Desecration Hardware, 1 (Project Introduction and Prelude)
PROJECT INTRODUCTIONYesterday, there was something in the mailbox for me. Something enormous, unexpected, unrequested, and ghastly.
It is called the Restoration Hardware Fall 2012 Sourcebook. Until this moment, I didn’t know what a Restoration Hardware is. For starters, it is very large.
It involves three pieces, one of which is 690 pages of paper, one is 154, and the third is only one free floating page but makes reference to how ecologically sound the collective existence of the other 744 pages is. Currently without the kind of scale on which one might weigh marijuana or robin feathers, I am limited to estimating, but it feels about the weight of one human hand and the majority of a forearm. A large hand, a large arm.
Judging by the sheer dazzling size of the object, I assumed that I had, whilst drunk one evening, resubscribed to Art Forum – in order to stay up on the advertising formats and fonts currently preferred by the art world – which alone could explain a chunk of shiny paper that size appearing in the mailbox, threatening to collapse the whole thing beneath its obscene heft. Alas, I haven’t been drunk for a while. Stranger, still: the address to which this thing came is one I barely use anymore, in a town and state where I no longer live. As for what prompted the decision to send such an arcane mass, I can only imagine that Restoration Hardware is self-authorizing and self-propelling, rather like the murderous robot in Richard Stanley’s underwatched, cyberpunky, and appropriately named – for this instance, at least – 1990 film Hardware: an autonomous assemblage of bile and cunning that roams the earth looking for energy sources and, in the case of the Restoration model of the Hardware, domestic spheres to infiltrate and decimate.
Since it arrived, I have learned what it is, because I read it. It’s rather like the Abercrombie catalog that used to get a lot of attention, except that instead of waxed teens rubbing their hipbones together, there are very expensive furnishings that have been rubbed with other objects – such as sandpaper and poor people – to make them look “worn.”
I had started a project a while back to compile a “black book” that would record the ongoing demolition of this species and its built world, grouped around the figure of the metropolis. That proved, not surprisingly, to be rather overambitious, although the file swells. However, I may abandon even that, as I found it already has been done for me. This is it. Albeit in reverse. It is a catalog not only of gently weathered chairs constructed from fuselage, but a catalog of all that should be struck from the record of history. Not that it’s not without its uses: the solvency of the company, not to mention its capacity to print this thing, is single-handed proof of the necessity of abolishing capital.
It is also, not coincidentally, the nightmare of salvagepunk: not an unbinding of material qualities from the value form, but the binding together of mediated ruination with value production. By that binding, I mean a “deconstructed 19th c. English Wing Chair”: “inspired by classic 19th-century seating but liberated from adornment and updated for comfort. A distressed solid walnut frame is complemented by the rich texture of sand linen and burlap, accented with whipstitching and nail heads.”
(I had to look up whipstitching as well: it is often used for joining together felt. It leaves a lot of visible stitches and looks “like crap”.) Not mentioned but visible are the tears that have been torn in them, as if they had been passed down through generations, rather than cooked in a yuppie kiln over a hell fire. The Deconstructed 19th c. English Wing Chair in Sand Belgian Linen with Burlap retails for $1795, with a matching French Napoleonic Ottoman (Catalog and Web Only) for $695 or $795, depending on size.
By that binding, I mean also a “Trestle Salvaged Table” in “salvaged black finish”: “handcrafted of unfinished 100-year-old solid reclaimed pine timbers from buildings in Great Britain. Rough-hewn planks are carefully hand-selected, planed, and sanded, yet How important is that little word “yet”! bear the nicks and imperfections that reveal the table’s provenance. Available in multiple sizes, with or without an extension.” It’s funny they mention Great Britain: after all, that’s the place where “salvaged” got its contemporary meaning. It certainly has a lot to do with tastefully shabby furniture for a new loft because it came to mean the clothes and equipment they “salvaged” off the corpses of soldiers killed in the useless bloodbath of the first World War.
It is also, coincidentally, as if history vomited in its mouth and breathed it back down into its lungs.
Also, while we are on the topic, I forgot to mention that the Trestle Salvaged Wood Dining Table is available not only in Salvaged Black, but also Salvaged Natural and Salvaged Brown, and its cost ranges from $1795 (also known as “1 Deconstructed 19th c. English Wing Chair in Sand Belgian Linen with Burlap”, an awkward contemporary unit of exchange) to $3495, which can seat up to 14 people.
As if that wasn’t a big enough problem, there is this:
The this in question was their CEO. His name is Gary Friedman. He’s a total fucking tool, obviously. But he has good stubble, I’ll give him that. He’s not the CEO anymore because although he is 54 years old, he somehow managed to win the heart of a 26 year old employee. No easy task, but again, there’s that stubble, and his jacket isn’t bad, although not as good as the stubble. Also, in his opening letter to the sourcebook, he quotes Don Quixote, which is always a good move, especially when you are trying to impress an employee of yours. However, because this joyous union of souls was not to the liking of the shareholders, Mr. Friedman resigned, although rumor has it that the relationship has continued, proving what everyone knew all along, that love knows no bounds.
And this:
which urges that “we are of the opinion that bigger is not always better”, although we know that such a statement should not cast doubt or aspersion on the God-given talents of Mr. Friedman, and which stages its tumors as lifestyle options, including “MILAN APARTAMENTO” and “AUSTIN BUNGALOW” knowing that somewhere, a couple will indeed say, Yes, baby, let’s go RIVER NORTH ROW HOUSE. All the fucking way. It doesn’t matter that we live in east LA. Fuck geographical specificity. Heterochrony is the new local. No shame, no regrets, no doubts.
And, for the final kick in the teeth of thought, regard the dazzling courage known as this:
It may be hard to read, so I’ll spell it out. It says that green is the new black, which is a clever – and extremely rare – play on words regarding the way in which black is seen as the perennial “in style” color, meaning that it is now “in” to be green. And Restoration Hardware wants us to know that they “support and promote sustainable forest management with our [their] use of paper sourced from PEFC-certified forests.” They further reassure us that they mail their “Source Book two times per year rather than monthly, and we [they] encourage consumers to participate in recycling programs in their [our] communities across the country.” Also, they will remove us from their list if we do not want to receive their “mailings.”
When I started writing that paragraph, I didn’t know where it would end, but I loosely envisioned I would have a snide comment to conclude it, in which I’d pretend to act like printing 744 pages of sheer hatred was in fact a good use for a forest that had been PEFC-certified, as was using the extra sheet and ink to tell us this fact. But I don’t have a joke now. Because it isn’t exceptional. Rather, it’s the typicality of the whole thing, even if ramped up to slightly more visible excess here, that is nauseating. In place of a joke: Gary Friedman catches fire. Inside a a “Circa 1900 French Locker,” “constructed of steel with a burnished finish.” Catches fire sustainably, of course.
What to do with this hostile gift I received? I, being someone who devotes a lot of his time to trying to understand the link between capital, horror, the built world, and social forms, all understood as historically particular and shifting relations, can’t exactly turn away from something this evil, this located at the center of all those forces and tendencies. Sometimes objects pick us, rather like the cube in Hellraiser, if that cube had been burnished and smudged to look like it was found in a warehouse on the docks of Marseille.
So I’ve decided to do the only reasonable thing I can think of: to produce a constrained writing gothic horror on the basis of the Restoration Hardware Fall 2012 Sourcebook, trapped within its confines. There are 158 tableaus, each of which features a specific product. Some show the product alone, framed against the dark, but the vast majority depict it amongst other products arranged in a living space: bedroom, bathroom, living room, dining room, office, kitchen. These 158 tableaus will therefore constitute the 158 rooms of the house – the Restoration House – in which this horror is set. Each room makes up one chapter, in which the prime source of antagonism – at times a monster, at times not – is the product described at the top of the page beside the photo. No plot has been or will be decided beforehand, and although I read through the catalogue to get a sense of what it was and to count its tableaus, I haven’t sketched out where the story will go on the basis of what rooms and items are to come. It will be dictated by the ordering that their marketing department had decided would be the most successful.
Within those rooms, the narrative can develop as I wish, Although looking at the prelude below, you’ll see how a certain content of the first image, namely a mirror, introduced a narrative content that necessarily skews the narrative in a certain direction and decides on the prevalent form of monstrosity that must follow from here out provided that it remain in constant contact with the basic conceit at the basis of this horror: that the signs of “wear and tear” may not be the consequences of the slow buffing of well-enjoyed use but signs of an exceptional violence that has occurred in this house. This is, of course, no fantastic conceit, but the actual inheritance of this things, the geopolitical structure which enables their production in factories in Vietnam and India and which have been built and then partially unbuilt by those who cannot afford to buy them, even before they have been “weathered” and hence increased astronomically in value. The utility of horror is to bring forth the inheritance within this objects and to reveal these yuppie fantasies as the beige-tinted fortresses of misanthropy that they always have been.
And so we begin…
PRELUDE
[No description]
I noticed, with a certain degree of concern, that the armoire – later, we were to be informed that it is the Montpellier armoire, but at this point, we were in the dark regarding its name, purpose, and intentions – was well and truly worn. Along the edges of its raised paneling, its irregular rectangles topped with a smaller rectangle as though a button to be pushed for a purpose we can very well imagine, the black stain had been worried away, as though lifted off, molecule by molecule, through contact with the traces of oil in the skin of humans. Likely the fingers laid on the Montpellier armoire – we believe in calling a spade a spade, and the same goes for armoires – carried away these flecks of dark, one by one with them when they had finished opening and closing the doors on alternate ends of the process of removing or placing something inside. In certain places, the stain was even chipped, even down to a wounding of the wood beneath, as though handled roughly or by those with rough hands who needed entrance to the materials within, perhaps a cream to put onto their hands so as to make them better suited for handling a fine armoire such as this one, rather than hauling brutish around town whatever new bunch of gussied-up teak fancied itself a piece of classic American craftsmanship and which asked, in its tartiest wooden voice, to be carried up the stairs by “such well-built men” and put down, “oh yes, in the bedroom would be just fine,” its door “accidentally” swinging open during the voyage and giving the whole street a view that left little doubt just what kind of furnishing they were dealing with. Evidently, someone had not been informed as to the quite different quality of the Montpellier – we will allow ourselves certain informalities by this point – and so the wearing free of the stain is particularly evident at the points of contact with either sweating calloused hands, the edge of a stair up which it had been carried by those not adequately strong, however well-built they may have been, or the rounded toe of a shoe. These points of contact are the baseboard and the left front corner, the latter being the only one visible from the vantage point at which we stood, but we can reasonably venture that given the pattern of carrying and extremely uncivil jostling to which it – at this point, what else would we be speaking of? – was subjected, the other corners would evince the same slow damage.
However, it was then pointed out to me, almost with a cry, as when one surprises a hall with an echo, that there are no handles on its doors, only a small keyhole. And although the key was nowhere in sight and we later had reason to doubt it had ever existed, wouldn’t that mean that the prime method of opening and point of tension was the key itself, first to release the mechanism and second to pull the door free, there being no handle to help with this labor? Therefore, wouldn’t the only contact required with the door itself, especially on the edges of that paneling, be but a gentle guidance of hands, to lightly direct the outward swing of the door, and the same on the way back in? But there’s no way that such activity, even extended over many centuries, could generate the kind of wear and tear we saw on the doors themselves, the silent violence of the chipping, the queer burnishing, almost as if trying to gain a grip on what could not be…
We knew. Someone had tried to gain entrance without a key, jamming fingers or something like fingers into the space between raised edges, desperately trying to get purchase on the battened door, the stain smearing loose as they clutched and they pulled in futility to make open without key or handle or time to spare.
And we did not need to open the doors of The Montpellier Armoire – which must be given the singular name of its category – to know what we knew, what had been so frantically sought. Because inside, the doors are clawed raw and black bloodied. If one could open it, one would never forget the sight of shards – yes, shards, because they too break like glass – of fingernail embedded in the wood that splintered under the frenzy, but did not splinter enough, that distance that could not be crossed between something outside that, lacking a tool, tried to open what could not be and something inside that, locked up like a old hammer to be shunned, raged and stormed until it split and wept and gurgled and then went silent.
Our shoes were loud in the room, even on the diamond print rug, so loud we could not hear if that silence involved the progeny of flies that had surely entered through the keyhole, centuries or days ago. We debated taking them off, briefly, but they were new, and it seemed a shame.
Having debated that, we argued about the length of our descriptions of the spaces we find, because given the time it took us to speak of one piece of furnishing, we might never get anywhere. This would be a problem not because the telling takes time, as certain things do, but because staying still for that long in creaking new shoes is painful and potentially dangerous, especially when there are Montpellier Armoires – yes, plural… – around, which, we were to learn later, start at $3495 and are notoriously resistant to small arms fire. Nevertheless, certain of us being not without significant military training or at least a grasp of historically proven strategic models, everyone agreed that it was wise to try and get the lay of the land, even if that land looks at first glance to be softly lit and carefully tired. (Besides, she said, I doubt we’ve seen the last of the armoire. I fear that, for once, she’s right, and I further fear the implications of the statement.)
In measured haste of exploration, neither scuffing nor babying our shoes:
In front of the thing, on the top of which are dark urns we neglected to mention and about which we will not speculate, there is a chair, and beside it a lamp. We need say no more about about it except to specify that the height of the lamp is such that it will illuminate a lap or whatever is placed on or in a lap, but it will bathe in total shadow the face of the body to which that lap may belong, or, at the absolute minimum, did at one point of the lap’s existence.
On the wall there is a painting. It is a strange one, just flat grey, with flecks of black, perhaps a consequence of someone touching it after having touched the armoire in abetting its entrance to this room. Yes, it is a strange painting, as the frame is of far more interest than the picture, having a certain sturdy ornateness, although it too is grey and also seems to have been handled roughly. (If two objects are enough to constitute a theme, then we are noticing a theme.) But we also notice at this point that the thing in front of us is not a painting. It is a mirror. Seeing no reflection in it, we recall, as one does, the old adage about vampires, or rather, of the many adages about them, we recall the specific one about their not casting reflections in mirrored surfaces. As might be expected, this is a rather terrifying moment: no group wants to be told unannounced that they are alone in a room with vampires, especially a room with a Montpellier armoire. Then we realize, more slowly than should be excused, that neither us nor the room itself is reflected in the mirror.
It’s never a good feeling to learn, in one and the same instant, that you are apparently a vampire and that you are in a house which is also a vampire. But with little in our collected strategic knowledge to help us on this front, we had no choice but to press ahead, without even a mirror to see how we looked in our new shoes, in and amongst this space of well-worn ruin.
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