The Aesthetics of Urban Precarity
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THE AESTHETICS OF URBAN PRECARITY By Anna L. Green A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English—Doctor of Philosophy 2020 ABSTRACT THE AESTHETICS OF URBAN PRECARITY By Anna L. Green Art historian Hal Foster points out that “Precarity has come to figure in sociological discourse, where it is used to describe the situation of a vast number of laborers in neo-liberal capitalism whose employment… is anything but guaranteed. This ‘precariat’ is seen as a product of the post-Fordist economy,” historically rooting precarity in the emergence of late-stage capitalism’s ever more unstable labor economy and the concomitant problems of poverty, displacement, and contingency. Yet Foster also admits, that despite our present sense of “emergency,” “precarity might be more the rule” and stability the exception, acknowledging that Modernist art too was marked by an overriding sense of chaos. In doing so, he casts precarity not as a novel condition but as a continuing phenomenon whose traumatic consequences undeniably mark and shape twentieth-century literature and art. Following Foster’s implications, this dissertation traces the emergence of precarity as an aesthetic sensibility that emerges with the earliest moments of consumer culture’s entrenchment with urban life and sociability. Responding to capitalism’s increasing ability to ratify the terms of personhood through regimes of bodily control, spatial regimentation, and visual policing, the artists examined in this project turn to precarity as an aesthetic rubric that resists these processes of reification. Pursuing methodologies of contingency, temporariness, and obsolescence, their projects—spanning from American Dada to post-war assemblage—thematically represent and formally recreate the instabilities of those who occupy subject positions made vulnerable by capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that a fuller aesthetic history of precarity enriches our understanding of modernism by seeking to understand formal innovation as an imperfect and compensatory struggle for representation against the overwhelming processes of deindividuation multiply reinforced by capitalism’s entrenchment into American society. This aesthetic history too provides a series of models of resistance capable of enlivening our current conversations regarding art’s ability to counterbalance the intersecting frameworks of dehumanization that characterize the present moment. Copyright by ANNA L. GREEN 2020 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To the members of my cohort: I continued to be challenged and molded by your intellectual strengths, inspired by the important ways your academic lives intersect with your everyday lives, and humbled by richness and generosity of your friendships. To my colleagues in the Cranbrook English Department: Only in an environment of such strong professional support would it be possible to complete a project of this magnitude while teaching full time. Thank you for your ongoing confidence in my ability to do this work. To Lee and Barbara Stevens: Few people are fortunate to find themselves with parents as wonderful as you. Fewer still are fortunate enough to find themselves as intellectually respected and valued as I am by you. Thank you for the many ways—large and small—that you helped this project come to fruition. To Madelyn Green: You started this project when you raised a reader and a thinker; you fostered it when you encouraged my passions and praised strong opinions; and you helped bring it to a close when you read and edited my manuscript. Thank you for always loving me by cherishing my potential. To Tim Stevens: I’ve fallen in love with you all over again for many ways you’ve refused to let this dream of mine pass by. There aren’t words enough to express my gratitude for you, my partner in the truest sense. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Towards a Modernist Aesthetic of Urban Precarity ........................................ 1 Precarity in Retrospect .................................................................................................................... 6 Modernist Precarity ....................................................................................................................... 18 Towards a Precarious Aesthetic .................................................................................................... 23 CHAPTER 1 Unruly Forms: The Reordering of Bodily Threat in the Visual and Textual Poetics of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven ................................................................................................. 32 Bodily Exposure: Rearranging Photographic Narratives .............................................................. 39 Aural Clutter: Juxtaposing Noise and Productive Sound ............................................................. 50 Solving Public Problems: Reordering Advertising Rhetoric ........................................................ 65 CHAPTER 2 Precarious Surfaces: The Optics of Skin, Fashion, and Decorum in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand ..................................................................................................................................... 78 The Veneer of Respectability: Rewriting How Surface Speaks Black Character ........................ 86 Sculptures Clad and Unclad: New Models of the Speaking Body ............................................... 93 Fashioning Femininity: The Precarity of Fixed Visual Frameworks.......................................... 102 CHAPTER 3 You’re Being So Good: Containment Strategies of Consumer Citizenship and Design Discourse in the Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn Brooks.............................................. 122 Lives in Contrast: Maxie, Annie, and the Failed Promises of Consumer Culture ...................... 130 “Equal to being equal”: The Domestic Aesthetics of (In)Equality ............................................. 145 Physical and Narrative Containers: Negotiating Space for Marginalized Voices ...................... 161 CHAPTER 4 A Disappearing Act: Mina Loy’s Materiality and the Representation of Precarious Experience................................................................................................................................... 176 Leaving Space for Outsiders: Silence and the Poetic Gap .......................................................... 182 The Visual Politics of Homelessness: Photography and Erasure ............................................... 200 Silence and Disappearance: Towards an Aesthetic of Obsolescence ......................................... 215 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 227 vi INTRODUCTION Towards a Modernist Aesthetic of Urban Precarity A study in four portraits. 1921: Fully engrossed in his phase of Dada experimentation, Man Ray began work on a collaborative experimental film with Marcel Duchamp, entitled “The Baroness Shaves her Pubic Hair.” The descriptive title was, perhaps, a bit misleading since the film did not actually feature the “Baroness” Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven shaving herself, but rather as the object of a barber’s careful attention. According to Man Ray’s own recollections in his autobiography, Self Portrait, “I shot a sequence of myself as a barber shaving the pubic hairs of a nude model, a sequence which was also ruined in the process of developing and never saw the light” (263). This latter detail explains why the only remainder of the film exists in the form of a still attached to a letter Man Ray sent to his friend and colleague, Tristan Tzara. Preceding the body of the letter, the still, a portrait of the Baroness, newly shaved and splay-legged, forms the letter “A” of “Amerique” in a poem that reads: “Merdelamerdelamermerdelamermerdelamermerdelamer … de l’a A merique!” (“Performance Poem 2”). Man Ray’s letter subsequently laments to Tzara: “Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is Dada and will not tolerate a rival” (“Performance Poem 2”). The identity of the model and whatever role she might’ve played in the project proved as forgettable and disposable as the damaged film. Instead, the only hint of her work was co-opted, cut, and pasted into a letter that objectified Loringhoven, both by transforming her body into typography while also taking clear pleasure in the grotesqueness of her flesh as a manifestation of the “shit of America.” 1932: Nella Larsen stands before Carl Van Vechten’s camera (Van Vechten Portrait of Nella Larsen). The image features Larsen’s face in profile set against a post-impressionist style 1 painting of a home interior; her face casts a shadow against the painting’s depiction of an elaborately patterned armchair. Deeper in the painting’s background, leaves of snake plant are visible; a basket of carefully arranged fruit decorates the counter beyond. Behind the painting, along the right-hand side of the photograph, traces of the detailed geometric wallpaper remind us of the visual layering at play: Larsen stands against a painting, hung carefully on the wall of an interior space. Without this subtle reminder, we might easily forget that Larsen herself is not a part of the painting. According to Larsen biographer, George Hutchinson, Larsen first became friends with Van Vechten in 1925, introduced to him via mutual friends and acquaintances in Harlem’s literary and artistic circles (In Search of Nella Larsen 192). Despite Larsen’s apparently warm feelings towards Van Vechten—she