The Worker in the Window: Class, Cut Glass, and the Spectacle of Work, 1910

Abstract

How might it have felt to have your work on display? Not only the objects you crafted, but your actual labor? He would have known, the glassworker in the window. Charles Mayer and Company, a store in Indianapolis, Indiana, “secured” this anonymous laborer for four days from the Wright Cut Glass Company (Anderson, Indiana) in June 1910 for their storefront window. There, he incised prismatic geometric patterns into domestic wares like bowl and vases, making examples of a then-popular genre of decorative art called “cut glass.” Working primarily from an illustrated newspaper advertisement for this exhibition, this essay takes as its subject a day in the life of this showcased worker and its potential social ramifications. The display, like earlier public demonstrations of glass cutting, made a spectacle of the medium and its production. Importantly, it also made a spectacle of the working-class cutter and his labor. The attraction offered a pointed opportunity for passersby to closely examine and evaluate the cutter as much as the wares being worked. Simultaneously elevating and objectifying the laborer, Mayer’s exhibition could inform how the cutter saw himself and how others saw him and the working classes to which he belonged.