Bijoux
mixed media
3’ x 3’ x 3’
1989
Designated pedestrian precincts have been common in large European cities for centuries. Usually these “shopping streets” , either open or arcaded, are developed in older, smaller parts of the city not conducive to contemporary motor traffic. Here the social ritual of the consumer promenade continues to flourish, and the concept of “window shopping “ is elevated to an egregious form of visual pleasure. Such areas are immensely popular with locals and tourists, and consequently an anticipation of intense scrutiny and constant surveillance often result in thoroughly-detailed windows for pedestrian spectatorship. The intention to direct displays toward absorptive contemplation of their contents draws the spectator into an intimate reverie past their own reflection in the glass.
Jewellery store are conspicuous participants in these calculated spaces, where storefront and display are amalgamated with equal care, often in small vault-like interiors. The experience of these glass cases gives rise to a recognition of something closely paralleling the taxonomy of the vanitas still life, that allegorical painting genre developed in Holland in the 17th century. Typically such works contain various articles - a book, a musical instrument, a flower, a coin, a watch, a shell, pearls, a human skull - revealing to the sympathetic viewer allegorical and conceptual attributes of fugitive life. The contemporary jewellery window’s selection of artifacts and objects de luxe, with studied choices of fine fabrics and surfaces, the conjoining of natural and artificial things, the intentional light and compositional care, have much in common with vanitas painting from that explosive mercantile century with its shifting relations to material culture and its formal depictions.
The impulse for reflection on mortality that the vanitas demonstrated in 17th century European culture may be reimagined in our present situation through the conflation of this art historical form with a meditation on current commodity relations. The new jewellery store window contains all the elements of the original vanitas except the critical one: in Bijoux the skull’s gilded apparition draws out those conflicted economies and terminal futilities of mortal accumulation and perceived value that our new century has inherited.
(Walter Benjamin’s distinction between symbol and allegory is useful here; the symbol has an unvarying reference, while the unstable meaning of allegory continues to shift according to context. This gives it transformative potential, which the specificity of the symbol lacks.)