28/11/2017

The Instagrammable Charm of the Bourgeoisie by Daniel Penny

While touring England’s Lake District, poet Thomas Gray suffered what we might call a selfie-induced injury. While looking more intently at the reflection of the setting sun in his outstretched hand than at the ground beneath his feet, Gray reports, “I fell down on my back across a dirty lane . . . but broke only my knuckles.” In case his reader was worried, Gray adds that he “stay’d nevertheless, & saw the sun set in all its glory.” Although Gray’s injury took place in 1769, during the rise of the picturesque, his accident resonates in the age of Instagram—a time when clickbait articles regularly report people falling off cliffs, stepping into traffic, and crashing into precarious artworks, all in pursuit of that perfectly Instagrammable moment.  It is tempting to believe that we live in a time uniquely saturated with images. And indeed, the numbers are staggering: Instagrammers upload about 95 million photos and videos every day. A quarter of Americans use the app, and the vast majority of them are under 40. Because Instagram skews so much younger than Facebook or Twitter, it is where “tastemakers” and “influencers” now live online, and where their audiences spend hours each day making and absorbing visual content. But so much of what seems bleeding edge may well be old hat; the trends, behaviors, and modes of perception and living that so many op-ed columnists and TED-talk gurus attribute to smartphones and other technological advances are rooted in the much older aesthetic of the picturesque.

Wealthy eighteenth-century English travelers such as Gray used technology to mediate and pictorialize their experiences of nature just as Instagrammers today hold up their phones and deliberate over filters. To better appreciate the picturesque, travelers in the late 1700s were urged to use what was known as a gray mirror or “Claude glass,” which would simplify the visual field and help separate the subject matter from the background, much like an Instagram filter. Artists and aesthetes would carry these tablet-sized convex mirrors with them, and position themselves with their backs to whatever they wished to behold—the exact move that Gray was attempting when he tumbled into a ditch. The artist and Anglican priest William Gilpin, who is often credited with coining the term “picturesque,” even went so far as to mount a Claude mirror in his carriage so that, rather than looking at the actual scenery passing outside his window, he could instead experience the landscape as a mediated, aestheticized “succession of high-coloured pictures.”


Connections between the Instragrammable and the picturesque go deeper than framing methods, however. The aesthetics are also linked by shared bourgeois preoccupations with commodification and class identity. By understanding how Instagram was prefigured by a previous aesthetic movement—one which arose while the middle class was first emerging—we can come closer to understanding our current moment’s tensions between beauty, capitalism, and the pursuit of an authentic life.

                                                            

                                                           


                                                Thomas Gainsborough
                                           
                                   Artist with a Claude Glass (Self-Portrait?), Pencil


Today you can still find echoes of the picturesque in travel photos on Instagram. A friend’s recent trip to Cuba, for example, will feature leathery old men smoking cigars among palm trees and pastel junkers. Or simply search #VanLife to see an endless stream of vintage Volkswagens chugging through the red desert landscape of the American Southwest. But rather than concentrate on generic similarities between the picturesque and images one finds on Instagram, it is more illuminating to think of how both aesthetics arose from similar socioeconomic and class circumstances—manifesting, according to Price, as images filled with “interesting and entertaining particulars.”
Price’s use of the word “interesting” is significant in understanding the relationship between the picturesque and the Instagrammable. In Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), philosopher Sianne Ngai positions the picturesque as a function of visual interest—of variation and compositional unpredictability—which she connects to the enticements of capitalism. For a scene or a picture to be interesting, she argues, it must be judged in relation to others, one of many. According to Ngai, this picturesque habit began “emerging in tandem with the development of markets.” Unlike beauty, which exalts, or the sublime, which terrifies, Ngai suggests that the picturesque produces an affect somewhere between excitement and boredom. It is a feeling tied to amusement and connoisseurship, like letting one’s eyes wander over a series of window displays.

And so, too, is the Instagrammable, a mode that is inseparable from listless scrolling. The pleasure comes when your eyes alight on that special something, which seems to pop out from the rest. This twinning of artistic and mercantile rapture is best encapsulated by a remark that a young Walpole made to Gray when the two were touring Europe for the first time: “I would buy the Colosseum if I could.” Likewise, there is no point in putting anything on Instragram that is not, in some sense, for sale—even if what is for sale is an abstract possibility unlocked through class belonging.
If we allow that the rise of the picturesque was in part a product of England’s material circumstances in the eighteenth century, then it follows that our own tumultuous economic and technological moment has helped produce the Instagrammable. Broadly speaking, I am talking about neoliberalism, defined by David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade . . . which seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.”

The picturesque was ultimately about situating oneself within the class structure by demonstrating a heightened aesthetic appreciation of the natural world, during a period when land was becoming increasingly commodified. By contrast, the Instagrammable is a product of the neoliberal turn toward the individual. It is therefore chiefly concerned with bringing previously non-commodifiable aspects of the self into the marketplace by turning leisure and lifestyle into labor and goods. Though the two aesthetics share a similar image-making methodology and prize notions of authenticity, the Instagrammable is perhaps even more capacious than its predecessor. Through the alchemy of social media, everything you post, whether it is a self-portrait or not, is transformed into a monetized datapoint and becomes an exercise in personal branding.



Imagine the scene: the rural, wild Lake District became a favorite destination for travelers wielding tinted mirrors and guidebooks, full of tips on improving the neighborhood. It was only a matter of time before they became the butt of jokes by everyone from Jane Austen to William Wordsworth.
Some lines could be pulled fresh from a modern-day critique of Instagram-obsessed travelers. In the 1798 comic opera The Lakers, tourist Beccabunga Veronique is hard at work on a painting that corrects the flaws of the Lake District’s all-too-real landscape. “If it is not like what it is,” she said, “it is like what it ought to be. I have only made it picturesque.”

Wordsworth, a shade-throwing resident of the Lake District, entitled one poem “On Seeing Some Tourists of the Lakes Pass By Reading; a Practice Very Common,” then griped at the distracted visitors: “For this came ye hither? is this your delight?” He frequently complained about the mindless tourists that crowded his favorite spots, and rolled his literary eyes about the use of Claude glasses.
And in 1812, Claude glasses and picturesque travel took a satirical death blow when writer William Combe published The Tour of Doctor Syntax: in search of the picturesque, a parody poem lampooning affected, pretentious tourists. Like William Gilpin and Thomas Gray, Doctor Syntax risked everything for a good view and an impressive story—falling in lakes, getting treed by bulls, and being thrown from horses along the way.

“I’ll make a tour—and then I’ll write it. You know well what my pen can do,” said Doctor Syntax to his wife as he set out to get rich and become a travel influencer. “I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there, And picturesque it everywhere.” Or as a 21st-century Doctor Syntax would put it: #travel #blessed #picturesque.







Popular in the 18th century, the Claude glass was a mirror that took the scene behind you and transformed it into something different, much like the filters in Instagram or Hipstamatic promise to do. The Claude glass was a sort of early pocket lens without the camera and it was held aloft to observe a vista over one’s shoulder. The technology was simple: A blackened mirror reduced the tonal values of its reflected landscape, and a slightly convex shape pushed more scenery into a single focal point, reducing a larger vista into a tidy snapshot.


                                                                 







The Claude glass is named for Claude Lorrain, a 17th-century landscape painter, whose name in the late 18th century became synonymous with the picturesque aesthetic, although there is no indication he used or knew of it or anything similar. The Claude glass was supposed to help artists produce works of art similar to those of Lorrain. William Gilpin, the inventor of the picturesque ideal, advocated the use of a Claude glass saying, "they give the object of nature a soft, mellow tinge like the colouring of that Master". Gilpin mounted a mirror in his carriage, from where he could take in "a succession of high-coloured pictures ... continually gliding before the eye".

Claude glasses were widely used by tourists and amateur artists, who quickly became the targets of satire. Hugh Sykes Davies (1909 – 1984) observed their facing away from the object they wished to paint, commenting, "It is very typical of their attitude to Nature that such a position should be desirable."



Also of interest  :

How Instagram is changing the way we design cultural spaces :  As neighborhoods, restaurants and museums become more photogenic, are we experiencing an “Instagramization” of the world?  by Emily Matchar

Some say the Instagramization of the world is leading to a troubling homogeneity. Art and design writer Kyle Chayka suggests social media is spreading a generic hipster aesthetic across the globe. You can travel from London to Los Angeles to Hong Kong and find coffee shops, hotels and offices with the same Instagram-friendly reclaimed wood, industrial lighting, white walls and “pops” of color.


No comments:

Post a Comment