Waking From the Dream: The Arcades Project, Copia , and the American Consumer

Abstract

Waking From the DreamThe Arcades Project, Copia, and the American Consumer Laura Morowitz (bio) When the project really started getting legs I started thinking about this idea in reference to the turn of the century, from the nineteenth to the twentieth, how there were some really interesting parallels, especially in visual culture and art, I was specifically thinking about the Post-Impressionists and Manet and Gustave Caillebotte, the great painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. It's kind of weird how in a sense that was almost like what we would call street photography, looking at culture and trying to see this psychological undertone and cultural underpinnings, similar, except the only difference was instead of walking down the Parisian boulevards or sitting at the train station it was now Walmart. —Brian Ulrich, Art Uncovered, November 2011 For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectic: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (N2, A3) In Brian Ulrich's photograph Cleveland, Ohio, 2003 (fig. 1), from his series Copia (2001–2011), a little girl in a red coat turns her back on the overstuffed shelves and perfect symmetry of a Disney Store display, bewildered by the scene. Behind her, in faded purple, rises Cinderella's castle, the site of twenty-first-century childhood fantasy. With her bright jacket and soft face, she has begun to resemble the cuddly toys behind her.1 While the stuffed tigers seem to laugh at a joke in which we may be the punch line, Eeyore casts a decidedly concerned glance in the little girl's direction, as if she might be on the brink of danger. [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Brian Ulrich, Cleveland, Ohio, 2003, from Copia: Retail, color photograph. Collection: Ulrich. The image captures perfectly both the lure of consumer culture and its threat to engulf us in fantasy. No corporation has been more successful than Disney in trafficking in our collective dreams. Centuries of humanity's legacy—the European fairy tale—are largely accessed now through the entertainment industry and its commodities. Its products hold power over us in part because they reach back to our deepest instincts and collective unconscious; benevolent kingdoms and harmonious villages are accessible now not through oral transmission but through computer games and packaged videos. In addition to its exploration of the bright gleam and highly ordered spaces of the box stores and malls of the United States, Copia equally images the worn and discarded products that overflow the shelves of thrift and secondhand stores and the shuttered malls that dot the American landscape since the economic downturn of 2008 (fig. 2). The perfect symmetry and vivid colors that characterize the earlier images become chaotic and faded, while the structures themselves remain only as ghosts of themselves. [End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Brian Ulrich, Pep Boys 3, 2009, from Copia: Dark Stores, color photograph. Collection: Ulrich. The photographic oeuvre of Brian Ulrich has been widely and ingeniously analyzed; his record of modern consumer culture has been mined for its poetic resonance and the way it lays bare the inner workings of contemporary American life.2 Despite their powerful evocation of twenty-first-century consumption, the photographs that constitute Copia are haunted by ideas and images first articulated by the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, in his magisterial—and never finished—The Arcades Project of the 1930s. It's a paradox: Benjamin's The Arcades Project, written by a twentieth-century German to elucidate nineteenth-century Paris, being used here to illuminate twenty-first-century America. Benjamin himself might have savored such a set of historical displacements. In the following pages, I argue that a close reading of Benjamin's texts unlocks some of the mythic, phantasmagoric content of Ulrich's images and that the photographs, in their specificity, give form to Benjamin's doomed project and to his concept of the dialectical image. In this essay, I use the language and imagery of The Arcades Project to...