Imaging and Imagining the Neoliberal: Martha Stewart's Entertaining

by Anna Kryczka, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

Throughout Catherine Liu’s seminar, I found myself consistently interested in tracing a publications history of the 1980s. So much of what has come to be the canon of critical or postmodern theory was either translated or published during this decade. From Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1000 Plateaus in 1987 to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in 1984 to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto of 1985 and many more. These texts and numerous others attempt to assess that state of theory, culture, and resistance in the decades since 1968. Rather than recapitulate the reception of these texts, I will examine yet another touchstone publication of the 1980s, one that speaks to the diverse themes and tendencies delineated in those academic publications: Martha Stewart’s debut book, Entertaining of 1982.  

Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982)Entertaining offers a luxurious vision of late capitalist, do-it-yourself, domestic display.  This oversized and lavishly illustrated book contains anecdotes, recipes, and instructions for events such as a “Midnight Omelet Party for Thirty” or a “Russian Buffet for Twenty–four.”  These opulent propositions for domestic entertainment and leisure activities fill this three hundred page aspirational and pseudo-instructional tome. The interplay of text and image, anecdote and recipe enact a form of imaginary class consolidation and aggregate an appropriate visual vocabulary around an ideal form of elite domestic display. Through a scale of overabundance and the re-enchantment of material culture, Stewart conquers the domestic with an elite bricolage, thick with neoliberal “values,” such as self-sufficiency, ceaseless work, and self-expressivity. 
In the introduction to Entertaining she details the transformation of her self-sufficient home into her nascent corporate headquarters.  She writes: “My own kitchen has grown wild with detail. I think it is very beautiful because it is expressive. The other rooms in the farmhouse are ordered and formal, with few truly comfortable places to sit down—for, in fact, we don’t sit down very much.” Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1980)Stewart’s embrace of gratuitous elite display is matched by her inflated and demonstrative work ethic. Further, her assertion that her kitchen is “expressive” relates to discourses of personalization and “Martha Stewart” individualism and neo-Emersonian perfectionism reiterated throughout the book.

While Stewart does not explicitly condemn or even hail progressive modernist design or food cultures, her willful anachronism and promotion of individualism, cultivation, and self-sufficiency can be seen in some ways as a rejection of the rhetoric of access to modernity and efficiency through mass consumption. The notion that all Americans can buy good taste or that good taste can be mass produced is the tacit target of Stewart’s rusticated and antiquated mode of domestic display. By circumventing this rhetoric of industrially or mass produced taste, expertise, access, and leveling, Stewart espouses the primacy of self-sufficiency, distinction, and cultivation over the promotion of good living through good citizenship, conformity, and consumption.

Throughout Entertaining, Stewart also works hard to differentiate her own recommendations for throwing the perfect social engagement from the long history of etiquette and the tight, top-down regulation of special events. Her brand of elite bricolage smoothly sutures together a highly selective family history, a résumé-like account of her various high end catering feats, all on a luxuriant scale, with recourse to homespun expertise, appeals to modesty, and a highly attuned form of spatial production. These aspects are stitched together and evened out by the overall thematic of style and through her consistent presence throughout the images that illustrate the book. Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982)Indeed, Stewart’s home, house wares, food arrangements or body populate every page of the book. Further, the spatial proximity of the nonspecific “Oriental” cocktail party, a splash of Victorian whimsy, the “Russian” Banquet, the ahistorical “Country” style produces, through pastiche, a non-hierarchical form of stylistic pluralism. Stewart obliterates difference across culture and history for the sake of class distinction and transgressive deviation from fussy traditions. Further, Stewart’s dismissal of enervating or stifling traditions associated with etiquette manuals works to position her intervention into the advice world as well-versed in past thought, permissive, and anti-authoritarian.

Stewart’s form of opulent, home entertaining espouses a kind of self-made expertise derived from endless labor that banishes drudgery because of its “higher calling” to Emersonian self-sufficiency.  Stewart tells her own story of self-overcoming from her humble family background to her entrepreneurial development, as a marker of her own embodiment of self-reliance.  Through the compression of time and space accomplished through the elision of difference between labor and leisure public and private, Stewart’s home is offered as a microcosm of the greater neoliberal imaginary. The renovated farmhouse, transformed from abandoned agricultural relic into self-styled hybrid working and living space, manifests Stewart’s self-transformation. Stewart, too, utilizes this language of growth and personalization and uses the event and the home as metonymic stand-ins or signifiers for the self. The everyday activities of cooking and household management find their extreme and fantastic form in Stewart’s banquets and dinners. These instances of domestic hyperbole are packaged as expressive emblems of the self, while also serving as markers of class distinction and, therefore, mastery of emergent neoliberal subject positions. Stewart’s book, published in 1982, was well positioned as a manual for a newly minted financial elite eager for the appearance of cultural fluency.

Indeed, Stewart’s homestead and vision of entertaining seems to cobble together a diversity of pasts—agricultural, geographic, economic, literary, personal, and historical—made manifest through and for decoration and display.Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982) Stewart’s practice is both spatial and fiscal; she fills her home space with this ahistorical, elite bricolage through a foreclosure of separable spheres of public and private and the elision of labor and leisure for the purposes of developing her domestic empire. Stewart’s fabricated rituals and “tactical” labors manifest through the colonization of domestic space and time with form of labor that is at once ordinary, performative, and entrepreneurial. Stewart works to codify an elite eclecticism, stemming from her proposition of “Martha Stewart individualism” as a new or invented domestic tradition. Stewart turns away from novel or technocratic solutions with regard to domestic labor and promotes performative individualism, care, and craft as the route to better living.

In closing, Martha Stewart’s wholesale revolution of the domestic advice industry traces back to this early 80s moment, when she so skillfully harnessed and met the cultural capital needs of a newly configured financial elite. Stewart was well prepared for the eventual fall of the hyperactive market activities that produced this intended elite audience. In 1987, the same year the massive stock market crash shocked the finance world with the largest single day drop, Stewart cut a deal with Kmart to carry a line of affordable house wares.  Since then, her entrepreneurial DIY ethos has become fairly ubiquitous, from Stewart’s own multi-media, multi-platform, and multi-product domestic empire to online marketplaces such as Etsy. The politics of entrepreneurial domestic labor and craft production would make for a fascinating conference in itself. Further, Stewart’s home-based enterprise anticipates the ubiquity of the home-office or the “work from home” freelance labor model. Her spatial and entrepreneurial practices inflect contemporary understandings of work and leisure—in and out of the domestic context. Stewart’s eventual imprisonment for insider trading has not tempered the popularity of her myriad domestic products and musings. Her role as a corporate scapegoat, her time in prison, and her post-incarceration resurgence together form a fascinating cycle of entrepreneurial bust, reform, and renewal.

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World on a Wire (1973)

by Anna Kryczka, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s made-for-television science fiction opus World on a Wire (Welt am Dracht) made its long awaited American big screen debut this summer. A newly restored print is touring North America through January. Fassbinder (1973)This three and a half hour affair serves up a wryly dystopian vision of a not-so-distant future immoderately evocative of its 1973 production date. The delightfully convoluted plot concerns a cybernetics engineer who begins to unravel a corporate conspiracy around a government-run predictive virtual reality program.  Prefiguring many of canonical science fiction films such as Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner of 1982 or the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 film, The Matrix, Fassbinder moves his hardboiled protagonist between realities and through a dizzying array of fabulous seventies set pieces. The designed surfaces, costumes, and architecture all contribute to the resolute and somewhat maddening superficiality of the film. Filmed on the outskirts of Paris, Fassbinder made the most of this area of new commercial development as a both mundane and vibrantly plastic backdrop of cheesy cafes, sleazy clubs, and impersonal glass towers for this noir tale. 

Fassbinder (1973)The film’s score mimics the set pieces, offering a curiously effective combination of irritatingly saccharine and synthesized arrangements of overplayed classical compositions and piercing techno-noise. Like many other works by the notoriously prolific and provocative filmmaker, World on a Wire sardonically balances the gravity of its sci-fi narrative with equal parts slapstick humor and an exaggerated noir-ish sexuality and moodiness.  Incorporating curious direct citations from canonical films such as The Third Man, Fassbinder plays fast and loose with intertextual references plunked alongside explosions, and car chases. The film cleverly combines the tongue-in-cheek silliness, earnestness, a ceaselessly panning camera, mediated/mirrored/refracted vision, and awkward silences that characterize Fassbinder’s peculiar filmic mode.  Fassbinder (1973)World on a Wire is not quite a typical sci-fi action film nor is it a redemptive metaphysical musing. Fassbinder’s promiscuous and self-conscious approach to science fiction mobilizes the then emergent built environment of 1970s urban peripheries to offer a vastly entertaining and alluring evening at the movies.  Contemplating the eventual importance of then-fictional virtual, computer-based realities and the corporate and governmental jockeying around profiting from and policing these worlds, World on a Wire predicts not only the thematics of science fiction to come but also maps out the tricky moral territory involved in the jurisdiction of such virtual worlds. 

Baltz, Pfeifer, and Irvine

 By Anna Kryczka, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

Reconsidering The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz by Mario Pfeifer, 2009.  Sternberg Press, 2011

In 1974 Lewis Baltz released a large, glossy book featuring fifty-one black and white photographs depicting the development of Orange County’s corporate industrial landscape.  These photographs coolly capture the façades of the various light industrial, storage, and office structures that came to populate the landscape in and around Irvine in the early 1970s.Lewis Baltz (1974)  Unlike their subjects and despite their lack of human subjects, these photographed surfaces are somehow ripe and alluring. These desolate spaces resemble a sort of back lot tableau for some dull, but nefarious, bureaucratic or late capitalist drama.  Baltz’s façade shots capture the slapdash quality of this architecture as their imperfect textures and half painted condition come into stark focus. The wide shots of newly poured concrete foundations and the remaining patches of grassland reveal the scale of this moment in Orange County’s development. The book has no essay, introduction, or statement and offers only the locations of each edifice depicted. Thirty-five years after the book’s publication, Berlin based artist Mario Pfeifer literally revisited the sites photographed by Baltz. Out of these visits, Pfeifer produced an eleven-minute, dual projection sixteen-millimeter film. The film penetrates one of the industrial surfaces photographed by Baltz, a single camera runs along a visible track running through the factory interior and captures a conversation with the factory’s owner regarding military manufacturing in Orange County in the decades following Batlz’s project  – the other projector shows a set of hands leafing through Baltz’s book from back to front. Together, these projects extend and broaden the afterlife of Baltz’s conceptual photographs and materialize—to some extent—the purposively invisible economic activity unfolding within these concrete shells.

Lewis Baltz (1974)

A slim volume released this year by Sternberg Press, orchestrated by Pfeifer, addresses both of these projects and sets them in conversation. The book includes two introductions, an essay from 1974 by Baltz, two essays, an email exchange between Baltz and Pfeifer, film stills, and productions shots.  Notions of realism, formalism, photography as document or critique, and abstraction were among the issues taken up by Pfeifer’s project and the essays anthologized. Most compelling among the essays is Chris Balaschak’s “New Worlds: Lewis Baltz and a Geography of Aesthetic Decisions.” Balaschak carefully engages the corporate and economic contexts that produced the climate in which the structures photographed by Baltz emerged. His essay nicely draws together an examination of the Irvine Company’s promotional literature, government funded photographic survey projects, and the political stakes of conceptual photography within academic art history. Lewis Baltz (1974)It is notable that all the essays in this book have avoided many of the typical limitations of scholarship on conceptual art. Oftentimes, the materiality of such works is diminished or warped in order to fit one’s argument or a form of readymade political critique. These essays, on the other hand, engage the specificity of both Baltz’s project and Pfeifer’s intervention along both political and artistic terms. In sum, the essays gathered in Reconsidering The New Industrial Parks are well worth reading as the environment—both built and economic—that Baltz captured and Pfeifer revisited has not disappeared.  This pseudo-industrial and nonhuman topography captured by these artists is tightlipped, seemingly inoffensive and intransigent, and, therefore, merits just the sort of critical exploration offered in this book.

Strike Time: Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976)

by Anna Kryczka, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

Throughout Barbara Kopple’s feature length documentary detailing a lengthy and contentious coal miner’s strike in rural Kentucky, one can observe several forms of temporal haunting and warping. Kopple’s film makes no use of voice over narration, but rather defers to the voices, songs, and actions of the people of Harlan County.  These voices flow alongside archival footage depicting the 1930s labor conflict referred to as “Bloody Harlan County” to make fully present the long history of mining related labor conflicts within the yearlong strike. This cautionary form of haunting inflects the motivations, language, and actions of picket line participants. 

The multigenerational presence of voices and bodies that endured the brutality of the 1930s as well as those that continue to find themselves embedded in the brutal and endless cycle of the mining economy make clear the non-generative and exploitative spatial and temporal structure of the mining community.  The traces and memories of 30s era unionism contend strongly with the stagnating and corrupted unionism of the 1970s—the resilience of belief in the union over this long pattern of exclusion and exploitation is quite staggering and produces a sort of suspended form of temporality that I might call Union Time or Strike Time. It is an anticipatory form of temporal existence that will last as long as it needs to. This form of temporality suspends differences between work and non-work hours, assembling, instead, a collective picket line temporality.

What’s more, the film unflinchingly documents the ways in which the mine ownership structures workmen’s compensation and retirement produces a system in which one must be just about dead before ceasing work. The removal of any prospect of retirement results in no differentiation between generations of mine workers and produces a closed and limited temporal and spatial existence.   The undifferentiated future of the multigenerational mining community is reflected in the endless flow of brutal mining disasters, protracted battles with black lung, and the necessity of long hours produced by substandard wages.  

Kopple’s film has a particular salience in our own historical moment. The war being waged on public sector workers’ unions feels like a form of 1980s anachronism in some ways, but as the historical consciousness of Kopple’s film makes clear, this is a long and unending battle for the continued salience and efficacy of collective bargaining.  In addition to calling to mind this current ideological struggle, the miners in Kopple’s film crucially materialize, both verbally and physically, the production of electricity into a human story of nocturnal descent into the unstable bowels of the earth to produce the nation’s light.