That this was Argenteuil’s fate was not entirely clear in the late nineteenth century. It was a liminal space, to which the railway brought both factories and tourists, work and leisure, and sooner or later one had to yield to the other. For a while, it seemed destined to be a playground, a spectacular version of nature, made of parks and leisure zones. It framed the city with a more or less woody border. For the artists of the avant-garde, the suburb is a special zone, where the modern mix might be detected. “A landscape which assumed only as much form as the juxtaposition of production and distraction (factories and regattas).”8
Manet’s Argenteuil, les canotiers (1874) is a big picture, made for the Salon. A couple sit by the riverside, boats behind them, and in the background, the factories on the other shore of the river. (The river, a vivid blue, is not quite as nature painted it. The color came from indigo dumped by a chemical factory upstream.) He looks at her; she stares into nothingness. Bored, perhaps, or indifferent, or blandly masking feelings for which there is no longer any public form or language. She is fashionably dressed, but the dress does not become her. She is uneasy.
Clark makes much of the disjointed quality of the picture. “Manet found flatness rather than invented it.”9 Her straw hat really is flat, a disc pinned at the back into a cone. “It is a simple surface; and onto that surface is spread that wild twist of tulle, piped onto the oval like cream on a cake, smeared on like a great flourishing brush mark, blown up to impossible size. It is a great metaphor, that tulle, and it is, yes, a metaphor of painting.”10 It is the brushy top half of The Death of Marat—domesticated.
Leisure can be a key site where the abstract workings of capital present themselves to the realm of sensation. “The subcultures of leisure and their representation are part … of a process of spectacular reorganization of the city which was in turn a reworking of the whole field of commodity production.”11 The landscape of leisure emerges as the symbolic field for the conflicts of a spectacular identity. At stake are the forms of freedom, of accomplishment, naturalness, individuality.
These were traditionally bourgeois attributes, but the new middle class claimed them as their own. Canotiers is an image of leisure that doesn’t quite prove leisurely. The woman in her boating outfit and hat does not quite seem at ease. Leisure is not quite the free time it is supposed to be. Capital is already producing its own specific disappointments. In 2006 Anousheh Ansari, a successful telecommunications entrepreneur, spent A$20 million on a tourist trip—into space. But all she could think to do when she got there was look at the view and eat chocolate.12
Leisure becomes a site of tension, just like work. It is work. Manet’s last painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), stocks all the ambiguities of the new, spectacular version of the popular. It’s a scene from a café-concert, or what now might be called a nightclub. But in the late nineteenth century it was still something of a novelty, with its fake marble under electric light, its singers in ostentatious gowns, singing simple pop songs that are poor in melody but rich in inflection. Clark’s claim for it is that the “café-concert produced the popular.”13 The café-concert generalized the instability of class. It made class contingent, a matter of passing, and called forth an art of mixture, transgression, ambiguity, in which the new middle class are the heroes, always angling for a way to exploit its edges.
This new middle class was creating a new class consciousness, which stressed what separated it from the proletariat, even if that claim struck the bourgeoisie, and its cultural functionaries, as ridiculous: “their probity was awful, their gentility insufferable, their snobbery outright comic.”14 And yet the avant-garde painters loved them, in their way. Their very ambiguity made them the perfect figure for the times. Modernist art tried to take its distance from the middle class and its entertainments, but artists are paradoxically fascinated by them. This usually served bourgeois interests. A characteristic of Situationist aesthetics and politics, with a nod back to Courbet, is to borrow modernism’s contempt for the middle class, but for proletarian purposes.
Clark: “The middle class of the later nineteenth century, and even in the early years of the twentieth, had not yet invented an imagery of its own fate, though in due course it would do so with deadly effectiveness: the world would be filled with soap operas, situation comedies, and other small dramas involving the magic power of commodities…,” not to mention the pilot for the NY Confidential reality TV show. “But for the time being it was obliged to feed on the values and idioms of those classes it wished to dominate; and doing so involved it in making the idioms part of a further system in which the popular was expropriated from those who produced it—made over into a separate realm of images which were given back, duly refurbished, to the people thus safely defined.”15 This inchoate spectacle learns to feed on, and transform, popular expression, extracting and selecting images. Hence the utility of modernism as a counter-project based on contempt for the result. But it is not as if there is a pure popular art that pre-exists its spectacular fate. The Situationist move is not to discard inauthentic pop in favor of an authentic popular, rather it is to appropriate the modernist critique of the popular as the basis for a new aesthetic and political project.
Clark: “It is above all collectivity that the popular exists to prevent, and doing so means treading a dangerous line.”16 It’s the same line that threads through The Death of Marat and Liberty Guiding the People. The representation has to engage the real desires, frustrations, boredoms of its public. Yet it has to arrest these affects and make of them nothing more than spectacle. “Those who possess the means of symbolic production in our societies have become expert in outflanking any strategy which seeks to obtain such effects consistently; but they cannot control the detail of performance, and cannot afford to exorcise the ghost of totality once and for all from the popular machine.”17
Armed with the techniques of the avant-garde, one can follow in Courbet’s footsteps and re-appropriate the appropriators. The middle class are specialists of the image. “Popular culture provided the petit bourgeois aficionado with two forms of illusory ‘class’: an identity with those below him, or at least with certain images of their life; and a difference from them which hinged on his skill—his privileged place—as consumer of those same images.”18 This is the power of the middle class over the proletariat, its marking itself off both by its distance from the popular, and its possession of the power to mark that very distance. Hence the popularity in the early twenty-first century of reality shows in which workaday proles compete to become designers or chefs.19 Becoming middle class means command of the surfaces of what now constitutes the popular, from a well-plated dish to kitchen renovations.
The middle class may be exempt from the rigors of manual labor, but it nonetheless encounters new kinds of labor, affective labor, cultural labor, for which it is hard to sustain much enthusiasm. Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère shows a woman working behind a bar, fashionably made up. “The face she wears is the face of the popular … but also of a fierce, imperfect resistance to any such ascription.”20 It might also be the face of someone whose feet ache. The other’s leisure is her labor. It can’t but provoke a certain boredom. Behind her is a mirror, which famously does not quite reflect the scene we see in front of it. The effect is cinematic. The mirror shows a moment before or after the one we see in front of it. There are two alternating moments, the act of serving, and waiting to serve. Which comes first? It doesn’t matter. The picture is an alternation of these two moments, of working and waiting, and neither with any pleasure. She is, in a word, a waitress.
Once upon a time New York nightclubs catered to the aristocracy of the fabulous, to those with the looks, the style, or the connections to gain admittance to the world of the night.21 That all changed with the invention of bottle service. Buy a table for some astronomical sum, and mere money will admit you to this world which once excluded the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, with their real jobs and neat suits. Sucking the credit cards out of their wallets became the main game, and the nightclubs became big business. Nightclubs ceased producing their own special kind of celebrity, and became dependent on attracting the sports and entertainment stars of their day. The nightclub became, in other words, just an enterprise dependent upon the spectacular, rather than one of its