal. To the locals, it’s just an occasion for a little passing pride: Someone wrote a novel set in town, someone else decided to film the novel there, and someone else took a few pictures of the process. And while there are more antinomies to come, they have the same curious outcome: They make the town seem just a little more normal.
Thus, the movie. The Last Picture Show is a brilliant and beautiful thing. Bogdanovich had studied the French New Wave carefully and well: the handheld camera, the black and white film (this was 1972), the jump cuts and other deliberately clumsy edits. But the setting pushes the style back onto its sources in American cinema–mainly, I think, by way of two elements on the move’s soundtrack: Hank Williams’s music and the prairie wind which blows through almost every frame of the film. In effect, then, Bogdanovich made an American version of a French version of an American movie, and the result is an enduring archetype of Americana. Along the way, even the town’s name passes through a series of transformations, through fiction and back into a kind of fact-once-removed: Archer City is called Thalia in the novel, and Thalia, in turn, is called Anarene in the movie, which is the name of a real town, about nine miles down the road from Archer City (nothing was shot there; Bogdonavich just wanted to use their football jackets). The sum of it all, then, is an improbable nexus of techniques, representations, reversals, and contradictions in the service of debunking the fable of the frontier cowboy, which yields yet another fable about what happens to small towns when their moment of history is gone.
But through it all Archer City remains utterly undisturbed. We drove in on Highway 79, and there it was. Fictionalized and then transferred over into another medium, renamed and then renamed again, the town itself seems to have endured all this metaphysical mayhem without a care. There was the movie theater, there was the water tower, there was the square, and everybody we met was very nice and utterly without pretension, and, to be perfectly honest, I was left wondering if it was only me, if nothing extraordinary was happening there at all. I was just thinking too hard, again.
Meeting McMurtry didn’t help. Three of the four branches of Booked Up are unstaffed and often left open overnight; you wander the stacks on the honor system, and take whatever you find over to the fourth store when you’re done. My friend and I did just that, and we were paying for our goods when McMurtry himself wandered in; so I chattered with him for a while. A nice man, thoughtful, erudite, obviously much enamored of books and the business of selling books, and I couldn’t get him to drop the “Yeah-I-opened-one-of-country’s-largest-bookstores-in-the-middle- of-nowhere-and-so-what?” attitude. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, a book-length essay McMurtry published in 1999, he says, with regard to his relationship to Archer City, “Stay in one place long enough, or return to the same place often enough, and some interesting ironies are likely to accumulate.” And yet no such ironies, no sense that he had done anything strange at all, came through in his answers to my questions. Some of his affectlessness was simply Texas style, which understates, as a matter of honor, the obvious (one riot, one Ranger); the rest, I think, was the natural reticence of a man who knows that he can’t give a quick answer to a complicated question, and perhaps can give no answer at all. So I stopped asking. Instead, I walked back out and wandered through the stacks a little bit more, and after a while I began to think, Yes, in fact, I have come to a perfect place. And somehow–trust me, follow me on this–I began thinking about the Strategic Air Command, up outside Omaha.
You see, there are enormous missile silos dug into the Nebraska Plains, as far from any human settlement as you can get in this country. They’re packed with state-of-the-art electronic equipment, computers, security and communications systems, and they’re staffed by highly educated and well-trained technicians. I’ve seen the silos, and wondered how they would seem a few hundred years from now, when they’re abandoned edifices in the barren heart of the continent. To the military men who built them, they are crucial elements of an effective defense, but to me they’re the emblems of our hubris, seemingly permanent, but sooner or later to be as defunct, and therefore as chastening, as the broken statue in Shelley’s poem:
TWO VAST AND TRUNKLESS LEGS OF STONE STAND IN THE DESERT … NEAR THEM, ON THE SAND, HALF SUNK, A SHATTERED VISAGE LIES, WHOSE FROWN, AND WRINKLED LIP, AND SNEER OF COLD COMMAND, TELL THAT ITS SCULPTOR WELL THOSE PASSIONS READ WHICH YET SURVIVED, STAMPED ON THESE LIFELESS THINGS, THE HAND THAT MOCKED THEM, AND THE HEART THAT FED: AND ON THE PEDESTAL THESE WORDS APPEAR: “MY NAME IS OXYMANDIAS, KING OF KINGS: LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!” NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS. ROUND THE DECAY OF THAT COLOSSAL WRECK, BOUNDLESS AND BARE THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY.
“Despair!” the statue says, not just to Oxymandias’s rivals but to us, for the statute’s fate is obviously ours, as well. To recognize as much is to acknowledge that there’s always an element of desolation lingering at the heart of any compilation of human knowledge, any exercise of human powers. You don’t feel it in cities, or on college campuses, or anywhere that culture lies optimistic on the landscape. But in Archer City, as I made my way down the aisles of Booked Up, I scanned shelf after shelf, read the spines of title after title, each representing an enormous effort on the part of its author, each once the pride of some publisher and the possession of some now dismantled library, most of them probably never to be read again. Outside, the wind blew down the wide streets and across the town square, and I wondered, I really did, at the ephemerality of the entire endeavor, the vanity and futility, and the inevitable anonymity of almost any effort one can make. The Texas Plains are harsh and lonely, Archer City is isolated, and Booked Up is a suitably melancholy place, where culture and its ambitions come looking to be reborn, and find that they are mostly to die.
I browsed for copies of my own books, which weren’t there, not even among the 500,000–never made the cut, I assumed, though I prefer to think that their owners had thought them too precious to sell. Later, I found a first edition of James Merrill’s Divine Comedies, as permanent a book of poems as post-war America has produced–whatever that may mean, around the time those Nebraskan missile silos are uncovered by some future archeologist. Anyway, I put down ten dollars for it, and then I took it home and read it. And I was glad to read it, in part because of its virtuoso rhyme-schemes and luminous language; in part because the poems themselves were communications with the dead, written to bring back some extraordinary men and women who would otherwise be gone; and in part because I knew the volume, small and jacketed in silvery gray, would have another life, for a little while anyway, on the shelves of my own library.

As more and more artists make movies, build houses, fabricate furniture, open restaurants, patent inventions, and design clothing and wallpaper, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re not threatened by the specter of commercial viability. “Bring it on!” the best works being made today seem to shout, “If I can’t stand the hype that accompanies being liked by more than a handful of standoffish fans, I’m not worth the paper I’m printed on, the canvas I’m painted on, or the various mixes of media I’m made of.”
Early on, Pop Art built this wisdom into its form. Jasper Johns’s flag paintings are based on the simple idea of putting something out in the world that people might stand before and salute, as if they cared so deeply about what it represents that they would line up behind it and be willing to fight for it. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyns use the rhetoric of fame to expand this relationship between objects and individuals to the culture at large, suggesting that a painting that doesn’t aspire to popular regard isn’t much of a painting at all. Edward Ruscha’s pictures of words don’t put words into your mouth or leave you speechless as much as they get anyone who comes across them to stutter and mumble, trying to say why they are so goddamned interesting when none of their elements appears to be anything special.
In the decades that followed, many viewers were not so promiscuous or open-minded. Despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, most still tended to think that selling equals selling out–that artistic integrity is so fragile, precious, and rare an essence that it can’t be mixed with too much popularity or success without being diluted to such a degree that its original impact is lost. Unfortunately, original impact is over in a moment–and vastly overrated. While it may leave indelible impressions in one’s memory, it’s not as important as ongoing impact, through which works live in the present, their effects rippling out into the world. Although integrity is central to all creative endeavors, the stubborn belief in it became for many little more than a palatable, aesthetically-correct defense of Art-with-a-capital-A, a catchall of a cliché in whose name all sorts of boring nonsense is perpetuated.
In the name of this capitalized abstraction, we often heard art audiences decry all kinds of entertainment, decoration, and design. Yet, decoration and design are the territories traversed by many of today’s most far-reaching artists–including Lari Pittman, Jim Isermann, Jorge Pardo, Takashi Murakami, Larry Johnson, and Pae White, to name but a very few–all of whom use easy-to-read vernaculars to change the world by making it look better, one satisfied customer at a time. Or think of Andrea Bowers’s drawings of solitary sports fans, concertgoers, and karaoke-singers–surrounded by mirrorlike fields of synthetic silver or gold leaf–which drive the point home: Artistic integrity is far less important than the responses viewers bring to works, even blatantly imitative ones.
Like commercial integrity, artistic integrity is a slippery concept that’s hard to pin down. But commercial integrity typically has discernible, pragmatic consequences. Consumers may not be able to define it, but our behavior reveals otherwise: We know what we’re doing whenever we acknowledge a product’s quality and value by buying it and using it (or admire more affluent consumers doing the same thing). There is no mystery to a job done with integrity in the world of commerce: Everything is up-front and surprises are few you’re satisfied with the service and happy to be a repeat customer.
In contrast, artistic integrity does not elicit such agreement, much less a coherent definition. What is clear is that it is not a matter of what something is made of. Using oil-on-canvas does nothing to insure that an object’s got it. (In fact, it’s probably more difficult to wrestle some integrity out of these tried and true/materials than it is to use ones that don’t have the historical burden.) Nor is it a matter of how something is made. We detect integrity in movies (upon Which numerous contributors collaborate and countless compromises are made). and poems (about as solitary an endeavor as exists in our world of multitasking team work) as well as in dance and theater symphonies, pop songs, TV shows, installations, photographs, and design. What links the diverse works in which we find artistic integrity is not the number of well-intentioned people who collaborate on them, but the number of viewers who respond to them.
In mercantile democracies like the United States, a big part of art’s job Is to allow people to distinguish themselves from one another. Many use art to Identify themselves as discerning consumers, whose refinement and sophistication Make run of the mill things seem dreadful and dispiriting. The beauty of Commercial culture as a critic friend of mine likes to say, is that it allows everyone To be an elitist–a self-educated enthusiast whose passion for fine things (or not so fine things) and cultivated experiences leads to a level of experiences that is constantly tested among one’s cohorts, colleagues, and comrades, by making what appear to be hairsplitting decisions as a matter of course. When it comes to art, outsiders may perceive such activities as privileged and overspecialized, but they are not fundamentally different from those of birders, sports fans, and rock-climbers, for whom a combination of passion, talent and time dedicated to an obsession produces a body of knowledge whose usefulness pales in comparison to the pleasures it makes possible. In all cases, participation has less to do with one’s upbringing and social position than with one’s interests. (I’m not excluded from the yearly proceedings of the NHL because It’s elitist, but because I don’t care about hockey)
Self-selected elites like myself are radically different from aristocratic or bureaucratic ones, although traces of both European and Soviet models make their way into the art world in the form of snobbery and arrogance, which never seem to be in short supply. If part of art’s power is in allowing a few malcontents to stand out from the crowed, the patron saint of this process is the artist as solitary visionary or misunderstood genius: a soul too deep, sensitive, and sweeping to live among those of us whose sensibilities are shaped–and whose desires are sometimes satisfied–by mass-marketed stuff. Laboring away in his or her garret, isolated from the distractions and depravities of commerce, the alienated artist represents an extreme, idealized version of viewers who are unsatisfied by what’s served up by the market.
But there’s a difference between standing out from the crowd and standing apart from it. To stand out from the crowd can be a powerful tactic, for in so doing one maintains some kind of connection to it. In art, as in fashion and rock ‘n’ roll, the more contentious, mettlesome, and unsettling the better. To stand apart from the crowd, however, is to transform the uneasy, back-and-forth tug of this charged, often antagonistic relationship into a flat, this-or-that opposition. It is to reject the imperfections of the commercial world in favor of the mere idea of something better. The result abandons any possible relationship to the presumed vulgarity of the market and, if lucky, ensconces itself within a museum.
In academic circles, works that stand apart from the culture are said to be “resistant.” But their resistance shares little with that of today’s most compelling art, whose power resides in its capacity to throw a monkey-wrench into the well-oiled machinery of production and consumption, generating meanings and experiences that scandalize some viewers while thrilling others. Throughout the history of Modernism, this critical frisson occurred at the point of consumption, when people bought works of art, took them home, argued about what they meant with others who also cared about them, and, every once in awhile, reorganized their lives around them. In the nineteen seventies, however, art’s critical component began to take on a life of its own. Institutions in which the artist’s critical intentions were honored rose up, driving a wedge between art’s critical and commercial components, which, in the past, had depended upon one another to insure that a work would have any impact outside the imagination of its maker. What counted was no longer what a work did, but what its maker wanted it to do. The revolution became an entirely symbolic affair. All too often, until recently, the works that got talked about and shown had stopped criticizing society from within (by presenting a living alternative to the status quo) and started criticizing it from without, from the safety of the ivory tower. Modernist self-criticism degenerated into finger pointing.
Such anticommercial prejudice forgot that works of art–even those that look good over the sofa–are born out of some form of dissatisfaction with the world. Artists wouldn’t take the trouble to make the things they make, or dedicate their lives to doing so, if they could buy them in stores or see them in museums. Like all forms of commercial ingenuity, art begins when an artist looks at his or her surroundings, perceives them to be lacking, and does something about it. Every work of art is a critique of its context in the form of an object that risks disappearing into that context. Of course, there is no problem in thinking of works of art as labors of love, but we often define love too narrowly: as something pure and virtuous, that has more in common with fantasies of knights in shining armor and alabaster-skinned damsels than with the lives of people like us. The love art elicits (and the behavior it incites) is more salacious (and satisfying) than such outdated illusions allow. So too are the compulsions and convictions that drive artists to make it.
One of the funny things about art is that if you act as if it doesn’t have consequences, it doesn’t. Its hold on viewers being consensual, and its powers reciprocal, art requires energized engagement if it’s to have an effect, especially a sustained one. The converse is also true. If you act as if art has any kind of agency, it does. As willing participants, the acting “as if” is what matters. Make no mistake; mistaken interpretations are just as effective as correct ones. More often than not they live longer lives and exert more influence than more sophisticated and meticulously elaborated ones. The same is true of responses: It’s impossible to have a false one. You cannot fake it. All are valid and authentic. The only catch, and the most ambitious goal, is to get others to respond similarly–to sell, and, if things go really well, to sell out.

Trips to India in the late 1980s convinced architectural partners Louisa Hutton and Matthias Sauerbruch of the power of color. “We saw strong pinks, red, oranges and saffrons in the natural spices and the red of the earth, some artificial and some natural dyes,” Hutton recalls. “What impressed us was that the colors were used in a completely everyday way. Someone will wear a beautiful sari to milk the cows-welt, not to milk the cows,” she laughs, “but every day.”

Since that Technicolor epiphany, the couple, both Architectural Association-educated, have tried to inject whole families of hues into their work-most often aqueous groupings of pistachio, turquoise and cobalt or Schiaparelli-esque sets of peach, crimson and cerise. They’ve painted concrete, powder-coated steel, lacquered wood and tinted glass, exploiting new technologies to embrace a heartily artificial palette.

Fear of color, Hutton says, “is the legacy of modernism. It’s still seen as something quite frivolous to do. We don’t see it that way. Architecture should be enjoyed by the senses.”

At the beginning of their practice, Sauerbruch and Hutton applied a lively palette to London’s 15ft. row houses. “We’re always trying to overcome the fact that the house is like a little tower, two rooms and a staircase,” Hutton says. “Through color, one can liberate the space.”

As they transformed houses in London, they entered, and won, multiple competitions to build in Sauerbruch’s native Berlin. Their Photonic Center, with its color-tinted glass optical labs, opened in 1999; and their 30,000sq.meter GSW Building-located just blocks from Checkpoint Charlie-has managed to steal some of the architectural press from Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum.

The GSW, a four-part composition of the couple’s favorite amoebic shapes, features an ovoid aluminum “pillbox” glittering with various greens, a reception desk lacquered indigo, and a tall, slim glass office tower with powder-coated shades. “The red and pink shutters are all made of steel sheets with very tiny perforations, so they have a scale,” Hutton says. “They’re not a uniform abstract color.” From afar, however, the double-layered glass facade resembles a constantly changing abstract composition, a painting in progress by hundreds of hands. An everyday task, like opening your office shutters, becomes part of a larger aesthetic project.