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PATTERNS OF ATTENTION: FROM SHOP WINDOWS TO GALLERY ROOMS IN EARLY TWENTIETH‐CENTURY BERLIN
Author(s) -
Klonk Charlotte
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2005.00473.x
Subject(s) - antithesis , german , consumption (sociology) , subject (documents) , aesthetics , visual arts , history , sociology , art , literature , computer science , archaeology , library science
In the aesthetic programmes promoted by the various German cultural reform movements that flourished in the years before the 1914–18 war patterns took on unprecedented significance. This article investigates the importance of abstract pattern‐making in the display strategies adopted in the museum and in the market place. Philosophical and experimental psychology was a common background in both cases. Among the questions that the article addresses are the following: Why were abstract colours and forms and their rhythmic arrangement assigned such a prominent place in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century? Why were they favoured above the more traditional illusionistic designs? Did gendered assumptions about consumption determine design choices? The article ends with an account of a new kind of display strategy that emerged in the late 1920s in antithesis to pre‐war efforts to engage patterns of attention. This abandoned the attempt to make a psycho‐physical impact on the perceiving subject in favour of a discursive strategy that posits subjects as part of rational collectives.