(9:30)

     In Siegfried Kracauer’s, The Mass Ornament (1927), one subject of his essay is a precision-trained company of dancers created in the 1880s by a British businessman and producer of church pageants, Arthur Tiller. 

     The “Tiller Girls”, exported to the United States and then to the continent, were all the rage in Berlin by the 1920’s.  Yet Kracauer senses that the form of escapism embodied by the Tiller Girls is less exotic than it appears.  In the dancers’ geometrically regulated and synchronized patterns of movement, he discovers “the possibility of an aesthetic relation to organized toil.”  “The legs of the Tiller Girls correspond to the hands in the factory,” he writes.  They are “the aesthetic reflex of the rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system.”

     Although the girls’ scantily clad bodies partake of the imagery of fantasy and sexual desire, they are bereft of eroticism, indeed grotesque.  The spectacular choreography fragments them into “indissoluble girl clusters” composed of “arms, thighs, and other segments.”  Like the Ford automobile factory assembly line, in which “[e]veryone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality”, the chorus line transforms the dancers into cogs in a suprapersonal, paramilitary machine.  Dance is reduced to a mere “marking of time.” 

     Likewise, the spectators at these events, “arranged by the stands in tier upon ordered tier,” themselves become absorbed into the mass ornament -- mesmerized voyeurs of a mirror image, a spatial hieroglyph, of their own condition.  And yet, states Kracauer paradoxically (and this is the crux), the aesthetic pleasure derived from these mass spectacles is “legitimate.”  

     Over time, however, Kracauer’s view of things becomes increasingly somber.  In a 1931 essay entitled Girls and Crisis where he revisits his allegory of the female chorus line (it is the Alfred Jackson Girls this time, not the Tiller troupe) whom Kracauer describes as making up a thirty-two-leg “girl-machine” and striking poses that evoke the regularity of the pistons of an engine.  But as the assembly line and the chorus line progress into bread lines, the girls now appear “ghostly” and out of date.  “They come as a procession of phantoms out of a dead past.”  

     For Kracauer, the fascist spectacle was more than just an aestheticized representation of Nazi ideology; it was an efficacious instrument for channeling bodies and deep-rooted desires “into a monumental system of dams.”  And again, by 1947 in From Caligari to Hitler, Kracauer attributes purely negative and totalitarian connotations to the mass ornament: “bastard reality” and “a frightening spectacle”.

     ... It was amongst and through these cultural synchronizations during Kracauer’s time (World War I, Fordism, Taylorism, Busby Berkeley, Nazism, etc.) that the idea of surrealism gained its intellectual currency as a viable political provocation: that is to say, as a counter-response...a counter-step...against the grain of a fearful implosion into the black hole of non-differentiation, mechanical cynicism, and human ‘thingness’.  Surrealism was invoked as a controversial political re-action towards a growing, anesthetized public -- not simply as an adjective denoting ‘weird unbelievability’ as the term is so often mis-used today.

     Likewise in today’s world of group-aggrandizement, choreographed conformity, Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds, global television, and a host of other obligatory mass ornament; we devalue and mis-recognize attempts at genuine counter-response.  And this results in our under-valuing the lonely singular, the un-fundable different, the un-promoted independent, even public critical provocateurs...not to mention under-valuing ethnographic surrealism as a means of philosophic methodology.

     Within our growing valorization of social organization: fandom, ‘friends’, crowds, flash mobs, campaigns, etc.; we too find ourselves in viral monumental systems not unlike Kracauer did during his time.  Hence, as experienced daily throughout our own infectious (fascist?) cultural-technological-spectacular synchronizations, I posit Kracauer’s sentiments hold true.  Mass Ornament is socially instinctual and often an expression of escapism first, but we must always remember that it also carries potential to turn dangerous fast.  For social synchronization can sometimes lead to lock-step, and then to goose-step, where everything out-of-step gets marginalized and eventually edited from ‘picture perfect’.  

     I could easily have made this simple video 10x longer with hours of clips of ethnographic data in my TV archives alone.  But 9:30 is plenty to write this story, don’t you think?

Sleep - Faith - Together

Pictures - I'm naked

Black - Dirty - Puzzle

Leaves - Skin - Gravel

Sex - Food - Happy - Good

Twenty - Minutes - Maybe - More

Soap - Eyes - Tears

Stretch - Orange - Love - Love

Voice - Mouth - Camera - Fog

White - Noise - Pictures of stars

Totally - Remote - Strangers

Real - Maybe - The earth

Now - Now

Rush - Look - Down

Itch - Bad

Lick - God - Nothing

TV - Blow - Dog - Bye

Heavy - Little - Lights

  This project is dedicated to Miriam Bratu Hansen (1949-2011).