Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

“Characteristic of the Biedermeier period […] is the mania for [industrially produced] cups and saucers” (Walter Benjamin Arcades H2,4). For Walter Benjamin, reflecting on the dialectical origins of domestic/public space, the over-stuffed bourgeois interior is important for the technologically produced objects within it. It is both the setting for a new cult of collecting and a scene of “deadly traps” – objects to hand and weapons-in-waiting, which might be read as the paraphernalia of the detective novel (One Way Street). The origin of this homely yet potentially traumatic space is the Biedermeier interior. Biedermeier marked a stylistic and cultural shift in which cultures of collecting, the accumulation of (mass produced) furniture came together with the self-consciously public display of private space: Individuals commissioned Zimmerbilder, de-populated room-portraits to give as gifts. The urge to self-curate and accumulate may be read as a symptom of a post-traumatic culture recovering from foreign occupation, yet is informed by the technological developments of early modernity: mass production and the spectacle of the image as public event (panoramas). At the same time, the emergent Prussian state employed technology to exploit nature: Schinkel commissioned a monumental object to be created from symbolically-charged granite outcrops just outside Berlin. These natural ready-mades employed the latest technology and were transported, shaped and polished to become an uncannily monumental public version of the Biedermeier object, a giant bowl. I will argue that this might be read as symptomatic as the very dialectics of nature/technology, private/public, domesticity and violence which Benjamin identifies.