Quick décor snacks !!! incl. SPECIAL GUEST ESSAY of STEVEN P.-H.
A listen (HOT TOPICS!) A gateway (HOT SOURCES!) An essay (HOT CONTRIBUTOR!) OH, MY!!!!!
THREE THINGS TODAY:
1. A LISTEN!
FOR SCALE was on MIDDLEBROW:
CRUCIAL DÉCOR TOPICS WERE DISCUSSED: design week events, bringing critique back into the mainstream, the spiritual weight of a couch, interior design as self harm, dude apartments, dupe culture, white bouclé, false notions of completeness, cinema interiors and LA restaurants.
PLS LISTEN and let us know what u agree with or don’t agree with. We know some of u have already had some opinions on the Internet.
2. A GATEWAY!
A part of that podcast was a DÉCOR INSPO philosophy. OUR PROPOSAL: even if its not sh*t you are buying (because its $ or because sometimes its a bit wacky), we suggested one pays attention to SELECT GALLERIES.
Unlike a brand, they’re far better at introducing u to new AESTHETICS and IDEAS.
From that, u can gain some greater explore individually.
Their are lots of very bad galleries tho.
Here is a TOTALLY NOT EXHAUSTIVE but list of “FOR SCALE” PREFERRED GALLERIES. Why? In part for their AESTHETIC VIBE, which u may reject, but also for their rigor and interest in a crucial mélange of new-old, young-old. (Or sometimes just old.)
AMERICAS
MARTA (LA), BLUNK SPACE (Inverness, C.A.), JACQUELINE SULLIVAN GALLERY (NYC), EMMA SCULLY GALLERY (NYC), TIWA (NYC), VOLUME (Chicago), CY (Miami), TREVOR CHENEY GALLERY (LA), SALON 94 (NYC)
EUROPE
UPPERCUT (Antwerp), BÉTON BRUT (London), MAX RADFORD GALLERY (London), ANTIQUA (Athens)
And sorry, these r just the regions we know. And just a handful of top favorites – should we be doing a full-scale DIRECTORY?
WHAT DID WE MISS?
Anybody with some hot tips outside the West/North?
3. A GUEST! STEVEN PHILLIPS-HORST ON “REFERENCES” IN A COUNTRY WITH NO MEMORY
HE WRITES, FOR “FOR SCALE IN PRINT ISSUE 2”, AND IT IS REPRODUCED HERE FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT. SO MUCH MORE (i.e. GUEST ESSAYISTS) IN THE PRINT ISSUE.
“FOR SCALE” MEMORY CORRESPONDENT, STEVEN P.-H.:
AND NOW HIS EXCELLENT ESSAY:
In Tina Brown’s memoir, she recalls having a drink at the Algonquin with the great Wallace Shawn, who shares, as she terms it, a quotable insight: “AMERICA HAS NO MEMORY.”
It’s unclear what the context was, but Tina is correct, it’s insightful. America has no memory. Pioneering homesteaders, Gold Rushers, post-war company men with green lawns, Steve Jobs, ALL OUR GREAT MYTHOLOGIES, REALLY, NECESSITATE A BREAK FROM THE PAST. Deleting what came before you in favor of “the miraculous now”. Impatience. This is the land of risk-taking, big swings, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street — so goes the folklore. But in breaking from history, we break from reality. Suburbia was invented here. So was Disney World. This plasticine fantasy is not just a result of technological advances, it’s intentional memory loss. America wants to be a vacuum of time and space, a suspended hologram of perfection, unmolested by history— and unadulterated by nature.
Ada Louise Huxtable’s “THE UNREAL AMERICA: ARCHITECTURE AND ILLUSION,” is a brilliant treatise on our country’s relationship to inauthenticity. On Disney World:
“There is no cynicism in the Disney creation of Main Street, U.S.A., even as Main Streets die across the country; there is simply no connection made between the two. Fantasy and selectively re-created reality have become an undifferentiated whole, in which the change of function to evocative entertainment cancels out the meaning and value of history and form. There is no longer an attachment to actuality. The appropriated is validated over the source.”
America, itself an invention, has a grand tradition of making something out of nothing, states cut from whole cloth, cities spun from thin air. This, too, is the promise of suburbia. Often, architecture attempts some nod to a vernacular, or at least an imagined one: Mission tile roofs for an open-air mall in New Mexico; shingled, gabled roofs at a (closed-air) mall in Cape Cod. But the terracotta tiles on the Albuquerque mall might as well be slate shingles, or concrete, or glass, because for the viewer (the shopper), the tiles aren’t referencing Spanish or Portuguese colonial architecture; they’re referencing TACO BELL. The Appropriated is validated over the Source. This is how Americans conjure their sense of place; from whatever mass market consumable feels most readily available. The contours and scale of suburban America began OUR LOVE AFFAIR WITH HERMETICALLY SEALED AREAS, luxury as defined by how much space you can have between you and someone else, even members of your own family. All this begets a fabricated existence, reliant on an aversion to the natural world, with its history, its fibers, its DIRT.
The Windexing of every surface, heavily processed foods, bringing a Beats pill to a secluded beach to drown out the sound of waves, , covering meat with a range of dried powders before placing it in a plastic “AIR FRYER,” going to the gym in a full face of makeup, driving to a supermarket a mere hundred yards away because the built environment doesn’t allow for walking; these are the hallmarks of a society that fears REALITY. The ghostly pallor of lighting these days has turned homes into hospitals, the bulbs set to freezing cold temperatures of white and blue light (5000k or above). LED car headlights VAPORIZE THE NIGHTTIME ROAD like the spotlight on a guard tower during a prison break. No longer do the high beams extend from the car gradually fading out at a decent rage, but now a stark cutoff between light and dark at the 30 foot mark. Instead of mimicking the human eye, it recalls a computer, a binary between off and on, fitting for drivers whose attention is held not by the road, but the various screens and phones on their dash.
DESPITE BREAKING FROM HISTORY, WE’RE OBSESSED WITH REPLICATING IT IN OUR HOMES. Or at least an idea of it. Current design trends fetishize the past, but what past is it? Mid-century modern is the reigning North Star for the average on-trend interior, i.e., what can be purchased at IKEA and WAYFAIR. Does the continued “relevance” of MCM mean that Americans seek a “harmonious relationship with nature”, à la FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT? Is there a nascent American desire for highly functional homes that maximize the constraints of a space, as seen in the careful interiors of RUDOLPH SCHINDLER? Do we want organic materials and warm, natural light, even? No. IT MEANS NONE OF THIS, because those aren’t the references the consumer has in mind when they’re perusingWest Elm dot com. They barely have “MAD MEN” in mind. Despite the apparent desire for all things retro, the average chair buyer isn’t looking to recreate anything, or espouse any design philosophy other than a refraction of an already refracted pastiche. The references have folded in on themselves so many times they’ve become a crumpled, meaningless ball. MCM doesn’t mean Shindler, it doesn’t mean Neutra, it doesn’t mean Knoll. It means “diagonal legs”; it’s ideas-free.
When a consumer buys a lamp with a tripod wooden stand, and big white drum lampshade, an MCM-lite go-to, maybe they’re recreating what they saw in a hotel. Not a luxury hotel, but a midscale, recently renovated hotel, with hanging rattan chairs in the lobby. Or maybe they just saw a photo of a hotel. Or maybe these imagined hospitality environments have no bearing whatsoever on the consumer’s choice, and they simply want what they saw in the photo on the Amazon product page for the lamp, which displays the lamp next to a green velvet bed frame. And it’s not even a photo. It’s a computer generated interior, drawn by AI at the behest of the Chinese lamp manufacturer. A floating lamp on a floating rug in a floating room. THAT IS THE CONSUMER’S REFERENT.
Just so, real life interiors begin to mirror these uncanny photoshop collages: everything appears floating, untethered. The Matisse-esque print, framed in white composite wood, floating above the fiddleleaf fig (there is always a fiddleleaf fig), floating on the grey floor, beneath a series of floating white shelves. THE TOM FORD COFFEE TABLE BOOK IS SOMEWHERE NEARBY. FLOATING. The uncanny effect is surely helped by the fact that nearly everything is plastic. Composite flooring, vinyl sided houses, lacquer enamel credenzas, and so, so, so many outlets. The American home is drowning in petroleum-based products. There’s an irony here: plastic, made from polymers, comes from oil; we call them fossil fuels because they’re fossilized life forms — plankton, algae, ferns — compressed over millions of years until they find a new lease on life as sweet Texas crude. Ferns! Ferns blanket the American home. They are the last thing the American consumer, so terrified of the natural world and all its discomfiting realities, will touch before he goes to sleep.
AND HERE, WE SIGN OFF ! ✨
'MCM doesn’t mean Shindler, it doesn’t mean Neutra, it doesn’t mean Knoll. It means “diagonal legs”'
So good
Suburbia was not invented in America, but it certainly took hold like crabgrass.