Conclusion

Schwartz, Vanessa R.

Save Cite Share

Free

Conclusion

Vanessa R. Schwartz

Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion

~Writing well after the arrival of the jet, during the period when even the jumbo 747 had already become banal and the Concorde had taken flight, Andy Warhol remarked, “Airplanes and airports have my favorite kind of food service, my favorite kind of bathrooms . . ....

Author

Vanessa R. Schwartz

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.183-189

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00209.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20301

Chapter subject tags:GlobalizationMass mediaTechnology and civilizationAlloway, Lawrence, 1926-1990Modernism (Aesthetics)

Conclusion

Writing well after the arrival of the jet, during the period when even the jumbo 747 had already become banal and the Concorde had taken flight, Andy Warhol remarked, “Airplanes and airports have my favorite kind of food service, my favorite kind of bathrooms . . . my favorite kinds of entertainment . . . my favorite conveyor belts, my favorite graphics and colors, the best security checks, the best views . . . the best optimism.”1Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 160. Warhol, the great artist of the everyday, described air travel as having a total design aesthetic, but with this book I have attempted to dig more deeply into describing why it could come to define a moment and what it really meant.

It was not a foregone conclusion that Warhol would have such a positive association with the jet or think of it as optimistic, or, for that matter, that anyone else would. We may have begun this book by observing the stuttering takeoff of the jet with BOAC’s Comet, but the Boeing 707 had its challenges as well. In fact, even Warhol depicted it as a deathtrap. In 1962, Warhol began his “death and disaster series” with 129 Die in Jet! (fig. 5.1) using the headline from the worst crash the 707 had experienced since 1958. On board Air France flight 007 was the entire board of the Atlanta Art Museum and many other cultural luminaries of that city. It was to depart Orly for the United States on June 3, 1962, after a tour of European cities. The plane crashed on takeoff, killing all on board except for two crew members. It was the first time that more than one hundred passengers had died in one crash, and it occurred in full view at the sparkling new airport. Why, despite the catastrophic deaths of these high-profile passengers, and the crash’s memorialization in haunting and caustic art by the likes of Warhol, did people still fly? Is this the more “true” picture of the jet age than the optimistic visions of sailing above the weather and a life of fluid motion and constant circulation that has been depicted in this book?

~

Description: 129 Die in Jet! by Warhol, Andy

Fig. 5.1 Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet! (Plane Crash), 1962. Acrylic and pencil on linen

Let me answer by turning to another Ernst Haas image, an ad for Delco-Remy from the 1960s (fig. 5.2). The company had little to do with the jet business. As a division of General Motors, it made alternators and motor parts (and still does). In the Haas photo, we see mostly an open blue sky, and tucked into the bottom left corner four tiny jets (not passenger 707s, but military jets) leaving beautiful smoke trails of “wake” naturalized into looking like clouds. They offer an elegant and sleek image of fluid motion, while also reminding us that the photo will record this trail of motion that will soon dissipate into the sky, leaving no trace. It is a pretty picture indeed.

~

Description: Delco-Remy advertisement by Haas, Ernst

Fig. 5.2 Delco-Remy advertisement, 1960s. Ernst Haas, photographer

The decade of the jet age came to an end, but no form of transport has outpaced the jet. Simultaneously, the jet age aesthetic changed us and helped prepare us for the world we currently inhabit. If seen as a story of optimism and excitement in a vision of air travel as pure flow, we know the jet age is long gone. In fact, one could see Arthur Hailey’s best-selling novel of 1968, Airport, and its runaway hit film version of 1970, as signs that in only the few short years since The VIPs the public image of flying had changed remarkably. Rather than an assembly of elites, the people on this plane are a geriatric stowaway, a bomb-carrying maniac, and a pilot and stewardess engaging in an extramarital affair. Danger erupts in the skies. The weather—a huge snowstorm—has hobbled the airport team’s ability to clear a runway of a banked plane so that a crippled 707 can land safely. Community activists, in the meantime, complaining about the “jet whine” caused by the takeoff and landing of the planes, had already forced the closure of the airport’s only other runway. At the end of the day only the crazy passenger dies and the ground crew saves the day, and the film could use Frank Sinatra’s song “Come Fly with Me” only as a sick joke. There did not seem to be anything glamorous or fluid about this ride.

The success of jet travel and its mass expansion presented material challenges as public expectations regarding the easy mobility of the early jet age years were dashed by airports that failed to keep up with the demands of people-moving on the ground.2Vanessa R. Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” in Overdrive: Architecture in Los Angeles, ed. Wim DeWit and Christopher Alexander (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013). At the same time, such freedom of movement also led to the era of skyjacking, which itself shows how symbolically meaningful such freedom was in the first place. Although the first plane was taken in 1961, the period 1967 to 1972 became the heyday of skyjackings, and terror in the sky remains one of the greatest forms of political and social violence used today. The new security-controlled airport is, without doubt, a concrete response to the limits of jet age visions of fluid motion and experiments in people-moving in real space.3Brendan I. Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (New York: Crown, 2013).

But to focus on airports or to say that the jet age failed or to think only about whether jet travel is still glamorous misses the larger achievement of the jet age aesthetic, which was never simply about moving people through airports. The history of this new aesthetic, wrapped in the dawn of a transport age and recounted here, shows that such transport was part of a communications network of spaces, experiences, and images. What the jet created was a kind of motion that it and other media of the period glamorized and celebrated: that you could go fast and have a sense of actually not moving at all—fluid motion. This aesthetic created “jet age people” who could better mediate between the material and image worlds, saw less antagonism between the human and the technological spheres, and were comfortable rather than distressed at seeing themselves as spectators of their changing world. The jet age may not have invented or created these qualities, as they have also been associated with the longer history of “modern life.” But the jet came to define an “age” in its own time because its impact on consciousness made a significant contribution not only through the reality of people taking to the air and traveling as never before but also by changing how people experienced life on the ground in new spaces and visual representations.

By the 1960s, the “network society” had begun to emerge as a commonplace concept or phrase among sociologists and has since been incorporated into most fields in the qualitative social sciences and the humanities. Although derived from the work of such turn-of-the-twentieth-century sociologists of modernity as Georg Simmel, more recent work by Manuel Castells has identified not just the fact of connectedness but also certain connections such as those made by technology, especially mass media and telecommunications, as the basis for contemporary social interaction and organization.4The body of Simmel’s writing is relevant, but see especially “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1950), 409–24; Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (1996; 2nd ed., Cambridge: Blackwell, 2010). The concept of the network society deemphasizes the centrality of physical co-presence. In Castells’ rendition, virtuality stands in for materiality. The technological mediation of form is an initial step toward the condition that media theorists describe as “intermediality” and “convergence culture”—in which content flows across media platforms.5Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). This study has shown the emergence of the network society from the jet age aesthetic.

The period of the jet age also reorganized how intellectuals thought about and approached the study of technology, media, and aesthetics. In the decade before the jet, the “two cultures” debate notoriously emerged in intellectual discourse; it opposed art, on the one hand, with science and technology, on the other.6This refers to C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). By the mid-1960s, astute observers such as Susan Sontag had pointed to the links between new transport technology and other media, as well as to the creation of a new sensorium. She identified the centrality of speed, giving examples about the physical speed of airplane travel and also remarking on the speed of film images and the “pan-cultural perspective on the arts that is possible through the mass reproduction of art objects,” which can be thought of as a description of the globalization of culture through its reproducibility and circulation.7Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 296. Sontag’s essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility” spoke of a new unitary culture in order to dispute C. P. Snow’s model on the development of two cultures, one of science and the other of the arts. She rightly grasped that an older literary culture and the cultural hierarchies it conveyed were being replaced by vibrant visual and performing arts cultures “which draw . . . on science and technology.”8Sontag, “One Culture,” 299. Whereas art had once served a ritual function, religious and then secular (on behalf of the state) art, Sontag included a much broader swath of culture than people such as Snow would have allowed, and it would organize a new sensory regime.9An article by Justus Nieland, “Midcentury Futurism: Expanded Cinema, Design and the Modernist Sensorium,” Affirmations of the Modern 2, no. 1 (December 2014): 46–84, draws very well on this essay.

Sontag was of a generation for whom questions about the role of technology and culture had become central. Slightly earlier, in the mid- to late 1950s, Lawrence Alloway, dubbed by art critic Clement Greenberg as a “sectarian champion of most things American” and who as a young man became a key figure in the Independent Group at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), articulated such an approach to culture before Sontag did. Alloway’s intellectual agenda emerged from the technological climate of his moment, especially the advent of the jet. He refused such binary distinctions long before anyone was really talking about network theory, because his experience living as a part of jet culture changed the way he thought.10Clement Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name” (1962), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957—1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 137. Alloway eradicated formal hierarchies in favor of intermedial connections and trained a keen and even favorable eye on the way technology shaped aesthetic experience.11Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds., Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015); Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures. See also Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” in Network: Art and the Complex Present (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 3–15. In 1959, Alloway advocated that something like techno-aesthetics would be entirely salutary: “One reason for the failure of the humanists to keep their grip on public values . . . is their failure to handle technology, which is both transforming our environment and, through its product the mass media, our ideas about the world and about ourselves.”12Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959): 25; reprinted in Lawrence Alloway et al., eds., Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Pop (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 32–33.

The Pop critics, including Alloway and others at the think-tank-like environment at the ICA, grasped the heterogeneity of a newly abundant material culture as well as the relation between technology and culture. They were thinkers and producers young enough to enjoy the excitement of contemporary culture, which they envisioned as emphasizing novelty, disposability, movement, and America. They owed the existence of the ICA to an earlier generation of artists and critics, such as Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, who had been bathed in Surrealism, Paris, and the values of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Their interest in technology, technologically mediated images, and things as well as expendability was not entirely unprecedented. The Futurists in the early decades of the twentieth century had shared such preoccupations, as had MoMA, which, influenced by the Bauhaus, held an exhibition in 1934 called “Machine Art,” in dialogue with such important historical works as Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization and Read’s Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design.13See Massey, Independent Group; Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); and Sidney Lawrence, “Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Crusade, 1933–1950,” Design Issues 2, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 65–77.

Unlike the earlier generation, the Pop critics wanted to know how art related to their own time rather than to all time. To legitimate such an orientation, critics such as Alloway sought to redefine culture toward an anthropological sense of the term, as a “complex of human activity.” Alloway turned to the popular arts rather than to folk culture, which many anthropologists sought to describe as having timeless and eternal qualities. British intellectuals such as Richard Hoggart and the Birmingham School (founded in 1964) also had an anthropological orientation, but they fit into the nostalgic, anti–mass culture camp that fretted over the loss of traditional folk culture in the face of rapid change. The Pop critics, on the other hand, had something very different to say.

Alloway was interested in the ephemeral. “Everything that in our culture changes is the material of the popular arts,” he posited, which led him to advocate for the study of such cultural forms as film not as an artform manqué but rather as a modern popular art.14Massey, Independent Group, 78. He also embraced culture that moved fast: he saw culture as a continuum or “flat-bed visual field” and an “expendable multitude of signs.”15Quoted in Ben Highmore, “Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group,” Journal of Visual Culture 12 (August 2013): 205–21. See also Highmore, The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Alloway believed the mass arts were one of the most remarkable and characteristic achievements of industrial society, and he celebrated their emphasis on anticlassicism.16Lawrence Alloway, “The Arts and Mass Media,” Architectural Design and Construction (February 1958). Mass culture moved as fast as the jet.

If the mass arts for Alloway concerned that which changed, he also insisted in a later essay, “The Long Front of Culture,” that to understand culture, the critic needed to concentrate not on production, but on reception and consumption. What was the “long front” of culture? As Jacob Bronowski put it, when he spoke at the ICA in 1951 of the relation of art and science, scholars had “come to the stage in structure where [they thought] it more interesting to look for the relations between objects than [at] the objects themselves.”17Ben Cranfield, “‘Not Another Museum’: The Search for Contemporary Connection,” Journal of Visual Culture 12 (August 2013): 327. The continuum that Alloway envisioned was a network.

Art, for Alloway, could not be separated from other visual means of communication; instead, it became part of a nonhierarchical system of public information. Although Alloway is well known to those who study the origins of Pop Art, his views are as important to twentieth-century media theories as those of the Frankfurt School, French semiotics, the Birmingham School, and American cultural studies because of his particular concerns regarding networks of media culture. His views are also of great importance in understanding the link between the origins of the network society and the jet age aesthetic.

Alloway wrote during a period of remarkable geographic mobility, due in no small measure to the expansion of air travel facilitated by the arrival of the jet. In fact, he met the dawn of the jet age by hopping a jet and visiting the United States for the first time in 1958; he would visit several times before moving there in 1961.18Bradnock et al., Lawrence Alloway. Alloway redefined culture across space, beyond national borders, and as traversing media forms because he was literally more mobile by virtue of living in the jet age. This development, I suggest, made it easier to reimagine the operations of visual media as part of a global network, and this moment has shaped not only mass media but also our study of it ever since. He envisioned a system of hubs with resonant points of connection that characterize what we think of today as global culture by embracing his experience of his visits to America not as particular and provincial but as the harbinger of a new universal—and not necessarily homogeneous—culture.

Throughout this study, jet age theorists such as Alloway and Daniel Boorstin, whose own life experiences motivated their devotion and insights into the remaking of aesthetic experience through technology, allow us to locate the emergence of a jet age aesthetic in the period under examination and, at the same time, to understand that period in genealogical relation to our own. They offer excellent theoretical guidance as we move from terrains to networks, out of national media cultures and into the circulation of a global visual and environmental culture, where connections and systems rather than national distinction and competition underlie our principal frameworks of interrogation.

This book has recovered a rich period of the history of the relation of technology to culture and experience. But it has one more ambition, which is to locate the history of the interdisciplinary field of visual studies in which the project is grounded. I suggest that the emergence of the field of visual studies hinges upon the very changes—material, technological, and intellectual—of the jet age itself, rather than the critiques of the commodity form associated with the Frankfurt School to which so many studies of mass-mediated visual culture are traced. In that way, I hope to contribute to how scholars can study not only what I have studied but why I have studied it the way I have. It offers a framework for moving beyond how theorists in the nineteenth century asked questions, defined fields of study, and chose objects deemed worthy of intellectual scrutiny.

This study is a cultural history of a moment’s popular aesthetic and has continuing implications for our own present media culture and how to study it. It takes a flat-bed visual field not as a modernist picture plane but as a cultural continuum, which is what Alloway describes. It engages with a host of fields of study but does not rest comfortably in any. This approach does not “flatten,” as art historians might fret, or study something “epiphenomenal” (treating culture as a reflection of something more real, like economics or politics, the way historians often treat representation), nor do I believe it approaches its objects without the skill, knowledge, or expertise to handle them, but that will have to be left to the readers to judge.

Neither the subject of motion nor the mediation of experience is unique to the jet age. These are elements of human social organization that have taken particular shape and importance in modern capitalist societies. Yet the jet named an “age” because of something much more than the increase in air travel or even the speed that made it possible to travel long distances. The jet defined its moment and ushered in our own. The jet age aesthetic created globalization at the level of subjective experience. It was only a matter of time before we could go to Disneyland on the other side of the continent or go to the other side of the world or go somewhere in our heads guided by external images without physically going anywhere at all. The jet age produced the individuals who would create the internet and immersive virtual media, not only those people who are now stuck in airports. The glamour of media in motion continues as we develop a twenty-first-century techno-aesthetics in which we seem to be extending human life on earth, while planetary changes that used to happen very slowly seem to be happening very fast. The news cycle is now constant, as are workdays and working hours, store hours and shopping hours. The jet age may have altered our sense of time for good. We are moving so fast that time may appear to have telescoped into an eternal present.19For more on time and the image, see Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Visual History: The Past in Pictures” Representations 145 (March 2019): 1–31. But it would be a shame indeed if, as a result, we have produced a world with no future. That is why I wanted to give this story a past.

1 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 160. »

2 Vanessa R. Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” in Overdrive: Architecture in Los Angeles, ed. Wim DeWit and Christopher Alexander (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013). »

3 Brendan I. Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (New York: Crown, 2013). »

4 The body of Simmel’s writing is relevant, but see especially “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1950), 409–24; Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (1996; 2nd ed., Cambridge: Blackwell, 2010). »

5 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). »

6 This refers to C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). »

7 Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 296. »

8 Sontag, “One Culture,” 299. »

9 An article by Justus Nieland, “Midcentury Futurism: Expanded Cinema, Design and the Modernist Sensorium,” Affirmations of the Modern 2, no. 1 (December 2014): 46–84, draws very well on this essay. »

10 Clement Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name” (1962), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957—1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 137. »

11 Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds., Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015); Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures. See also Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” in Network: Art and the Complex Present (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 3–15. »

12 Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959): 25; reprinted in Lawrence Alloway et al., eds., Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Pop (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 32–33. »

13 See Massey, Independent Group; Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); and Sidney Lawrence, “Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Crusade, 1933–1950,” Design Issues 2, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 65–77. »

14 Massey, Independent Group, 78. »

15 Quoted in Ben Highmore, “Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group,” Journal of Visual Culture 12 (August 2013): 205–21. See also Highmore, The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). »

16 Lawrence Alloway, “The Arts and Mass Media,” Architectural Design and Construction (February 1958). »

17 Ben Cranfield, “‘Not Another Museum’: The Search for Contemporary Connection,” Journal of Visual Culture 12 (August 2013): 327. »

18 Bradnock et al., Lawrence Alloway. »

19 For more on time and the image, see Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Visual History: The Past in Pictures” Representations 145 (March 2019): 1–31. »

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()