“Allegory is extravagant, an expenditure of surplus value; it is always in excess.”
– Craig Owens, The Allegorical Impulse, 1032

Meaning in material culture functions on a continuum of legibility. The iconic elements of an object most legibly present meaning; iconic signifiers mimic the signified in their form like onomatopoeia, therefore allowing the ‘reader’ to infer their significance purely through logic. An object’s patina functions iconically because one can deduce its meaning – the object’s longevity of use (McCracken, 37). Physical elements that function linguistically, i.e. elements that employ an arbitrary relationship between the signifier and signified, present meaning less legibly because they depend upon the reader’s cultural knowledge. A chair may bear the legs of an ox to symbolize stability and power, but the message can only be received by a reader familiar with the cultural association between oxen and these virtues. Yet the meaning of an object can be even further divorced from its formal and material characteristics and thus become illegible in the object. Through fetish, nostalgia or sensibility, objects can carry a meaning imposed from the outside, an allegorical meaning.

Fetish and nostalgia imbue objects with a significance beyond themselves. Underwear becomes lucky; shoes become sexually exciting. This allegorical reading of objects necessitates the erasure or obscuration of their original meaning and use (Owens, 1027). Sometimes this erasure happens forcibly and completely, especially in the realm of fetish, wherein an observer renders the object an idol to a particular sexual taste, thus eclipsing its original significance. A man who fetishizes high-heeled shoes does not own them because they match his suit or because they are comfortable; they play no role in his practical, every day life. Instead, he appropriates them as props in a private ritual act. Conversely, a nostalgic allegorical reading often occurs retroactively to objects which have already lost their original significance through obsolescence. When an observer has a nostalgic attachment to an object, they feel a sympathy toward it. Nostalgic allegory is an act of pathetic fallacy; an object like a tattered teddy bear comes to reflect its owner’s anxiety toward loss and impending loss. Childhood, friendship, physical fitness – they threaten to dissolve with the passage of time, so the observer invests appropriate objects with the fear of losing these things and the desire to rescue them for eternity.

Nostalgia and fetish function on a personal scale; such allegories can be established by one person alone. A person’s lucky pair of underwear does not require the approval of anyone else to gain this status. The allegorical reading of a sensibility, on the other hand, functions on a social scale; in order for an object to be recognized as an instance of a sensibility, it must be agreed upon by many observers. Furthermore, a sensibility is an acquired taste; it can be taught, whereas a fetish or a nostalgic connection cannot. Hence, a sensibility gives objects meanings outside themselves like fetish or nostalgia, but meanings that are recognized by a group of people, not only by an individual.

Two of the most prominent sensibilities are those of the avant-garde and camp (Sontag, 105-106). Refinement, a formal or empirical education enabled by capital and leisure respectively, enables the acquisition of both of these tastes. The observer of an avant-garde art-object, such as a painting by Picasso, must learn to find pleasure within the painting’s difficulty, usually through formal education enabled by capital. Clement Greenberg observes that avant-garde culture “is one of the most artificial of all human creations,” and “its enjoyment needs a considerable amount of ‘conditioning’” (548). The miraculous and sympathetic pleasures of art, which are instantly available in works of lesser refinement, are “not immediately or externally present in Picasso’s painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities” (Greenberg, 546). Hence, the more an art-object becomes autonomous, the more it becomes contingent upon its observer.¹ The avant-garde sensibility teaches the observer how to allegorically inject a pleasing meaning into an art-object whose physical manifestation is barren of such pleasures.²

Camp, the other great sensibility, allegorically gives value to objects that are passionate, extravagant failures – like the overwrought elegance of a Tiffany lamp (Sontag, 102). Unlike the avant-garde sensibility, camp is the product of an empirical education engendered by leisure. Susan Sontag describes camp as Dandyism in the age of mass culture; however, while the nineteenth century Dandy sought out rare goods, for the connoisseur of camp, “mere use [by the masses] does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way” (Sontag, 107). In other words, in camp the rarity of goods is replaced by their rarifaction. The connoisseur of camp allegorically creates rarity in mass-culture, a place where there is none, just as in art the avant-garde observer creates pleasure in Picasso.

The allegorical meaning of an object produced by a sensibility holds cultural capital. The recognition of such an object as an instance of a sensibility demonstrates the recognizer’s educated taste enabled by capital or leisure. Furthermore, the illegibility of these objects, the opaqueness of their meaning, allows them to act as shibboleths for the community associated with a given sensibility. For instance, many consider a Tiffany lamp as an object of high culture; there is nothing to suggest in its intricate art nouveau patterns, nor in its sizable price tag, that it should be considered a failure. The bold accusation that this object is a site of camp, despite evidence to the contrary, could definitively prove the accuser’s familiarity with camp. But like the emperor’s new clothes, these allegorical convictions are materially invisible, and wearing them on one’s sleeve always comports the danger that the wearer will be left hanging in the wind.

Notes:

¹ “Autonomous” is being used here in the sense of art concerned with exploring the plastic qualities of its medium rather than mimicking life – a concern that Greenberg finds at the core of avant-garde, Modernist Painting. Picasso is a more mild example of this. Throughout the 20th century, avant-garde painting became further abstracted to the point of complete illegibility to the untrained eye, as demonstrated in the controversy caused by Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire.

² Greenberg assumes that the refinement of an avant-garde sensibility is the ‘correct’ way to approach such art, and thus elides interpretation and allegory. He considers the ‘true’ meaning of the art-object to be latent in the object, and the trained avant-garde reading of it to be a hermeneutical endeavor; however, he himself recognizes that the observer projects the meaning onto the work through his/her refined sensibility. Would a Picasso painting hold the same ‘latent’ meaning if it were found by archeologists long after every member of our civilization has disappeared?

Works Cited:

Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Art in Theory 1900-2000 An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Eds. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 539-549.

McCracken, Grant. “Two: ‘Ever Dearer In Our Thoughts’: Patina and the Representation of Status before and after the Eighteenth Century.” Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. 31-43.

Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism.” Art in Theory 1900-2000 An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 1025-1032.

Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modernist Thought. Ed. Sally Everett. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1995. 96-109.