Mette Mechlenborg
HOME IS WHERE THE ENTERTAINMENT IS
Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? asked the English artist Richard Hamilton in 1956, presenting the new artwork with that title that was later to become so famous. Hanging freely in spacethe home in Hamilton’s collage is a presage of mass culture’s invasion of the private sphere. It introduces the strong colours so characteristic of the sixties and the zebra rug that irrevocably made the home the preferred setting for lifestyle and staging. Next to the comic strip Young Romance hangs a portrait by the painter Roy Lichtenstein illustrating the new art ideal. The consumer culture that staged itself in the fifties inside the walls of the home manifests itself as a Rosenquist canned ham placed decoratively on the table. The lamp is decorated with a Ford logo and an arrow pointing at the woman hoovering the stairs, telling us that “ordinary cleaners get only this far”. Even the technology of mass culture is represented in Hamilton’s collage: a housewife series is being shown on television, the radio has been placed on the floor, and in the window you see a flashing cinema sign advertising the legendary jazz singer Al Jolson. A modern hero and heroine are placed at the centre of the collage; a well-exercised half-naked woman sitting on the sofa with a lampshade on her head and the distended tits of the fifties, and a phallic muscleman posing for the audience with a gigantic lollipop in his hand, bearing the inscription “pop”. Both figures are “displaying their lats, pects, and tits as Product” (Hughes 1991:344).
Hamilton’s collage is the first work in modern art history to incorporate the notion of “pop”, and one of the first works of art to recognize the sweeping transformation of everyday life that the growing entertainment culture brought with it. As Lawrence Alloway wrote in his review of the work in 1959, Hamilton illustrates “a shift in our notion of what culture is” (Hughes: 342).
This article is dedicated to the subject Home as entertainment. In the following pages I would like to focus on this particular aspect of the home; an aspect that does not entirely explain the magic and complexity of the home, but an aspect we cannot and must not ignore.
Entertainment has always played an important role in the home. From storytelling in the light of the paraffin lamp after dusk to piano-playing in the afternoon and singing folksy songs while drinking beer. Entertainment is an important part of human history, of understanding ourselves and of our conception and understanding of the world.
In this article an anecdotal introduction to the emergence of the modern home will function as our entry point to an examination of the entertainment activities outlined in Hamilton’s collage that have resulted today in what can be called the ‘Tivolization’ of the home, and have made the home an indispensable pawn or player in the entertainment industry; a Tivolization that strikes everywhere in our culture, from the idea of the experimental city through the showmanship of politics, sexuality and sport as well as in edutainment programmes, funscapes and parks designed to appeal to your senses. Entertainment has become an increasingly important business everywhere.
Home entertainment and surround-sound systems
Two important aspects come up when we talk about the home in relation to entertainment. One is the issue of consumer culture, which throughout the era of modernism has made the home a theatre for escalating consumption. It is a general assumption that since the breakthrough of modernity the home has become an even bigger asset in the nation’s balance sheet, and that today it accounts for as much as a third of the gross national income in several Western countries (Kumar); this is a proportion intensified by the fact that our society is increasingly moving towards a ‘do-it-at-home’ economy. As observed by the Australian economist Hugh Stretton, home is the place where we spend most time and most resources.
“In affluent societies … much more than half of all waking time is spent at home or near it. More than a third of capital is invested there. More than a third of work is done there. Depending on what you choose to count as goods, some high proportion of all goods areproduced and even enjoyed there. More than three quarters of all substance, social life, leisure and recreation happen there” (Stretton:183).
In the perspective of industrialization, the Tivolization of the home is closely connected to the commercial industrySearching for ‘home entertainment’ on Google gives you an idea of the powers controlling and benefiting from the demand for entertainment in the home. This summer (2007) more than 716,000,000 sites refer directly to this search phrase. The market does not yet seem satiated. On the contrary, in January 2006 the international Dutch trend bureau Trendwatching proclaimed the home one of the global consumer trends – and recommended companies to be up front with home entertainment if they want to continue to be able to satisfy the ever more creative and demanding consumer (
The other aspect of the home as entertainment is the communication industry which provides cheaper, more mobile and more flexible inventions. This has made entertainment easily accessible to members of the household. The multimedia business in particular saw the possibilities in the home at an early stage and made it its strongest, most stable marketing target. Since the 1950s, when Hamilton presented his collage, the multimedia industry has grown enormously. The possibilities have become greater, and today cover a variety of sophisticated high-technology entertainment options for the entire family for time-consuming and challenging self-entertainment programmes on the computer and the Internet.
These possibilities further indicate that the entertainment options found earlier in the public sphere have now moved into the private sphere/the home. Today the public cinema has strong competition from the home cinema, Disneyland from the Sony Playstation, and outdoor concerts from the private Dolby Surround Sound System, DVDs and MTV. Cafés and bars compete with high-profile espresso machines, drink-mixers, home-café chairs and tables to an extent where the experience at home becomes as good as the experience out there. Among other things, the ‘home pub’ has experienced a renaissance since the 70s, when it was still hidden away in the dusty basement. Heineken has already sold more than 150,000 of their newly-marketed Beer-Tenders in the Netherlands alone, and Philips Interbrew’s counterpart – Perfect Draft – has been predicted a glorious future in the home bars (Trendwatching.com, January 2006). Thus the big entertainment experiences are absolutely not only found out there, but also at home.
Home’s best
As Martin Zerlang wrote in Underholdningens Historie (1989), the entertainment industry is closely connected to the history of modernity. According to Zerlang, entertainment plays an important role in the growing demands on the human ability to concentrate. As compensation for this, entertainment is where we find diversion, amusement and redemption. Entertainment considered as a sort of cure for the new demands on our time is close to the image of the modern home. Since the beginning of modern times, the home has been described as a place where you can find shelter, ease and comfort. A sacred place in a world of chaos and change.
This is confirmed by medical texts from the second half of the 19th century, describing a direct connection between the new conditions of modernity and the function of the home within this modernity. The texts deal with various illnesses that arose in relation to the escalating trade market that became the starting signal for the capitalization of the Western countries. One of the most important of these was George Miller Beard’s A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion from 1869. This book, based on studies of patients in New York, was published in translation in France in 1895 (Robinson: 1996) and laid the basis for a general diagnosis of many nervous ailments prevalent at that time. In the book ‘neurasthenia’, or the ‘maladie de Beard’ as it was soon named, is explained as an overstraining of the nervous system exposed to the intense stimulation of the urban world. Because the typical patient suffering from the ailment was “the mental worker”, a well-educated malefrom the bourgeoisie, the condition soon became a symbol of mental superiority and was considered a natural and socially acceptable consequence of the new power in the market place – capitalism (Drinka, 1984:208).
The cures for the ‘maladie de Beard’ were many and varied, most of them suggesting that the busy, overburdened professional should withdraw to a quiet oasis of rest and convalescence when he returned home after a hard day’s work. Because the home was the most evident place for such withdrawal it also became an urgent matter to discuss how the home could be organized so it would not provoke or excite the nerves of the overburdened, hard-working professional. As the art historian Joyce HenriRobinson explains in her article “Hi Honey, I’m Home– a whole series of handbooks and popular articles (later this became the domain of magazines and periodicals) concerning interior design and furnishing grew out of this new market culture advising the housewife how best to create an interior satisfying to her husband. Among other works, Robinson refers to Jacob von Falke’s Art in the House 1879:
“.. the husband’s occupations necessitate his absence from the house, and call him away from it. During the day his mind is absorbed in many good and useful ways, in making and acquiring money for instance, and even after the hours of business have passed, they occupy his thoughts. When he returns home tired with work and inneed of recreation, he longs for quiet enjoyment, and takes pleasure in the home which his wife has made comfortable and attractive” (Robinson 1996:102).
As revealed by this text and similar texts from the period, beauty, quiet and a comfortable atmosphere were the ideals determining the creation of attractive home scenarios. The main point in all these texts is that the house contrasts aesthetically, socially and culturally with what is outside the home. And more than that, the ‘quiet enjoyment’ at home compensates for and heals what has been disturbed or destroyed outside the home.
It is a paradox that the combination of entertainment and home, in the long run, makes it difficult to maintain the idea of the home as a secure and safe haven, or as Benjamin expresses it a “box in the world-theatre” (1983:169). If home was from the outset the main framework for various kinds of entertainment, then entertainment soon burst out of the framework of the home and opened up to the “world-theatre”. Without any doubt, one of the biggest blows was the entry of television into the private sphere.
Television: The modern altar
Since the 1950s, when television had its breakthrough in Europe and the USA, the television has more than any other technological apparatus influenced the way we access entertainment, and perhaps more importantly, how entertainment is developed. In the infancy of television broadcasting was limited to a few hours – only a third of the Danish population owned a television set at the beginning of the 60s (Carlsen). Soon, though, the media revolution gathered pace and in the 1990s it culminated in an explosion of the number of television channels – with 24-hours news services as the standard. Today it is not unnatural to have 30 channels, a television for every member of the family and a variety of accessories, for instance video and DVD players, surround systems, Playstations and access to specialized television channels. Television represents the industrialization of entertainment in the modern home.
From an interior design point of view the entry of television into the home should not be underestimated either. From the beginning, television entered the home with a natural kind of authority which very soon made the radiolose its position as the family’s favourite focal point. While other technical objects like the toaster, the dishwasher and the food processor, which at that time were put away when guests were visiting the home, and in general were kept in rooms of lower status (the kitchen, the scullery, the basement), the television was installed in (what was then) the most important room in the house – the living-room – in which the most precious family hours were spent and staged. The sofa suite, the chairs and the little coffee table were arranged to make sure that wherever you sat in the room you would have a good view of what was being shown on the screen. If the television was not placed on a plinth in the middle of the room (which often gave it the character of a sculpture), it was often an integrated part of a bookcase designed with a special shelf for the television, where it posed with the same importance as the family heirlooms and photos of birthdays, holidays and deceased family members/relatives.
Today other rooms seem to have taken over the role of the living-room as the most important room in the house. One example is the Scandinavian mega-success, the ‘conversation kitchen’ (a combination of living-room and kitchen), which in the late 90s was the room that from a cultural point of view replaced the living-room. This is where quality time is spent around the kitchen table and at mealtimes, and this is where pleasant, meaningful and entertaining conversations take place. The conversation kitchen – like any other new rooms in the house that we decorate, furnish and show to others – is an image of the evolution of the home, socially and culturally. It is like what could be called ‘wellness rooms’ like bathrooms, yoga rooms, and so on. But this is also an evolution closely related to technological developments in entertainment. You could say that today it is just as prestigious to be able to show off an American refrigerator with multiple functions, a built-in ice-cube machine or a high-tech home spa as it was in the early 50s to own a television. The television – like the American refrigerator and the Jacuzzi – is not only for your own pleasure; it also plays an important role in creating and staging your status and identity.
Entertainment for the masses
Television was quickly adopted in ordinary homes and in Denmark was soon given the popular name ‘the house altar’. This designation was first and foremost meant as a joke, but it was highly descriptive of the role that the television set was given in many homes. The television became the object of daily worship and for many people also the pivotal point around which activities in the home were structured and planned. Many sociologists consider the dinner table the most significant rallying-point for the family, but they underestimate the importance of television and the effect it has on the family life (as exemplified by the sociologist Mary Douglas’ “The Idea of Home: A kind of space”, 1999). There, in front of the blue light, today’s programme was discussed and the news was evaluated, as well as the clothes of the host or hostess of the programme. In front of the television was where you spent time together in a way that, according to Douglas, is a condition for the coordination of time and place that is fundamental to the creation of bonds between family members (Douglas 1991: 291).
Zerlang claims that entertainment is the modern human being’s substitute for the community of family or society that was lost when modernity set in (Zerlang 1987, p. 8). If this is the case, television did – at least while there was only one set in each home – to some extent form the glue that stuck the modern family together. This is what David Gauntlettand AnnetteHill conclude in their analysis of television habits in the UK:
“.. television is, at the very least, a catalyst for forms of organisation of time and space – or, to be more emphatic, often a primary determining factor in how households organise their internal geography and everyday timetables” (Morley: 90).
The comparison of the television to an altar is given an extra dimension if it is seen in the light of the German intellectual Walter Benjamin’s reflections over the loss of “aura” in “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarheit” from 1935/36. Surprised, fascinated but also worried about the new world, Benjamin predicts dramatic changes in our reception of art. Technology can bring us art from remote corners and places in a way that has only now become possible. However, the benefits of this new technology come at the expense of the “aura” – the unique mystique that is associated with religious art and the relics used in rituals and ceremonies.
Benjamin experienced the invention of the radio before he died in 1940, but he did not experience the invasion of mass culture we have seen since the invention of television. This medium, to a far greater extent than radio, cinema and photography, has replaced art as the communicator of reality. More than anything else, the medium has changed our conception of reality. Instead of seeking information, visiting foreign cultures and places ourselves, we let the world come to us in small, concentrated doses via television programmes, often constructed in a way that makes them interesting and entertaining. Furthermore, as Robert Hughes points out, we create our own television montage when we zap from one programme to another (1991). Today people all over the world sit in front of their television, zapping through a wide variety of programmes like quiz shows, documentaries, soap operas etc. and between German, Arab, English and French channels to find what they really want to watch. In this chaos of images and inputs we piece together our own private montage of the world from the existing montages brought to us by television. It is very unlikely that this jigsaw puzzle we create for ourselves is a depiction of the world as it really is. On the contrary, it is very possible that our own montage “insulate[s] and estrange[s] us from reality itself, turning everything into disposable spectacle: catastrophe, love, war, soap” (Hughes1991: 345).