Modernism, Modernity and English Art

Abstract

House). George Wagner's essay is also concerned mostly with written text. But it is much more successful. He turns to male architectural fantasies in 1950s and 1960s North America to focus on masculine fantasies of seduction and control in the city and the home. This essay ranges from a consideration of Daniel Burnham's plan of Chicago of 1908 to the representations of the bachelor pad, especially as portrayed in Playboy magazine. Wagner relates his essay to the theme of the book by arguing that documenting spaces of oppression is a necessary part of imagining spaces of liberation and he sees the domestic as having become 'the most intense and gendered site of commodity consumption in the mechanical and electronic era of privatization'. He sees the articles on architecture in Playboy as providing instant escape from the feminization of the suburban domestic realm in to a compensatory urban, single, rich and male world of bachelor houses and penthouse apartments, equipped with every fetish of modern technology. But his thesis that 'public speculation of the ideal and utopian within architecture, both domestic and urban, can be read not so much as proposals for the alteration of reality as vehicles of transcendence, desire, and escape' (p. 185) seems to duck some of the most crucial aspects of representation itself. Rather than see representation as a mode of refiguring a crudely untheoreticized 'reality' from which it remains distinct, it may be useful to see representation as part of social relations enacted in specifically visual form and, therefore, as partly constitutive of social discourses of oppression and control.